These posts were imported from Playing with Games, a collaborative gaming blog that Megan and I wrote between August 2011 and January 2018. The authorship and formatting might be mixed up. If you spot any issues, please let me know.
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Megan and I found out about Cinq-O while looking for simple dice games with few components that aren’t Yahtzee or Ten Thousand. We’re always on the hunt for interesting games with few components; games which can easily be carried about. We also want to find nice strategically interesting dice games for two. Cinq-O is great for the former, but not so great for the latter.
For a game with so few materials, Pig can be very risky, stressful and intense. It is well suited for playing with children and impulsive gamblers.
Thoughts about playing board games.
Recently I was wondering why Y has received so much less attention than Hex. In any discussion I’ve seen about connection games or the elegance of modern abstracts, the name Hex comes up – why doesn’t Y? It seems as though Hex has become a much more widely known classic than Y.
Homeworlds is a game by John Cooper that uses Icehouse Pieces. It involves star systems and star ships and the battles and catastrophes that surround them.
Parker and I absolutely love Entropy. We do not, however, love the Domino Bead Game. The moves seem very forced to us, and the scoring is too extreme. So, we have combined a game that we love with a game that we wish to improve.
Eric Solomon’s Entropy is a perfect example of the theme of Chaos versus Order. Each player gets to assume each role once. As Chaos, you try to prevent your opponent from organizing patterns. As Order, you try to create as much structure as possible.
Yahtzee is a bit like Poker but uses dice. It is a game where Probability is either on your side or not on your side.
Oddball is a game that Parker and I created when we were visiting my mother on Gabriola Island, BC. It is inspired by the game Paletto.
Cribbage is my favourite card game. It is a two player game, but can be played with three players. The modifications for a three-player game are listed at the end of the rules.
It is easy to carry around a handful of dice. So, the more dice games you know, the more fun you can have with only a handful of materials.
Tablanette is a two-player card game. Parker and I discovered it when we were looking through the Pan Book of Card Games by Hubert Phillips. We have not played Tablanette in a while, but I remember enjoying this game and hope to play it again soon.
My mom and step-dad absolutely love the card game Rummy. As a result, my sister and I have also come to love this game. During my high school years, it was our main go-to game on homework-less evenings and slow weekend afternoons.
The first trick-taking game I ever played with Parker is French Tarot - the most complicated trick-taking game I have ever come across. We both enjoyed French Tarot and still talk about playing it again, but it took a while to get used to the rules. We soon after discovered 500 (a simpler form of French Tarot) and, because of our experience, took to it quickly.
At a staff Meeting on Tuesday, August 21st, my coworkers and I were asked to come up with a goal to achieve by Tuesday, September 25th. Since I’ve been wanting to play games more often, I decided on this goal: play games twenty times by the deadline.
Raj is my new ’new favourite game’. I learned about it by reading up on what Boardspace.net has available, and after reading the rules I instantly fell in love. Raj has that essentialness which is shared by certain abstracts. It is the simplest possible expression of a fundamental game mechanic and yet it still playable as an interesting game in itself.
Zendo is a great game. It’s a really, really, great game. It’s one of those perfect examples of a game mechanism distilled to its finest and packaged into a game that really works. Kory Heath, the game’s designer, really hit on a genius idea. It’s also a very general game. You can play Zendo with Looney Pyramids, designed by Looney Labs, one of my favourite game companies, or almost any other set of things that are plentiful and can be assembled into a large number of configurations. I’ve played Zendo with pictures on a chalkboard, and with words over e-mail. As an illustration I’ve included below a game played with strings of zeros and ones.
A very deep almost-tie in Catchup.
Last Friday, Parker and I began a new project: a six-week-long children’s program that is part homework help, part games workshop. Each class consists of forty five minutes of tutoring and forty five minutes of game play and discussion. Our first game of the workshop is Hex.
I’ve just finished playing a hundred games of Catchup (BGG). Here are the rules. Below I’ll talk mostly about how Catchup feels and what it makes me think of.
We’ve been trying to think up a large multi-player game that can be played asynchronously, doesn’t involve lying or back-stabbing, and isn’t going to be wrecked by the players communicating with each other. In fact, it’d be great if the game encouraged players to communicate and work collaboratively. Such a game is still in the works; but, while we were working on it, the following occured to us.
We played the Claude Soucie game Divide and Conquer at the laundromat. It was very good, but we found the hand management to be hard. It was too difficult to imagine what the other player was holding.
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