You can write an explicit description of optimal play on one standard sheet of paper, front and back. There's a bit more subtlety, but that's almost all there is to it. I think we'll keep it to piquet and Schnapsen for two-player games, with piquet being the longer, more tricky option and Schnapsen being quick and fun. I might suggest clobyosh or some other 2-player derivative of klabberjass as an alternative longer game, especially as related games are very popular worldwide and the mechanics of them are good to know. It's like with whist or related games: people don't play whist anymore because they quickly start thinking about how they'd like to bid on tricks and trumps or whatever and end up playing bridge, but it's an easy game to learn and teaches you the basic mechanics of a lot of popular card games. Not to demean whist.

Whist is, by the way, one of the opposite extremes from ecarte, in that it takes a lot of sheets of paper to describe optimal play and those sheets of paper exist. This complexity makes it somewhat undesirable, in some ways, because it leads to the possibility of the same sort of one-sidedness as chess (though, note, this is a 4-player game).

This is bouncing around again for some reason, it's about why somebody hates Tim Ferriss, that time management guy: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-tricks-i-learned-from-years-of-hating-tim-ferriss/

A previous mention of backgammon brings up something from the Aubrey/Maturin books I have not gotten to yet. They eventually realize they can't play chess because they pour too much of themselves into it so they feel bad about both winning and losing, but they can't play piquet because Maturin is so much better at it, so they play backgammon because there's just enough luck to it that they don't feel bad about the result and enough skill that they can exercise themselves. Perhaps we should play backgammon, too. We would need a set.

Work continues to be work. Somebody needed something rather urgently - whatever we had - and we just don't have the data to support what they would really want, so I was trying to think of a good way of saying this, but I came in the morning to see the team lead had already taken care of it, which was good, because I'm lazy enough that it's hard to gauge when I'm being a disappointment and when there really is little that can be done.

I've had enough of this writing for the day. All I have to talk about is card games. I'm out of here.