As has become a tradition, a bunch of us without family commitments
got together for boardgames.
After a bit of
Sea Salt &
Paper
while people were arriving, we moved into some six-player games,
starting with Deadly
Dowagers—which
is good fun at 2-4, and pleasingly chaotic at 6. Three out of six of
us had the money and reputation to marry the Duke on the same turn…
A couple of games of
Landmarks
next, first time I've had the chance to try the team mode. The
connection with Codenames is even more obvious than in the
cooperative mode, but I still very much prefer this one.
On to Curses &
Covens,
definitely better with six than with four.
Back to party games and some
CrossTalk.
Hard work for me, this one, and I think it may be degenerate: each
turn a team has a choice of making a guess or asking for a clue, but
there's no penalty for a wrong guess and if they get a clue the other
team will get to guess it first. So I suspect it might be most
advantageous never to ask for a clue but guess based on what the other
team get. Still quite fun, but not one I adore or plan to acquire.
Then 3 of a
Kind, in
which one person chooses a category ("animal noises"), three other
players choose descriptions ("most likely to start a dance party"),
and then everyone writes down answers. If you have the same answer as
at least one other person, you each score equal to the number of
people with that answer. So a bit Just One-ish, but more
distributed. All right, nothing offensive about it, but nothing I'd go
to any trouble to own.
The
Chamæleon
struck me as unpleasant in much the same way as Spyfall (one player
has no idea what's going on and has to bluff it, i.e. me in many
social contexts).
A few rounds of ito
which is more or less Wavelength without all the bulky plastic bits.
Everyone gets a card numbered 1-100, there's a category, and you put
your card face down into the row while naming a thing; the quality of
match of the thing to the category is a clue as to your number. (So if
you have card 1 and the category is "things you could stare at all
day", you might say "the sun".) The objective is to get all the
numbers in order.
Finally, Project
L using the
"line clear" layout to allow two simultaneous turns. It's all a bit
chaotic and we didn't line up the turns until the end, but I think
that did no harm. Still a game I enjoy each time I play it.
