The Gaming thread - anything but video games

[JNLister]

I played Villainous where you are a villain trying to do bad things and being plagued by heroes. (All the characters are Disney licensed and there's a huge range of interchangeable expansions.) The basic mechanism is a little like Scythe in that you choose one among several sets of actions, you can't do the same set two turns in a row, and you can do the actions in any order. The twist is that you can cause havoc on other players by making them bring out heroes which block some of their actions (physically placing the card over the icons) until they are vanquished. Another neat thing is that every player has their own win condition, but most only let you win when it's your turn. We all ended up within a turn or two of winning, so there's a real tension to "this person has the win condition, how do we change that before it gets back to their turn" (or in my case, how do I get everyone else to change that while I concentrate on clinching the win.")

Very fun and clearly replayable, though the big downsides are that there's quite a bit of downtime if you have slow players and some of the characters need to get certain cards (which are drawn from a deck) to take the various steps to winning, so it can be quite luck dependent on where they are in the deck.

Also played Hand to Hand Wombat, surely the first ever dexterity game with a traitor mechanic. It's basically blindfold cooperative Tower of Hanoi (with three towers and sets of discs), but one player is secretly the bad wombat. After each attempt, you can vote to eject a player and if a majority pick one person, they can't take part any more. Very stupid fun, especially trying to distinguish between intentional sabotage and genuine incompetence.

[cobra_gordo]

I'm going on holiday in a couple of weeks and after suggestions for card games to play on the flight with my 12 year old please. It needs to be portable, ideally the size of a regular deck of cards and not needing loads of tokens, dice, meeples, that sort of thing.

We've got Monopoly Deal (which we really recommend, like Monopoly but way quicker and with less risk of falling out) but not great for just 2 players. There's a Battleship card game I've been looking at and I was considering Star Realms but he likes a fantasy D&D setting so that would be the preference if anybody knows of something that sits in that realm.

[Onyx2]

54 minutes ago, cobra_gordo said:

Star Realms but he likes a fantasy D&D setting

Star Realms is awesome and I'd recommend it to anyone, luckily for you it has a sister title Hero Realms which is a fantasy version of the same thing.

For other tiny games - Deep Sea Adventure (tiny amount of tokens but worth it) or any version of Love Letter.

[Chest Rockwell]

I'm really gutted that my wife refuses to play Star Realms with me. We played it a bunch when she was pregnant and she associates it so strongly with her morning sickness she gets nauseous just looking at the cards. 

But yeah, excellent game and I understand Hero Realms is exactly the same. I recommend pen and paper or an app to keep track of your life rather than the cards they give you as that will help to keep things compact. Word of warning you do need a bit of space to lay out the market for stuff to buy and your bases that are active. Should be doable on your tables on the plane though.

[cobra_gordo]

17 minutes ago, Onyx2 said:

Star Realms is awesome and I'd recommend it to anyone, luckily for you it has a sister title Hero Realms which is a fantasy version of the same thing.

For other tiny games - Deep Sea Adventure (tiny amount of tokens but worth it) or any version of Love Letter.

I've never heard of Hero Realms! That looks like it could be spot on. 

I've just found this. Pricey but could be great for a flight.

Tinny Dungeons Minimalist Pocket RPG in a Tin Box Perfect Travel Companion and Gift RPG Gifts D&D Gifts Tiny Role-playing Game - Etsy UK

[Onyx2]

Any roll and write is probably a good bet, Kingdomino Duel, Cartographers...

[Thunderplex]

Tiny Epic Galaxies would be great for on a plane.

[Jazzy G]

I found a copy of Don't Get Got for £3 in a charity shop yesterday. Also found a copy of Boss Monster on Vinted pretty cheap. Just need to find some people to play them with now. 

Played What Would You Do the other day at the Autism group I attend. Some of the answers were less imaginative than I think the game calls for. 

[FLips]

47 minutes ago, Jazzy G said:

I found a copy of Don't Get Got for £3 in a charity shop yesterday. Also found a copy of Boss Monster on Vinted pretty cheap. Just need to find some people to play them with now. 

Played What Would You Do the other day at the Autism group I attend. Some of the answers were less imaginative than I think the game calls for. 

Boss Monster is pretty decent, we've had that one for years but I wouldn't say it's one of our go-to games. It's essentially Dungeon Keeper in card form. Never feels like it reaches it's full potential. Worth it for cheap though!

[JNLister]

Perfect example of the lovely frustration of Just One yesterday (for those who don't know, a guesser has to try to find out a word, everyone else writes a one-word clue, but if any clues match they are erased before the guesser gets given the list.)

The word was tomato and we had six clue-givers. One person realised "ketchup" was too obvious and somebody else would likely put it, so wrote "sauce". Unfortunately a second person had the exact same thought process and also put "sauce". I was a step ahead and thought somebody would think "ketchup" too obvious and put "sauce", so I put "relish". Unfortunately another person had the exact same thought process and also put "relish".

That left two other people who'd come at it from a different angle, leaving the guesser with the not-very-helpful out of context combo of "cherry" and "fruit"...

[JNLister]

Let's go with italics for Distilled as I've only played it online. In theory it's a themed deckbuilder: you collect ingredients, distilling vessels and bottles and turn them into booze which you sell and use the proceeds to buy more/better ingredients and equipment and recipes for the next round. Hard to rate fairly as it's definitely not a good online turn-based game (as opposed to playing it in real time) as there's a lot of points where you're taking it in turns to choose cards, so it goes by very slowly. Even with that disclaimer, I really didn't get into it as there doesn't seem much meaningful decision making in it (most of the time the game software was asking if you wanted to do something and you'd just think "well, why wouldn't I?") and it's really not obvious why anyone is winning or losing other than being lucky.

It may be better in person, but the main game mechanic seems to fit very clunkily into the theme and effectively means you're a distiller who starts production day by gathering together everything that might possibly be useful for making booze, then randomly throws two things away.

[Onyx2]

On 10/25/2024 at 12:53 PM, JNLister said:

Perfect example of the lovely frustration of Just One yesterday (for those who don't know, a guesser has to try to find out a word, everyone else writes a one-word clue, but if any clues match they are erased before the guesser gets given the list.)

The word was tomato and we had six clue-givers. One person realised "ketchup" was too obvious and somebody else would likely put it, so wrote "sauce". Unfortunately a second person had the exact same thought process and also put "sauce". I was a step ahead and thought somebody would think "ketchup" too obvious and put "sauce", so I put "relish". Unfortunately another person had the exact same thought process and also put "relish".

That left two other people who'd come at it from a different angle, leaving the guesser with the not-very-helpful out of context combo of "cherry" and "fruit"...

Just One is so easily overlooked for most but it's never not gone down an absolute storm with any group I've introduced it to. For stories like this! 

[Nexus]

I ran a game of Eat the Reich for my D&D group last week. I was a bit apprehensive because two of the players have only ever played D&D, one has played multiple systems, and the other is happy to try anything but has a habit of zoning out during rules explanations. However, it's very straightforward, and it's a lot of fun. 

 

I accidentally didn't read some of the rules properly, and so they got their over-powered powers from the beginning of the game, but ultimately my attitude with RPGs is that everyone should be able to have fun, and the rule of cool should outweigh the actual rules if necessary. So far they've wrecked a Nazi officer's funeral, fired a WW1 Howitzer and thrown a Spitfire at a Rust Witch, and generally caused havoc around the streets of Paris. 

 

I would highly recommend it if you want a fun couple of sessions where you can just go absolutely crazy. 

[JNLister]

We had a Hallowe'en themed night at the group so I did Scooby Doo: Escape From The Haunted Mansion. It's pretty much a heavily themed escape-room-in-a-box game, though lasts much longer than the usual 60 minutes or so, to the point there's a "save point" halfway through. It's a one-and-done experience though you can pass it on to someone else as nothing gets altered/destroyed.
 

I have to admit it was much better than expected, particularly after the first ten minutes where it felt very uninteractive and aimed at kids, and we wound up getting very into it, with some tricky puzzles. There's a nice variation on the PC game point-and-click mechanism where every character has a book of numbered sections and their own special ability (investigate/use/smell). The objects you discover have a number and then you combine that with the character's number (and in some cases you need to combine objects or crack a code). So, for example, if you want to have Shaggy try to smell some cookies you'd turn to 3256 but if you want to have Velma try to investigate them you'd go to 5256.

Only downside is that we ended up streamlining it to fit it into a single evening, so we were all doing our actions simultaneously and only announcing if we triggered an event (which would reveal a card or open a mystery envelope), skipping over a lot of the narrative text you are meant to read out. This mean that while we did the escape element, we didn't realise we were also meant to be using clues from the narrative to solve the mystery of who the ghost was.

Also had my first game of One Night Ultimate Werewolf, which takes the established social deduction game (which can go on for hours), boils it down to under 10 minutes, and chucks in a load of extra roles (think Coup) rather than just villager/werewolf. It brings some nice variations, such as the Tanner, who wins by dying themselves, which means that the best tactic is to act shifty and try to make people think you're a werewolf. However, there are a couple of characters who switch cards, meaning that three of the players aren't actually playing the role they thought they were. To me that adds too much chaos and makes it too difficult to parse the available information because some of it is unreliable (for reasons other than bluffing/lying.)

[JNLister]

Played Revive, which is your classic "here's a bunch of mechanisms with a token theme pasted on" (you're making Earth habitable again after an Ice Age). It's all established mechanisms (cards that can be used in multiple ways, limited choice of actions each turn or a reset if you can't do anything, variable powers, control of a map) and is a nice balance of having lots of things to do (and engines to build) but not being able to do everything. Main limitation is it probably takes at least one playthrough to really get to grips with what actually earns you points and wins the game, particularly as it's got a trigger for the game ending very quickly rather than it being a fixed number of turns/rounds.

Also played Cheese Thief, which is pretty much a variation of Werewolf/Village/Coup/Insert Social Deduction Game here but has a cute theme (you're all mice and one steals it in the night) and a little twist of a mechanism (you all wake up at different time in the night, so can figure out when the cheese was stolen, except people lie), so it might be a good one to try with non-gamers.