Game: "$2 blackjack"

There are many definitions of game which Salen and Zimmerman scrupulously list in their book Rules of Play (2004) but a simple one that interests me is the idea that a game always has a goal and obstacles.  Jane McGonigal quotes the example of golf: the goal is to put a ball in a hole in the ground, but there are a whole lot of obstacles such as having to hit the ball with a stick from a great distance.

However, goal-with-obstacles is also a pretty good definition for how life works.  What's a budget but the idea that you have things you want to buy but only a limited amount of money with which to buy them?  And what's the difference between the extremely poor and us is that they have even less money.

Blackjack can be looked at as a game about budgetting.  If you have 17 do you stand pat or draw and risk getting a king?   In the game if you get anything over 21, you lose automatically.  In the real world you can't spend more than you have.  

In my version of $2 Blackjack, instead of a regular deck of cards, the deck will be of picture cards with a price value, so for example, a tomato at 12 cents or a bowl of rice for 35 cents.  The aim is to get as close as possible to, but not go over, a total of $2.  Just to keep things interesting, there could be a few cards in the deck with, say, a laptop valued at $2000.