Ok, so the flowers don’t wander, at least these ones don’t. But I do take photos of flowers while I’m out walking, and these ones demanded to be shared. Narcissistic fl– wait, no, that’s daffodils. Pretty flowers, then. They’re pretty.
Exactly what it says on the tin. Zuko hanging out with the other cats… and a bear.
Featuring more of our flower garden! Today we’ve got daylilies, Aussie tulips, and lilacs.
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! 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 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.
Has a friend ever recommended something that you thought sounded cool and interesting… and then promptly forgot about? I used to have that problem, and eventually I found a solution: write it down! Whether that was a continuation of my Write It Down principle for story ideas, or inspired by Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in which “I’ll put it on the list” entails an actual list – or, more likely, both – it’s had a major impact on how I approach new content.
With comprehensive lists come a reduced sense of urgency, more (remembered) options at any given time, and, of course, more ways I can organize those options to best suit my needs. To begin with, I split my lists out by those books/shows/etc. that were directly recommended by friends or family, versus content I’d heard about indirectly that I decided might be interesting. That way, when I got around to something a friend recommended, I’d know who to thank and talk about it with.
After a couple years, I realized the lists – especially the indirect one – were getting inconveniently long, and adding items in the order I heard about them wasn’t making it any easier to navigate. So I subcategorized by medium: what to watch, what to read, what to play, etc. And again, it made life so much easier! If I want to look for new shows to watch, I know exactly where to find them. Some already have side notes about which streaming platforms they’re on, or whether they’re available through our library. I put a tiny bit of work in, each time I find something interesting, and it manifests as a massive convenience later. Cool, right?
I think the point, ultimately, is that how we manage life is a constantly evolving process. What worked before might be an obstacle now. The tools you overcame an obstacle with may need to be improved. But if you have the tools to improve your day-to-day, even a little bit… why not use them?
I gather Rummikub has many variants, but I’m only going to comment on the version I’ve played, for obvious practical reasons. If any of you play by different rules, though, I’d love to hear about it!
The version I’ve played goes like this: everyone draws 14 tiles at random out of the bag, and lays them out on their tray, where only they can see. Your goal is to make sets of 3 or more tiles, in either a consecutive run of the same color, or multiple colors of the same number. The tile selection is effectively two decks of standard playing cards, so there’s two of 1-13, in each of the four colors. There are also two wild tiles, that can be used in place of anything! The goal is to be the first player to empty your tray of tiles.
For your first play, you need to have 30 points of tiles, determined by adding their face values. If you can’t play, you draw another tile from the bag instead; in this fashion, you may find yourself with 26 tiles before you can actually play anything, draw that higher value tile you needed and suddenly clear out half of them! Getting on the board late, then, is not the game-defining disadvantage that it is in so many other games.
Once you’ve made that first play, you no longer have to hit a certain point threshold to play your tiles. Furthermore, you can now use the tiles other people have played to complete your sets, so long as the set they played remains complete! For instance, in the picture, I could take the red 3 from the far right set (which, having 4, 5, and 6, is still a valid run), swap it for the wild tile in the middle, and use it to make a run with… my blue 9 and 10, my yellow 5 and 6, my black 3 and 4, or my black 11 and 13. Or my black and red 13’s… Wild tiles bring a whole host of opportunities! You don’t have to make a new set, either; if you have a stray tile or three that fit an existing line-up, you can just add them on!
All of which is to say, Rummikub requires a lot of strategy and split concentration, to follow the ever-shifting layout of the board, your own tiles, and how to use both to maximum advantage. For a game with such simple mechanics, it’s certainly a challenge!
The flowers didn’t wait for May to bloom! And since I’m a sucker for pretty things, I’ve got photos of tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths to share!
Because lets be honest, you can never have too many napping cats! Well, photos of napping cats. The ideal amount of the cats themselves depends on how many hands you have to pet them all.
