The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition. A compliant and deferential press is a powerful tool for dictators; how else do they communicate the wonderful news that gasoline is dropping in price from $2/gallon to $5/gallon!
NUMBER OF PLAYERS: 2-7 players
NUMBER OF CARDS: 52 deck cards for 5 or less players and 104 cards for more than 5 players
RANK OF CARDS: 8 (50 points); K, Q, J (court cards 10 points); A (1 point); 10, 9, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2
TYPE OF GAME: Shedding-type
AUDIENCE: Family
Introduction:
- The spades symbol was used as psychological warfare against the Viet Cong, who were highly superstitious of the symbol. In addition to that deck, there’s the famous peel-apart deck for POWs during World War II and the Aircraft Spotters Decks meant to educate the public as well as the military.
- Download this game from Microsoft Store for Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 Mobile, Windows 10 Team (Surface Hub), HoloLens. See screenshots, read the latest customer reviews, and compare ratings for Classic Spades.
- Spades is a trick-taking card game devised in the United States in the 1930s. It can be played as either a partnership or solo/'cutthroat' game. The object is to take at least the number of tricks (also known as 'books') that were bid before play of the hand began. In partnership Spades, the bids and tricks taken are combined for a partnership.
Traditional Spades Four Players
The Setup:
How to Deal:
How to Bid:
How to Play:
How to Score:
- Trench warfare, 1860–1918
- Permanent fortification, 1914–45
- Linear fortifications of World War II
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3 Player Spades Rules
JoinWhat Are The Rules To Spades
Britannica's Publishing Partner Program and our community of experts to gain a global audience for your work!Fortification, in military science, any work erected to strengthen a position against attack. Fortifications are usually of two types: permanent and field. Permanent fortifications include elaborate forts and troop shelters and are most often erected in times of peace or upon threat of war. Field fortifications, which are constructed when in contact with an enemy or when contact is imminent, consist of entrenched positions for personnel and crew-served weapons, cleared fields of fire, and obstacles such as explosive mines, barbed-wire entanglements, felled trees, and antitank ditches.
Both field and permanent fortifications often take advantage of natural obstacles, such as canals and rivers, and they are usually camouflaged or otherwise concealed. Both types are designed to assist the defender to obtain the greatest advantage from his own strength and weapons while preventing the enemy from using his resources to best advantage.
This article discusses military fortification since the introduction of rifled artillery and small arms. For discussions of fortification up to the modern era, see military technology.
Military Spades Rules
Trench warfare, 1860–1918
The American Civil War
In the American Civil War, field fortifications emerged as an essential of warfare, with both armies employing entrenchments to an extent never before seen. Troops learned to fortify newly won positions immediately; employing spades and axes carried in their packs, they first dug rifle pits and then expanded them into trenches. Early in the war, General Robert E. Lee adopted the frontier rifleman’s breastwork composed of two logs on the parapet of the entrenchment, and many of Lee’s victories were the result of his ability to use hasty entrenchments as a base for aggressive employment of fire and maneuver. Two notable sieges, that of Vicksburg, Miss., in the west, and Petersburg, Va., in the east, were characterized by the construction of extensive and continuous trench lines that foreshadowed those of World War I. In the Cold Harbor, Va., campaign, when General Ulysses S. Grant sent his troops against Confederate earthworks, he lost 14,000 men in 13 days. Field mines and booby traps were used extensively, and trench mortars were developed to lob shells into opposing trenches.
World War I
The lesson taught by accurate, long-range fire from entrenched positions in the American Civil War was lost on European commanders. Even the bitter experiences of appalling losses in the Crimean, Franco-German, and South African (Boer) wars failed to lessen an ardour for the theory of the offensive that was so fervent as to leave little concern for defensive tactics in the field. Few took notice of the immense casualties the Turks inflicted from behind field fortifications in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, and even though the Russo-Japanese War soon after the turn of the century underscored the lethal power of the machine gun and breech-loading rifled artillery, most European commanders saw the increased firepower as more a boon to the offensive than to the defensive.
The fallacy of the faith in offensive firepower was soon convincingly demonstrated. Once the French had checked the German right wing at the Marne River, the fighting degenerated into what was in effect a massive siege. For 600 miles (1,000 kilometres), from Switzerland to the North Sea, the landscape was soon scarred with opposing systems of zigzag, timber-revetted, sandbag-reinforced trenches, fronted by tangles of barbed wire sometimes more than 150 feet (45 metres) deep and featured here and there by covered dugouts providing shelter for troops and horses and by observation posts in log bunkers or concrete turrets. The trench systems consisted of several lines in depth, so that if the first line was penetrated, the assailants were little better off. Rail and motor transport could rush fresh reserves forward to seal off a gap faster than the attackers could continue forward. Out beyond the trenches and the barbed wire was a muddy, virtually impassable desert called no-man’s-land, where artillery fire soon eliminated habitation and vegetation alike. The fighting involved masses of men, masses of artillery, and masses of casualties. Toxic gases—asphyxiating, lachrymatory, and vesicant—were introduced in a vain effort to break the dominance of the defense, which was so overpowering that for more than two years the opposing lines varied less than 10 miles in either direction.
Ace Of Spades Military
During the winter of 1916–17, the Germans prepared a reserve trench system, the Hindenburg Line, containing deep dugouts where the men could take cover against artillery fire and machine guns emplaced in concrete shelters called pillboxes. Approximately two miles behind the forward line was a second position, almost as strong. The Hindenburg Line resisted all Allied assaults in 1917, including a vast British mining operation under the Messines Ridge in Belgium that literally blew up the ridge, inflicting 17,000 casualties at one blow; the advance failed to carry beyond the ridge.
Permanent fortification, 1914–45
World War I
Most defensive thinking on the eve of World War I was reserved for the permanent fort, which was designed to canalize enemy advance and to afford time for national mobilization. The leading fortification engineer of the time was a Belgian, Henri Brialmont. He placed his forts, built of concrete, at an average distance of four miles from a city, as with 12 forts at Liège, and at intervals of approximately 2.5 miles. At Antwerp his defense system was even more dense. He protected the big guns of his forts with turrets of steel and developed disappearing cupolas. Some forts were pentagonal, others triangular, with much of the construction underground.
In building defenses along the frontier facing Germany, French engineers emulated Brialmont, with particularly strong clusters of fortresses at Verdun and Belfort. So monstrous were the forts of the time that they were known as “land battleships.” But by marching through Belgium with a strong right wing (the Schlieffen plan), the Germans circumvented the powerful French fortresses. Passing between the forts at Liège, which Brialmont had intended to be connected with trenches, they took the city in only three days, then systematically reduced the forts. Namur, also heavily fortified, resisted the powerful Big Bertha guns for only four days. The concrete of the Belgian fortifications crumbled under the pounding, but the French forts at Verdun, of more recent and sturdier construction, later absorbed tremendous punishment and served as focal points for some of the war’s bloodiest fighting.
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