Poetry for Neanderthals

Spent some time today playing “Poetry for Neanderthals”. It’s a great little game which comes with an inflatable stick you can use to hit players with. The idea is simple enough. There are two teams. Team members take it in turns to describe the concept on a card using works of only one syllable. If anyone uses a multiple syllable word or otherwise messes up they get tapped on the head with the inflatable stick. Get as many words right as you can before the egg timer runs out. Then the next player from the opposing team gets to have a next, and probably wacked.

Once everyone has had a go cards are counted and the winners identified. Cards contain a simple word (for example milk) and also a two word phrase (for example chocolate milk). You get one point for the simple answer, three for the more complicated one and lose a point for every mistake and skipped card.

We won. Although the fact that we had one extra team member might have had something to do with it. As an icebreaker it is great fun. Strongly recommended.

Sonic Super Teams is a smashing little game

Played Sonic Super Tams today. It’s a race game. First team to get all their characters around the race track and over the finish line wins. There are 8 Sonic characters in the race which are represented by beautifully made little figures. At the start of the game each player gets six move cards and a team of two characters to get to the finish line as fast as they can. Move cards apply to one particular team, so you frequently find yourself having to move your opponents pieces. The trick is to send them onto the spikes to slow them down, or get them stuck in front of a loop, while you and your teammate head off towards the double speed rings. When you’ve used up all your move cards they are dealt out again. There are also chance cards to be had which add even more variation.

With four players you play as two teams of four, which adds more fun as you try to help your teammate. Games last around half an hour, which is just the right length for a game like this. A great game with some nice strategy.

UNO No Mercy is a Horrible Game - I love it

The people behind the Uno game have a neat line in making new, different versions of their core product. A while back I had a go at Uno Flip, which I thought was a nice twist on the game. Uno No Mercy is not a nice twist on the game. It is thoroughly nasty. You can do horrible things to your opponents. But, better yet, those horrible things can rebound with hilarious results. We played it today.

You normally win an Uno game by getting rid of all your cards. But in “No Mercy” this is close to impossible. Instead you have to resort to destroying your opponents by increasing their hand size to more than 25 cards, at which point they are kicked out. When you find that there are “pick up 10” cards, and that card pickups can be passed on and increased from player to player, you get an idea of the kind of mayhem that you can get. In the end I won, thanks to some very helpful advice from the other players. But I want to have another go. Great fun, but you might not finish smiling.

Betrayal at House on the Hill

There have been several editions. I think we played the first one.

Of all the stupid things people can say, I reckon one of the most stupid is “Let’s split up and search the place”. Especially if you are in a decidedly dodgy location where even the rooms themselves have it in for you. But that’s exactly how “Betrayal at House on the Hill” starts off. You all get your personas and then head off into the hallways, rooms and basements, uncovering all kinds of stuff - must of it unpleasant. Then, suddenly one of your party is at the centre of an evil plot and all the other players must team up and do some thwarting. We just had to beat the devil at chess, but other tasks involve monster slaying and whatnot. There are around fifty of them to work through.

We had a go at the game tonight and much fun was had. We managed to win thanks to some inspired dice wielding right at the very last minute. It’s a great game and we are definitely going to play it again.

Stationfall is good back-stabbing fun

This is what the rabbit thought the boad looked like at the end. Note the cheating three-handed player on the bottom left.

Stationfall is a board game that plays out on a space station falling from orbit to the ground. On board are a totally motley crew, each with their own agenda. Some want everyone to survive. Some want everyone to perish. Some just want to have fun (or so it seems). When the game starts nobody knows which game players are assigned which game characters, and players can use their influence to move any of the characters and make them do things (for example release deadly killing machines from quarantine at a really annoying moment).

I think we are going to have to have another go at this because there was a lot of stuff to take in at the start. But we all did enough to agree that it is good back-stabbing fun.

Playing "Heat" and "Hidden Leaders"

Had a great game night yesterday. Played Heat and Hidden Leaders.

Heat is a racing game with a very nice card based moving system which forces you to take more risks as the game progresses. We only did a two lap race as we were learning how the game works. I’m sure I would have won if we had a longer race.

In Hidden Leaders you have hide whose side you are on while trying to tilt the game outcome in your favour. I very nearly won this one, but I was thwarted by some of Simon’s hidden players. A good game is one you want to play again so that you can try something different. This is a good game.

Ligretto

Ligretto is a fast moving card game. It is a bit like multi-player simultaneous patience. The aim is to get rid of your cards by placing them in matching stacks of the same colour. Thing is, everyone else is doing exactly the same thing at the same time. Quite often you are waiting for another player to put a number down so that you can unload a bunch of your cards. As is eeryone else. It can get rather frantic. But it is great fun.

Fun with Captain Flip

That’s a human canonball I’ve not seen before…

Captain Flip is a fun little board game where you add crew members to a board that represents your ship and try and maximise the number of points. Each crew member confers a specific advantage and the trick is to get the most profitable mix. You crew turn up on random tiles that you pick out of a bag. If you don’t like the one you got, you can “flip” it to the one on the other side. This is a bit chancy, but adds a lot to the fun. And gives the game its name.

You’re not going to play this all evening (although the game comes with a bunch of different board designs so you probably could). However, we certainly had fun with it.

Bohanza Bean Elastic Fun

Bohanza is a bean trading game we played years ago. Tonight we had another go. It was kind of embarrassing. Last time I played it I carefully put all the cards in elastic bands. But a lot can happen to an elastic band over 10 years or so. Prior to dealing I had to scrape bits of elastic off the cards. Oh well. The game was great fun.

Prey Another Day

The artwork adds a lot to the game

Prey Another Day (which makes me think of James Bond film) lets up to five players try to eat each other over a series of hunts. For each hunt you pick an animal to send into the fray. You’re torn between power (the bear can hunt anything) and uniqueness (more than one of any animal in a hunt and all those animals are out of the round). So perhaps you might go for a “mid-table” lynx and hope that nobody else has made the same choice. Which is what four players did in our first game (it was hilarious).

As the game proceeds it gets more and more strategic and bluffy. Players start slapping down cards and making bear noises (at least some of us did). And maybe, just maybe you can take a lowly mouse to victory. Great fun and strongly reccommended.

Aircon Fun and lots of games

I did take a picture when we got home though..

Here’s the thing about AireCon 2024 at Harrogate. I was having so much fun that I completely forgot to take any pictures. We arrived at opening time (a good move) and the first stop was the bring and buy sale where we bought a bunch of second-hand games. Which we then sat down and played. They have a whole bunch of tables and chairs just for this. We tried Dino Dump (OK) and Planes (a bit complicated - to us - but shows promise). Then we slipped out for a nice meal, came back and had a wander around the stands from game makers and sellers.

It’s rather nice to be able to sit down with the people who invented a game and play it. We bought a couple of games on this basis. Flip, Switch and Roll is a really nice dice and card game which stretches the maths muscles well and Danger Zone - the Game is based on Thunderbirds. We went back to the bring and buy to discover that lots of people had been buying, the place was pretty much stripped bare. If you plan to go (and you should) make sure you get there early.

Play My Gold Mine

Not sure why they make a big deal of “Open & Play”. We’ve been doing that with our games for years..

My Gold Mine is a nice little game. Particularly if you allow nice to mean “Setting up fellow players for a bit of dragon flambé”. The rules are simple enough. Each turn you have to decide whether to head for he exit or pick up some more gold and maybe move towards the dragon (a brave move).

The risk is that if you find yourself occupying the same position as the dragon you end up roasted and out of the round. Some of the moves let you mess with your fellow players, swapping places with them or dragging everyone towards the exit when you’re ahead in the game.

The game plays over three rounds and the tension racks up nicely as you head for the final that will decide the winner. It was great fun and comes strongly recommended. Even though I didn’t win..

Decktective: Nightmare in the Mirror

A great way to spend a couple of hours

We had a great time tonight playing “Decktective: Nightmare in the Mirror”. It was passed on to us as something we might enjoy. We did. It’s a card based game which turns each player into a detective racing against time to crack a tricky kidnap case. Clues have to be evaluated, shared and decoded and a crime scene examined. It’s great fun, very clever, and you can only play it once. But then you pass it on to the next person who might like it.

There are more games in the series. We are definitely going to seek them out. Strongly recommended.

Bought some board games

Now I just have to work out where to put them….

I found out about the board game sale via the Yorkshire Boardgaming group on Facebook. This morning I was down in a garage in Willerby looking at hundreds of games arrayed on trestle tables. I started with a little pile of potential purchases, but then things stepped up a gear when I was told that everything was being sold at half the sticker price. I ended up with a boot full.

We’ve not played all the games just yet, but we did have a quick go at Tonari last night. I bought it because I liked the look of the game art on the box (this is how I buy most of my games). It turns out to be extremely strategic, with simple rules, pleasing play pieces and lots of scope for cunning. We can work our way through the rest of them over the next few weeks.

On Tour Board Game

We’ve just had another in-person board game night. The novelty of being in the same room as everyone is starting to wear off a bit, but it is still much more fun than online. We played a game called “On Tour” which is all about planning routes over the USA or Europe. You take it in turns to throw dice to get numbers you have to place on a map to form a route of continuously ascending values.

I was spectacularly bad at it. I think this was because I made some bad decisions early on which destroyed any prospect of making progress. The game itself is beautifully produced and the artwork is very well done. Don’t expect to finish the game in 20 minutes like the rules say though. It took us a couple of hours to get complete all the routes. Perhaps we’ll be a bit faster next time. And maybe I won’t put adjacent values at opposite sides of a continent.

Point Salad is carrot counting fun

One of the games we played last night was Point Salad. It was great fun. You collect salad vegetable cards and multiplier cards (three points for every tomato was one of mine) to get the salad with the most points. Quite strategic, with quite a bit of arithmetic thrown in. Great fun.

Play Mantis

Mantis is a nice little game. Except that it isn’t nice. And it isn’t little. There are loads of cards, each of which poses the question “Which of the three colours on the back is on the front?”. Gameplay involves either scoring “I’m going to user the colour on the other side to match with cards I have and score points” or stealing “I’m going to use the colour on the other side to match with cards I don’t have and steal them from someone else”.

Get ten scored cards and you win. And that’s it. There really isn’t much else to tell. The game is beautifully presented, with an entire back story that will tell you a lot more about shrimps that you thought there was to know. The rules are simple, but how you apply them and what you do is up to you and can get surprisingly deep. This is not a game that you will spend the entire evening playing, but it is a great way to get the party started.

The Estates is a great game

We’ve started having in-person game nights again. With real people. At the last one we played The Estates. This is a fantastic game. The gameplay has you playing as a construction company vying with others to put buildings on tracts of land. If you manage to fill your tract, you get points for the bits of the buildings you made in it. If the tract is not filled, all of those in it get negative points.

It is great. Highly strategic, with with plenty of bluff, counter bluff and whatnot. One wonderful thing about the game is that every turn involves an auction, which means that even when it is not your turn you can either buy something you’d rather like or try to scupper another player by forcing the price up.

The gameplay forces a kind of cooperation. It would be impossible to fill a tract with just your own buildings. However, since there can be only one winner, it also forces chicanery and double crossing. It is the kind of game that you really appreciate playing in the same room as everyone else.

I’ve put in an order for a copy for Father’s Day……..

Whatever happened to MouseTrap?

You know how old people are supposed to get cross about change? Wellllllllll.

They’ve changed the MouseTrap board game. The new one doesn’t let you eliminate other players by catching them. Instead you collect portions of cheese or something. Most unimpressed. I see this further evidence of the continuing decline of civilisation etc etc.

My advice: seek out the original and best. Proper sudden death action.

Mouse Trapped

So we get down our old Mousetrap game and teach number one granddaughter how to play it. She promptly catches my mouse first time. It’s one thing to be beaten by the next generation. It’s quite another when you get beaten by the one after that….