card game adventures!
We are now in the part of the year where the weather just has no damn idea what it's doing - we're going from days in the 60s to days in the 90s with no gaps in between. (Today is the latter.)
We did a lot of erranding today--we were going to get paladin his pool pass and then take advantage of the hot weather and go to the pool, but by the time we got done getting pool pass, acquiring lunch, buying cat food, and hitting up the grocery store and got home at 2, we only would've had a couple hours to pool before heading over to
spreadnparanoia's place, and instead it turned out I fell asleep on the couch for two hours while paladin played video games.
Then we headed over to
spreadnparanoia's, where she had some games for us to play and give our thoughts on. They were all card-based games and we did a full round of each, so. Thoughts!
Red Flags is sort of like Cards Against Humanity. The idea is that one person is the "single" person at the table, and everyone else suggests someone for them to date, using two white cards. (The cards range from the mundane, such as "firefighter" or "lumberjack," to the ridiculous, such as "vampire--the sexy kind" or "you will never age while dating them.") Pronouns are always "them", which I appreciated. Once all the dates are on the table, you go around again, playing a "red card" to give the potential date a terrible flaw. Flaws include things like "amateur vigilante" or "only speaks Klingon." (There's also a deck of Dark Red Cards, which is pretty much what it says on the tin--it's definitely an 18+ deck.) It was pretty fun for the first three rounds, but because we were playing with a large group (8 people) we started getting into repetition after that, and much like Cards Against Humanity or Slash it's way less fun when you've seen all the cards, I think.
Punderdome was one that I think you really have to be in the right mood to play. The general idea is that the judge draws two cards, and the other players (or teams, we did three teams of two) have 90 seconds to come up with a pun involving the two things. So, for example, our first pairing was "sickness" and "facial hair," and one team came up with someone growing a Flu Manchu. There was the potential for hilarity, but it was really hard to come up with puns on the spot, and frustrating when you spend all that time racking your poor brain and coming up with nothing. We thought that maybe having larger teams might help--more brainpower--but although it seems like it definitely could be hilarious and fun, maybe we just weren't in the right mood for it.
Spank the Yeti is in Kickstarter (funded) that works like a variation on Fuck, Marry, Kill. Each player gets three cards, ranked A, B, and C. One player is the decider for the round, and they draw three Action cards and three People cards. They must then match actions to people (in secret), and the others vote on what matches they made. You get points based on how many you got right. We had a lot of fun with this one, although in a few cases we had to re-deal because the person who was supposed to be choosing wasn't familiar with the people/things they were being asked to apply actions to. Overall I thought it was great and would definitely be up for playing again.
The highlight of the evening was honestly a toss-up between Spank the Yeti and Bad Medicine, which had been successfully Kickstarted. You work for a Big Pharma company where the communication between the research division and the sales division is lacking, at best. The players split up into teams of two, one of whom is Developing and one of whom is Pitching. The developer draws six cards, each of which come in three parts: a syllable, a mechanism, and a side effect. The developer then assembles 3 cards to make the name (out of the syllables), 2 to be the mechanism, and 1 to be the side effect. The pitching person then gets those cards, face down, and makes their pitch while turning them over. Everyone then votes on the best pitch, and the winning pitch's side effect becomes the malady one is curing in the next round.
We had a bit of a challenge figuring out the rules and getting started, but once we did, this was pretty amazingly hilarious. The mechanisms and side effects range from the perfectly plausible (works by affecting cholesterol levels) to the hilariously outrageous (side effects may include demons erupting from your forehead.) After the first round, we got really into it and got some really stellar pitches; a couple of times we were laughing so hard we couldn't finish the pitch. Because each card has three parts, it seems like it would be a really replayable game - you're only going to use one part per round, and there were a lot of cards, and the combinations are nearly endless.
So that was a thoroughly excellent way to spend my Saturday night laughing my ass off at various quick card games (going through a full round of all the games, plus ordering/eating dinner, took us about 4 hours.)
In other news, I started Persona 4 Arena last night. My overall impression are thus: wow, I'm so fucking bad at fighting games that my husband took over for me pretty much right away. (I zoom through the visual-novel-like sections, he does a fight, repeat.) BUTTONS HOW DO THEY WORK. Also, I am finding the way the plot is set up (your friends are being super mean and weird to you) genuinely upsetting--I like these characters (mostly), I don't want them to be mean and WHY ARE YOU BEING MEAN TO [whoever I'm playing right now] STOP IT THIS INSTANT! We've gone through Yukiko and Yosuke's routes, and are probably more than halfway through Yu's. I figure we'll finish it, but I might save myself the time and YouTube P4 Arena Ultimax. So, uh, if anyone wants an unopened launch copy of that, with all the extras, lemme know.
And now I think I shall go find a hidden object game in my collection, since I am feeling very much like puzzles but not reflexes.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1147605.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.
We did a lot of erranding today--we were going to get paladin his pool pass and then take advantage of the hot weather and go to the pool, but by the time we got done getting pool pass, acquiring lunch, buying cat food, and hitting up the grocery store and got home at 2, we only would've had a couple hours to pool before heading over to
spreadnparanoia's place, and instead it turned out I fell asleep on the couch for two hours while paladin played video games.
Then we headed over to
spreadnparanoia's, where she had some games for us to play and give our thoughts on. They were all card-based games and we did a full round of each, so. Thoughts!
Red Flags is sort of like Cards Against Humanity. The idea is that one person is the "single" person at the table, and everyone else suggests someone for them to date, using two white cards. (The cards range from the mundane, such as "firefighter" or "lumberjack," to the ridiculous, such as "vampire--the sexy kind" or "you will never age while dating them.") Pronouns are always "them", which I appreciated. Once all the dates are on the table, you go around again, playing a "red card" to give the potential date a terrible flaw. Flaws include things like "amateur vigilante" or "only speaks Klingon." (There's also a deck of Dark Red Cards, which is pretty much what it says on the tin--it's definitely an 18+ deck.) It was pretty fun for the first three rounds, but because we were playing with a large group (8 people) we started getting into repetition after that, and much like Cards Against Humanity or Slash it's way less fun when you've seen all the cards, I think.
Punderdome was one that I think you really have to be in the right mood to play. The general idea is that the judge draws two cards, and the other players (or teams, we did three teams of two) have 90 seconds to come up with a pun involving the two things. So, for example, our first pairing was "sickness" and "facial hair," and one team came up with someone growing a Flu Manchu. There was the potential for hilarity, but it was really hard to come up with puns on the spot, and frustrating when you spend all that time racking your poor brain and coming up with nothing. We thought that maybe having larger teams might help--more brainpower--but although it seems like it definitely could be hilarious and fun, maybe we just weren't in the right mood for it.
Spank the Yeti is in Kickstarter (funded) that works like a variation on Fuck, Marry, Kill. Each player gets three cards, ranked A, B, and C. One player is the decider for the round, and they draw three Action cards and three People cards. They must then match actions to people (in secret), and the others vote on what matches they made. You get points based on how many you got right. We had a lot of fun with this one, although in a few cases we had to re-deal because the person who was supposed to be choosing wasn't familiar with the people/things they were being asked to apply actions to. Overall I thought it was great and would definitely be up for playing again.
The highlight of the evening was honestly a toss-up between Spank the Yeti and Bad Medicine, which had been successfully Kickstarted. You work for a Big Pharma company where the communication between the research division and the sales division is lacking, at best. The players split up into teams of two, one of whom is Developing and one of whom is Pitching. The developer draws six cards, each of which come in three parts: a syllable, a mechanism, and a side effect. The developer then assembles 3 cards to make the name (out of the syllables), 2 to be the mechanism, and 1 to be the side effect. The pitching person then gets those cards, face down, and makes their pitch while turning them over. Everyone then votes on the best pitch, and the winning pitch's side effect becomes the malady one is curing in the next round.
We had a bit of a challenge figuring out the rules and getting started, but once we did, this was pretty amazingly hilarious. The mechanisms and side effects range from the perfectly plausible (works by affecting cholesterol levels) to the hilariously outrageous (side effects may include demons erupting from your forehead.) After the first round, we got really into it and got some really stellar pitches; a couple of times we were laughing so hard we couldn't finish the pitch. Because each card has three parts, it seems like it would be a really replayable game - you're only going to use one part per round, and there were a lot of cards, and the combinations are nearly endless.
So that was a thoroughly excellent way to spend my Saturday night laughing my ass off at various quick card games (going through a full round of all the games, plus ordering/eating dinner, took us about 4 hours.)
In other news, I started Persona 4 Arena last night. My overall impression are thus: wow, I'm so fucking bad at fighting games that my husband took over for me pretty much right away. (I zoom through the visual-novel-like sections, he does a fight, repeat.) BUTTONS HOW DO THEY WORK. Also, I am finding the way the plot is set up (your friends are being super mean and weird to you) genuinely upsetting--I like these characters (mostly), I don't want them to be mean and WHY ARE YOU BEING MEAN TO [whoever I'm playing right now] STOP IT THIS INSTANT! We've gone through Yukiko and Yosuke's routes, and are probably more than halfway through Yu's. I figure we'll finish it, but I might save myself the time and YouTube P4 Arena Ultimax. So, uh, if anyone wants an unopened launch copy of that, with all the extras, lemme know.
And now I think I shall go find a hidden object game in my collection, since I am feeling very much like puzzles but not reflexes.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1147605.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.