We’re all sitting in a circle, eyes suspiciously darting from one to another. I place a card on top of the discard pile. “Uno,” I announce, watching everyone else. Little do they know, my last card is a color changer — no matter what they try to do, I will win. The person next to me looks at me and grin, silently placing a card down: Draw Four. Shoot. I draw my cards, successfully defeated.

Uno: the card game infamous for causing immense frustration and anger amongst groups of people. My friends and I play it almost every available moment during the school day. Basically, the lunch period is now filled with exasperated sighs, glares and the joy that comes with absolutely destroying your friends at a surprisingly intense card game.

Instead of getting work done during lunch — you know, catching up on homework or getting ahead to decrease the amount of physics work we’re gonna have on any particular night — we all block the hallway and switch between shuffling the deck, intense concentration and yelling at each other for having to draw four cards.

Frankly, though, Uno is a strategy-less game for me. I’m sure there are really clever ways to somehow win every round, but honestly, it’s guesswork. I pretend to have a strategy of not giving up the color-changing card so that it’s my last card (therefor winning no matter what), but that never works out. I’ll end up drawing an unnecessary amount of cards to the point where I have to shift through them to find one to play while my friend next to me wins.

When my friends and I play at lunch, we play with “stacking” rules, which basically means Draw Two cards can stack up on each other, forcing one character to draw a lot more than two or four cards in one turn. This has caused some intense frustration in the group. There was one day when I ended up having to draw six cards. Three times. Twice in one game, actually. It’s a great feeling when you get to pass the task of drawing cards onto the next person, but there’s nothing worse than having your own Draw Two card come back around the circle to you.

I’m sure the rage felt during Uno is well known among people. Imagine that feeling every single day. For the length of a game, we’ll all absolutely despise the people next to us, and we’re all irritated with each other by the end of it. That being said, we all genuinely love it and go back to playing it every day.