I’ve already posted about Duolingo in comparison to Rosetta Stone, but I’ve recently realized that a not-insignificant number of my screenshots are of Duo… more specifically, of the strange and amusing sentences their lessons are known to have. There were several that almost made this post, including “The fly is important,” (why, we are not told) and “She is making a drink out of beans.” I’m hoping they mean coffee. In the end, though, these are the ones I chose:
There’s one more, which I picked less because it’s humorous, and more because it’s timely. I was pleasantly surprised to find it in my Hawaiian lessons!
Pairs is a press-your-luck game as simple as its name. The deck is triangular – there’s one 1, two 2’s, three 3’s, and so forth, all the way through ten. At the beginning of each round, every player is dealt a card face-up. Whoever has the lowest number goes first! (If there’s a tie, those players draw again, and so on until it’s resolved.)
On your turn, you may either hit or fold. When you hit, you’re drawing the top card of the deck and placing it face-up in front of you, alongside any other cards you’ve collected this round. The goal is to not get a matching pair. If you do, you take points equivalent to the number on the card (keep the card in front of you as a reminder) and all other cards in play are discarded. It’s time to start a new round. Folding also ends the round, but because you chose to stop, you score the lowest value card in play… even if it’s your opponent’s!
As you may have guessed, points are a bad thing. The first person to reach the target score – which is 60 divided by the number of players, plus 1 – loses. There are no winners in this game, just one loser, but I imagine you could play it elimination style if you have patient friends.
What we have (and what I linked to) is the Shallow Ones deck, illustrated by John Kovalic. As always with John’s work, the art is fantastic and frequently hilarious! It’s hard to see in the picture, because the card is upside down, but what Cthulhu and… I think that’s the Formless Spawn? From Cthulhu In The House? (…how have I not blogged that yet?)… regardless, what they’re watching in card #7 is, in fact, the contents of card #9. And card #10 is definitely the Shoggoth going to an optometrist. Poor optometrist.
To nobody’s surprise, the game Adventures of Riley: Penguin Rescue is about rescuing penguins. The characters are all part of the same rescue team, so it’s a very friendly competition… it’s just a matter of who can collect all 5 colors of penguins first!
The penguins’ colors match the colors on the dice, and the spaces on the board. Movement is simple – follow the arrows to the nearest of each color you rolled. You get to choose which order to resolve them in, though, so use that to your advantage! There’s a bit less choice involved when you roll two of the same color, but you do get to roll again once you’re done! Some spaces are slides, which you can use to skip sections or slide back to Start in the middle of the board. If there’s a stranded penguin on the slide, you can take it with you! There are also Rescue Zones, which let you collect any one of their remaining penguins when you land there. If you’re lucky, you might be able to hit it twice in one turn! Just remember, you can only have one of each color penguin, which are also differentiated by size and numbers, so it’s pretty easy to tell!
The sixth side of the die is the Wild side. If you roll this, or land on a Krill space on the board, you must immediately draw the Krill card and resolve its effects. Most commonly, these have you move forward or back a certain number of spaces, but they may also send you back to Start, end your movement for the turn, or have you un-rescue someone else’s penguin. (Unfortunate, but sometimes warmer ocean temperatures around the Antarctic Peninsula are endangering Uncle Max’s colony, and a penguin flees to safer ice. It’s for the best.) If you roll two Wild sides, though, you get to move anywhere on the board! Including a Rescue Zone, if you so desire.
Once you have all five of your penguins, you still have to make it back to Start. And honestly? We found this to be way harder than collecting all the birds. There were several rounds where both of us had achieved a full iceberg, but we kept passing over all the slides home. I suppose that’s when a double Wild would have been really useful, huh?
It’s a simple game, fun, and the cards are clearly aimed to be educational. The little penguin figures have also been kitten-approved as extremely entertaining! (No penguins or cats were harmed by this fascination, but she did bat them off the board several times. While sitting in the box. Because of course she did.)
The game Loaded Questions comes from the same creators as The Worst-Case Scenario Card Game, with a similar concept. When the question is posed, however, instead of everyone guessing how the active player will respond, everyone else responds and the active player has to guess which responses belong to whom!
It goes like this: each card has four categories. When you roll and move, the space you land on will determine which category you read off, unless you land on the wild space and get to choose your own. That question, whatever it is, is what your fellow players will be answering. For instance, in the photo below I picked the No-Brainers category, so the question posed was “What’s the best song you don’t currently have in your music collection?”
When everyone has written their answers, their sheets are handed to the previous roller, who shuffles them and reads them off. The current player will then decide who they think wrote each answer. For each correct match, they get to move forward an additional space! I especially like this game because it can be challenging even among close friends. In a lot of games like these, familiarity is an unmitigable advantage, but what I’ve found with Loaded Questions is like-mindedness just results in extremely similar answers, which makes them difficult to correctly attribute.
The objective is to reach the end of the board, and match at least three players’ answers correctly once you’re there. I’m not sure why that’s a fixed number, as it seems to me that it should vary depending on your number of players… but aside from that the mechanics are sound, the questions are fun, and we had a blast!
That’s right folks, the only meaningful industry is bacon! At least, that seems to be the premise of Bacon-Opoly, where you’ll make or break your fortune on the profitability of pork.
As the name implies, this is one of the many Monopoly variants. Given how prolific Monopoly is, I don’t feel I need to go too deeply into the mechanics, but for anyone who hasn’t played, a brief overview: dice determine movement. When you land on a space, you play out its effect; if that space is a property and it’s unowned, you may choose to buy it, while if it’s already owned by someone else you have to pay them rent. If you have all the properties in a color-coded set, you can develop them (houses and hotels in Monopoly, pounds of pork and smokehouses here) to charge more outrageous sums for your product. You can also mortgage your properties in a pinch, when you need more cash. The goal is to bankrupt all the other players… or survive until everyone else gets bored and forfeits. That’s usually how I win!
This game took the bacon theme and went “how far can we run with it?” Instead of $200 for passing Go, you get $200 for passing Sizzle. Jail is Burnt, visiting is Just Crispy. There’s a card where you have to say the Pledge of Allegiance… to a bacon-eater’s guild. Our most frequently used player tokens are the skillet, the bacon strip, and the pig. And the properties are all some sort of bacon. Which, I mean, some of them sound good – Bacon Wrapped Filet, Cheesy Bacon Popcorn, Bacon Bits… and then there’s the more questionable enterprises. Bacon Floss. Bacon Bandages. Chocolate Covered Bacon On A Stick. And Bacon, Ohio, which is an actual place, and while that’s not a problem, I have no idea how you’re supposed to buy and own a whole city. Or loan it. Why is it only $22 to rent?!
The photo above has been fondly titled “Many, Many Mortgages.” It’s what one’s side of the board looks like when they are losing. On the bright side, though, the mortgage face of each property has a snippet about the product! Or city, in Bacon, Ohio’s case. Some of them are more informative than others (while the Bacon Bandages description just reminds me of Sokka from Avatar: The Last Airbender) but they’re all fun to read. There are also a handful of (multiple choice) bacon trivia cards in the Cured & Smoked deck, which are surprisingly educational! …and the fact that I’ve played this game enough to have them all memorized is possibly a little concerning, but oh well. Bacon!
Good news! There’s 80 of them. Which is a lot of puzzles, and you may not want to do them all in one sitting, but they’re there!
Noodlers is a spatial reasoning game. Each of the 80 cards (puzzles) has an array of symbols across its face and a number of plastic noodles that you’re allowed to use in solving it. The goal is to section off every symbol into its own, separate space… like quarantining with spaghetti.
The puzzles vary from 3 sticks (easy) to 6 sticks (hard), and while the concept is wonderfully simple, actually solving some of those 6-stick cards is not. Straightforward, perhaps, but only in that the sticks you’re working with are linear. It’s a neat challenge! More so for those with an abundance of patience, or extreme talent in spatial logic. Either works!
A few months ago, I posted about the suddenly ubiquitous game Wordle. Since then, I’ve been introduced to quite a few variants (at varying levels of masochism), but the handful I consistently come back to are foreign language Wordles (Duolingo‘s blog has a list of those here) and Globle.
Globle is effectively the geography edition of Wordle. Each day there’s a mystery country, and as you guess each nation it gets color-coded by its geographical distance from the correct answer. That distance is listed numerically as well, under the map and the list of your previous guesses. Your list can be organized by order of input or by which is closest; personally, I’ve found the latter quite useful when dealing with island nations, where I can at least approximate which continental areas it’s closest to.
Since there are so many countries in the world, this game has no guess limit; you only lose if you give up. Because of that, I consider it to be a low-pressure, fun and challenging sort of educational resource: I’ve become a lot more familiar with where countries are in the world – and in relation to each other – and even learned about countries I hadn’t known existed. It’s fantastic!
Pick up Sticks is another classic, of the Jacks and Tiddlywinks variety. I actually have a combo set of all three, which is why they’re getting posted in such quick succession.
Setting up Pick up Sticks is really easy. You take all the sticks, save one, hold them upright in one hand (hand on the table) and then you just… let go. Whatever crisscrossing spread they’ve landed in is what you’ve got to work with!
The goal is to pick up the sticks (shocking, I know), one at a time and without jostling any of the other sticks in the process. The exception to this is the stick you set aside at the beginning, which you can use to help pick up the other sticks. When your efforts move any piece other than the one you’re trying to remove, your turn is over and the next player gets a go at it.
I suspect scoring varies by set, but for mine it’s color-coded: 10 points for yellow, 25 for red, 40 for blue and 50 for green. This can serve to even out the game, if all the easy pickings for the first player are yellow and red, or pretty much settle it from the get-go if they’re blue and green. Depends on the luck of the draw… or more accurately, the luck of the fall. Beyond that, it’s sort of like Operation, without the buzzing and with a lot more angles to go at it from.
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?
