thegamesprivate

Barks has referred to his years as an employee at Disney as being lonely ones. He never felt comfortable among people - partly because of his severe hearing problems - so his solution was always to bury himself in his work. He must have felt unspeakably relieved when, after his Disney years had ended in 1942, he was able to work from his home for the rest of his life!
So Barks did not participate in his Disney colleagues' social bonding such as having a beer with them at the nearest bar after hours, or partaking in their sports activities (My expertise was an occasional game of horseshoes at lunch hour!) except for one recurring type of event - horse racing.
His comment for the sketch above: You will see by the cartoon that I must have missed a $90 longshot once and took a terrific razzing...

1956
Garé and Carl celebrating Christmas at Mik's family in Hemet, California

Barks - as well as his last wife Garé - enjoyed playing cards very much. Beginning in the 1950s they frequently met with Danish immigrant Henning Dahl Mikkelsen and his wife in joyful evening gatherings to play cards. Mikkelsen is better known under his artist name Mik, under which he was the creator of the immensely popular silent comicstrip Ferd'nand.

Barks invented a novel card game of his own. He developed the game (which never received a name) over many years adding new features and rules all the time. The game was vaguely similar to the well-known board game Monopoly insofar that the 4 players were engulfed in buying and selling and a broker was appointed to supervise the trading. Barks' material for the game fills dozens of pages of diagrams, notes, illustrations, and rules, and gives a glimpse of his detailed and highly creative mind. There can be little doubt that Barks was dreaming of publishing this card game.

Barks also invented an intricate solitaire consisting of no fewer than 3 decks(!), and he played this game for numerous years. It also never received a name, but Barks played it against a fictitious Chinaman, and the point was, of course, to win over his opponent. Over the years Barks produced countless pages of statistics, in which he illustrated in graphic form how the Chinaman and he himself were progressing. Barks used fictitious money, booked meticulously in ledgers, to show the results and he would sometimes complain to Garé that the Chinaman was ripping him off, while at other times he himself was grinding his opponent into the ground. After many years of concentrated playing Barks finally conceded that they were each other's match...