Spooneye.Pdf
• • SPOONEYE! First dpcumented as "Thirt y-Fours" in a 1571 British list of injunctions, the modern form of the game developed aboard pirate ships sailing in rhe Caribbean in the late 17th centuty. The game's most nOlOrious enthusiast was none other than the rllthless pirate Spooneye, who had a spoon in the place of a lost hand due to a fo ndness for soups, :iIld who, owing to ext reme myopia in one eye (the right, it is believed), would often cover the bad eye with his spoon-hand in order to focus. During the infamous double mutiny fad of the 1690s, (itself immortalized in the gaIlle, as weI! as numernus ballads,) Spooneye learned of Thirty Fours from the crew fo rmerly belonging to his mortal enemy, the nefarious Danish privateer Weirdbeard. Legend has it that the most powerful card in the game, the Nine, or 'Spooneye', originated when Spooneye was engaged in a �ame with his ship's new cook (name unknown). Fnlstrated at his own poor performance, Spoon eye played a Nine-his favorite card, due to the rcsemulance-and then grabbed one of the cook's cards and placed it on his side of the table. Justifiably angty, the cook argued that rhis was not part of the rules: in rhe origi nal Thirty-fours, Nines grant no special privilege. Spooneye, in response, leaped out of his chair and gouged out the unfortunate cook's left eye with his mighty spoon-hand. Most accounts suggesr thar the cook was keelhauled after the game; some (possibly apoctyphal) accounts suggest that it was this cook who later became the despised buccaneer Disheye.
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