Be Excellent To Each Other

Walking through Southport Mall (Australia Fair) and look at the selection in their board game shop. If I weren't travelling light that might have been expensive.

I bet that inflatable piggy is light and would pack up small. Buy it!

I've heard good things about Patchwork but never played it (and now might rush down to Meeples at lunchtime). From what I've read (eg this Reddit thread), the scoring appears designed like that. Perhaps see it as one of its charms?

My life is one long pyrric victory, I don't need those in leisure too.

But you should definitely try it, though bear in mind it's 2 players only.

At the end of the game, both the king and the pawn go into the same box.

Giphy "deep.":
https://media1.giphy.com/media/7wlbTBylL5k6k/giphy-loop.mp4

Ha!

Yellow popped balloon game!

Decrypto:

Everyone loves 'Codenames', the team-based mystery word game. Yet it has, for me, one major flaw: not much is happening when the other team are playing. 'Decrypto' takes the guess-the-mystery word concept and makes it much more involving for every player, regardless of team.

The first major difference is that unlike 'Codenames', everyone on the team knows the four mystery words. The other team have their own secret set. The aim, however, is not to guess the other team's words or successfully read out our your own, but to work out the order the words are in. In this, it's more like popular cover art game 'Mastermind'.

Each round, one player from each team draws a card from their team's deck of floppy disks. These contain a three digit code, say, '1 - 2- 3', corresponding to your team's mystery words. The player then gives clues to each of the three words aloud, and both teams scribble these down. Both teams then write down what number each clue relates to. After some faff (you can use the sandtimer of passive-aggressiveness if the other team are slacking), the two teams read out their answers, and you either say 'correct' or 'wrong'. You then reveal the correct code, and the round ends (see below for an example).

If your team successfully guesses the three digits of your opponents, you get one victory token. Gain two, and you win. If you successfully guess your own team's words (despite the clue-givers constantly-failing poker face as he gets more exasperated by the idiocy on display), you get smug satisfaction. Get your own team's wrong, however, and you get a black token of unvictory. Two of these and your team are rubbish cryptographers and therefore lose the game.

It sounds complex, but it really isn't and after one turn of wild mass guessing you'll quickly get the hang of it. As with 'Codenames' part of the fun is thinking up clues that are obvious to your team but meaningless to your opponents, but as you are punished for being too clever you need to pitch things just right.

Unlike 'Codenames', everyone is involved through out, and everyone gets to be a clue-giver. You also need to pay attention to the other team, and trying to unpick the connections between seemingly unrelated clues that are all in position '1' whilst convincing your teammate that their obsession with 'river' and 'fridge' being related to 'sumo wrestler' is so obviously wrong as the sandtimer of quiet smugness is being banged in front of you adds to the tension.

It's also really well presented, using an 80s-micro theme through out. The mystery words only appear when slotted into their red-screened slots, and the decrypto discs add more vintage fun (although parents be faced with awkward 'daddy, what's a floppy?' questions). Personally, I feel the happy-and-sad totally-not-Apple-inspired victory/loser tokens are too cartoony, and feel something more hardcore would be in keeping with the rest of the design but that's a minor quibble.

Play it.

How about clues that are meaningless to your team?

Mammal......

Tense moments in the Oxfordshire league...

The Mind

It's the early 2000s. I'm in my early twenties, but for the sake of the scenario let's say it's the grad school years, so 2004ish. I'm out in my favourite pub with my friends, and after a few beers we move on to the Purple Turtle, the nightclub underneath the Oxford Union (famously opened by a young Michael Heseltine). We're not there because it's any good, but mainly because it's a place for a few extra beers back when last orders at 23:00 was a thing and the night is still young. I've been talking all night to a friend of a friend, but after a short appearance on the dancefloor the house lights come up and before I know it I'm back outside on a cold November night in Oxford heading down to my cheap digs.

A few days later, a friend asks me if I remembered X. I look mildly confused as I search my memory, before nodding and saying 'he was alright, I s'pose' .

'Kern.... he was totally in to you....'

'Oh'.

'The Mind' is every situation you've awkwardly misread, every sign you've ever misinterpreted, and every bought of l'esprit d'escalier you've ever had, all condensed into one tiny box. In short, it's the live action roleplay version of date night with Kern.

There are 100 cards in the deck. You and your team draw up to the current level you're on. Level 1 - get one card. Level 2, two. And so on. All you and your friends have to do is play your cards in ascending order. Easy. Multi-player solitaire. That's the game.

Except you're not allowed to communicate. At all.

So, if I'm holding a 34, whilst Groucho, Harpo, and Chico are holding 10, 56, 88, and 100 respectively, I need to wait long enough for Groucho to play the ten whilst at the same time trying to stall Harpo from playing his 56. But if I hold back too much, and Harpo drops the 56, we've failed and lose a life. No more lives, and that's it. Game over.

It's even more tense when two of us are holding cards that are close to each other. Is he suggesting that I carry on moving towards the pile, or have I got this completely wrong and he thinks I'm one higher than him? Arghh....

To make it easier, we start with one shuriken (thematically this makes sense, as the rest of the artwork involves bunnies). At any point, a player may raise their hand. If everyone else does so, the shuriken is thrown and we all drop our lowest-ranked card. This can be a handy release, but you need to time it properly otherwise you've wasted your advantage. But if everyone is holding back, it helps ease the tension slightly.

There are twelve levels, and as you advance you get extra lives and shurikens to help you on your journey to total understanding. It took us four games to complete level seven, by which point we'd started to work out what each player's little eye movements and otherwise unnoticeable gestures might mean. Yet without talking, it's really hard to actually know if you've got the mood of the table right, especially in the later levels when the lives are low and the shuriken supply exhausted so playing every card becomes an act of utter agony followed by an almost euphoric sense of relief.

So, did we actually enjoy this?

Well, the fact that when we lost we immediatly reshuffled the deck and started again is probably a good sign that we were actually having fun, were starting to get the hang of it, and wanted to beat it.

But, during play, every single decision I made was wrapped up in as much self-doubt and pain as when playing poker for high stakes (£3.20 based on my experience of late night undergraduate penny poker in the CU president's room), the hardest rounds of 'Modern Art', or that round in 'Ticket to Ride' where you know you could possibly make the ticket you've just drawn but you lack the right colours and the player next to you is dangerously low on carriages. And all we're doing is just laying down cards in sequence!

I remember the first time I won a game of 'Pandemic', after several failures and near-misses. I remember finally beating 'the Grizzled'. I remember how satisfied I was on both occasions. I think beating 'The Mind' and reaching level 12 will be just as satisfying. And perhaps reaching a higher state of being will just be as good as saving the world from plague or surviving the trenches.

This sounds like the best game ever

that does sound good. How well would it work with 2 players?

I reckon it'd work really well with two, especially once you get a rhythm going and can pick up on each other's tics. Like a really good bridge partnership.

Nice, will pick it up. Cheers!

P.s. I was in the purple turtle last year, it was pretty depressing and pretty pissy smelling. Did enjoy many other nice pubs that day though.

Had I spent more (['any' - Ed.]) time next door at the Cellar instead back in those days I would have seen Frank Turner when he was just starting out. Ah well...

I've been listening to Mr Turner quite a lot lately. He has a wonderful way with words. Brit Boss.

Mr Kern! I played this for the first time last night witj my wife and parents. We enjoyed it, nearly fell out. Question: how much communication are you allowed? Silent? Innuendo? Nods, winks? Other? We found ourselves very unsure of what we could and couldn't say. Maybe that's the point.

Loved it though, simplicity is key with getting my parents to do anything other than drink gin.

No communication. Faces as straight as you can make them.

Title.

Excellent stuff! Good to hear you got non-gamers playing it. It's come out on my gaming group's table quite a lot recently too.

The translated rule set I've got just bans consulation and 'secret signals'. We've always banned speaking but allowed non-verbal encouragement (eg, eyes widening and heads nodding excitedly as you move towards the pile). Often, how someone is sitting and how far away their hand or card is from the centre is the main way we end up sending signals to each other.

I think the nature of the game lends itself to the group establishing norms of acceptable behaviour that are both within the spirit of the game and allow the game to flow well.

Inicidentlly, there's a fun article on it over on Ars Technica today.

The more I think about it, the more I think that other than speech the main thing that is forbidden is doing anything to communicate the value of the card you hold.

You can suggest by your behaviour that playing a 42 when you hold 41 is bad but nothing you do should give away your hand.

Metagame

A long time ago, I played a lot of 'Apples to Apples' with my family. The game was quite simple - someone plays a card with a topic, adjective, or concept on it, and people play a card from their hand that they think best matches it. Laughter and discussion followed when the word was 'vacuous' and the options included 'Tony Blair' and 'Eastenders'.

The mechanic was then used in 'Cards against Humanity', replacing the anodyne with dead babies and casual racism, and making millions in so doing. Almost every camp, party, hostel trip, or idle moment would at some point involve someone pulling out the iconic black box and guilty laughs about Fred West and misogyny.

But that too got old.

I wanted a simple game for non-gamers and gamers a like that would fuel pointless discussion, debate, and nonsense, much like the early Apple days that could be quickly set up and explained and everyone would enjoy. One night last winter, I came back from a night out a little tipsy and idly started watching various 'Shut up and sit down' videos. One of them was talking about a then-current kickstarter and showed the team playing a simple topic association game that seemed like it would fill that hole. I therefore created an account on Kickstarter, sent some money, and then completely forgot about it until the notifications about printing and shipping started appearing in my inbox last month. Oops...

So, the 'Metagame'. Or, technically, 'Metaquilt', because the set includes various rulesets but other than this one they all look like 'Apples to Apples' clones or just plain unfun. It was the Quilt that appealed to me on that drunken November night and that's the game we're going to call 'Metagame'.

As ever, you have a black deck of concepts, topics, and opinions, and a white deck of answers all drawn from popular culture, life, the universe, and everything. It seems I'd bought the film expansion too, so in those cards went. You start with a hand of ten - five of each. The house rule of discarding unfamiliar US references and drawing replacements whilst whistling 'God Save the Queen' applies.

A black card is turned over as the starter. Over time you'll be making a patchwork quilt of cards, with topics and answers touching each other in a pleasing layout.

On your turn, you choose a card to play and place it so it touches a card of the opposite kind and, somehow, addresses the card it's touching. So, if you have a black card saying 'Hot', you could place a white card of 'tea' next to it. If it touches more than one card in its space, it must make sense for both.

Any player may then decide to challenge you on this and play a card they think better suits that space on the grid. After a short discussion, the remaining players point to who thinks they should win. If the challenge succeeds, that card takes its place, but if it fails the challenger has to discard that card and draw two more as punishment. Finally, whoever played a card gets to discard as many cards as that card is touching. The turn ends and the next player starts. The winner is the first person to get rid of their hand, but their final card must be played on the board.

It's simple and the bizarre connections your friends make between 'reminder of our mortality' sitting next to 'the Bible' and 'Saturday Night Fever' is wonderfully surreal. The growth of the quilt as it spreads across the table is pleasing on the eye too, and looking for a spot to play a card whilst it's not your go adds to this. The mechanics suggest that it's better to never challenge and risk enlarging your hand, but part of the game is the silly arguments so it's always worth doing if you think you can top something or get a laugh.

Definitely one that's going to come to the table when we need something light. I don't recommend, however, late night drunken Kickstarter as a regular activity - I got lucky this time.

That does look fun. Like conceptual dominoes.

Yes! An apt description.

I'll add it to the pile for the Cottage's anteroom.

Yeah, I could get on board with that.

Patchwork is brilliant. Arrives yesterday. Relaxed game hiding cut throat antics. 2 games in and love it.

You view time linearly?

How very gauche.

A Binding of Isaac card game is coming. I know a lot of people here liked the video game quite a lot, so: https://the-four-souls.backerkit.com/

Melodice

This is a brilliant idea: enter a board game and it produces a custom playlist to add atmosphere. Quite a large selection of games on there already.

Game night!

I really like 'Great Western Trail'. It's well-designed, turns come round quickly, and there's plenty of ways to win so the final denouement as the points are added can be as tense as a good Eurovision.

Played it last night but made a complete pig's ear of my early turns, tried several strategies but never had enough resources or commitment to make any pay off, and came fourth with a score over half that of third place. Gah. Will lick my wounds and ready myself for a rematch.

One of my group was talking about using the Flamme Rouge app for a twelve-stage cycling tour, where exhaustion cards are carried over as we work through the courses. I like the idea, but not sure if we'd tire of it given it lacks the other variables that make legacy games so much fun.

I'm putting an order in at work for board games for the office, what should I buy? We need games that arent crazy complex and don't take forever to play. We already have flamme rouge and dead of winter.

I'm thinking ticket to ride (obviously), munchkin, fluxx.

What would you buy if it wasn't your money you were spending.

Revolution.

Am I the only one that does any fucking work, here?

Superfight

Not played that. Bring it to the next cottage.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf
Sheriff of Nottingham
Forbidden Island or Desert

Ta folks, that'll do me

King of Tokyo

Do you need high player counts? Because Formula D fits that quite well.

Work is overrated.

Diamant - addictive push-your-luck game of mine exploration
Funemployed - using your hand of dubious skills, pitch for your dream job

And, obviously (so no links required):
Captain Sonar
Decrypto

Good shout on Formula D, that looks perfect, especially as i'm building a motor insurance product, so i'll put it down as research...

Formula D is wonderfully chaotic and really fun with lots of people.

Speaking of Flamme Rouge, we started a 7-game 'tour' last night. My Roleour came an acceptable third with a minute penalty, but due to a spate of really bad hands my sprinter limped across line three minutes after everyone else. Going to be tricky to catch up over the remaining stages, as the app tells you how many tiredness cards to carry over in your deck. We haven't quite worked out how the app scores stuff yet but should be fun.

You have to make the gearchange noises, though. If you forget other players get to add or subtract 1 from your die roll.

Ah, bugger - knew there was something I'd forgotten to play at the cottage.