271 - play more games 🎲🃏
boardgames are back
Hey there, !
It's been a while since I brought a passion of mine to the newsletter - board games! I love playing them, I have a big collection of them, yada yada yada - and I thought it would be good to give some recommendations for fun games to play with friends that are easy, chill, and just good vibes all round.
Well, some kind of vibes anyway...
A list of light board game recommendations for very specific, particular circumstances:
If you want to play a bluffing game but half of your crew don't have the patience for Resistance and you also want the option to make it a drinking game:
Skull
Honestly, you don't even have to buy a copy of this. All you need is a deck of playing cards - each player gets 3 red and 1 black card (numbers don't matter), and then pretty much the rules below:
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Put a card face down in front of you to start the game, and then go around in turn order to either add to your stack or start the bidding
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If you add to your stack, you put another card face down on top of the card you already put down - that's it.
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If you start the bidding round, call a number - that's you guessing how many 'roses' / red cards you can uncover without hitting a black card. Each person then goes in turn order to either up the bid or pass.
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Once everyone has passed the highest bid - then whoever had the highest bid has to start trying to flip cards over to only hit reds.
- You have to start by flipping over all of your own cards first, so there's lots of bluffing and guessing to go through.
- If you hit a black card, then that person gets to take a card face down from you, and put it in the center; this means it makes it harder for you to bluff in the future
- If you successfully pick all red cards - you get a point!
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Winner is last person standing, or the first person to get to 2 points.
I use this game as a filler game - it takes like 10 minutes, you can have as many people as you want with it (as long as you have enough cards), and you get all the joy of lying to your friends in a neat, simple package.
Go break some friendships :D
If you want to get told off for not knowing English and you like to overthink the shit out of clues like you're Sherlock Holmes:
Codenames
Surely y'all have played this? Two teams, trying to find their 'agents' in a town (a 5x5 grid of words). Each 'house' has a codename, and the spymasters can only send one word, and one number to tell their team which houses to choose (spymasters know where their cards are; the team doesn't). Be careful though, as you might find the assassin which means you instantly lose - find all your agents before the other team to win!
There are a few quirks to exactly what words and what numbers you can use, but that's essentially it. This is a perfect big team game, but I'll say in my experience that lots of people do not like the Spymaster role because there's a lot of pressure to create a really good clue.
However, it is a great game to create really great moments of fun, like:
- "HOLY SHIT you guys guessed all 5 of the words I was thinking AMAZING"; or
- "WHY WOULD YOU SAY 'OASIS' WHEN THERE'S LITERALLY 'WATER' ON THE BOARD AND IT'S NOT OUR WORD?????"
If you want to do a slapdash job at town planning, feeling the brain burn of 'WHY CAN'T I DO THE THING I WANT TO' and like using whiteboard markers:
Welcome To...
You're a town planner for [choose your town name here], and every round, you are given a number, and a 'power' to use to fill in your town. It's only got three streets, and each street has to have numbers in ascending order only, which means you have to work out where to put your numbers before you run out of space!
The powers help you:
- Build fences so you can create 'estates' which will get you points at the end of the game
- Invest in different estate sizes - so you can bump up those points even more
- Create 'extensions' - so you can create bigger estates for those juicy points
- Change the number given +- 2 - so you can have more flexibility to put things in
- Build a pool - on potential properties for, you guessed it, POINTS
- Build parks - on particular streets, to get you more points!
Bonus if you're able to achieve what the architect plans want first (essentially, goals for everyone to achieve), for those juicy juicy points!
This one's fun because you get the choice of three numbers / powers each turn, and anything you screw up is your fault entirely. You put a 9 really high up in the street? Bad luck if a 13 arrives and you can't fit it! Oh, you want to put this pool somewhere? But it'll be so low down, and the number is a 10!! What do you do?? There's tension in every card flip because if you get that perfect card combination then it'll fit so nicely in your street!
Also you get to live your childhood dream of being a town planner, and what's better than that? 🥹🥹🥹
If you want to feel the existential crushing weight of property investment without having to actually invest in property:
For Sale
You're flipping houses - that's all you really need to know theme-wise. Gameplay-wise:
- First round: You buy the left hand side properties by bidding money. If you win, pay your whole bid. If you withdraw, you pay half your bid (rounded up).
- Second round: You sell what you got for the cheques on the right. Everyone puts in one of their properties and the cheques are allocated in number order.
This is an old game (it came out in 1997) and legitimately stands the test of time. It is so good - it's a tight auction/bidding game, and it's the exact push your luck kind of vibe that makes it hilarious to play. I'll pay $6 for the 22 house, but I really don't want to pay $3 by withdrawing to buy a 2 house!!
You might think it's a "solved" game but the way that the cards come out (since there's probably a mathematically optimal way to think through your choices), but the way that cheques come out makes it hella chaotic, and really does show your friend's natures in how they push the bid, bully others, or play extremely strategically with the hand their dealt.
New favourite for me - it's incredibly fun!!
If you want to experience what it was like in the 1980's Communist Poland, having to send your family to queue up in lines for food, clothing and other goods over the week, only to have someone CUT THE LINE and the RAGE YOU FEEL THAT YOU'RE GONNA HAVE TO GO HUNGRY AHGHH:
Kolejka
I bought this because, well, the English version of this is out of print, and a LONG time ago, when I was first getting into this hobby around 2012 or so, it was only sold in Poland and even out of print there. Nowadays, you can get the Polish version on eBay, and I have wanted it for a long time so I finally got it. ADULTING.
The history of this game is fascinating - the game was meant as an educational aid for Polish kids, and funded by the government to essentially preserve history. The rulebook is full of detail about what it was like in 1980's Poland at the tail-end of Communist rule, where families would send out members to line up at different stores during the week to just...wait.
So thus, in the game, you send out your family members to wait in queues behind 5 different stores, hope that something gets delivered (1-3 goods per store, but not all the stores every day!), play some cards that give you different powers (like, "Move to the front of the line" or "Close down the store" or "Move to the second place of an adjacent line"), and try to fill the shopping list you need for your family. Everyone's got the same deck of cards, but draws 3 at a time, so you kind of know what everyone's got, but you also don't.
I know it sounds like a depressing game, but it's quite a fun simulation. It's a game of queues, but how you manipulate those queues using your cards makes it feel like you're laying down powerful card combos and the tension is high when you're like 'all I have to do is survive and I'll get those CLOTHES I need'!! You feel frustrated when someone gets in the way, or cuts the line, or after waiting for 5 days, the store closes anyway the day it gets a delivery.
And lastly, if you want to play a simulation of capitalism which will likely in tears or everyone being like 'oh fuck this let's move on to something else':
Monopoly
(note: I do not recommend this game which is why it has the LOWEST RESOLUTION PICTURE you do not need this, I do not need this, NO-ONE needs this)
Even if you play the 'actual' rules of Monopoly where everything goes up for auction and taxes don't go to free parking, it's still a game where y'all are just going to die to rent and mortgages. It's not fun! Player elimination is super annoying when you have put so much time into a game, and it's about the luck of the dice. Boo to Monopoly.
However, you should watch this - Monopoly, but Communist - because this crew make some amazing content regarding House Rules for boardgames, and making Communopoly is amazing. They've spun it off into SO MANY other variant Monopoly's, but this one was the OG and one of the funnest experiences to watch.
Chat soon :)
📋Today's Question
✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Flow - it won the Oscar for best Animated Film, and was co-produced by Latvia / France and Belgian. Latvia loved it so much that they made it their submission for the International Feature Film Oscar as well! It's an animated feature film about a cat who is living in a post-apocalyptic world and tries to survive a flood on a boat with a bunch of fun animal companions. It's a beautiful production, and though it lacks the normal 'three-act' or story structure for a character, it is so beautiful to look at. The 'cinematography' was really fun to think about, since you know it's illustrated / animated, but the way the camera moves makes you think it's kinda real? Recommended!
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Heide Market - a new maker's market that is held monthly in Bulleen at the Heide Museum of Modern Art. I don't usually go to stuff like this but it was the long weekend so why not? A fun little market in the area!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Melbourne start-up launches 'biological computer'; made of human brain cells - what? WHAT? They really out here making brains now that they got the language part of it down-pat with LLM's. AI? More like AI want you to calm down before we get a Substance-lookin' monstrosity in our lives.
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Becoming Data-Driven from First Principles - I usually post pretty flippant fun articles but seriously, this is an eye-opening example of what data-driven actually means in business. I loved this because I had exactly the same thoughts that he outlines in this piece around 'well you can get data to say anything, and if you see it go up or down, how do you link that causally to something specific?'. Fascinatingly, Cedric breaks down that it's about understanding the variation, and more importantly, having a shared understanding of how the business should be running rather than kneejerk reactions to things going up and down. It's a long piece, but it's worth it.
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A Solution to the Onion Problem of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt - ending on a nerdy note - someone working out the best way to create even cuts in an onion.