Featuring more of our flower garden! Today we’ve got daylilies, Aussie tulips, and lilacs.
May Flowers
Month: May 2023
What Will You Serve At Your Food Truck?
Food Truck is a simple but challenging game in which you and your opponents all run competing food trucks. It employs a combination of luck and predicting what your opponents are likely to do, as you endeavor to serve meals nobody else is offering yet.
Players start by picking a Food Truck and taking the appropriate deck of five Truck cards. They also start with a deck of one Dessert and five Meal cards, though this number will increase as the game goes on. In the center of the table is a general supply of face-up cards equal to the number of players.
Each round, players will flip over the top card of their Truck deck, and arrange all their Meal and Dessert cards in whatever order they choose to form a draw pile. Then, they’ll take turns turning over the top Meal card of their deck. A few things can happen here: 1) it can be a unique item, that nobody else has played yet. This includes all Desserts, which are wild cards and match with nothing. In this case, it stays in front of them and play passes to the next player. 2) It matches one of their own cards, and adds to that pile. 3) It matches someone else’s card, and the player playing the duplicate is eliminated for the round, taking a card of their choice from the general supply and, if they’re the first person eliminated, the first-player marker. 4) Their top card would match someone else’s card, but they can play their Truck card to somehow circumvent that, whether by rearranging their own deck or affecting someone else’s cards. This is where the pile mechanic becomes important; for two of the five Truck cards, you can use your action if (and only if) the card you’re targeting isn’t part of a pile. Once you use your Truck card, you discard it.
The round ends when all but one player have been eliminated. They claim a victory point and the last card from the supply, any unused Truck cards are discarded (and reshuffled, if all five have now been used), and the general supply is restocked. Once someone has three victory points, they win! Otherwise, Meal decks are arranged and the next round begins.
The result of everyone gaining one new Meal card per turn is that planning your deck becomes progressively harder. Either you have more types of food to strategize with, or you have several of the same types of food, or both, and so does your opponent. Accounting for your Truck ability and whether you’re first-player or not is crucial! So Food Truck is easy to learn, hunger-inducing to look at, and a mental workout to play.
Articulate! And Quickly
Articulate! is a party game one might call the word version of Charades. Someone is trying to convey the word on the card they drew, while someone else is trying to guess it. The difference is that in Articulate! the person conveying the word is doing so with… more words!
Play starts when the timer is upended. There are six categories on each card, and the active player will attempt to describe the word from the category their team’s token is on – for example, the Start space is Object – without using any form of the word itself. If their team guesses it, they get to draw another, and so forth until the timer runs out. They may also pass on one card per turn, unless they’re playing with house rules like we were; in our case it was twice. Occasionally, instead of categories a space corresponds to the spade symbol, which appears next to one random word on each card. I gather the official rules have special mechanics around this, but again, we were playing with house rules. We also didn’t use the spinner.
Once the timer runs out, the team counts how many cards they got right and moves their token that many spaces on the board. This determines what their category is next time! We found that the Person and World categories were UK-biased, so the others were easier for Mom and I to score high on. Especially Nature! Regardless of where you’re from, though, this is one of those games where the better you know your teammates, the more likely you are to do well. Especially if you can use shared fandoms to your advantage!
Victory, unsurprisingly, involves reaching the Finish space.
I also just discovered that Drumond Park (the company behind Articulate!) have all the cards for free on their website so that folks can play remotely! How cool is that?!
Sloths vs WHAT now?!
Sloths vs Kraken is, perhaps appropriately, a very quick game. However, the mechanics of the competition aren’t quite what the name implies. Instead, players use Sloth cards to prevent their opponents from spelling the word KRAKEN, while racing to build the word themselves.
Players are dealt six cards. As a result, it’s entirely possible to win on the initial deal, if you happen to start the game with all six letters of KRAKEN. Otherwise, players take turns playing cards, whether those be actions or letters. “Playing” a letter at this stage in the game means discarding one and redrawing. Similarly, any action that takes cards from someone’s hands requires that they immediately redraw, so they continue to have six cards. Any player that has five letters of KRAKEN must yell (or speak at a reasonable volume) “Ahoy!” or else they forfeit their hand and have to draw a new one.
In our case, I started with five of the six necessary letters, reversed someone else’s theft, stole the letter I needed, and won before my first turn. On the one hand, it was a perfect length for the time we had to play it in; on the other, victory relied heavily on luck of the deal. Is that the kind of game you want to play? This, I can’t answer.
