Games

Hadrian’s Wall plays largely as a solo game. Interaction is primarily reserved for leveraging an icon on another person’s card where the benefit of doing so outweighs the boon you may provide them in the form of a paid resource. If you’re staring deep into another person’s strategy, you can influence them in minor ways (e.g., in a two-player game you can trigger extra attacks from the Pict that you might be able to handle better than your opponent or you might play a card with a good you know that they’ll need), but generally you’re probably better off focusing on your own game and then allowing happenstance to prompt interaction. Though, I will say that we’ve had an oddly cooperative experience in that I or my partner might lament missing a particular resource which begets helpful suggestions.

 

The game is designed well in that you usually feel like there’s an option. You might not be able to do what you want to do, but there’s at least some means to expend rather than squander your resources. With a varied panoply of tracks, you can continue your victory-point march ever forward.

 

You’ll spend an hour marking boxes; however, this time passes quickly. Downtime is minimal, only occurring should you finish a round ahead of the other player or players. Our experience has been that we’ve generally aligned the conclusion of our turns. And, I will add that glancing over to see what another player has left inspires me to adjust my speed of play. If the other player’s reserve is low, I’ll expedite my decision-making. If I’m finishing first, background music serves as a distraction, as does my phone, a bathroom break, a quest for sustenance, etc.

 

If you enjoy Excel, you’ll probably love this game. If maximizing efficiencies appeals to you, ditto. You like X-ing off items from a to-do list, then Hadrian’s Wall may be for you. I’ll add that there’s something delightfully absurd and fulfilling about the chains of cascading benefits you can accrue. More than once, you will discover yourself trading in a yellow worker for a purple one to get a yellow to get a purple to grab a stone that gives you back a yellow worker and so on.

 

Want direct interaction? Perhaps move on. Have terrible eyesight? Grab a magnifying glass, or perhaps move on.

 

The different categories of population are color coded. If you’re like me, you might only easily remember that the purple meeples are slaves (though, the instructions label them as servants). If you’re like me in that I then found it harder to recall that black meeples are soldiers and blue ones are builders, then you, like me, might have to do some soul searching… Soul searching I didn’t realize I had to embark upon had I never opened the game’s box. But, it strike me that I’d say, “grabbing a blue person, grabbing a black person, getting a yellow, need a slave.”

 

Recognize that the teach will take some time. A person may need time to internalize the rules, as well as recover from having ingested them. Teaching this game is one of those swallow-a-large-pill moments.

My City was a great experience. The rules are simple. You shuffle a deck of cards, with each card’s face showing a different Tetris-like piece that you possess. You flip the deck card-by-card to learn which piece next needs to be placed on your personal player board.

 

However, you’re juggling multiple conditions at any one time, which is what creates the puzzle. I paused a few times during our first games to marvel that there’s more going on that I had initially realized. Conversely, it’s not an unbounded playpen, which fortunately means the options, while myriad, shouldn’t lead many people into analysis paralysis. Given that you can expect to play nearly every piece that you have, you can pre-plan moves, which also expedites the gameplay. Yet, since each play must be contiguous to a piece you’ve already placed, the timing of when a card arrives may not fit your plan. Fortunately, most games allow you to skip most pieces at the loss of a point, so even in a damnable situation where you truly don’t want to play a given shape, you often can forgo doing so.

 

What’s genius here is that your final score is calculated after twenty-four games, with the winner of a game securing points toward the final score, alongside there often being additional ways to accruing such points as well that don’t require you to have won the game. Meaning, it’s no big deal if you get blown out in a given game since the final score isn’t based on differentials from the individual games that you play, and you don’t need to win the majority or plurality of the games either. Also, the winner of a given game typically receives changes to the personal game board that make it a touch harder to win future games whereas the loser gets benefits to increase the score of future games.

 

Given that this is a legacy game, in that it evolves and continues across a span of games, each game tweaks the rules, with some changes being somewhat trivial to some changes being rather intense. Intense being proportionate to a game that involves placing polynomials in a landscape grid; nowhere did the rules say to smack your opponent or cut oneself as penance for losing three successive games, which is something that I definitely experienced, the losing not the hypothetical penance.

 

So, I’m familiar with legacy games. Some friends and I played Pandemic Season 1. We grew bored. Which feels like sacrilege to confess given how loved the game is by the community. Yet, we abandoned it after completing about three fourths of the game. Most of the games felt like straightforward wins. Inevitable. Foregone conclusions. Perhaps we should have recruited a fourth, with three-player Pandemic simply being a touch too easy, or maybe we missed some integral rule or rules. But, assuming all went as it should have gone, it just wasn’t all that engaging – we had more fun trying to win vanilla Pandemic with six or seven epidemics.

 

A different group of us completed Gloomhaven and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, though due to various happenstances we never quite finished Forgotten Circles. We’re still mid-scenario traveling upward within what had been feeling like an ever-rising tower. Holidays, travel, covid, and my relocation to Seattle effectively taped that box up, perhaps for good. Sometimes it’s hard to sleep at night knowing that my character remains entombed mid-stride, nearly exhausted, all while surrounded by cardboard standees. We all took photos of the game state. On dark stormy nights as I drink a dark and stormy, I’ll sometimes load up the images, text my friends, and imagine one day we’ll be forced by the fates to reunite, perhaps to save humanity, with it turning out that cardboard adventures reverberate in import across the mortal plane that is our actuality.

 

But, while I am still working through my relationship with unresolved legacy games, as well as my unrelenting desire to play The Rise of Fenris legacy version of Scythe – one day — Kelly had not yet played any game that evolves. I told her multiple times: “Yes, you can write on the board.” “No, you won’t be teleported to hell.” “It’s ok.” Oddly, though, applying stickers seemed like less of a shock for her. Pens are indelible. Glues, merely sticky. I don’t claim to be immune to morality or sympathy or whatever sparked the concern she demonstrated. For, upon being instructed to rip up cards in Gloomhaven, I’d set them aside. Until, one day, after realizing I had spent innumerable moments sorting through materials to set up and tear down gaming sessions, that destruction meant incremental liberation freed me from my hang up. Heaving game components into the trash, freed us ounce by ounce from what was and remains, even after such cardboard carnage, a ridiculous box brimming with nearly unyielding content.

 

So, yes, legacy games replicate the evolving nature of life, teaching us to evolve as much as to let go. And, beauty of My City is that the modifications are invariably incremental, with the accreting and dissolving of rules as you apply stickers and then sometimes proceed to cover such stickers. The rules keep moving, and I won’t label every particular change to be stellar but none of the modifications were off putting. You keep flowing, and that the game is generally engaging alongside the excitement to see what changes next and how it influences your decision-making kept us going.

 

The other thing to note about a competitive legacy game is that there’s the terror that a participant will crush the competition, or that someone will simply get trounced and get dragged through dozens of games, ever reminded that life is meaningless with each accruing defeat. Fortunately, and I cannot speak to whether this arose from the evening-out mechanic of clipping the wings of an individual game’s winner while boosting the losers’ boards or our similar abilities at the game, but we kept our overall scores close throughout the experience, with Kelly winning on a tie breaker at the end. Which is the best outcome of such an extend series of bouts.

 

My City supports up to four players, and then it includes a backside on each board to provide a non-legacy version of the game. Since we played the game as two players, we’ll be able to go through the 24-game cycle again. It’s not something I’m clamoring to do in the near-term, and I don’t know how often, if ever, I’d be excited to play the non-legacy version of the game, given how much more engaging the full experience is, but perhaps three, six, or more months from now I suspect we’ll give it another go, and if Kelly trounces, me, I suspect I could make it through the entire series. If not, even eeking out a handful more plays before placing it within purgatory alongside Gloomhaven Forbidden Circles isn’t a terrible fate.

Recently, Hanabi has become my go-to online social game. It produces anxiety, stress, elation, and curiosity. The premise is simple. You play through a deck of fifty cards. Each card displays a color (purple, red, yellow, green, or blue) and a number (1 through 5, inclusive). For each color, there are three 1s, two 2s, two 3s, two 4s, and one 5. Thus, 50 cards. You can add an additional ten cards for a rainbow color, but we’ll skip that aspect for this post. Your hand size varies depending on the number of players; for three players, you hold five cards. The goal is to play cards of each color in numerical order, 1 to 5. You can work on each of these color sets concurrently, in that you can move up the number continuum for each color at equal or separate rates. For example, you could have played the blue 1, 2, and 3; yet, only be at a 1 for the yellow color, and perhaps not even have started with the green, red, and purple colors. The number stack for each color can be built separate from each other color, with the dominant rule being that you must play numbers for a given color in numerical, increasing order.

The rub is that you do not see your own cards, but you see everyone else’s hand. During the game, you’re not to speak about the cards or convey strategy. You socialize about life, discuss books, share baking tips, wax on about aspirations, and generally behave as if you’re in a knitting circle or other imagined social gathering of your preference.

You begin a game with eight hint counters. On your turn, you can either discard a card and draw a new one, play a card, or give a hint by spending a hint counter. Discarding a card removes it from the game and earns you back a hint counter. Note that you cannot have more than eight hint counters. Playing a card means you go to add it to next lowest sequence for one of the color sets. If the card is a valid play, it is added to the set (i.e., the next number in the set for the given color). If it’s not playable, then it’s added to the discard pile. You do not receive a hint counter for a played card, whether it is a viable play or is discarded.

To give a hint, you inform another player which cards in that person’s hand are of a certain number of color. For example, you could indicate which cards are a 1 and then tap each of those cards. Or, you could say these cards are blue, and tap each of those cards. To give a hint, you indicate every card that fits the given criterium, thus if the person in the last example is holding three blue cards, you couldn’t just tap the one blue card that you want the person to play, but rather you must indicate that all three are blue.

I had encountered the game years ago, but in person its logistics overwhelmed me. For, memorizing what people had told you wasn’t easy. I would recite each clue perpetually, a sort of mantra. And, then you also need to recall what you’ve told other people as well. The magic of the game is deducing what you may have based on what others have shared and when they’ve shared that information. It’s a game of efficiency gained via deduction and navigating the imperfect information you possess is from which its magic arises.

Being distant from friends, we’ve turned to online implementations. There are many for Hanabi, but I’ve only tried one site. It’s bare bones. Simple. Yet, it’s elegant. Clues received appear on cards, indicating all info each player knows about a card. Thus, if you tell someone that two cards in the hand are 3s then the other cards become marked with a “not 3” symbol. Rather than provide a turn log, the screen displays the last move conducted, thus you must remember some details, in terms of when clues had been given, but the presentation alleviates the heaviest load of details you’d need to remember, namely what people know about their cards based via provided hints.

As you play, you develop a manner of sharing clues and expectations about such clues. Players develop a common set of assumptions and behaviors that resembles a modest language. You elate when a friend gets what you want done or not done, and everyone sighs collectively when a mistake gets made. Following games, we’ll turn to a text or video conversation to relay what went wrong and celebrate slick clues. I have fist pumped the air more than once due to a solid move, and if my friends had been near, we’d have exchanged high fives. I love the sense of accomplishment induced by a perfect score, playing 1 – 5 of all five colors.

Having explored Hanabi with the same two people, the rare times we’ve brought on another person have felt odd. The conversation of hints and plays becomes disjointed. The rhyhym is off. Misplays occur with frequency. These people have all been new to the game, so whether such a disconnect would occur with seasoned players, I know not, though I suspect that some standards we’ve incorporated into our games may be somewhat unique to our specific crew. Though, the spaces in-between various standards could likely be closed quickly. Something I’ve loved about certain games is how you feel them. In chess, I can sense another person’s strengths as turns accrue. Agricola provides a sense of dread as you time the options through possible worker placements against the clocking tick of the game’s hunger mechanic, where you lose points due to your game’s family members lacking enough sustenance. With Hanabi, playing with friends provides a sense of home

Played Barenpark earlier tonight with Kelly. It’s a polyominos placement game (Tetris pieces, essentially). You try to maximize points by being the first person to claim certain pieces. Each turn resembles the prior turn, and there’s only a touch of a need to think ahead. Simple, yet fun.

Earlier, I loaded a rules video while doing my daily 50 burpees; however, I phased out as the person explained how to set the game up, so I decided to forgo learning the game ahead of setting it up. It’s one of those games that’s much easier to learn without a video; two or three pages of rules, with graphics included with the explanations. It’s faster and clearer to skim the rule book with the pieces on the table than it is to suffer through a video. Rather simple game; You basically make one move each turn that can then trigger up to a few outcomes. Rinse. Repeat.

Not a bad experience though, despite its simplicity. There’s something fulfilling about aligning Tetris-style pieces. That you get points for being the first to claim certain pieces and to reach certain goals requires you to plan ahead, perhaps sacrificing your preferred course to achieve a more valuable outcome. Timing is the main variable, given that first movers gain more points, as is pre-planning moves, for you grab pieces ahead of playing them, and sometimes you accumulate several pieces, yet you may only play one each time.

As a two-player game, your options to block the other player were relatively straightforward. I could see it being best with four players; more occurring between your turns would keep you on your toes and would increase the tension felt regarding the unique pieces.

I have to select games wisely when it comes to gaming with Kelly. Certain mechanics never will hit our gaming table, especially ones that put us in direct conflict. For example, Skulk Hollow was a complete flop. Same with Evolution. No targeting of another. Personally, I avoid “take that” mechanics, so I get her preference, though some of the meanest games out there please me immensely (e.g., Through the Ages and Innovation). If you let yourself be a target, then I don’t mind the aggression as much, and combative elements in two-player games is fine, since there’s no arbitrariness involved in whom gets harmed. Logic of the “Dave won the last game, so let’s put the thief on him” variety displeases me. Much better when everyone gets hit, as is typically the case in Dominion – attacks either harm either everyone but the person playing the card or potentially do so, with randomness being the factor that drives the “potentially.”

This game lands well in the playable camp. It’s cute, though the theme is rather pasted on. You have some decisional space, but the game doesn’t require ample thought. No analysis paralysis will occur yet slowing down to contemplate options does help.

I’ll add that I had thought that I had slaughtered her. I had grabbed more of the advanced bonuses, and I had taken some of the more valuable large pieces. Yet, in the game you vie to complete four player boards upon which you place the polyominos, with serious points going to the person first completing their boards. She had completed the first few before me, which racked her up some serious points. Despite my worry that I had a runaway win, she bested me by six points, 100 to 94.

We’ll be playing the game again before long, that much I know. It’s a pared down version of Isle of Cats, which we also enjoyed. That game has more degrees of complexity, in that you draft cards and then pay for cards from the set that you draft, which consumes the same resources needed to buy cats (i.e., the polyominos) to then add to your board. The bonuses vary per game, and you select them as you proceed, as well as potentially block the other from gaining them given the draft mechanics. That we can explore similar mechanics via a quick game or an extended one serves two distinct options within one gaming mechanic universe. It’ll be interesting to see which game sees more play in the end.

This post continues the prior discussion of games I’ve been enjoying that are suitable for playing online.

Via App/Steam/Tabletop Simulator/Boardgame Arena/Etc.

Scythe

The Steam implementation is great. You can access much information easily and readily. You can set limits on turn lengths by providing a max amount of time any player can use during the course of the game, thereby encouraging people to move with alacrity, yet retaining the ability to deliberate during pivotal moments of the game. The finicky bits of the game are made mellifluous. There’s no more, “hey, I forgot to take coins when I upgraded, does anyone mind if I take them now,” or, “did you enlist on your turn for I didn’t catch that you did and thus didn’t take a combat card, can I take one now?” Which is lovely, because remembering to do all of the little things while navigating whether or not people did things can drive you batty. I also love that the designers made the executive decision to provide everyone’s score during the game. You could always count it up if you wished, though the manual tries to dissuade you from doing so, so it makes sense to incorporate a score tracker and allow its presence to help inform decisions.

On that note, though, this version is unforgiving! For if you click incorrectly or change your mind after selecting an option then there’s no looking back. Lumbering mechs and overworked workers within an alternate 1920s Europe that has a cold war feel to it have no freedoms for rethinking moves. In person, the game design allows one player to start a turn as the other player completes a turn, thus producing a steady flow of actions, one player’s moves segueing into the following player’s turn. This implementation, with its draconian refusal to allow an undo button, seems to try to mirror the crushing onward flow of time via its no-takebacks philosophy. You click. You commit. Onward!

I found that after I made a few mistakes that I learned my lesson; it’ll be a rare day that I fail to carry a worker when I had meant to do so. Resources WILL NOT be left behind again. I won’t accidentally mishit options so as to produce without actually producing any goods, and I’ll be sure to get my resources as the encounter card had offered them to me. Like acme, a mistake might flare up on occasion, they’re inevitable. However, once you get a few games under your belt, they’ll be rare. To continue the analogy, you’ve grown up – no longer a teenager. Makes sense [whistles].

In short, I love that this version makes the game quicker, not only in that set up, take down, and scoring is instantaneous but also in that you can set a timer on moves and games proceed at nearly double the speed as compared with in person, at least from my experience with the game.

 

Through the Ages

Two truths: (1) I love this game. (2) I never get to play this game in person. You’re looking at three hours of gameplay, lots of fiddly bits, some intense interpersonal moments given the aggression and war military cards, and the need for repeat plays. Years ago, I had a solid gaming group. Outside of backpacking and climbing seasons, we’d play for four to six hours every weekend, and then during the prime weather months we’d still get in sessions once or twice a month. Those were my halcyon gaming days, a group who were all friendly, committed, engaged, and communicative, and were ever ready to throw down some cardboard chits while having some beers and conversing away the hours. Not to diminish my current crew or other groups, but this level of consistency and pure geekery has not yet been matched, though there have been glimmers of such possibilities from time to time. This game, along with Power Grid, were our main go to options.

With Through the Ages, Vlaada did well in designing a game with rules that make so much sense once you play a few rounds. You have themes of cards and they build upon each other as you go through the ages. You’re manipulating resources, trying to control the pace at which new cards become available for fewer action points (or more action points, if we’re focusing on our opponents), and making do with what some of the randomness of the game throws at you. Each game, you’ll see the same civil cards, but when they become available and whether you’ll be able to grab them varies with each play. The elegance of the game is determining when to focus on culture, in terms of at what level to accrue such points during the early game, and when to focus on culture in earnest. You spend much of the game developing your engine, and then at some point you blast it toward victory; with you finessing the options as overlapping circles of options, each game varying the degrees you pursue various strategies: to what extent do you prioritize colonization, military strength, seeding events, farm and/or mine production, blue cards, government options, leaders, wonders, etc. Variances of the various options creates a myriad of paths toward the end game.

Given the time commitment, the app/Steam version is perfect. You can shift between asynchronous and real-time play as you like. It reminds me of when Rich and I lived together and kept a chess board in play. We’d sometimes make moves back-to-back, both at the table, though sometimes the pace would see a move a day, if not at a less frequent pace. I recall us performing consecutive moves and then realizing I had blundered to then say, “ok, I’m done for now,” so that I could think through options. What struck me about those games is that I could imagine the board perfectly and work through series of moves in my head, which was one way that I got through my dreary job at a law firm, where I toiled as a docketing clerk, which basically means you’re largely doing mindless, repetitive work, at least that’s what it meant for my instance of this position. So, with Through the Ages, you trade off playing through a game quickly to allowing it to blossom over days, though sometimes you’ll find that you finish it within a few hours should you and your friends churn through the moves quickly upon being notified that you’re up.

There’s a free version as well. It works fine. When I moved away from the gaming group mentioned above, we continued to play Through the Ages for the next year or two, but then we all moved on. I haven’t used the free version since then, but I suspect it’s just as good as it had been, if not better, which, is to say, that it’s perfectly viable, simply lacks the flourishes and polish of the non-free version, I suspect.

 

Innovation

Innovation is one of my favorite 2-player card games. Dominion probably holds that spot, though I largely stopped playing it when it left the Isotropic website. That implementation, as bare bones as it was, was amazing. You could knock out a game in under ten minutes. The interface provided all the info you required without fuss, and the lack of graphics and animations meant everything worked smoothly and quickly. There was an elegance to that site’s implementation.

Fortunately, Innovation remains available via Isotropic. Now, Innovation is a tougher beast to wrangle via the bare-bones approach, mostly in terms of how unforgiving the interface can be. You click the wrong thing, and you’re out of luck. In Dominion, there were few opportunities to make a mistake; whereas, Innovation serves as a mine field of “viable” moves that do nothing. You can make a demand on someone even though you lack the symbol strength to implement its text. As with the Steam version of Scythe, you’ll quickly learn to not make these blunders.

Innovation is wonderful in that its many cards mean that each game feels different, and even though there’s so many unique cards, the base rules are pretty straightforward. The interactions amongst the possibilities is where the game shines, along with the sense that you’re ever dancing against chaos, for many plays have you scrambling to maintain your plan, recouping when your strategy crumbles, or trying to get out from the brutality being unleashed by your opponent, turn after turn.

The first few times I played this game, I largely hated it. Random, I declared. Happenstance. Then I realized that if you know what you’re doing, and can engineer options then you’ll win most games, regardless of “luck.”

Though, while I recognize that Engineering is a card and can explain what that card does, this game hasn’t infiltrated my brain as Dominion has done. About eight years since I last played Dominion regularly, I still recall card names and their text. Yesterday, I referred to an Envoy and then smiled as I recalled what that Promo card does. This recollection skill of transforming words like Goon, Mint, Throne Room, and other names of Dominion cards from their in-person use to images of the given card and its ability remains a nostalgic distraction that will never cause me to say Rats, which is a card I would rarely pursue, but appreciate for its zaniness.

 

Root

 

I’ve written about Root already. I love the asymmetry of this game, that much of the balance lies in the conversations you have as the game proceeds. You can point out a player’s apparent strategy or weakness (e.g., no one attack the Eyrie, for they will enter turmoil during their next recruit phase), argue that someone should not let something happen, or plead for someone to do something (e.g., move your otters there and I’ll pay for their services, provided you don’t set the price beyond X). That each game feels like multiple games given how unique each faction brings wonder to my mind, like matching multiple jigsaw puzzles with pieces that connect along the vertical plane, with each, meanwhile, forming a thematically linked horizontal puzzle. The only flaw is that it’s not necessarily a quick game, and it can drag. I think a timer would do wonders for it. That an app version is forthcoming excites me, for the TTS version is especially slow when people aren’t adept at the interface, which, fortunately, resolves somewhat quickly for most players.

 

Quacks of Quedlinburg

Accessible, pared-down, press-your-luck version of Dominion. Bag building. Where you throw chits into a bag rather than deal with shuffling. Genius! I love that each game feels different given the randomized powers associated with the various color tokens. The TTS implementation moves as quickly as playing in person. This is a fun game that I’d never call a favorite, but will generally be down to play, especially if we need to resolve within 45 minutes, for even 30 minutes is feasible if you keep things moving.

 

Sushi Go

Board Game Arena has a great implementation. You can play a game in ten minutes. It’s fun. Goofy. Some strategy, but not much. I like it with 3 or 4 players because you can count cards much more easily and maintain more control of your fate; 3 feels tight, which is probably my favorite count for the game.

 

Carcassonne

I may have overplayed this game. In 2010 I was bedridden for a month and played the Asobrain implementation quite a lot. I became highly ranked. It was intense. Best as a 2-player game, it can scale up, which is also nice. The expansions got out of control, though Inns & Cathedrals and Traders & Builders expansions add much to the game, without overly complicating or extending the game. I’m not familiar with Abbey & Mayor, though have read positive things about that expansion. The Board Game Arena version works well, same with the App version, which I sometimes play against AI opponents.

 

Dominion

 

Mentioned Dominion above; I have checked out the current website version, and it’s nice, but my love for the former Isotropic version has prevented me from using the site all that often. To some extent, Dominion lurks in my past. One day, perhaps, it’ll become a focus again, provided I find the right person or people with whom to head down the Dominion rabbit hole. The main thing I need for Dominion is an opponent who plays quickly. Boredom ensues if the moves aren’t happening at a rapid pace.

 

Hanabi

Great cooperative game where you build logic systems with friends to convey info about cards hidden from you. Each player can see the cards others hold, but cannot see one’s own hand. You can only give some many hints before people are forced to play or discard cards, thus you need to prioritize certain info by providing hints that maximize how much usable info you can convey. It’s fun, a brain burner, and the online version is better than playing in person for it’ll track info that you have, which makes the game much easier to play and takes it out of a memory exercise.

 

Azul

A free, rip-off version was recently launched. It works well, and you can play quickly, which is wonderful. My understanding is that the creator will soon be adding a turn history box, which will be helpful because we often find ourselves having to declare what we did, which isn’t a big deal, but it seems like a step that could be automated. I really enjoy how simple this game is while providing interesting decisions in terms of when to focus on grabbing points versus preventing others from securing the tiles they need.

 

 

My board game playing has intensified due to COVID-19. Most of uptick has occurred online, though solo sessions have skyrocketed as well. My count for the past 30 days equals 54 plays. For perspective, considering the past 365 days reveals 354 plays. If I keep up the 54 plays every 30 days, I’ll manage just more than 650 games over the year. My gaming sessions had a tendency to disperse across a spectrum of games. A fan of change and variety, the cult of new often afflicts me. Mastering a game is fun, but the allure of exploring another game’s take on common mechanics regularly entice me. With online gaming, certain offerings have become the usual suspects. There’s a wide bounty of options, but my group doesn’t like paying for app versions of games, and does not always have the interest, or patience, to learn new games via the online medium. To some degree, the onus is shifted more to theme to pick up the rules, for not every online version of a game lends itself to rules explanation over a video chat.

This post will celebrate some of the games that have been my go-to options for social distancing. My next gaming post will focus on games I’ve been playing without the need for video conferencing.

 

Via Video Conferencing Software

 

Just One

Just One is easy to play. It’s a cooperative game, where you take turns trying to guess a word based on one-word clues provided by the other players. The other players write down clues in secret, compare their clues, and then you see only unique clues. That is, if two or more people wrote the same clue then you don’t see clues from those people; thus, the tension is trying to provide good clues that no one else will provide. When you’re the guesser, you see the clues that weren’t repeated and have one guess to say the word on the card.

Only one house needs to have the game, and, in theory, you could play without the game, simply generating a random noun for a person to guess. Whoever is up turns away from the screen, or turns the screen away from view, until it’s time to guess. Everyone else can draft their clues, compare via the video feed, and then not show struck words. If people are in the same house, they do not share with each what they wrote until they all have written down their words.

The last time we played, I messed up by not guessing, though I knew the answer. I was presented with Haunted and Spooky. I thought House and then Ghost and then Halloween. Given the options, I didn’t guess. However, Halloween was obviously the best guess given that if people had seen “House” they likely wouldn’t have written Haunted and Spooky. Maybe one person would have written “Haunted” to help me distinguish between words like “Home” and “House” in terms of what to guess, but receiving “Spooky” and “Haunted” in response to House would have been odd. Same idea with Ghost. Sure, a ghost is spooky and a ghost haunts, but would someone have written haunted rather than haunt or haunts and would people provide spooky and haunted for ghost? I don’t think so. Whereas, Halloween makes sense for Haunted and Spooky, fitting both words. After passing, my friends informed me that two of them had written candy, thus canceling that word. Candy, amusingly enough, would have also fit with house, but, again, I think Halloween would have made the most sense in terms of what associations would have come to mind upon seeing that word.

 

Welcome To

Welcome To is a flip-and-write, as in you flips cards and then each player selects a set of cards to use, marks a sheet accordingly, and then you flip more cards so the players can make another round of selections. The theme is that you’re populating a neighborhood by providing mailing addresses, building pools, constructing blocks by building fences, increasing real estate, and performing other similar neighborhood activities. They’ve rolled out alternate player sheets that incorporate ice cream cones, zombies, Christmas lights, among other variants, each with tweaked scoring rules. You can download and print the player sheets, and there is also a markable PDF version of the sheets available. So, all you need to do to play is point a camera feed at the flipped cards and go from there. I got tired of shuffling the deck, so I created an app that contains replicas of the cards, thus allowing me to share my tablet’s screen and conducting the flipping that way, which simplifies and expedites the process.

 

Pandemic

Pandemic requires no introduction for most gamers. In short, it’s a cooperative game where you combat four diseases while traveling the globe, in map format, treating infections of the diseases (glorified wording for removing cubes from the board) and curing the diseases by collecting and turning in cards. You lose by running out of player cards (a representation of time), suffering more than eight outbreaks, or being overwhelmed by a given disease (represented by running out of cubes that indicate infections of the disease). There’s no multiplayer app that works remotely, though you can hot seat the game (i.e., hand the device to people to have them conduct moves). However, with screen sharing, you can video chat, discuss moves, and have the person who hosts the game handle the app logistics. Given that a turn consists of 4 action points, it’s easy to discuss options as a team, and then have the host perform the actions. With an undo action available so long as hidden info hasn’t been revealed, you can play out options to see them on the board before committing.

Games can cause pain. That’s something we all know yet tend to not discuss, let alone recognize. Much of the distress people undergo is fleeting. Some sense of consternation arising from stress. Disappointment can prompt passing ire or malaise. Oftentimes, I’ve witnessed a person berate him or herself or disengage due to a poor decision or outcome. At the close of some games, a person would lament that so-and-so won, and sigh, with weariness, “for what else would you expect?” These moments stick with me. I’m sensitive, and want people to have fun, enjoy their experiences, and not get too invested in outcomes. Yet, the reality is that we each come to games with our individual expectations and baggage, and what another person undergoes during a game lies outside my control.

Sometimes barbs prick people’s psyche, whether egos or insecurities or simply feelings. In a recent game where you enter into battles with other players, a friend became upset when I indicated that the move was faulty because another player would surely win. The friend did not like that I pointed out what the other person needed to do to win, which was common information and did not seem like table talk to me. In general terms, whether I crossed the line with my commentary, I suspect not, yet due to this person being angered, I did cross the line with this person.

Then there are people who behave in secret, trying to mask open information and ensuring that all info that need not be disclosed stays shrouded. Hard it is to unearth how many cards they hold, what they did on their last turn, or any other game-state info. To play within some level of secrecy shall provide an edge, I suppose. Discussing games, and endeavoring to keep information exchanged, in terms of strategies, perspectives, options, and the like please me, and enrich the game, though I recognize this viewpoint is not the consensus.

Reading online strategy disinterests me, for the beauty of the game is to learn and deduce things, whether with friends or individually. Like, with Scythe, from generally following a Facebook page for it, I know that there are strategies for each faction/board combo that can end the game quickly. That you can conduct your moves based on the given board to ramp up to achieving six stars. The idea of memorizing and performing these scripts disinterests me. What’s the point?

In contrast, sharing what you recognize, or think you have recognized, is a strong aspect of the joy that gaming can bring to me. To keep things level, if I learn something online, I share it. It’s an open book, this gaming realm. I do, however, enjoy reading discussions of rules, reviews of games, and other various posts, within which strategy tips may be embedded. In terms of these trinkets, I try to share them. Some of my friends engage, others don’t. It runs the gamut, with some people wishing to engage and others not wishing to do so. I suppose one aspect of Root that I love is that table talk is incorporated into the game. You can reveal where others might be scheming and point out weaknesses. The balance in the game is contingent on the players poking at weaknesses and maximizing opportunities. I haven’t been the Riverfolk yet, but the idea of offering to move my pieces places and conduct other various actions so as to entice purchases appeals to me. We only used them once, and I think we had engrained ideas of “table talk” that prevented them from being fully explored.

There are personalities adverse to not being the alpha on the top, or perhaps personalities adverse to allowing another person to be the expert. With rules explanations, certain people will not engage, preferring to stare at rulebooks rather than listen. The act of sharing the game via an explanation not being an enjoyable part of the process. At these moments, it’s unclear to me whether it’s personal toward me, or simply the other person’s general nature. I know when I’m not being clear or precise with my explanation, which happens sometimes. Other times, I slay the elucidation. I think, on the whole, I’m decent at it, though I do recognize that when people don’t pay attention and then ask multiple questions that I had answered that I can become frustrated, especially when people ask the same question in succession, as if they’re unable to pay attention to another person’s question. Perhaps I’m too demanding, and that these past interactions have turned certain people off from my explanations.

I have been focused on the impacts of the games themselves, whether preparatory, during, or following. There are related but external hurts as well. Like when you’re not invited to a gaming event, for whatever the reason. There’s an entire world of ways that you can be slighted due to games. Learning that people have a habitual game night of which you hadn’t be previously aware can hurt, as can trying to have set up games to learn that people declined to then play the same game with others.

Game groups can be like dating in this regard. Each person brings strengths and weaknesses, and you accept these traits, or you move on to other people. Ultimately, for me, it’s good to balance a range of people for varying games, which allows you to overlap what works with certain individuals while distancing the mechanics that falter as appropriate. Within my mind, I can picture someone and assign game characteristics that’ll suffice in terms of length, complexity, game mechanics, etc. Some people lack the ability to pay attention and need fast turns. Others bog within analysis paralysis and need simplified options. Some people detest bluffing or might not like direct conflicts. My view of each friends is a series of overlapping circles, seeking the best option to match where everyone’s preferences converge.

Ultimately, my goal remains to not take things personally, while taking in as much gaming splendor as I can, even if this means that I must play Splendor, which isn’t a knock on the game, but rather a recognition that there are richer experiences to be had.