Some highlights and lessons from playing at Evins Board Game Festival. (Most of these are meant more as notes to me than you.) * If people would just shut their gobs and listen for a second to my superior pearls of wisdom, rather than rabbiting on forever with their gibberish illogic, their lives would be so much better - and I wouldnt be eaten by werewolves, get shot by the mafia, or lose miserably at Cranium Tournaments. * Hanabi: Clever, elegant, co-operative game play. You want to choose the group though - not a drunken party game, but a short but slow logic/deduction game. Like a puzzle, I can imagine playing an optimal version of this game with a smart bunch of people and never touching it again. (Could it be mapped to regular cards? 5 suits, each suit has 5x1, 4x2, 3x3, 4x2, 5x1) * Managed to persuade people to play Bartog several times which is all I need to be happy. * I used to be frustrated by strict turn-based games with more than 5 players. I remain frustrated. Im not there to sit around playing games. I am there to play games! * Junglespeed. Ah, Junglespeed. Now, that is a real game. Played several games. Blood only drawn once. Tried a variant (not an expansion) where the pile of cards in front of you belongs to the person on your left. Simple change wiped out some of the experienced players. Should try again. * People actually care about game artwork. I am as bewildered as I was as a child, when everyone cared so much about computer-game graphics that crappy game-play was ignored. (I make an exception for Dixit, where the art is the game.) * When it all boils down to it, Im happier playing old-school. Why do kids these days need all their fancy board games with fancy pieces. All I had when I was a kid was a hand-carved wooden truck and a couple of 54-card decks, and I was happy. * Johann Sebastian Joust: experienced jugglers will scoff at it as a gimmicky version of tri-corner club-hat balance combat for talentless non-jugglers with gadget fetishes. They would be wrong. Awesome game. A+++. Would play again. Not quite prepared to invest in all the equipment (because I dont have a Playstation 3 or a suitable laptop), so I hope some other friends will. * Finally played Munchkin for the first time. Meh. I realise that I need to add to my shit-list any game where every card has a different effect. Watching people reading rules isnt fun. * The shock humour of Cards against Humanity seems to get diluted with 8+ players. * Learnt Kames the way all good card games are learnt - from Germans. Great group game for 6 or 8 players, but has to be even number. Some similarity to Spoons. Rules are remarkably simple, but some still found it tricky to pick up. I wonder if teaching the rules in the upside-down order would improve things. Let me try: Everyone has one partner and many opponents. The goal of Kames is to say Contra when an opponent on the table has four cards of the same rank, before their *partner* says Kames. If you correctly call Contra first when your opponent has four of the same or Kames first when your *partner* has four of the same, your partnership wins a point. If you call Contra or Kames incorrectly, every other partnership wins a point. It therefore becomes necessary to agree on a secret signal for when you have four of the same, and to try to detect when others are signalling. First to five wins. Game play: 104 card deck (or 52 at a pinch). Everyone is dealt a four card hand. Four cards are face up. At any time (no turns) you may place one of your cards down face up, and pick up a face-up card. When trading stops, the four cards remaining are discarded and four more are dealt face up. * Finally played Zombie Dice. Interesting, but pretty similar to Ten Thousand. I see Zombie Dice, like Ten Thousand, as a single player game which you happen to play in turns in the presence of several others playing at the same time. * My impatience was a bane. I found myself frustrated by people who dont understand that keeping 15 people waiting for them for a minute, is morally equivalent to keeping one person waiting for 15 minutes. Its rude. * I also wish people would realise that beginners learn faster if one person leads them through the rules, rather than every other player shouting random rules (and tactics, and anecdotes about previous games) at them. Nominate someone to be the instructor, and every else give them some space. I found myself wishing these previous two life-lessons were taught to every school-child, but I realised that school classes are the ultimate embodiment of these rules, and people dont pick it up. * Life lesson: If a young woman appears to be in some minor distress, do not ask if she is okay... if you are playing Bartog. Shell tell you to pick up a card. * How Evin and co-hosts managed to fill the house for three days with interesting people playing great games (and then played poker on the fourth day) astounds me. An excellent job. My hat is tipped and my glass raised. * Plus a special mention to Steven Medway of the Serious Gaming Club who professionally hosted a huge game of late-night Werewolves.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 13:00:33 +0000
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