At the risk of publishing incriminating information on the internet – I confess myself to be fairly nerdy. Not “oh-I-watch-Big-Bang-Theory-and-actually-understand-Sheldon’s-jokes” nerdy, actually nerdy. I complete my homework on time, read about subjects outside of school, and perhaps worst of all: I love board games.
This obsession began four years ago, when I first visited the now-famous Snakes and Lattes cafe and became instantly hooked on the sheer variety of unique and fun games that were available. You have the mainstream board games, such as Monopoly, Risk, or Life, and then you have the lesser-known, but still popular ones such as Cards Against Humanity, or Settlers of Catan. And then, you have the variety that I’m going to talk about here: incredibly fun and barely heard of for most people who don’t spend their Friday nights almost exclusively playing board games (shout out to TGIF: Table-top Gamers of Innis Ftw!).
Let’s be clear: if you walk into a game cafe and play this, you cannot complain when I flip your table over
Citadels
Fairly Simple – Fairly Difficult, depending on who you play with (i.e. hopefully nothing like my friends)
Citadels is a card-based strategy game, where 2-8 players can compete to build the best city possible. Each turn, they select a different role for them to play, with advantages and disadvantages. For instance, the assassin is capable of selecting another role and thereby eliminating that player from the round, but since no one knows each others roles, they stand the risk of failing and wasting their turn. The game is cutthroat, as the players kill (assassin), steal (thief), and destroy property (warlord).
The true advantage of this game is that it is so light and small, it can easily fit inside your bag and be carried anywhere. It’s easy to learn, while being suitably challenging for veteran players. I’m personally awful at it, despite being a supposedly veteran player – I screw up moves, get picked on by players, and fumble when I try to strike back.
Above: 8 reasons why I hate my friends
Cards Against Humanity + Telestrations
Incredibly Simple, with the caveat that you will end up somewhere rather warm after death
CAH, in my opinion, becomes boring over time. You may not believe it, but after hearing the fourth “jerking off into a pool of children’s tears” joke, or sixth time someone asks what “smegma” is, it really gets quite mundane.
Then one day, a friend of mine told me about blending it with Telestrations, and everything changed. Telestrations is a game that’s essentially broken telephone, but with drawing. Person 1 writes down a word, Person 2 draws it, Person 3 writes what they think was drawn, Person 4 draws it, and so on. Every person is simultaneously drawing, and simultaneously guessing, and once the papers have made a complete revolution, everyone shows what they have. Simple. Now imagine that, but with Cards Against Humanity cards supplying the words.
I cannot stress how fun this game is. Drawing the four hour erection. The three dicks at once. The Harry Potter erotica!
I have my doubts that this picture, or anything from this section, will make it past my editors. (It did – we are definitely going to try this game.)
Dominant Species
Fairly difficult – Incredibly difficult, may cause trembling in ecology students
This is one of my absolute favourite strategy games (maybe because I’m in LifeSci) – but it is board-based and fairly complicated, so make sure to get someone who knows the game to teach you. Be patient too, especially if you haven’t tried anything like it before.
In this game, up to six players can play and each represent a different group of animals (mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians, insects, or arachnids), all competing for survival. You develop traits to try and out-live each other. You can influence a variety of factors such as player-specific traits (speciation, adaptation, etc.) or general traits of the land (glaciation, abundance of resources, etc.). The thing about this game is that you have to plan out all your moves for that round and share them with your opponents, before the round actually begins. If you were the type of kid who was way too into Pokemon (see above: nerdy), this is definitely the game for you.
If you too get even a little bit excited by this, we can be friends
Image Sources:
http://files.tested.com/photos/2013/03/19/46153-collection.jpg
http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/monopoly.jpg
http://nothingsacredgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/citadels_pool.jpg