Category: Interesting Stuff

I think this could be the beginning of something special…first date games.

IBGC is a ‘bang on’place for a first date. Sitting there trying to make constant conversation for fear of looking boring can heighten the stress levels on a date. With a game between the two of you, you have something to talk around and about. Picking the right game can be a bit tricky though, so here’s some help to stop you #$%@ing up the first date with your dream girl by trying to get her to play Agricola…

Here are some general rules to follow:

Don’t make it too ‘thinky’. First off, thinking means you are not talking. Talking is generally good on a first date. Also, if strategy isn’t your thing and you get hammered, you’ll feel stupid. Feeling or making someone feel stupid is also bad.
Games should be a reasonable length of time. 20-30 mins is a nice amount of time. Chatting around that usually extends the game anyway.
Try and make sure they are fun. If you have fun with someone, you’ll probably want to see them again.
Make sure they are simple to learn as well. Explaining rules to someone for 20 minutes is not traditionally what you would call a conversation.
Ask us to help you if your not sure, we don’t play tonnes of games to find the perfect one for you for fun you know (OK we do, but we try and make it seem like work)

So here are few good IBGC approved first date games:

Jenga/Riff Raff – Fun, simple and silly. Jenga is a classic, and if you want something different ask us to show you Riff Raff.

Patchwork – Easy to learn and fun to play. You are making a patchwork quilt, there is some strategy to the game, but its non-confrontational and at the end of the game you’ll have a lovely quilt in front of you (plus you get to say ‘buttons’ a lot).

Word on the Street – Word games are always a good call. Its a concept we all get and this tug of war style game is great as the questions are easy and the time constraint means Scrabble players don’t have 5 mins to think of amazing answers.

Forbidden Desert – Co-operative games are great as you win and lose together (celebratory hug or consolitary hug, win/win situation baby). Just don’t start being bossy and telling the other player what to do, or tutting if they do something you wouldn’t have…

Cardline/Timeline – Super easy to learn and fun to play. If you both know history do timeline, if not go with Cardline. Do you know how heavy a Panda is? That’s OK, so long as you know they are heavier than a Rabbit, you’ll be fine.

XCOM – Review

You’ve played the video game right? Great, I haven’t, in fact I had never heard of it till the board game was announced to confused and angry cries of horror at the integration of an electronic app with a board game.

This review therefore will be purely about the game, with no comment about ‘it being rubbish because the video game does this and why doesn’t the board game do that.

Its a co-operative game set in the future with a hoard of aliens trying to mash us humans upside the head, while we valiantly try to hold them off with our puny guns and fighter jets.

You win if you fight them off and lose if two continents fall into utter chaos or your headquarters gets overrun.

There are 4 roles that need to be filled, with each person taking responsibility for a specific role in the defense of mankind (scientist, army dude, fighter pilot bloke and the boss man in charge). The game is broken up into a series of rounds, which are themselves broken into two parts:

Real time planning
Resolution of those plans

The real time planning is where the app comes into its own. The events that happen are always the same but the order in which you must plan for them will change every time. For example, you may be asked to allocate your fighters to defend the different continents, but wont have received reports of exactly how many spaceships will be there, so an educated guess has to be made, under time constraints. Yes there is timer going that gives you a limited amount of time to make each decision before it moves onto the next phase.

Those decisions are then resolved one at a time in a set order using a unique mechanism. In order to defeat/complete an objective a certain number of ‘hits’ must occur using a set of dice . If you make it on one roll, well done, if not…well you can try again, but you are also rolling an 8 sided die in conjunction with those hit dice. There is a fail track that starts at one. Every time you don’t make the objective it goes up by one and if that 8-sided dice rolls equal or less than that fail track, well, you can guess what happens. You fail, plus lose all the units involved on that objective. That really sucks, because it costs you money to get them back and then more money to place them on the missions. Oh, money is also crazy tight, you can overspend but then for every extra $$S you use it sends continents into further chaos, but any cash you don’t or can’t use is lost for the round (sounds like city council spending).

dice — Great role, unless it was the second attempt…in which case they lost all their units.

The scientist can develop upgrades to help make life easier, but if you spend your budget on that, you aren’t defending the planet. Life kinda blows during an alien invasion.

There is a fair amount more to this game, but this is usually the point I get bored reading a review, so I’ll stop as you get most of the gist.

When we played on easy, we lost miserably, but in hindsight we saw a lot of things we would have done differently. The app is pretty awesome and is also the rulebook. The only thing the game comes with is a set up diagram. Then you just follow the app step by step while playing the game to learn how it goes, which is pretty groovy.

The first game will go pretty long, as you are learning the rules, but I can see games taking about 60-90 mins once you get it down. It plays well as a 1 player, as you just take all 4 roles. It would work well as a 2 and 4 player as well. The weak spot is 3 player, where one person has to take 2 roles and can kind of slow the game a touch.

You are definitely at the mercy of some dice roles and if spending a quarter your budget on one mission only to role a 1 and lose all your units is likely to drive you bonkers, this ain’t for you. If you are looking for a game with a strong theme and story arc with some great new ideas, this will be a hit.

wilsmith — Let’s hope Wil Smith is driving one of those bad boys…

Victoria’s Favorite Game 2015

You came into the cafe and you voted and these are your bestest games ever*:

Settlers of Catan
Cards Against Humanity
Dominion
Splendor
Agricola
Ticket To Ride
King of Tokyo
Concept
Race for the Galaxy
Camel Up
Scattegories
Dixit
Munchkin
Anomia
Netrunner

Wow, TTR at 6th, very surprised about that, I thought it would have been battling for the #1 spot. The top two were streets ahead of the rest in votes cast, with 3-7 very close in votes.

*TTR and TTR Europe, King of NY and Tokyo, were merged into one vote set.

Card games I can stick in my handbag, because you never know…

Parade

I think this is my favorite small card game in the universe. It does an excellent job of mitigating the luck factor that can be frustrating in card games, while also offering a tonne of interesting decisions and strategies to play. It also does one thing that is very rare in a game. Plays well as a 2 player and as a 6 player game (plus all numbers in-between).

Parade is designed by Naoki Homma from Japan and in it you are looking to get the least amount of points. 6 cards are laid out in a row at the start to form the parade (from Alice in Wonderland) and on your turn you lay a card from your hand of 5 at the end of that Parade. If your card is a ‘Green 4’ you ignore the first 4 cards on the parade, but if any of the rest are 4 or lower and/or green you take them and they become part of your score. What makes this game great is that at the end of the game whoever has the most cards of each colour gets to flip them over and they become worth 1 point each. So if you do have to take the Red 7 & 9 (16 points), you can attempt to take a lot of red cards and reduce your score to say 5 (for 5 red cards). There is no real ‘bad’ hand, high cards allow you to skip a lot of cards, but any you can’t skip you are almost guaranteed to take, low cards are vice-versa. Lovely purple box too.

Red 7

The latest and greatest from Carl Chudyk, a maverick designer who likes to test the limits of what’s been done before (see Flowerfall for an example). 49 cards, 1-7 in the 7 colours of the rainbow. The golden rule, if you are not winning at the end of your turn you are out! You start with 7 cards plus 1 in front of you, and you can play a card in front of you, one to the middle to change the rule, or both. However, you are not going to draw cards, so playing two will drain you fast.

Just a second, did I say change the rules? Why yes indeed! Each colour is a rule about how to currently win the game, meaning the game is about trying to cover as many bases at once with the cards in front of you. The more you play, the better you get and the more the game opens up to you. A brilliant little design, with a round taking about 5 minutes, and variants for longer play and more complex rules.

No Thanks

Another, take the least points possible game. Every player starts with 11 red chips. Place a card in the middle of the table (numbered 4-36) and on your turn either place a chip on the card to not take it or take the card (and receive the points on it) and the chips on it. Obviously if you keep putting chips on the cards, you will run out of chips and have to take the card, which would suck of it was 30+, hence the balancing act. However if you have cards that are consecutive they only count as the lowest number (i.e. 26, 27 & 28 would count as just 26 points). But 9 cards are removed from the deck, so taking 19 & 21 doesn’t mean that 20 is in the deck…

A 20 minute push your luck game, that’s easy to learn but leads to some tough decisions and really fun game play.

Sky Tango

Brand new, a game about Suns and Moons (and numbers), rising and falling. It’s really quite gorgeous, but quite cut-throat at the same time. The goal is to try and collect as many cards as possible by creating runs of 5 cards in a row, in either Sun or Moon.

Cards can be added to either end of the row, but must be sequential. However, your opponent can also play on your card rows and the only time you draw is when your hand of 5 runs out. If you can’t make a legal move (by adding to the end of your or your opponents rows) you lose all the cards you played and must start again. There are also eclipses which can also be played on top of Suns/Moons to break up a row of cards (and hose your opponent). When played as a 4 it also becomes a partnership game, which I always quite enjoy.

no thanks parade red 7 sky tango

IBGC’s Game’s of 2014

Interactivity Board Game Cafe’s Game of the year 2014 is here! At the Cafe we play a lot of games and between Staff and Game Teachers we were able to poll 17 ‘experts’ to vote on the best games of last year and here are the results:

1. Splendor
2. Camel Up
3. Red 7
     Concept
     Colt Express
6.Viticulture
     Sheriff of Nottingham
8.Tragedy Looper
     Istanbul
10.Dead of Winter
     Star Realms

The surprise was probably Tragedy Looper, by far the most brain twistingly/meltery game of the year, but those who played it and retained their sanity loved it. Red 7 which only came out mid-December was the small boxed hit of the year, if you haven’t tried it yet, its a must! Let’s hope 2015 is as great.