Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Holiday gatherings are filled with traditions like eating favorite foods, giving gifts, drinking excessively, and interrogating new significant others. Games are another tradition, providing something to do while the meal’s cooking or to extend the night after the plates have been cleared away. While you might not be able to persuade your family that you really don’t need to serve Jell-O this year, you can at least freshen up the competitive activities, ditching Cards Against Humanity or charades in favor of one of these new party games.
(May Cause) Side Effects
Games Adults Play’s (May Cause) Side Effects is a perfect icebreaker, since it’s designed to make everyone playing look absolutely ridiculous. Each team of two players gets a pile of five red and blue pills, each representing a restriction on how they move or speak. They take turns spending 40 seconds trying to get their partner to guess words printed on a deck of cards while under the influence of two of the side effects.
The side effects make the relatively simple task of getting your partner to guess words like “furniture” or “change” hilariously complicated. Adding in charades components is difficult if you need to spend the round flexing your muscles, and it can be hard to make out what your teammate is saying when they have three fingers shoved in their mouth. Some will cost you time, like needing to tell your partner to shush every time they speak, and it can be hard to get out guesses while laughing at the spectacle of someone running around the room flapping their arms like a bird while also talking like a belligerent drunk.
Other teams are encouraged to gently chastise players if they aren’t acting out their side effects satisfactorily, but this game is all about high-energy spectacle. Each correctly guessed word awards a point, which are tallied up once every team has taken five turns. That’s usually plenty of time to get everyone a little sweaty and hoarse and to forge the bonds that only come from sharing some particularly undignified behavior.
Tattoo Stories
A decidedly calmer experience, Bicycle’s Tattoo Stories has up to six players take on the role of rival tattoo artists trying to impress another player acting as the customer. The customer draws 10 cards featuring elements they could incorporate into a tattoo, like a board game or a mountain, and then chooses five of them for the other to players sketch on whiteboards. They have three minutes to produce something resembling a coherent design and are welcome to ask the customer questions like what kind of zombie they’d like inked on their body. At no point during the drawing process are you allowed to erase your work.
Once time is up, everyone pitches their design to the customer, explaining how they’ve integrated the various elements to please them. This keeps the game from just being a judge of who has artistic talent and also provides opportunities for sucking up and spinning bizarre tales about why the twins from The Shining are now zombies wearing jetpacks. The customer then awards each card to the person they think used it best, meaning multiple people are likely to feel like a winner each round, though a particularly good design can earn someone several points. The game ends once everyone has been a customer twice, though you can easily feel satisfied after one full round.
The Blockbuster Party Game
Big Potato Games’ The Blockbuster Party Game goes well beyond nostalgia value, delivering a brilliantly designed game that’s extremely entertaining to both watch and play. In the same vein as Trivial Pursuit, two teams compete to collect film cards representing eight genres. Each round kicks off with a head-to-head buzzer battle, with one player from each team facing off by alternating naming movies that fit a randomly chosen criterion like “based on a book” or “featuring Jennifer Lawrence.” Every time they name a new film, the player hit a buzzer, which sets a 15-second timer for their opponent. The first person who can’t come up with a fit during that time loses. Naming sequels isn’t allowed, so as soon as someone says Twilight for “vampire movies,” Breaking Dawn is no longer an option.
The winning player then gets to draw six movie cards and choose three for themselves and three for their opponent. Then they assign each of their cards to a category laid out on a game board that resembles a Blockbuster store parking lot: “one word,” “act it,” and “quote it.” The rest go to their opponent, who does the same with worse options. The first player has 30 seconds to get their teammates to guess the film in the chosen way, like saying “ape” for King Kong, “It’s all for you, Damien” for The Omen, or imitating a chestburster for Alien. If they manage to get all of their cards guessed in time, they can start stealing cards from their opponent.
This is obviously best played with people who like movies, though if you don’t know a quote from a given film, you’re welcome to make something up in the hopes your team will figure it out anyway. There’s some decent strategy when it comes to picking and placing movie cards, since you want to try to ensure you get all the categories you need while denying your opponents their victory. If you have four movie cards of the same genre, you can discard three to steal a card from the other team, which keeps the game from slowing to a crawl due to bad luck in drawing cards. That ability, combined with the chance to get bonus cards in a particularly good round, makes it surprisingly easy to come from behind so that the game feels competitive and entertaining throughout.
Everybody Knows
Another fast-paced show of knowledge, Endless Games’ Everybody Knows gives players 60 seconds to answer 10 fairly easy questions. These include basic trivia like naming the branches of the U.S. government, and things that would be found in Jeopardy!’s “Stupid Answers” category, like “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” While there are a few questions that will certainly stymie people who don’t know much about sports or kitchen implements, this is mostly a test of fast thinking under pressure and doing a little quick guessing to figure out what particular word is meant to be the answer to a prompt like “It could describe extreme, uncontrollable laughter.”
The editing could use some work on this one. Some cards had the same question printed on them twice, or too many things from the same category. Other times, the answers were just oddly phrased, like saying that Cinderella lost her shoe when running from the ball, rather than her glass slipper. Players should be prepared to cut their opponents some slack, letting them have the point if it was pretty clear they knew what the card was getting at. If you guess wrong or don’t know the answer to a question, you can pass and come back to it after answering the others. The person who earns the most points after five rounds wins. The nature of the questions means that scores are likely to be relatively close.
Codenames: Disney Family Edition
A licensed version of Vlaada Chvátil’s excellent spy game Codenames, Codenames: Disney Family Edition is perfect for gatherings with kids and adults who still want a challenge. Players split into two teams, each with a cluemaster tasked with getting their teammates to guess their designated treasure cards without guessing the cards that belong to their opponents. They do this by taking turns sharing a one-word clue and the number of cards that it applies to, like “Smirk 4.”
The fun and the difficulty come from the ways that players are guaranteed to misinterpret the clue. A picture of Robin Hood might have an obvious smirk on his face, but is the title character of The Good Dinosaur smirking, or just giving a goofy smile? Players end their turn whenever they make an incorrect guess, which could involve picking a “neutral” card, giving their opponents a point by picking one of theirs, or even picking the game-over square, which causes them to lose immediately.
The Disney branding may make the game more appealing to younger players, and the game has a variety of ways to tune the difficulty, like playing with fewer tiles for faster games, ditching the game-over square to place less pressure on younger players, or using words instead of pictures for an extra challenge for true Disney fanatics who know that Kevin is the name of the bird from Up. Like with traditional Codenames, the different configurations and the chance to switch between cluemaster and guesser makes the game easy to replay, and gives everyone at the table a sense for how the other people think.
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Another fun one is called “Screw Your Neighbor.”In this game, (best played with three or more couples) you get drunk and try to have sex with your neighbors.
Here’s that cup of sugar yo…oh my god!
Same old same old.
We lived next door to my cousins when I was a kid, so that game got awkward really quick
Salutations~!*looks at site article position changes*Nah, I’m just kidding. ^^ I don’t mean to overreact. I just tend to be a, I guess, “right sided screen reader” first. So now I have to reset my default eye position for this site. OCD part of brain: “everything skews slightly left instead of slightly right now, arrrrrrrrrrggghhhh~! It’s a nightmare!!!” (Hmm, the OCD part of my brain sounds like Bernadetta from Fire Emblem now. Huh. Well she’s awesome, so that’s cool).As for what’s being played currently, not much differently compared to last week. Just more Shenmue III(which I still love), and FFRK. Nothing new out this week, gamewise (understandably so). And I’m not going to see The Rise of Skywalker or Cats (though I am enjoying the zero hour critic and civil fan discourse for both; it reminds me of how we all felt about Game of Thrones Season 8 together earlier this year. We all hated different, specific things but were united by awe and disappointment all the same. Viewer and actor alike). Hmm… oh yeah, there’s that new Witcher series inbound soon. Anyone gonna watch that? I hope it’s good.
Hmm… anything else… remember those old school QTE Shenmue chase sequences?I didn’t realize some of the ones in Shenmue III have nifty fail state animations until recently:(Don’t worry, I have trained in the art of Ladder-Fu!)This game has so many little bits like this scattered throughout. Again, given that this is veritably Anti-Progress: The Game, I can’t really recommend it to anyone. So many players are born and raised on zoomin’ for that next pinata to smash and loot and nothing else. Shenmue III puts its figurative pinata in a hedge maze that goes nowhere, and even if you stumble onto that pinata by chance, it’ll just have a nifty little capsule toy inside. You gotta fall in love with the journey or else the game itself will feel utterly empty. But again, I really appreciate this game exists. That it got made and even more miraculously, stayed true to itself in the process. So many other Kickstarter properties have ended up being underwhelming by comparison because they tried and failed valiantly to appease old fans and new fans alike (resulting in a game stuck between two worlds). Shenmue III is firmly stuck 20 years in the past… but there’s some real magic to be found in that blessedly hokey time capsule. /salute Whatever you decide to watch and/or play, take care and have a blessed weekend, everyone. Be safe and warm.
Last week I said I was going to do another go through Dragon Age Origins. Thing is though, since I last played it I got a new PC, so I’ve actually spent the last week trying to remember what mods I was using and re-working out how mod installation works.
My brother and his girlfriend are coming to visit my girlfriend and me (they live in New Hampshire; we live in the Netherlands). They arrive Christmas Eve and leave on New Year’s Day. They’ve visited us before and have already done all the touristy things, which means this coming week our plan is to sit around in our pajamas drinking beer and playing games.
High on my list to play: Promenade, The Artemis Project, Aqua Mirabilis, Calimala, Alchemists, Biosphere, Castles of Burgundy, Viticulture (all of which we own).We’re going to spend a day at the local board game cafe, which unfortunately requires pants. But I want to play Great Western Trail (which I love, and we really need to get a copy of) and Tapestry (which is just OK). We will probably also play Scythe, because I don’t think the others have tried it yet. I don’t like it very much. Oh, and Spirit Island. Maybe we’ll finally try Wingspan if we feel like doing any necessary translations (mijn Nederlands is heel slecht).And finally, every year they do a 7-game series to determine their household champion. They have a plaque and everything. We’ve agreed that they’ll play Games 5, 6, and 7 (if necessary) at our place, and we’re going to stream it on my Twitch channel with my GF and me doing commentary, just for fun. I believe two of those games are Power Grid and Through the Ages; I don’t know the third.I have been looking forward to this coming week for months! It’s almost here!
I wanted to say that Wingspan’s rules are pretty simple and there wouldn’t be that much reading involved, but some of the specific instructions on individual birds’ cards would probably require a very clear understanding on when abilities activate, so a middling understanding of a second language might cause problems. But it’s a fun game and worth whatever language barrier you’re anticipating.Spirit Island’s decision-making becomes a bit too slow for me in a 4-player game, but if you’ve got a good group of people whose first impulse is to poll the group about who’s taking care of the invaders on space 7 instead of locking in the big attacks they’re excited about and forcing other people to address their blind spots, you may have better luck than I did.
Oh hey! Long-time lurker of WAYPTW, it’s been a bit of comfort through a pretty horrible year. I thought it’s about time I said hello and threw my own coin in the pot So, yesterday I started playing I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream , the 1995 adventure game with a whole lot of dark, adult material and some really great voice-acting. But I REALLY struggled to get into it, and I can’t put my finger on why. I’m not sure if it’s just the relentless darkness of the whole thing, but I lost interest really quickly and found the puzzles to be more irritating than enjoyable. I completed the first two character scenarios (Gorrister and Ellen), but couldn’t bring myself to go any further… I just felt kind of numb and bored.
So what am I missing? I know it’s a well-loved game by many people, so am I seeing it wrong, or is it just not for everybody? Anyway, I’m moving on to something a bit more accessible and fun for today: Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3! I’m working my way through one of those ‘Best Games Ever!’ lists at the moment and I’m excited to give this game a shot. Spent so many hours playing HORSE mode as a kid and I’m sure I’ll be bopping my head to the early 00’s punk soundtrack and ruining super-long combos by losing my balance on a manual in no time at all. Cheers! Hope everyone has a fun weekend!
Backlogged: King of Igniters EditionThis week in my ongoing quest to experience all the games I’ve missed out on over the years, I laid the smackdown on some Geese, became a demolitions expert, and mastered the art of time travel… in order to push blocks into holes in the right order.First up was SNK’s Fatal Fury: King of Fighters. I have very little experience with fighting games, and my only familiarity with this particular series is Terry Bogard’s inclusion in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (naturally, I chose to play as Terry during my playthrough). With that limited frame of reference to work with, my overall impression of the game was that it was… not bad? The Neo Geo’s graphics were certainly impressive for the era, and I enjoyed a lot of the small details when it came to backgrounds and environments (the stormy sky in the first round against Tung Fu Rue, followed by the pouring rain during the second round was one of my favourite touches). The control scheme certainly allowed for more complex combos than my recent foray into Golden Axe II, though in the early matches I was worried that my cheesy jump-kick-and-run strategy would carry me through the whole game. Fortunately, later opponents forced me to switch things up and improve my defensive efforts if I wanted to progress. Unfortunately, my emulator and laptop setup meant special combo moves were pretty much a no-go, but that’s not really the game’s fault. Control issues aside, Fatal Fury was a short, satisfying, and relatively painless introduction to fighting games, and I’m curious to see where the franchise (and its beefier competitors) go in the yesteryears still to come.
Next up was my latest trip back to the ‘80s for Hudson Soft’s Bomberman (specifically the 1985/87 Famicom/NES one; boy there are a lot of Bomberman games). I’d dabbled in more recent Bomberman entries before, but this was the first time I’d really sat down to play one start to finish. I don’t have a whole lot to say about this one. The gameplay was familiar, and fairly repetitive (blasting your way through fifty screens of bricks and bad guys doesn’t provide a whole lot of room for variety), but the slog through the later levels was buoyed somewhat by the ludicrous, cumulative collection of power ups you can accrue if you’re thorough in your destruction. By the end I was able to phase right through bricks and withstand the blasts from my own bombs, leaving even the most deadly enemies with few options to slow my unstoppable, explosive advance. I hesitate to imply that I’m on the lookout for recommendations, given how many options there are, but at this point my plan is to skip ahead to 1993’s Super Bomberman the next time I’m looking for a taste of heroic demolition duty; am I missing any absolute classics from the intervening years?Finally, I decided to investigate one of the more obscure titles among the early entries on my list, 1985 puzzle-platformer Catrap. Consisting of 100 bite-sized levels that require you to manoeuvre your feline protagonists with precision and careful planning, Catrap starts out deceptively simple and gradually shifts into something much more challenging and satisfying. It also features a convenient (and fairly groundbreaking, for the time) time-reversal mechanic that ensures you’re never trapped for long. Perhaps it’s not so surprising that a puzzle-platform hybrid would hold up better than some of the pure action games of the same era, but despite only being 40 levels in, I’m already chalking it up as one of my favourites.Anyway, that’s it from me this week. Post-Catrap, I’ll be concluding my return to the ‘80s with Taito’s 1986 arcade platformer Bubble Bobble. See you folks next time!
I’m playing holiday games, like Keep Irma Away from the Liquor Cabinet, and Didn’t Your Parents Bring Two Dogs?.
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Haven’t posted in one of these in awhile. I got me & my lady a Switch last month, like two weeks before Black Friday because I couldn’t wait for any deals. With it, we got Mario Odyssey and Super Mario Party. Both good, especially Odyssey, and also downloaded Tetris 99. Then on Black Friday, I took advantage of Target’s 50% deal for Breath of the Wild, which is just incredible.BotW has pretty much taken over our lives and it’s all we’re doing with our free time. It’s her first Zelda, so I’m excited for her to hopefully go back and play the N64 games eventually. I kind of wish we had gotten the Switch way earlier. Just the ease of being able to stop playing on the TV and take it up to the bed is great. It just does it so fluidly and quickly. I can press the power button on the system and it’s just immediately on and ready and I’m into a game within one minute. I feel like everything just takes way longer on the PS4.
I always tell anybody on the fence to just do it. Get a Switch. It’s just that good
You forgot the wild and wacky sure fire hit: 20 questions. Who did you vote for? EditionThe best part, it’s usually over by question 2 and everybody storms out of the house. So play it when you want your relatives to leave.
So I picked up Code Vein on black Friday not expecting much but a budget dark souls and I gotta say it’s exceeding my expectations. It’s very anime and a little too much for my tastes but the gameplay is very solid. It’s a lot easier than dark souls which allows you to play around with different builds and weapons more without having to worry about screwing up later. It also makes the game feel less stressful so I can kind of enjoy the whole thing more without dreading what the next boss fight will bring. Overall, it’s good and they just added a Santa costume.
If you like Codenames, having Codenames pictures or any of the licensed codenames is pretty good because you can mix the cards for different sets together. It’s a different experience for the “experts”.
How the hell is Christmas only five days away? Son of a bitch snuck up on me this year. On the plus side, there will be plenty to do on the Xbox … that will be occupied by the lucky bastards who get this thing called a “winter break.” The Witcher 3 hit Gamepass, Control and Borderlands 3 are waiting under the tree. But let’s face it, Untitled Goose Game will be the one that sweeps the days away.One game that’s gotten the short shrift from me because it’s on the Xbox and not on my PC with Gamepass has been The Outer Wilds (No, unlike The Outer Worlds, this is not on PC and Xbox Gamepass). The Epic Games Store sale has it down to $15 with the voucher, so I might do that thing where I buy a game I already own on a different platform like a stooge.My Switch hasn’t gotten as much quality time lately. Actually it was really funny looking at the play graphs Nintendo put out with their end-of-year sales pitch. Perfect bell curve of me playing little in January/December, but peaking in June/July. Ironically they recommended I get Into The Breach … and it just so happened to be free on the Epic Games Store, so I picked it up there and will probably play it sometime in 2021. I almost pulled the trigger on two games thanks to the Redbox clearance sale, but sadly their Switch games are only available in certain markets where I seem to know nobody. If you do have one near you, I highly recommend hitting them up. Yoshi’s Crafted World is $18 and there are plenty of other Switch titles hovering around $25-30. Finally, fuck off Ramuh. Those 6* magicite fights are a big pain in the ass and I’m glad I at least got this one done and can relax until Leviathan drops in … less than 9 hours.
Congrats on Ramuh! /cheer /cheer! And hey, at least Leviathan’s supposed to be one of the more straightforward fights of the bunch. So less insanity beyond those base Doom shenanigans. Plus I bet you’ll be super lucky on Banner 3 and just wipe the floor with him via Lightning Sync power. Best of fortune to you!
I’m understanding more about the role empowered infusions play in these fights, and it doesn’t hurt that my lightning glint game is a bit better than my Earth one. Nothing would make me happier than slashing that serpent Day 1 and being done with it.
I’ll be focused on wrapping up Persona 5. Finally reached the back third of the game and have 2 palaces to go. Really want to complete this one so I can move onto something new. I forgot I asked for games as gifts from family members and if I remember right they are all long RPGs so I need to create some time.
Having a weird pull for a fighting game as well so may download Injustice Gods Among Us or Mortal Kombat XL off PSnow.Wattam continues to be cute AF. Opened the last platform based on the seasons so I feel I can’t be far from the endgame. My guess is it is around 5ish hours. I am a touch frustrated as once I finally realized the camera character actually worked and I could take wonderful screen shots, the lil creep just disappears. I’ve scoured each platform looking and even checked every piece of poop to see if I accidentally consumed it at some point. Alas. This will be good for a replay as all the little character interactions, hat wearing, eating things, pooping things, stacking the poop are just fun in their own right.
Just played BLOCKBUSTER last weekend! That is a fun game!! Easy to pick up and easy for drunk people to play and follow. Highly recommended.
My unorthodox party game recommendation is Baba Is You. While technically a single player puzzle game, it’s shockingly fun to play with others. The puzzles are so insanely creative, with so many different ways of approaching them, that it’s fascinating to see how other people approach them. My girlfriend and I have learned that our brains appear to be exact opposites, as the puzzles I get most hung up on she seems able to solve without breaking a sweat, and vice versa.
As for what I’m playing, well, a little bit of everything. I have a sneaking suspicion that I have a PS4 waiting under the tree, which means I’ll have tons of exclusives to catch up on – Death Stranding, Persona 5, and Bloodborne chief among them – and so I’m having a hard time focusing on/losing myself in anything in the meantime. I’m still ever so slowly working my way through a second playthrough of The Witcher 3 – my first time with the DLC. I thought I would have it done in time for the show’s release today and I just got to Novigrad, whoops. It’s hard to believe the game is as old as it is, the gameplay, writing, and visuals have all held up so well, and I imagine they’ll continue to do so for years to come.I’m also working my way through the Banner Saga trilogy, which I somehow haven’t played despite being a backer on Kickstarter. It’s perfect for the wintertime though, the art is breathtakingly beautiful, the writing is great, and of course Austin Wintory’s score is absolutely gorgeous. The battles are fine, some of the mechanics I find a bit counterintuitive, but everything else about the game is so phenomenal I don’t mind them. Slay the Spire continues to be in constant rotation, especially now that I finally caved and got it for the Switch. I also picked up Cardpocalypse, another fun deckbuilder (more traditional than StS, lacking the roguelite elements) with a very cool 90’s vibe and fun, unique artstyle. It also has some very light RPG elements in the form of sidequests and forming friendships with various characters. If you’re a fan of the core Hearthstone-esque gameplay, I strongly recommend it. I’ve been chipping away at Untitled Goose Game since it came out on Game Pass, it really is every bit as charming as I’d been led to believe. I downloaded Demon’s Tilt for shits and giggles, not normally being a huge pinball person, but for whatever reason it’s gotten its hooks in me and I usually play at least a round or two every day. I’ve pretty much given up on My Friend Pedro at this point – it started off strong and I was really enjoying it in spite of the clunky platforming because the action was so satisfying, but for some reason the latter part of the game has turned into almost exclusively a platformer. Shame, really, as the shooting is a ton of fun. On a more positive note, I started my umpteenth run of Stardew Valley now that version 1.4 is on consoles, and holy cow is there a ton of new stuff (granted it’s been a couple updates since I’ve played). And of course it continues to be the video game equivalent of a dog – no matter how tired I am, no matter how shitty my day has been, no matter what I’ve got going on, I can come home and Stardew will be there to make me feel better. We really do not deserve ConcernedApe, the sheer amount of content – all of it of the highest quality – I’ve gotten from my $15 purchase is insane. I don’t know if he can ever surpass what he’s accomplished with Stardew, or if he’ll ever try, as he seems pretty happy to keep iterating on it, but if he does ever make another game, it’s a guaranteed day one purchase for me, no questions asked.
More physical games! At my office’s Secret Santa, my Santa got me a party game called Bad Choices, which comes pre-packaged with a NSFW edition. It’s essentially a game of “Have You Ever…?” where you have to feel the room and play your cards on people who have not done the thing on your card, lest you replace your card with a new one from the draw pile, mixed with Uno-style rules about announcing when you have only one card left, and extra cards for skipping players’ turns and handing them more cards.It’s a simple enough icebreaker-type game, but the questions are largely aimed at people who did a lot of sleeping around in college and have problematic relationships with alcohol. There’s not a whole lot of variety, and I don’t think it’s going to be very fun if we’re in a group where there’s a 75% chance that the answer to any given question is, “No.”
Not that I blame my Santa for the game not being the best fit, but after peeking through the questions and then reading these 5 mini-reviews, I’m a bit envious of the alternate-reality me who got any one of these games.Video GamesI’ve continued taking it easy on this end. I’m now on case 2-4 in the Ace Attorney: Phoenix Wright trilogy and am excited about all the twists and turns that a final case brings, but I fell asleep at the very beginning of the case last night, participating in the time-honored tradition of poking holes in Detective Gumshoe’s basic case summary so the prosecutor can counter with a simple explanation so I can then counter-counter with RIDICULOUS ANIME BULLSHIT that never fails to somehow be an accurate representation of what actually happened. I’ve played all three of these games and I definitely remember where each case is headed, but it’s been over a decade and it’s still incredibly satisfying seeing everything unfold.Sprinkled throughout the week, I also dusted off my RetroAchievements account and started re-earning the 100% completions for games that had their sets completely rehauled, or a couple where someone added a mind-numbingly easy goal seemingly just to knock me off the leaderboard for the first ten people to complete the set. All that work four years ago making sure I was the first one on my block to finish Mega Man 1 without using any special weapons except Power Arm and Magnet Beam, just to be knocked off the leaderboard by a “collect 9 lives” achievement. Boo. But I’ve managed to reclaim completion badges for Super Mario Bros, Mega Man, Duck Tales 2, and Pokemon Yellow, and having taken a break for a year means there’s been all kinds of new stuff added to the site that I’ve barely scratched the surface on.
Board Games We did it. We got an ugly game of Eldritch Horror together this past Sunday, we taught three new people the rules, and the five of us faced off against The Rise of the Elder Things. I closed gates to the Other World and addressed rumors, Amanda generated massive amounts of clues and solved mysteries, Mary used powerful spells to take out dreadful monsters from afar, Jose fell into the rookie trap of spending half the game trying to get more equipment so he could be even more prepared for doing the important work that he never actually got around to, and Andrew rolled a character who started with a debilitating condition and was seemingly built to die early, who then died early. He would later talk about how much good he did for the group by spending all of his turns accruing equipment that Mary had to make a special trip deep into the Arctic Circle to retrieve. It was a very Andrew game. Fortunately, we re-read the rules last week and realized that we get to roll a new character when somebody dies, so he wasn’t out of the running for good.In the end, we died in a brutal fashion. A dark god awoke, revealing that the Elder Things weren’t attacking us but fleeing from a much greater threat cultists had conjured in their city. A fifth goal was added to our win condition, pushing victory further out of our reach. Within three turns, first a rumor and then a mythos card did three damage to every investigator. Three of us were wiped out, advancing the awoken god’s loss condition far enough to bring about the end of the world.And yet everybody had fun. The three newbies learned enough about group strategy that, in a game that started slowly with a very difficult mystery to clear, everybody felt empowered and useful and team-focused (and kinda tired) at the end of the game, and we were all entertained enough by all the flavor text and the rapid boost of progress we made in the last several turns that the sting of losing a 6 1/2 hour game wasn’t that bad.
Amanda and I exchanged Christmas gifts. She now has the Colonies expansion to Terraforming Mars (I listened when she said, “I need to work on expanding this” after our game last month), and we now own a co-op post-apocalypse survival game called Dead of Winter that she has said for months would be our cup of tea. Add this onto the Under the Pyramids expansion I just got for Eldritch Horror on a Black Friday sale and copies of Elder Sign and Everdell that both arrived at the local game shop last week, then Andrew’s going to be opening the copy of Legendary I picked up for him for Christmas a month ago, one of my gifts from my parents is a box that feels like it has a lot of moving parts in it, and Andrew may very well be getting me a board game as well…… and this is turning into a very big month for our game closet. The shelves are full. We’re now forced to stack some on the carpet under the bottom shelf.I spent like an hour in the board game room at AGDQ this year, and it kicked off a series of events that led to this. At that time I owned Scrabble and the Oregon Trail board game, while Andrew brought, I believe, six games to the table when we got our apartment in May. Not including unopened gifts, we now have (unless I’ve forgotten one or two, which I almost certainly have) 31 games with 14 expansions. When I head to Orlando in two weeks for AGDQ 2020, I wonder if I’ll ever leave the board game room.
I wish RetroAchievements had existed during my Great Emulator Binge of the early 2000’s. I could have wasted so much more time!