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There are about 311 games in my collection. The oldest (that’s still available from Zatu) is Inkognito (which dates back to 1988), and the newest is Tesseract (which I just received and will be writing a review for shortly). The games which I have played most are Poker, Liars Dice, and The Crew: Mission Deep Sea.
Poker and Liars Dice are perfect reflections of the games I like to play – lots of player interaction, bluffing, and an opportunity to trash talk. The main reason for playing The Crew so often is that it’s an ideal filler game. Whenever we get together for game night, there is always someone who arrives late (or early), and we can just play a game or two while were waiting. On top of that, when the late comers arrive, they too want to have a game. Another game that works well in this capacity is Decrypto.
In order to make it into my collection, a game has to fulfil a couple of requirements
· It plays 2-4 and isn’t too complicated
· It plays over 30 minutes
· Decent player interaction and opportunities to trash talk
These rules came about simply from the nature of my play group, and the games I like to play. I would love to have a group of eight and play Captain Sonar, but I find it hard enough to get 4 players on a week night. I have Dune, Alchemists, and Tragedy Looper waiting for the day that the group will do their homework and read the rule book in advance. I would love to spend a day playing several rounds of The King’s Dilemma, but my friends simply don’t have the time to spare.
I’d like to say that my ideal game would have the tagline “five minutes to learn and a lifetime to master”, but most of these games lack depth. Don’t get me wrong, I like to play Dominoes, Charades, Yahtzee and Scrabble, but there has to be some trash talking to keep me interested. Games where you are drawing cards and creating your own little tableau (eg, Wyrmspan) are forms of multi-player solitaire, and those games don’t interest me at all, and I don’t have any in my collection.
I like bluffing games, and I even wrote a blog about my favourite ones. To be honest, there aren’t many good bluffing games, but I have them all anyway (as they are generally small box games that hardly take up any room). I also like negotiation games, and I again wrote a blog about my favourite ones. Both of these genres involve player interaction, and that’s an important prerequisite for me when I play games. As I often tell my friends, when I sit down to play a game, I want games that feature conversations and temptations.
There is another category of game that I like which is hard to describe because how some of these games are categorized on BGG isn’t the way that I would class them. Let’s call these improv games. The idea here is that you have to communicate something and that involves being creative. Now you’re probably thinking of something like Charades, but my wife and I have been together for over forty years and we can guess each other’s clues with very little effort (so it’s no fun unless we’re on opposing teams). The better example is Don’t Get Got. In this game, each player receives six secret missions, and the winner is the first person to accomplish three of those missions. Now the mission might be as simple as “Get someone to
say Sugar” or as devious as “Get someone to argue with you about which way north is”. But the genius of the game is that it isn’t played directly, but rather it exists in the background. So, when Rebecca is asking me to pick up a card that she dropped, I’m thinking “Did she genuinely accidentally drop that card, or did she do it intentionally wanting me to pick it up so she could achieve a mission?”. The Shut Up & Sit Down edition has 140 missions specifically aimed at board gamers like “Boo something and get another player to join in”. In some sense, Don’t Get Got is like an escape room, with each of you having to achieve different goals. I’ll talk about these improv games in a forthcoming blog.
I also like to make my own games (I have about 50 of these in addition to the 311 I mentioned at the beginning). Sometimes, I will re-theme a game. For example, a friend of mine was getting married and they were having an Alice in Wonderland themed wedding. I knew her husband liked Love Letter, so I made them an Alice in Wonderland version of the premium edition. Other times, a game is out of print and unavailable, so I’ll make my own version of the game. Or, there is a PNP version of a game on Kickstarter, BGG or PNP Arcade, and I’ll make up the game to try it with my play group. Or, I’ll have my own ideas for a new game or an expansion for a game on my shelf, and I’ll make (or remake) all the relevant parts. I’ll talk about the art of making games in a forthcoming blog.
I’m a hard core board gamer, and while most of my friends really enjoying playing games, they aren’t board gamers. Well, they might be board gamers, but they don’t have any board games I would want to play (Monopoly, Herd Mentality, Zingo, Cluedo Junior, 5 Second Rule, and Codenames instantly come to mind), so they rely on me to supply them on game night. I store most of my games in the panic room – a small triangular prism shaped area behind a trap door in the attic. The builders were going to cover it up when we were converting the roof space into an attic, but I made them convert any available space into storage space. It holds about 100 games, and the rest of the collection is scattered on open shelves in the attic or in my study.