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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1091 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 2, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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One of my New Year's Resolutions was to pick up playing board games. The primary goal here was to stare at screens less and engage more face-to-face with friends. This is working great, and I recommend it to anyone else with the same general goal! I picked up Wingspan and one of its expansions and my wife and I have been having a great time playing it even when we don't have anyone else to play with. Throw on a Spotify playlist with some bird-centric theming, pour a birb-on, draw some cards, and you have a pleasant evening.

What are you playing these days? What should be my next purchase to add to a very thin game library? My current inclination is towards Ark Nova, which BoardGameGeek users score highly and recommend specifically for two players.

I recently taught my girlfriend to play backgammon. It's great because you can play a game in five minutes for low stakes (we start at 10 cents).

These are some of my favourites:

  • Dead of Winter (2+ players, better with more)
  • Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space (4+)
  • Mysterium (it's like Cluedo + Dixit) (3+)
  • Pandemic (2+)
  • Codenames (4+, best with at least 6)

Personally I cannot bear dead of winter. It's incredibly slow and tedious. Expect even a "quick" game to take over an hour with 4+ people and you'll be begging for the zombies to just kill you by the end of it. The crossroads cards are a cool mechanic though.

I do second the last three (never played escape from aliens).

I also like the "Sherlock Holmes: consulting detective" series. Be warned, lots of reading, the first entry in the series has some insanely dubious French translation and typographical choices. Unfortunately nobody I know shares my enthusiasm for these games (anymore) so I have several unsolved cases.

I think I played Consulting Detective once. I was playing it with a group of non-native English speakers of vastly varying levels of spoken English, which made it rather confusing.

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