Spinning and winning!

Anyone who has watched the TV series Sex and the City too many times, might remember a song that went like this...

...Oh dreidel dreidel dreidel

I made it out of clay

Oh dreidel dreidel dreidel

The dreidel shall I play...

Taking a little jump start to Chanukah, a while ago I played with the dreidel for the first time ever. I was playing against a very experienced opponent - someone who has celebrated Chanukah every year of his life. And me? Never.

Neither of us (!!), however, knew the rules to this game. Thanks to my Dreidel App, it didn't take much time to figure out how the game works. Dreidel is a spinning top with rectangular edges. Each side of the four sides is equipped with letters (gimel, hei, shin and nun) belonging to the Hebrew alphabet. The words they mean come from Yiddish.

all = ganz = ג 

half = halb = ה

put in = shtel arayn = ש

nothing = nisht = נ

  

Each player gets a certain amount of game tokens, which can be e.g. coins or raisins. We used jellybeans. A game pot is created by each player putting a token in the middle of the table - and then the spinning begins... Depending on the letter you end up with on your turn, you either get all that is in the pot, half of it, add one token to the pot or get nothing.

Trust me, the game can go on for a while. But it was fun! Who could have believed that two nearly 30-year-olds would spend a Monday evening playing with this little simple toy. My wooden dreidel was in heavy use to find who's the winner - and it was me who lost both rounds. Next time around, now that I have learnt professional techniques like spinning the dreidel upside down, my goal is to clean the pot.