Ah...memories.  We used to play this card game every New Year's. If you want to shock/impress your future Japanese inlaws, learn to recognize the matching card after hearing the first line of a few of the poems (tanka).   変な外人　　 

The cards are quite beautiful, you can order them. There are also games and vocabulary practice online.A nice site/blog with everything to do with uta kuruta is here. It has commentary, audio, woodblock prints, historical translations, links, etc.

Also, here's an article (Super Mario's temple) about an interactive museum in Japan dedicated to this poetry card game. Modern technology meets and traditional culture. It's partly financed by the former head of Nintendo, the company that sold the card games long (a century?) before it got into video games. Their other card games were a bit hit with Yakuza gamblers (anyone see that 日本人の知らない日本語 episode?)　

article wrote:

The basic “deck” for uta karuta is the Hyakunin Isshu, a compilation of one hundred poems by one hundred poets originally assembled by the thirteenth-century imperial poet Fujiwara Teika. During the Edo era (1603-1867), the poems began appearing on playing cards in the houses of Samurai and Shogun nobles, and a game soon emerged in which a reader would sing the lines of a poem and players would scramble to be the first to pick up the matching card. Over the centuries, uta karuta grew into one of Japan’s most popular pastimes; memorizing the poems remains part of the curriculum in some Japanese schools.

If anyone's interested in the tricky job of translation, check out the many different English versions of just one poem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyakunin_Isshu