Christmas etc games

[liv]

Over the present-giving season we (that is me and my partners and my OSOs' kids) gave and acquired lots and lots of new games as presents, so I shall try to write not too extensive reviews of some of the ones we've played.

• We turned up at OSOs' in the evening of Christmas Day to find people playing Exploding kittens. I didn't actually join in, just watched the end of the game, but I formed a favourable impression. It looks like a good mix of silly and tactical, up there with Fluxx as a game that works well for slightly too many players in a silly mood. I'm not a huge fan of The Oatmeal, but the humour is less grating for a card game than for the actual comic.
  
  
• Judith had My Little Pony Top Trumps in her stocking. This mainly reminded me that I hate Top Trumps, but it's making Judith happy, and it's not bad for number recognition and sight-reading.
  
  
• ghoti gave jack Dixit. (The name of the game has earwormed me with a bit of Latin set to music which I can't place, but anyway.) It's one of those games which is only marginally a game, it's more like a creativity seed with a scoring framework. I often like those when they're done well, and Dixit is original and just lovely. It has some extremely beautiful and slightly surreal pictures, and you have to describe them ambiguously – you lose if you're too precise or too obscure. I played atrociously badly the first game through trying to be too clever, but I definitely want to come back for more. I think it might run out of replayability once a regular gaming group get to know the cards well, but that's a minor downside.
  
  
• We really shouldn't have started Smash Up as late as we did that evening, but my goodness it's a fascinating game, and the more so now that OSOs have acquired a bunch of expansions for Christmas (jack gave Judith the Pretty Pretty expansion, cos it has ponies, kitties and princesses. She's carefully keeping it separate from her family's main collection so that she can take it with her when she leaves home...) It's not totally unlike Magic:The Gathering, but takes itself a lot less seriously, and I love the way the game changes from one turn to the next. The biggest problem I have with it, and I don't think that's only because we were too tired to play properly, is that it's really quite hard to see what's going on with all the bases when they're spread over the table. jack and I were noodling around whether it's the kind of game that would work well augmented by a smartphone app, so that all the players had a quick reference to the state of the table without having to read something upside-down at the other end of the table. The cards are really well written, but that means that the exact wording is often vital to game-play.
  
  
• Boxing day is for opening boxes with new games inside (this is a lie, but it pleases me to believe it). jack and I had a go at The Harbor expansion for Machi Koro, ghoti having given me the base game for our anniversary. It's a somewhat different mechanic, in that the marketplace consists of ten piles of cards which are replenished by drawing randomly from a large deck, as opposed to a fixed set of cards in the base game. I think that works pretty well, because it limits how much it's possible to win massively by building up sets of cards that stack almost too powerfully in the base game.
  
  
• Playing that inspired jack to invent a new game, which is aiming to be a physically and conceptually compact game that lies somewhere between Machi Koro and Dominion. I've been having an interesting time playtesting it, and I'm excited about where it's going.
  
  
• During down-time over Christmas, we managed to get in a couple of games of alextfish's Steam works. I'm continuing to love the game on further plays, it still feels like it's a bit different every time.
  
  
• We also played the game jack chose as a present from me to him: Orcs orcs orcs. Apparently jack heard of it because there was some controversy about a designer ripping off someone else's ideas, but anyway, it's a cute little game. I really like that the meeples are semi-3D, with both fronts and backs printed on the cardboard, with plastic stands provided. The rules are atrociously badly written, but once we figured out what we were supposed to be doing, it plays reasonably well. It's got a slightly Dominion-like deck-building mechanic, and the scoring is quite clever. Don't love it, but I probably will play it again.
  
  
• And cjwatson gave me The castles of Burgundy for our anniversary, and Christmas was the first time we actually got an opportunity to sit down and play it. In fact I played once with cjwatson and a second time with jack. It's a game I've been enjoying a lot on Yucata, but it's slightly fiddly and the implementation there makes it even worse. Playing it in person feels nicer, definitely, even though it's still a little busy in terms of trying to use pictograms to explain what all the different tiles do. The basic mechanic is that each turn is two actions based on the roll of two dice, either acquiring a hex tile from the market, or playing the tile on your board, while playing tiles triggers extra actions, sometimes at the time and sometimes stored for later. I find that the mix of luck and strategy works really really well. For a game released in 2011 it feels strangely old-fashioned, as if the designers hadn't paid attention to the last 10 years of development of Eurogames (eg it doesn't have meeples, just plain round tokens). Pleasing in spite of that, though.
  
  
• jack and I gave our OSOs and their family Ticket to Ride: Europe, which for my money is the best train game out there. I really really like the balance between tactics and strategy, such that it tends to play fast, there's usually a fairly obvious thing or small range of choices each turn, but the route-building means you're always trying to plan long-term. We played it once with a mixed-age group, and it's a bit of a stretch for the littles but I think still basically interesting for them with a bit of adult help.

Besides that we've been rediscovering some classic games with having a bit more time lately.

• I gave Benedict Uno as a chanukah present, and we've played a couple of rounds and it's reasonably friendly for a mixed age group.
  
  
• Judith has, amazingly for someone who's still working on reading, got quite into Scrabble recently. It's very good for me to drop my usual cut-throat style and play just as a fun word-learning game. I was enjoying the Open Scrabble app pseudomonas recommended for asynchronous, remote play, but then it broke and the upgrade to fix the bug won't install on my phone :-(
  
  
• I managed to find our childhood Mah Jong set stashed away in the back of a wardrobe at my parents'. I had hoped that the combination of building the city from the lovely tactile tiles and the strategy of making sets would make it appealing to the children, but our first game didn't entirely work perfectly. I haven't given up entirely, I will keep it around as an option.
  
  
• I somehow accidentally got Andreas enthused about RoboRally... I think he was trying to pick a game at our place and recognized it as a game he also has at home, and we had a go at playing it. He doesn't exactly understand how to put a series of five cards together to make a viable program, but he gets the general idea and enjoys it at least for the first 20 minutes or half an hour, again with adult support. Myself, I am ridiculously terrible at it, cos I always get the mental rotations wrong or forget how the conveyor belts work, but I'm having a lot of fun playing it. There's no point trying to come up with ways to simplify it for an enthusiastic 3yo, because there are already plenty of professionally made games like that for kids, and I think it's the aesthetic of it that Andreas likes.
  
  
• Another one that's popular at the moment is a variant of Guess Who called Whoosit. The first couple of games that Andreas played gave me the impression it was a bit beyond him, but he kept asking for it again and actually if he concentrates fiercely he can in fact play it effectively, even without adult help. It turned out that the only mistake he was really making was getting confused half way over which side of the dichotomy he was supposed to be eliminating versus keeping, and if you keep holding his attention while he flips the pictures he completely understands how to play properly, and fully gets the idea of asking questions to narrow down the field efficiently and then making the appropriate single-step logical inferences.

Also early this week the OSOs and their littles joined me for a late lunch while I was working from home, and we played a couple of small games they'd acquired from a home ed resource swap. Klopf klopf klopf, which is a slightly brain-twisting memory / recognition game where one player knocks out a pattern and you have to rapidly grab the card that matches the pattern from a set that are all really similar. Andreas I think was basically playing randomly, but Judith got the hang of it in a really visible click moment, when she figured out that if she mentally rehearses the pattern, she can easily spot the match. That's such a valuable skill for lots of things beyond playing silly kids' games, I'm deeply impressed.

And King Toad, which is a very simple play the cards in sequence game but just exactly the right amount of silly. Basically if you can't play in sequence, you play a Toad wild card, and then you have to ribbit and stick your tongue out the number of times corresponding to the next number you want played. I often don't like games designed by adults to help children to be silly, but that one works well.

Comments

[cxcvi]

I'll comment on the games I know well enough to have thoughts on.

The thing about Dixit is that you kinda have to know people in the group fairly well, and also to a certain extent be able to think like they do. Quite often, I've found that I see things in the cards that no-one else does, which means that I often do poorly, in ways that it's very difficult for me to see.

Smash Up is certainly interesting, but I think it's the sort of game where if you don't understand what each of the factions do then you're at a disadvantage. It's slightly less in the category of "knowing the cards really helps" than a lot of other games, but it's still there to a certain extent.

Looking briefly at Jack's game kinda reminds me of Can't Stop (because you're constantly rolling 4 dice and pairing them up in that game). Very interesting push-your-luck dice game if you can find it. Plays upto 5, and I know of a partnership variant for 4 if you're interested.

I'm not sure how Castles of Burgundy would work with meeples. Or if anything would be done with meeples. Maybe the turn order track... I want to play this game more. Or again, for that matter.

TtR: Europe might be the best introduction to the TtR series. I think probably because the stations mechanic makes it a lot less "miss out on one link and you're screwed".

Am amused that you describe RoboRally as a "classic". I miss playing that game.

[seekingferret]

The thing about Dixit is that you kinda have to know people in the group fairly well, and also to a certain extent be able to think like they do. Quite often, I've found that I see things in the cards that no-one else does, which means that I often do poorly, in ways that it's very difficult for me to see.

My question on this for you is, when you do poorly from a scoring perspective in Dixit, do you feel unsatisfied? I've only played the game a couple of times and I did not score all that well, but I really enjoyed it anyway precisely because I enjoyed giving the kind of overly clever, allusive answers liv described as being unsuccessful for her. There were other satisfactions to the game besides winning, that is. I can imagine that not being the case for other people, but it's the case for me.

[cxcvi]

My question on this for you is, when you do poorly from a scoring perspective in Dixit, do you feel unsatisfied?

It's been quite a while since I last played, but from what I remember, yes. I feel like my ability to communicate has failed... Being understood is important to me, and Dixit makes me feel that I am not understood...

[liv]

Ooh, thank you, this is a great comment, and just the sort of conversation I want to have about games!

I think our first Dixit game was ideal because it was a group who know eachother pretty well, but we'd never seen the game or cards before, so it was a really fresh experience. I do like the combination of trying to guess how other people will think, and actually playing the game as designed.

I think Smash Up does have a bit of an advantage to knowing the cards. But also once you have more than a couple of expansions, it's almost impossible to know all the possible cards and combinations in detail, so players are generally at about an equal disadvantage. (I suppose there might be players at the level of pro M:tG players, who really do know by heart every single card that can possibly come up, but generally I've not played with people like that.) I agree that knowing roughly what sorts of things each faction does gives you a big headstart. Whereas when we played on Christmas, we all had equally little clue because we had just added in several new expansions so couldn't really plan ahead for what was coming up or what countermoves opponents were likely to make!

I like Can't Stop, it's one of the most playable heavily luck-based dice games I've tried. It's another one I play quite regularly on Yucata. I don't think jack's game in progress is quite like that, though, it's mainly using dice in the manner of Settlers of Catan or indeed Machi Koro, as a way of distributing resources with a luck element.

Castles of Burgundy: I was thinking meeples just for the scoring track and turn order track. And the whole system of having these over-detailed pictures on each tile, and slightly too many different actions going on, all feel quite old fashioned. But I do love the game, and I'm playing it a lot both with friends and strangers on Yucata.

When we played Ticket to Ride Europe we ended up not using the stations, as most people hadn't played before and that seemed like a complex mechanic to introduce. But maybe it does in fact make the game easier, rather than more difficult.

Maybe I shouldn't have put RoboRally in with games like Mah Jong and Scrabble. But it's definitely not a new game we acquired at Christmas, rather an older one that we've rediscovered due to 3yo-led serendipity!

[cxcvi]

When we played Ticket to Ride Europe we ended up not using the stations, as most people hadn't played before and that seemed like a complex mechanic to introduce. But maybe it does in fact make the game easier, rather than more difficult.

The way to think about it is this: Every missed ticket is a negative instead of a positive. To use one station to complete one ticket, you're trading 4 points (not that much), one train card (you usually have a spare in an odd colour floating around, in my experience), and one turn (tempo is a thing; sometimes you don't have the turn to spare); and you're receiving twice the value of the ticket (normal tickets being worth anywhere between 5 and 13 points, long tickets being 20 or 21).

And this is assuming that you're only completing one ticket. Assuming that you select your opening tickets so that they're not badly antagonistic with each other (which is usually a good strategy) (for later tickets, this tends to become antagonistic with what you're building or have built), it can often be the case that one station means completing two or three tickets, which can mean that someone blocking you on a single route can mean a 40 point swing that you can avert with just a single play.

Yes, there is strategy in blocking, and yes, it's still worth it sometimes, especially if it can be done while reducing the number of turns that everyone has, and yes, there is strategy in trying to make what you're trying to build not obvious for as long as possible, and yes, knowing which tickets are in the game can help here as well, even though this is not something that I've ever tried to learn...

But stations help to prevent that DFL feeling, which is important in a game that last about an hour (or longer, depending on if I'm having to teach the game or not). Because games should be about having fun, and not about feeling that you're the only person at the table who isn't...

[mathcathy]

Wow. For some reason DW really hates this post and has put one word to a line! So I haven't read it, can wait till I have a computer instead of nt phone with its sucky rendering.

We played Exploding Kittens at Christmas too and I liked it more than I like Fluxx. Similar level of play effort though.

One day you guys should come to London and I'll introduce you to my new guy at a games cafe we found - Draughts. There's a library of games at the back, you can choose from a huge range. No booking at the weekend which is a downside, but it is otherwise great .

[liv]

That's amazingly rubbish in terms of formatting!

I think I like Fluxx more than many of my gamer friends like it; a lot of people seem to feel it's too random and not enough skill-based. But yeah, sometimes I want a game where I'm not thinking too too hard about each turn.

Draughts cafe sounds amazing, I would really like to visit a games library, and meeting your bf would be super exciting, of course!

[pseudomonas]

re the Scrabble game, the upgrade that will actually fix the bug is due in a couple of weeks. If it doesn't install OK, then let Eric, the author know, cos he relies heavily on bug reports.

[liv]

Yeah, I'll wait until the next upgrade comes out and try a clean install of that, and if that doesn't work, I'll submit a bug report. It's possible my Android version is too old or something.

[switterbeet]

I love Dixit, but I think it really needs to be played only occasionally to retain it's replayability as you say. That said, there are lots of expansion packs/new editions with new scenes. (There is also some way to combine Dixit and Cards Against Humanity which I haven't tried, but sounds like it has potential.)

I got to try Machi Koro for the first time over the holidays, and enjoyed it quite a bit - I can see how working on different strategies would be really fun.

[liv]

That makes sense about playing Dixit occasionally. I don't think it's going to be one of those games that's constantly in rotation; apart from anything else it's fairly long, and very often we're looking for a game that plays in half an hour or under. I'm certainly happy to pay for expansion packs if they actually contain real content in the form of more beautiful artwork! I'm really intrigued by combining Dixit with CAH; I think it might work well even with vanilla Apples to Apples, more or less replacing the red word cards with Dixit cards, perhaps.

Machi Koro is perhaps not the most brilliant game - it gets really nasty reviews on BoardGameGeek. But it's just delightful, it always makes me smile when I play it.

[flippac]

I enjoyed playing Dixit regularly with my regular group, but I'm somewhat known for games of reading etc there and there was a definite split about trying to play it as a "serious game" or not. Thankfully it's rare that doing the former gives you too big an edge, but people having to skew who'll get the right card for having too many points changes things for example.

[lovingboth]

Some good games (Dixit, Castles) and some I go ugh about.

An app might be the only thing that could save Smash Up - too much reading and counting downtime for what could / should be a fast playing filler. (But then I hated MtG. I'm also not a fan of Fluxx - just roll a die to see who 'wins', it's quicker and the end result is the same - so I have been avoiding Kittens.)

While I don't mind it as a game, TTR's train theme is wafer thin and I don't think of it as one. It's an abstract that could be 'about' any grabbing route thing.

For other 'programming' games and which I like much more than RoboRally, Asteroyds was available cheaply via The Works and some copies may still be around.

If you ever go to Copenhagen, go to Cafe Bastard: how a games place should be.

[liv]

Ooh, opinions, I like opinions. I think you're probably right that Ticket To Ride is only lightly a train game; I possibly prefer stuff towards the more abstract end of the route-building spectrum. When I was a kid I used to really like September which is literally pure abstract route-building with no theme at all. Which train games do you prefer?

I see why you might find Smash Up annoying. I'm really enjoying it, but I agree it's fiddly and if you hate games with hundreds of slightly variant cards then it's clearly not going to appeal to you.

Fluxx I play more because it's funny than because I care about winning. For me it works well as a game with 6-8 (optionally drunk) people clowning around and enjoying eachothers' company, rather than as a game for 2-3 people who really care about winning; if I want the latter I'll play Scrabble or Agricola. Exploding Kittens is less random than Fluxx I think; yes, it's random when an explosion comes up in the deck, but there are mechanisms to reduce your odds of getting one, and that's the fun of the game.

Maybe I should look for other programming games, at that. I know the kids have Robot Turtles, which is supposed to be a child-friendly programming game, but it's RoboRally they keep asking for.

[lovingboth]

TTR does have the advantage of being a connection game where you can play with people of different skill levels. With most of them, the weaker player(s) are usually hopelessly beaten by move three. Somewhere, I have a book on this class of games.

For real :) railway games, I have yet to see anything better than Railway Rivals, which varies from simple kid-friendly (unsurprisingly as it was originally designed for use in lessons) to something more skilful, and the 18xx series, which have as much emphasis on the share-dealing aspects as the network building ones but are unsurpassed as games where you're thinking for hours and end up feeling it was worth it almost regardless of where you came at the end.

I don't find Fluxx funny, just chaotic. For 6-8 etc, I'd go for Apples to Apples (and not CAH), Camel Up, 5 Second Rule, etc etc. For 6, Braggart is a good card game.