What do you actually get up to when friends come to visit and the summer evenings stretch on so long that twilight can’t quite make up its mind? Here at Dalslands Studio, on evenings like these, we almost inevitably end up at the games table – sometimes with a new game that someone has just brought along, sometimes with an old favourite. One of our oldest and most beloved games is Canasta – though not with cards, but with game pieces.
A card game that became a global phenomenon
Canasta itself isn’t actually that old: it was invented in 1939 at the Jockey Club in Montevideo, Uruguay, by the lawyer Segundo Santos and his bridge partner, the architect Alberto Serrato – as a faster, less chance-dependent alternative to bridge and rummy. It owes its name to a small basket borrowed to hold the playing cards – ‘canastillo’, shortened to ‘canasta’, which is Spanish for ‘basket’. From Uruguay, it spread to Argentina, then North America, and in the 1950s it even briefly overtaken bridge as the most popular card game of all in the USA. Most people therefore know it as a card game for four players in two pairs.
What is less well known is that Canasta also exists as a tile game – a variant closely linked to another, related invention: Rummikub. This was developed in the 1930s by the Romanian merchant Ephraim Hertzano, who used it to get round a ban on card games at the time – he simply replaced the cards with tiles bearing coloured numbers, initially even made from recycled Plexiglas from an old aeroplane. This family of tile-based games also includes the Canasta variant, which is played with tiles instead of cards – the same calls, the same tactics, just made of clay, wood or plastic instead of paper.
Learnt from Heinz
Our own game pieces have a special history: we inherited them from Heinz, a good friend who died in 1997 as a result of AIDS. Heinz came from a family of Transylvanian Saxons – that German-speaking minority which had lived in Transylvania (in present-day Romania) since the 12th century, summoned by King Geysa II as settlers and border guards, and which preserved its own language, rights and culture for over 800 years before most of its descendants – particularly after 1989 – returned to Germany. Of the roughly 300,000 Transylvanian Saxons who once lived in Romania, only around 13,000 to 16,000 remain there today – the rest live scattered across various places, mainly in Germany, and carry on their traditions in suitcases, stories and, indeed, in game pieces.
It was from Heinz and his relatives and friends that we learnt to play Canasta with tiles – a small, private passing on of a family tradition that has been preserved for us all these years in the form of a bag of tiles and as a memory. When we sit at the table with our guests evening after evening, shuffling and arranging the tiles, making bids and forming canastas, Heinz is always there with us in a quiet, natural way.
A summer evening at the games table
It is precisely this blend that defines a summer evening at Dalslands Studio: a game with a long, wandering history – from Montevideo via Romania to our courtyard – sustained by the memory of a friend. Anyone who’d like to is welcome to learn tile-based Canasta with us; those who’d rather try out a new game will always find a place at the table here too. At the same time, Hajo is always present alongside our friend Heinz during this game.