"So I heard something about card games?" prompts Dylan.

"Card games!" 

Eliza makes Joey shuffle. 

The first card game she explains, demonstrating with a handful of imaginary players whose hands she has laid out on the floor, is sort of like Uno, only instead of "number or color," each card within a suit has a set of characteristics assigned quasi-arbitrarily to them by seven-year-olds; for example, two, seven and Queen are all "fresh." You can only put one card on top of another if they share at least one characteristic but are not the same number or suit. 

"Does anybody have a notebook and pen handy? I think we should write down a chart to refer to if we're going to try to actually play this. And I totally want to try to actually play this."

Eliza levers herself up and dips into her room, returning with a notebook and a pen with twelve different colors. 

"Impromptu handwriting contest, or would you rather write them all down yourself because you might as well since you made them up?"

She flips the notebook open and starts drawing up a chart, clicking through the different ink cartridges as she color-codes it. 

"Since Joey is going to be a doctor, I have to have good handwriting to compensate." 

"Sensible!"

(Dylan is peering at the paper trying to read what all the traits are and which cards have them.)

"Oh," says Lenore, peering in from the other direction, "it looks like a disintegrating starfish!"

Snort. "I bow to your pareidolia." 

"I'm not seeing it."

She traces a shape on the page: one arm going toward Oeuvre, one heading up toward 6, one sort of over by where Guy has three checks for the three face cards, and then the remaining two kind of vaguely disintegrating down below. "See?"

Squint. "Maybe??"

She pats Dylan's arm. "I don't see it either."

Hopefully it won't be super obvious that he pauses for just a moment when she touches him.

Anyway, moving right along, "Does this game have a name?"

"I think it should be called Disintegrating Starfish."

Snort. "It's called one hundred sixty nine." 

"Disintegrating Starfish is a much cooler name but you made the game so you get to name it. Let's play!"

"In my defense I named it as a small child who didn't see the starfish!" 

She deals everyone a hand of five cards and flips the first card off the top of the deck to start the discard pile. 

"And that was entirely reasonable of you!"

There will be a lot of consulting the chart going on while the newbies pick up the rules. For all that, it is still pretty fun, mostly for novelty reasons.

All this simple lighthearted fun is—useful for Dylan's goals and he needs to get used to it.

Eliza and Johann are, unsurprisingly, much better at this game than the other two; neither of them need to consult the chart, and they're both better at strategizing what things are connected to what other things are connected to which third things. 

Eliza wins the first round. 

Lenore picks up the correspondences pretty quickly and manages to hold her own in the second round, though she doesn't win it.

Which leaves Dylan plodding along as the obvious loser, consulting the chart every time he has to think about where to put his cards. This is Fine. If it wasn't fine, that would be a problem, so it's fine and that's that.