The Card Game Illegal in All 50 States Comes Back to Life in Fairplay

There is a card game they will deal at Rache's Place Saloon this weekend that you cannot legally play for money in a single one of the fifty states. Not Nevada. Not anywhere. It is called Faro, and the reason it is banned is almost funny. The odds tilt toward the players, not the house, so the house never had a chance. That alone is worth the drive.

But that is one station out of dozens.

Living History Days runs Saturday and Sunday, August 8 and 9, 2026, at the South Park City Museum, 100 4th Street in Fairplay. Demonstrations go from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. both days. It sits just off Highway 9, about an hour from Denver, and here is the thing most people miss about this place. It is not a gift shop with a couple of old wagons out back. It is a full open-air restoration of an 1880s Colorado mining town. Forty-three buildings. More than 60,000 artifacts spanning the 1800s through the 1920s.

What actually happens on the grounds

For two days a year, the whole town gets staffed like it is still running. Staff and local volunteers put on period clothes and become 19th-century townspeople. Gunfighters. Gold prospectors. Train engineers. Gamblers dealing that Faro at the saloon.

And they are not just standing around posing. Every corner of the museum turns into a working station teaching real frontier daily life. You can pan for gold. Take a horse ride. Watch yarn spinning, pioneer cooking and baking, butter churning, and old-time laundry, which if you ask me is the demonstration that makes you grateful for your washing machine. There are parlor games too, the stuff people actually did at night before Netflix existed.

So bring the kids. Or do not, and just go be a kid yourself. Nobody is checking.

The man who built a town that was already gone

Here is the backstory people do not realize. South Park City was one guy's idea. Leon H. Snyder of Colorado Springs dreamed the thing up in 1957, and the South Park Historical Foundation opened it to the public in 1959. The concept was to save actual mountain mining buildings that were rotting away and rebuild them all in one place before they disappeared for good.

It worked. The place now pulls 20,000 to 25,000 visitors a season, according to finance officer Betsy Koppen. Two of the buildings, the South Park Brewery and the Summer Saloon, are on the National Register of Historic Places.

And then there is Father Dyer's Chapel, which has the wildest travel history of any building on the property. It started as a hotel in Montgomery, Colorado. Somebody took it apart, hauled it to Fairplay, and rebuilt it as a church in 1868. It honors John Lewis Dyer, an itinerant Methodist preacher who covered these mountains the hard way. So a hotel became a church. That is the kind of story South Park City is full of.

Why the town is even called Fairplay

The name is not decoration. The town of Fair Play, two words back then, got incorporated in 1859 so miners in the nearby camp could actually get, you guessed it, fair play. The single-word Fairplay came back in 1872.

Now I know exactly what half of you are thinking. Yes, the cartoon. And here is where it gets a little awkward and a little charming at the same time. The museum plays down the connection to the South Park show. But the town itself leans right into it. Wander the shops and you will spot Cartman, Kenny, Kyle, and Stan around town. So the serious history museum keeps its distance while the rest of Fairplay grabs the tourism money with both hands. Honestly, both moves make sense.

The real estate angle, because of course

I cannot help myself here. Park County is one of those places Front Range buyers keep circling back to when Denver and the foothills price them out. You are an hour from the metro, you are surrounded by 14ers, and you are in a town that has a nationally significant museum sitting in the middle of it. That combination does not stay a secret forever. Places with real anchors, a real Main Street, and real history tend to hold value differently than the subdivisions that got thrown up overnight. Fairplay has all three. Something to keep in the back of your mind.

Go this weekend

The museum is open daily from mid-May through mid-October, so you have got a window either way. But Living History Days is the two days a year the whole thing breathes. The gunfights, the Faro, the butter churning, the gold in the pan. You do not get that on a regular Tuesday.

Saturday and Sunday, August 8 and 9. Ten to four. One hundred 4th Street, Fairplay. Roughly an hour up Highway 9.

Buckle up. This is the Radically Colorado kind of weekend that beats another afternoon scrolling on the couch, and Hayley already has the sunscreen packed.