The Christmas hotness. https://imgur.com/gallery/d4LRNKZ

Killing it. I have Intrigue and Lady Tiger will shortly be opening up Kingdomino. Hopefully get some games in tonight!

^^This.

I got Elliot Kung-Fu Zoo and its now turned into an impromptu winner stays on War of attrition between our family. So simple but bloody good fun.

Neat, I’ve got Keyforge to try

Wish you were my Santa

Ev didn’t quite understand the concept so only bought one deck, we’re off to grab another today.

Codex and Thunder and Lightning.

Codex is another Magic style game but with deck building from a book of cards. Read loads of good stuff about it, and I love my 2 player card games. It's all self contained, so no boosters or owt. You can get different factions though.

Thunder and Lightning is a Loki vs Thor bluffing combat game, from what I've read. Looks ace.

I have big love for 2 players , and have acquired quite a few now. Plus points if they're in the small Kosmos/Mayfair style boxes.... as they fit nice together on my shelf

Games over Christmas were...

Azul - Which looks superficially like a fairly gentle game in which you select tiles, and arrange them in pretty patterns. But is in fact a surprisingly involved tactical bastard of a game that involves screwing over your opposition in order to win.  It's elegantly designed, lovely to look at, and triggered a surprisingly large amount of bad feeling when people started losing.

The Captain is Dead - Space themed co-op game for 2-7 people.  (We played with 6)  The basic premise is that you're on  a spaceship, the captain's dead and you've got to fix the jump drive before you all die.  I'd say it's at the tougher end for co-op games (though it may simply be because we took a little while to realise that we really, really needed to prioritise fixing the afore mentioned jump drive).  None the less, we got close to escaping - only one cycle of repairs needed, but by that stage we were surrounded by a veritable flotilla of alien ships, and stuff was blowing up everywhere.  Not a perfect game - the instructions aren't brilliantly written, and it's pretty unwieldy - but when everyone's playing in character and generally screaming about imminent death, it pretty much comes into its own.

Bring Your Own Book - I'm not really sure about this one yet.  The basics are easy enough - each player brings their own book, and they then have to find a sentence/phrase/word in the book that best encapsulates the heading on the card.  At its best, the game's hilarious, and we had some very funny suggestions - at its worst however it's a bunch of people sitting in a lounge quietly flicking back and forth through a book in silence.  It kind of needs the right crowd I guess - and the right books.

On the still waiting to be played pile we have Tokaido and Sagrada.

Child free day so we have relatives round and are hammering the beers and games.

Just One, the current hotness, is just wonderful. Such a simple game but everyone just keeps asking for one more game. So fun.

Onto Concept next, then Dixit. Love days like this with a bunch of social games.

What are some good games for larger groups? Like 10 people. I know there's Resistance etc but are there any other ones that are good?

ShabbyMcCrabby wrote:

What are some good games for larger groups? Like 10 people. I know there's Resistance etc but are there any other ones that are good?

The obvious one I guess is Werewolf.  (Of which One Night: Ultimate Werewolf is probably the easiest to run, and goes up to 10 people.  Or if it's a really big group go classic, and try Werewolves of Miller's Hollow which is for 8-18)

I've not played it, but 2 Rooms and a Boom is popular with a few of my friends.  (Like a lot of games for large numbers it's essentially a bluffing game.  Players switch rooms in an attempt to either leave the Pres with the bomber/escape them depending on the team.) 

If you want to move away from bluffing games, and more into the silly party type games (and you can't face Cards Against Humanity) then I like both Marry Kill Blank and Joking Hazard.  The former is basically Fuck,Marry, Kill, but with the sex replaced with an alternative verb - players secretly vote on what the victim will choose, then having voted use a bunch of different modifiers to try and sway them.  (So, it might be Brad Pitt, but every time he speaks somebody dies, that sort of thing.)

Joking Hazard is a game based on random comic generator.  You get the first two frames of a comic, and players add the final one to compete on which is "best".  It's just another variant on a familiar theme, but it works pretty well. 

Finally, whilst it's not a board game, it might be worth looking at the various Jackbox packs if you're going to be somewhere with access to a console/computer.

There’s a new one called Just One which I imagine works great with 10. It’s a “guess a word game” where one person guesses a word. The twist is everyone else writes a clue and then compares all their clues - if there are any matches then those clues are erased.

There’s also something called Trapwords which is like taboo but (again guess a word) but when it comes to the forbidden words they are selected by the opponents. there’s also some other Gimmicks where you have to describe the word using some impairments.

There’s also “Fake artist goes to New York” which is a game where all but 1 player are given a thing to draw (eg lion) and must contribute a line to it. The twist is to draw enough to indicate you aren’t the fake artist but less enough so to prevent the fake artist from guessing the thing.

Also there are some cool games like Monikers and Champion of the Wild (the last is a game where you argue the toss as to why your animal would win a certain Olympic event).

If you have access to a TV you can always go jack box as well.

mistercrayon wrote:

There’s a new one called Just One

FranticPea wrote:

Just One, the current hotness, is just wonderful. Such a simple game but everyone just keeps asking for one more game. So fun.

*cough*

I think 10 would be too many tbh.

Cool thanks fellows, I'll look into these. Some of the group are early sleepers so I'm sure I could whittle the group down a bit.

Jungle Speed is up to 10 people I think and lends itself well to big groups. It's a variation on Snap using coloured patterns and symbols and if you get a match with someone else you and them are then in a race to grab the totem that sits in the middle of the table. The loser then has to pick both persons discard piles and add them to their hand. It's fast paced and leads to lots of hilarity when people accidentally disrespect the totem by punching it.

It's a good one for people that don't play a lot of games and is quick to explain. My 71 year old dad won a game of it over Christmas despite not really knowing what was happening. He and my sister were down to only their discard piles when my sister got a match with someone but instead of grabbing the totem she punched it accross the room and had to pick up the all discard piles of everyone in the game and gifting my dad the win.

I pulled Dis/Brobnar/Untamed, Ev got Mars/Brobnar/Untamed, but we didn’t share that many cards across Untamed.

Dis is cool but I only have commons so Untamed did the most work - had a great first game with a silly Untamed combo. Ev didn’t think her deck worked very well but in her second game used Mars to pull like 5 Aember on one turn and forge a key next turn.

I love how the combos are so big and silly, and it’s really easy to plan them because there’s no mana cost, just your house cost. We already want to get some proper tokens and new decks. I’ve been playing some Artifact and MtG and Keyforge feels really refreshing after the slow burn of those games. Even just being able to freely discard and the way deck cycling are encouraged is amazing.