Agent 299 is a great game I was introduced to at GameholeCon – it takes a little strategy, a little memory, and a little deck. Seriously, the whole game is 10 cards, 9 if you exclude the rules. It’s a pocket card game!
It’s also a game of the rarer sort, where you don’t look at your own cards. Cards are instead laid out face down, split evenly between the players, with the leftover card (in a 2- or 4-player game) face down in the middle. Who goes first is up to you to decide – we flipped a coaster – but whoever that is gets the rules card, which doubles as a First Player marker. Starting with them and working around the table, each player must perform an Interrogation. This can work one of two ways: firstly, by peeking at one face-down card in front of another player, and swapping one of their own cards (face-up or face-down) for any one of that player’s. Alternatively, in a 2- or 4-player game you may instead peek at the card in the middle and swap it with any card.
After all players have performed an Interrogation, the person with the First Player card must flip one of their cards face-up. Some of these have abilities that are usable once revealed, but only for so long as they’re in front of you… and again, face-up cards can be stolen! (Ok, swapped for, but if you’re getting a Blown Cover worth negative 3 points – and nothing else – for your super useful ability card… it’s not exactly an agreeable trade.)
The game ends when the active player can’t perform an Interrogation (everyone else’s cards are all face-up) or a Disclosure (all of their cards are face-up and they don’t have Secret Documents, which would let them skip this step), at which point scores are tallied from the cards you have in front of you. Check them all – most cards only score when face-up, but the Blackmail card gives you a 2-point bonus if you have it face-down at the end of the game. In the case of a tie, the winner is whoever has the Top Secret Documents card face-up… or, failing, that, the Secret Documents card face-up, or failing that, the Blackmail card, regardless of where its face is. It’s a very thorough hierarchy.
I like this game a lot, mostly for how portable it is – I’ve actually taken to keeping it in my phone case, in case the opportunity for a game arises. And don’t they always?
I mean, it’s the same board. Though if you were really hoping for a post on chess, don’t worry! You can find that right here. (Why did it take me so long to write about checkers, especially when it’s the same board? I’m glad that you asked, imaginary other half of this conversation! I forgot that I knew how to play.)
How To Play Checkers, a strategy-free overview: each player starts with three rows of four pieces, all on the same color of space. Taking turns, players move their checkers to one of the forwardly diagonals of the same color; if there’s another piece in the way, you’re stuck, unless it’s your opponent’s and the next space down the line is empty. In that case, your checker can pole-vault themselves over the enemy, gloat and send them to checker jail – that’s how you capture pieces! If you’re really lucky, the space you landed in yields the opportunity to do that again, and you don’t even have to wait for your next turn. Just chain reaction your way down the line! Once a checker reaches the opponent’s back row, it becomes “crowned,” (flipped over to display ridges or wearing another checker as a hat, depending on your set) which means it can now move backwards, too… still only one space at a time, like a pawn that got promoted to branch manager instead of queen.
The game is over when you’ve captured all of your opponent’s pieces, when one of you gives up and surrenders, or, occasionally, when the traffic is so backed up that none of your checkers have anywhere they can legally move.
Who’s that- Wait, no, sorry, Tiddlywinks may sound like a Pokémon, but it’s actually another classic game! Where Jacks requires speed and coordination, Tiddlywinks is more focused on aim. And physics, if you want to be technical about it.
As you can see in the picture above, the play mat looks sort of like an archery target if archery targets were smaller, thinner, and laid flat on a horizontal surface. You may also notice that players are seated on corners, not sides, and that we each have a little felt rectangle over our arrows – these are the launchpads from which the “winks” are fired.
Winks are the small, color-coded disks you see scattered across the play area. You turn starts by placing one of these on the felt pad. Then, using a larger disk of the same material and thickness, players press down on the edge of their wink, launching it forward. Once players have alternated their way through all their winks, points are determined by the values of the rings they landed in. The cup in the center is a valid target, and if you manage to get a wink in there it’s 50 points! It’s a challenging angle, though, with a significant potential for overshooting – a lesson we learned the hard way.
There’s definitely a learning curve to the amount of force you use and the angle it’s applied; whether you approach that with physics equations or trial-and-error, it’s a neat new skill to learn! Besides that, the game is quite simple, making it perfect for a lazy afternoon of uncomplicated fun.
…just ignore the part where I’m posting this in April. In the Midwest. Because hey, the board game Harvest Time is pan-seasonal! It’s also from the same company as Max, The Secret Door, Eyes of the Jungle, and Caves & Claws, which seems to always be good for some simple, cooperative fun.
In this particular game, players are trying to harvest their vegetables before winter comes. There are four gardens – if you have more than four players have some team up on the same gardens, or if you have gardens to spare, a particularly ambitious player might tend multiples.
In standard gameplay, you start with your garden prepopulated – four types of vegetables, with three of each – and roll to harvest. The green dot on the die means you should harvest peas, the red dot means you should harvest tomatoes, etc. with the black dot denoting good soil – pick any vegetable you want! – and the white dot indicating that winter is on its way. If you roll white, choose one of the six winter pieces to place over the fall scene in the middle of the board. Your objective is for everyone’s gardens to be harvested before the winter scene is complete!
There are a few special rules to help with that. First off, you can help other people with their gardens! Whenever your roll would allow you to harvest, you can choose to harvest that color vegetable from a neighbor’s crop (and give it to them; you’re helpers, not thieves). This is especially practical when you’ve finished harvesting your own of that color, and your neighbor has not. If there’s none of that color left in any garden, reroll the die.
The other rules are even cooler warmer: as soon as your garden is completely harvested, you get to remove one winter piece from the board. Furthermore, when you roll white now, you get to remove another winter piece! If you’re thinking “but seasons don’t work like that!” …you probably don’t live in the Midwest.
If you’d prefer to play the extended version, it’s really easy to set up: just make planting a part of gameplay! The fall scene is actually its own set of tiles that cover the spring scene on the board (Why do we skip summer? Who knows!) so gameplay is the same, you just roll for what to plant and dread fall’s approach instead of winter’s. Or rather, before winter’s, because once you’ve finished planting – or fall has finished your planting for you, whichever comes first – you roll straight into the harvesting part of the game! I personally find this version much more fun because the better you do in the first half, the harder the next part is. And on the flip side, a really dismal planting season means you’ll probably be able to bring it all in before the frost! It’s a “glass is always full” situation, really.
Alright, that’s a rhetorical “let’s,” because this game is definitely designed for people younger than me. But people younger than me exist, so for those of you who are and/or live with such individuals, let me tell you about the Brain Quest board game!
Brain Quest is an educational game aimed at first through sixth graders. Players are seated by age so that the oldest player is on the youngest player’s left, the second oldest is on the oldest’s left, etc. To start the game, the youngest player rolls the die while the player on their left grabs a card from the tray and announces the subject. (The subject of the card is at the top, and cards are folded to have the questions facing outwards while the answers are hidden inside.) Questions are labeled 1-6, but which you answer isn’t determined by your roll. Instead, you must choose a number equal to or greater than your current grade level.
As you might expect, your Reader then reads you the question you chose and you answer it. If you’re right, you get to advance your piece on the board, as many spaces as you rolled on the die plus the difference between the question grade level and your own. (So if you’re a second grader, you rolled a five and correctly answered a fourth grade question, you’ll move seven spaces.) Anyone who’s beyond sixth grade can only answer sixth grade questions, and takes either a -1 on their rolls (if they’re still in junior high) or a -2 if they’re older. Note that even if you get a negative roll, you do not have to move backwards.
I had wondered at first why you’d bother rolling before learning the subject and choosing your question, but having played with fabricated ages for a blog-worthy grasp of the mechanics, I realized that how much the dice weren’t helping encouraged me to go for higher level questions, since I kept rolling ones. Similarly, as answering incorrectly means you don’t move at all, the subject can affect how ambitiously you challenge yourself. The Brain Quest subjects are your usual core classes, English, Math, Science, and Social Studies, plus Grab Bag, which is a random mix of other material. (From the card pictured below, I got stuck with “Mick Jagger is the lead singer in what rock group?” Which I believe is the only question we missed, because while I’ve aged out of the academics, I evidently know nothing about rock. Or Rolling Stones. Whoops.)
There are a few interesting spots on the board as well, accentuating the school theme with a track (move along the track that matches your grade level, and don’t worry! They’re all the same number of spaces), a game of foursquare (go through the spaces in numerical order, just like actual foursquare) and a mud puddle, because recess just be like that sometimes. If you end a movement in the mud, lose one turn. The first person to reach Finish wins!
I’ve previously blogged a story by the name Barrel of Monkeys, but not the actual game… which struck me as an oversight, so guess what I’m talking about this week?
Barrel of Monkeys isn’t as old as Jacks, but it’s definitely another classic. Your container is – surprise – a barrel, and the contents are a set of monkeys*, each with arms curling in opposite directions. To play the game, you hold one monkey by its upper arm (Pick a side. Congratulations, that is now the upper side) and hook another monkey’s arm through the first one’s lower. Continue to make a chain in this fashion until something drops! It’s not at all complicated, but for young ones it practices fine motors skills, and even older players may find their arms protesting the static hold. That, and if you have cats they will definitely contribute their own Challenge Mode. If you don’t have cats – or they’re not interested – you can make it harder yourself by combining multiple sets!
While the amount of monkeys in a set varies, the official scoring for multiplayer is has each monkey worth a certain amount of points. When you stop (either because someone fell or because you ran out of monkeys), you score however many monkeys are still on your chain, and the first player to reach the victory condition (points equivalent to completing the full chain) wins. Though as kids, we always just went for “whoever can make the full chain first.” It’s your choice by which rules you play! The objective for single-player is more along the latter lines, as you time yourself making the whole chain and try to be progressively faster.
*Monkeys are not required to play this game. You may alternatively utilize a Barrel of Pterodactyls!
This game is a classic! Despite the name, it has nothing to do with folks named Jack – unless your name is Jack and you’re playing Jacks, of course.
For any of my readers who don’t know, a “jack” in this case is a plastic or metal “X” shape, with extra spokes facing front and back to make it 3D. The game Jacks uses these – shocking, I know – and a bouncy ball. “That’s it?” you ask. Yep! Now scatter the jacks on the floor, throw the ball into the air, grab a jack and catch the ball before it bounces twice… all with the same hand! This is how Jacks is played. If you succeed, move the jack you grabbed to your other hand and go for another! The goal is to get all of them (my set has 10, which I’m assuming is standard) without ever letting the ball bounce twice in one throw. If it does bounce twice, re-scatter the jacks and try again.
Got them all? Great! No, you’re not done yet – you’ve just progressed to the next level, which is picking them up two at a time! Once you’ve picked them all up in pairs, go for three in a throw, four in a throw, etc. until you either give up or manage to pick up the whole set in one bounce. Good luck! And remember, you can legally shift jacks without picking any up so long as you still catch the ball in time. Shoving them closer together is a valid move!
If you want to play Jacks competitively, simply trade off turns whenever you miss a throw. The winner is whoever makes it through the full progression first!
Catch The Monkeys is one of those games like Tic Tac Toe or Hangman where you can get a printed board, or you can just draw one yourself. You could probably adjust the size as you like for longer or shorter gameplay, but the version I found is an 11×6 array of dots with ten monkeys in between them.
On your turn, you draw a line between two adjacent dots. That’s it! Then the next player draws a line. Simple, right? But also not – whoever completes a box (draws the fourth line to make a one-unit square) puts their initial inside it. Regardless of who drew the other three lines, the player who finished it gets the point! While normal boxes are worth one point, boxes with monkeys in them are worth five, and when all squares are drawn whoever has the most points wins.
Catch The Monkeys definitely isn’t hard to learn, but the strategy that goes into it will get you thinking. If deceptively strategic games are your cup of tea, you might want to give this a try! All you need is paper, a writing utensil and someone to play with.
Affliction: Salem 1692 is based on an abhorrent event in American history – the Salem Witch Trials. I was worried when we bought this game that it might make light of those events, or perhaps unduly mystify them, but I found that it does neither. Instead, it addresses the true nature of the Trials: various factions exploiting mass hysteria to accuse whoever dared oppose them.
To that end, each player starts the game with both a Faction and a Grievance card. Each Faction has a prominent family that they’re trying to influence into their Circle, and a family they’re trying to arrest, as well as why. Which factions are used in which game depends on the number of players. (Ex: the two-player minimum Salem Village was extremely fundamental in their Puritan beliefs, backed the Putnam family, and targeted the Proctors for their liberal views and financial success. There’s another Salem Village faction for when there’s more players, also backing the Putnams, but targeting the Porters for refusing to pay damages after flooding Village lands.) Unlike your Faction, your Grievance card is hidden, with three Colonists worth extra points if you arrest them, and one Colonist you’ll lose points for if they’re arrested at all.
Everyone also gets a Starting Colonist, but we didn’t realize those were separately marked until halfway through our first game, so the starting colonists in our pictures aren’t actually Starting Colonists. Whoops. Anyhow, the rest of the Starting Colonists are then shuffled back into the Colonist deck (not to be confused with the Prominent Colonist deck), six cards are removed and mixed with Mary Spencer Hill and Increase Mather, and those eight are placed at the very bottom. From the top of both Colonist decks, four cards are flipped face-up; you can tell which row are the Prominent Colonists, not only because the cards’ backs are different, but because their names are color-coded by family. Convenient, right?
Gameplay is a lot like Quetzal (which I’ve posted about here) in that players claim actions with Messenger meeples, one at a time, and then those actions are resolved by their order on the board. So what are the actions? Let’s go in order: first is Meet in Secret, which gains you one Influence Token and lets you place one Accusation Token on any Colonist; we’ll get to these later, but basically Influence is currency, and Accusations make arresting people cheaper. Second (well, third – there are two Meet In Secret spaces) is Exonerate, which lets you remove two Accusation Tokens from any one Colonist… or more tokens, if you’re willing to pay Influence for it. Also serving to protect your interest is – aptly named – the Protection Token, which you can place on any Colonist to protect them from arrest. This action also comes with the First Player Token, meaning next round, you’ll place the first Messenger! Both of these stay put until another action is used to move them.
Next up is Colonist Abilities & Generate Influence! This was definitely my most-claimed space throughout the game, not because it directly achieves victory points, but because it sets so much framework for them. Most straightforwardly, it gains you Influence tokens equal to the amount of Influence Icons on Colonists in your Circle, plus your Faction card for a minimum of 1. Colonist Abilities are a bit more complicated. Every Colonist has some special ability detailed under their illustration, but only some of them activate on this action, those being any with a hammer icon. Don’t worry, though! The reason the others don’t specifically activate now is because they have standing effects! For example, if Thomas Putnam is in your Circle he lets you place an additional Accusation Token whenever you’re accusing. Given that my not-so-Starting Colonist’s ability (action-activated) was to accuse someone… you can see why I liked this space.
Now where things get really interesting: Arrest A Colonist! A Colonist may only be arrested if they have at least one Accusation on them. The price of arresting someone is their Reputation value in Influence tokens, minus one per Accusation on them… hence why accusing is so useful! The exception to the price is if they’re already in someone else’s Circle, in which case there’s a +5 defense bonus to that there sum. All the Colonist’s tokens are cleared and they’re placed to the left of your Faction card in the “Arrested” area, where they’ll remain for the rest of the game. Following this, and closely related, is the Spectral Evidence action, which moves the corresponding green token onto any Colonist of your choice. Nearly the opposite of Protection, this token nixes the +5 defense bonus, the Colonist’s Influence Icon, and their character ability. Fear Tokens are the less potent, more abundant version of this: two Fear on a Colonist blocks their Influence generation, while three blocks their ability. It’s your choice whether you use this action to place two Fear (and gain two Influence) or to remove one.
The Accusations action is, effectively, both Meet in Secret spaces combined. You get two Influence Tokens and two Accusations (which don’t have to go to the same Colonist, by the way!) at the price of it being the second-to-last action in a round. The final action to resolve is the most important: bringing a Colonist into your Circle. Which is a lot like arresting someone, really, except Accusations don’t bring down the cost (you value their reputation, therefore, you pay full price) and they keep any tokens already on them at the time of their adoption. Also, you now have their abilities at your disposal! Plot wisely! But remember – you may not bring anyone into your Circle who’s marked as an opposing faction (T vs V), just like you can’t arrest members of the family you’re supposed to protect.
Once all Messengers are reclaimed from The Esteemed action board, the two rows of Colonists are refilled. First, shift remaining cards all the way to the right in the row, and if none of the bottom row (common Colonists) have been arrested or brought into a Circle, boot the one on the very end to the bottom of their deck. Then refill all empty spaces. If the Prominent Colonist deck runs out, refill from the normal Colonist deck before refilling the normal Colonist row. The privileged folk demand priority, even if they’re artificially inflating their relevance.
When either Mary Spencer Hill or Increase Mather is drawn, the game ends immediately. Points are tallied as follows: one for each Colonist in your Circle and each Colonist you’ve arrested, one for each Property Icon on Colonists you’ve arrested, two for each successful arrest or adoption of your target families, and then the conditions of your Grievance card as listed. As usual, whoever has the most points wins!
Affliction is especially interesting in that the very strategy that will lead you to victory will also leave you grimly appalled, because “people actually did this. And it got people killed.” It’s both an engaging strategy game and an effective way to emphasize the atrocity of what occurred in Salem, 1692.
Combining spatial recall and luck with teamwork, The Secret Door is a cooperative rendition of the classic Memory matching game. In this version, players are detectives trying to determine which three Valuables are behind the Secret Door, using process of elimination… and they’re up against the clock!
Like Memory, there are two of each Valuable, ranging from a treasure map to a statue to a stack of cash. However, unlike Memory, three of these are chosen at random and hidden under the Secret Door, and the rest are shuffled in with the twelve Time Cards before being laid out face-down on the board.
Once it’s all set up, players take turns revealing two cards. Any Time Cards discovered are set face-up along the top of the board, while matching pairs of Valuables go to the Vault at the bottom. Mismatched Valuables are then returned to face-down before the next player’s turn. Try to remember what’s where!
If you have enough paired Valuables in the Vault that you think you know which ones are missing, you can (collectively) decide to make your deduction and check it against the cards under the Secret Door. You only get one guess, though, so use it wisely!
If the twelfth Time Card is revealed, the game ends immediately. Time’s up! You’ll have to take your chances now, regardless of how far from a definitive conclusion you are. How many of the hidden Valuables can you guess right anyways? We seem to have a 2/3 trend, whenever time isn’t on our side. (Or is on our side… of the board. The photographed game above somehow had Time Cards on all three spaces of the astronomy tower, which was a very disappointing couple turns.)
