How to Win Easily in Wanted Cards in a Way-Out World

When I called home to my father, Neville Dixon, about this one, he laughed uproariously.

“Son, don't you know that every civilized society, by definition, plays some version of spades?”

Wanted cards played by suit … it does seem to be a function of humanoid life everywhere, and during my unwanted and yet enjoyed 30-day stay on Hypahradys, I learned what my friend Vivaleshoom and his friends did for that, before the rush.

First understand: Vivaleshoom was about average height for a Hypahradysian at 24 feet tall. His race was a race of giants, and so that hand of cards above that would fit neatly into his hand was like holding an accordion for me.

It was sort of accordion-like, in a way … thin metallic squares in a variety of colors and sizes held together by a subtly shifting magnetic field based around the fractal geometry of the hand. Even adding one little squares could change the entire orientation of the hand because of the field shifts.

Which, of course led to the fun of the gameplay: at the beginning, a desired formation was agreed upon as the goal, and then the squares were dealt out after shuffling them in an anti-magnetic bowl, with a certain number being left in the bowl to be pulled out of or discarded to. Players could also at the beginning pass squares around to each other, could pull random disks from the bowl, and could take what was directly discarded by the player who had played just before them.

Here was the key: at any one time, a player could only have so many squares of each type in their hand, and in the bowl, the values of each were invisible. So, other than pulling at random, one had to have tremendous mental concentration to have determined what in someone else's hand one needed by computing that piece's value in the formation and thus in the mathematics of the hand, and then to manage one's own hand to be ready for that piece to come along. A miscalculation led to startling results that rarely were helpful in the reorientation of one's hand!

Hypahradysian trash talk: displays of mental ability to do exponential arithmetic at will. This was also partner talk if players played in pairs: it helped to be able to telegraph what kind of equation was forming up in one's hand so one's partner could help you. Little wonder: the math of those hands of cards they were playing basically had to do with creating a set of squares with said fields that formed an exponential equation, with advanced games even going into tetration.

For ease of understanding, let's just say that the agreed-upon formation was to get enough squares in one's hand to equal 500. Whoever got there the fastest won – or, if all the squares had been pulled out and added to the hands of the players, then whoever was the nearest one to 500 would win. If two people had made the same score, then depending on the game, whoever had the neatest way of getting there would win – the whole idea of flushes and straights and pairs and such came into play.

One level up: consider that now the way to 500 is to make a quadratic equation in the form of ax^2 + bx + c =500. That's a little harder to do … which is why Vivaleshoom and others trash talked by showing how they could factor quadratic equations, cubic equations, and higher-level equations just as easily as I talked among engineers about engineering. That also would tell you, if you follow math, that the squares not only represented whole positive numbers but also negative numbers, imaginary numbers, and complex numbers that combined all of the above.

But then there were those “sunstorm” numbers, just like spades has that Queen of Spades play in which you “shoot the moon” … if a player got out into a known tetrated equation (exponents raised to exponents), that was that. That player won the game, and maybe even the whole day of games.

My friend Vivaleshoom “sunstormed” one game he was in, and told me a lot about the intelligence of my mellow friend and the society he was a part of. Most of us would be pretty baffled with having to physically manifest a hand of cards such that ax^2 + bx + c =500, and even that's a simplification compared to what the Hypahradysians were actually doing.

Vivaleshoom ended the entire day of playing cards by manifesting something visually that caused all his friends to put their squares down, bow to him, and leave the table out of respect – and cause half of Earth's young mathematicians to come running out to Hypahradys to talk with him and every other person who would let them observe the game they were playing.

The number Vivaleshoom sunstormed on is represented as 3↑↑↑↑3, a tetrated number representing a multiplication of threes too immense to even begin to explain here, but which is only the first in 64 steps in creating a number STILL not computed all the way from the 20th century to now. I will have to let ancient mathematician Ronald Graham explain Graham's Number to you himself in this following ancient video … but suffice it to say, if you are sitting at any game of wanted cards and you come up with the first step of Graham's Number, you have not only shot the moon, but the galaxy – you win!

*When I first made this fractal in Apophysis 2.09 by working around both curls and square patterns, I had to come up with a card game to go with it ... so I reached back to my other love in mathematics beside fractal geometry: STUPIDLY BIG NUMBERS, of which Graham's Number was the first to capture the public's imagination. This is my tribute to Mr. Graham, whose number started with working out a number involving physical cubes -- he passed away this year, but his memory, and the inspiration, still goes on!

RIP, Mr. Ronald Graham (1935-2020)!*