Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Pick Up & Deliver 860: Introducing the Hobby, part 1 – Crowd Pleasers
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- Pick Up & Deliver 860: Introducing the Hobby, Part 1 � Crowd Pleasers Transcript Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step out for a walk and deliver an episode to you while I stroll around. I'm Brendan Riley. [ Intro music ] Well greetings, listeners. It's a broiling day here in suburban Chicago. It's so hot that toggle gaming is going to meet in the smaller room that we use when it is really hot, because we can air condition that room and hopefully keep it a little cooler. That's the goal for today anyway. After toggle gaming tonight, the next gaming event I have is I am hosting the Game Club meeting the first game club meeting of the year on the eighth floor of the six hundred building. So I'm looking forward to doing that on Friday. If you're at Columbia College, you should come to play games with us. So I've been thinking about introducing games, and I thought this might be a great time to share some of my wisdom or my experience in teaching people games, showing people games, getting people to understand games. And I thought I would do this with a episode about the games that I find reliable, and why I like them as games to show people. I'm thinking this is going to be in two parts because as I was making the list, it was getting longer and longer and longer, and it got to the point where I had eight games each and two categories. You know, these episodes are usually about 20 minutes. So I could talk about each game for 30 seconds, which doesn't seem like long enough time to really give you a sense of it. Or I could do it in two parts, so I'm going to do it in two parts. So this is introducing people to Games part one. So first thing I did is I checked my Podcast log to see have I done this topic before? Because this is season nine. So I'm in my ninth year of doing episodes of this, so I probably have. Turns out I have, uh, it was episode twenty. Episode 20 that was first season. I wasn't yet creating a separate thumbnail for each episode, which is funny or I was, but I wasn't putting images in it. I don't know if you if any of you have noticed, there's a separate thumbnail for each episode of this podcast. The thumbnail is a picture of a person walking with a messenger bag. And there's, and I put the game covers from the games that are that we're talking about this week as though they're falling out of his game bag. I also changed the text that's on there. It says episode whatever. The early episodes though, don't have any of the pictures on them. I think I was changing the text on the episode cover, but I'm honestly, I don't remember. That's something I noticed. But back in episode 20, the episode was called Introducing the Hobby, and I did not go back and listen to it because I don't do prep for the podcast. I should say I didn't go back and listen to it in much detail because I don't do much prep for the podcast, but I did look at the show notes and there were five games listed there, so these must be five games I thought were good for introducing people to the hobby. These are Mysterium Sonar, Kingdom Builder, Happy Salmon, and ladies and gentlemen. I would say I agree with that. All five of those are great for introducing people to hobby. Because of that, I'm not going to mention any of those beyond now. So take that into account as I'm talking about the thing. So what I thought I would do is, uh, part one is what I'm calling crowd pleasers. And part two is baby's first mechanism. So for crowd pleasers, what I'm thinking is if I get invited to a game of an event where we might be playing games, or I just get invited to a party or something and people like, hey, Brendan, bring some games along. My presumption there is that the people who are there are not going to be gamer gamers, which means that I want to bring games that people who do not play games much will enjoy and can be taught easily. This category. This would generally be called party games. But I don't just bring party games. I think I bring games that work fine for groups of up to, say, six to eight, which is usually about the size of a a gathering I would be asked to bring games to anyway. I mean, sometimes there would be a bigger group, but that's a different question. So what I thought I would share with you were my eight most reliable games to play with six people. So me and five others. So you get invited to a dinner party with two other couples. They say, hey, Brendan, bring a couple games that we'll have fun with. These are the eight games I might bring. Um, if you're a regular listening to the podcast, This episode might be kind of repetitive. I am not trying to find the weirdest niche game that I have for this conversation. I am providing practical advice. Ideally, this is a bottle episode. It stands alone. If someone's searching my podcast, they might find this episode and it would be useful to them. Even if they don't listen to, they haven't listened to the other eight hundred and fifty plus episodes, although I would encourage them to do so. Head on over to BoardGameGeek Guild 3269, or Rattlebox games dot com to find show notes about more episodes. All right, so crowd pleasers, these are in no particular order, except this is the order I thought of them in. And I think all of these are reliable. So this first one works for a group of six. I think it goes up to eight. Naturally it can go much higher. And if you start playing in teams or if you have multiple sets of the game, this is wits and wagers. Wits and wagers is a party game from North Star Games. The designer is Dominic Crapuchettes and it is a game of trivia. But it solves the core problem that some people have with trivia games, which is that they're not good at trivia. Now, as an aside, I think it's interesting to think about which things you could be good at or not good at that are generally considered part of game mechanisms or not. Like for example, um, there's a lot of people who consider memory to not be a reasonable thing to ask people to do in games or it is strange to think of memory as a game mechanism or a game requirement, but the ability to do math in your head quickly, for example, often is required either overtly or covertly. So anyway, Wits and wagers is a game for people who are interested in trivia. You're probably better at it if you are good at trivia, but you can do just fine if you're not good at trivia. So the way it works is there's a question, and all the answers to the questions are numbers, and most of the questions are not questions that you will have a clear answer for. Instead, they will be something where you you might be able to get in the vicinity. If you know a lot about it, you could probably get close. It's pretty rare that you're going to get it exact. What you do is you write that number on a little whiteboard and you turn them in. Then we line them up in order on this betting sheet. And then then everyone bets on which answer they think is right. If you get the bet correct, you get money or chips. And the person who has the most chips at the end of seven rounds wins. I say seven rounds because most of the time now I play wits and Wagers Vegas. That is my preferred play model. I think that's the epitome of the game, but they're all really fun. If you haven't played wits and wagers or you like to get a copy, I strongly recommend hitting up some thrift stores. I usually I see a copy at least once a month at a thrift store, and I've gotten to the point where I'm not buying them anymore because I have so many copies of it. I have like two or three copies that I've jammed into my copy at school. So we can play with like twenty people now. So that's wits and wagers. Next up is Qwixx. Qwixx is an excellent little dice roller. I would say it's made to play with four with four people, but you can play with six. Okay. This is probably the biggest stretch when I'm saying how many people can play this game, but the clever part of Qwixx is that on your turn you have two options, and when it's not your turn, you have one. This is really good for a dinner party or something, because when it's not your turn, you only have to kind of casually pay attention and you can chit chat. Then when it's your turn, you have to spend a little bit more time, but the game will keep moving pretty smoothly. It also doesn't overstay its welcome. It's like fifteen to twenty minutes and it's a lot of fun. It's maybe a little longer. If you did stretch it to six players, it would take a little bit longer probably. But generally that's gonna be okay because like I said, you're doing this in that kind of environment. You could probably manufacture a way to play this with like eight people by having two people share a role, like just the two people who are there when they roll, they both get whatever was rolled. And so you would speed up the game because you have two people taking a turn at a time. Um, the tricky part of that is, or maybe you just have two people who are across the table from each other taking a turn at the same time. One person rolls, they both get the dice. Yeah. So anyway, um, in Qwixx, you have these three lines of numbers. You're trying to eliminate them. And the trick is you have to decide, do I wait for a better number, or do I cross off what I have now, and then maybe later I'll get a better number and I can't use it. I don't want to explain the whole game on a podcast, but that's the way it is. It's really fun. Very simple. Well worth a look. Next up is Las Vegas. This is a game I play a lot because it is very accessible, very easy to teach and really fun. And they just released a new version of it. Ravensburger did, so I strongly recommend checking it out or picking it up if you can. Essentially, it's a dice rolling game. There are six casinos which are these tiles with money on them, and each tile corresponds to one die value from one to six. You get eight dice at the beginning of the round, and on your turn you're going to roll all your dice. Then you pick one value and you put all the dice that have that value on one of the casinos. So as you go around, you're slowly putting your dice out on the casinos. Some people will get a couple matching and put them all on the one. Some people put out one die at a time, you know, a die that they didn't roll any matches. So they have a little more leverage later in the round. But you might not roll matches and then you end up with just like one die on each of the six things or whatever. The clever gimmick of Las Vegas is that when you get to the end of the round, when everyone has placed all their dice, any, any two people or any, any people who have the same amount of dice on the tile as anyone else loses their dice, so, or their dice don't count. So you might have a tile with three dice from player A, three dice from player B, and one die from player C. Player C gets the money from the tile or the highest value money, and players A and B are out of luck because they they tied. It's a delicious complication that makes the game really fun. Las Vegas definitely check it out. I have two sort of traditional party games that I put on Here. The first is time's up Title recall. You could also use monikers for this situation. These are. This is a clue giving game where you are telling people some clues about a card with the goal of getting them to say what's on the card. It's a classic party game, but I think it's personalities or celebrities or something is the party game version of it and it is excellent. It's fun. It's easy to play. It's got variety because the way the game works in Time's Up and Monikers does this too. You get a certain number of cards dealt to you, and then you pick some of them to put into the pot. So going into the round, each player knows, you know, if you're playing six players, each player knows one sixth of the cards that are in the pot. Then when you're guessing, everyone hears what all the cards are, which is really important because you don't use the cards one time, you use them three times. The first time you go around, you're trying to get people to guess the card. You can. You give them clues, uh, without saying the words on the card, and then you're trying to get them to guess it the second time around. You do that same thing, but you can only give a one word clue. So the one word clue is particularly clever because you're drawing on mostly the clues that were given previously could be the answer, but often the clues. And then the third round it is charades. You're or not charades just pantomime. You're making motions and acting things out. But you're not. You're not speaking at all. Those are. They're both really good games. Time's up. And oh, Time's Up is really good monikers. Like I said, it's the same game, the other party game that I would bring if I were asked to bring games to introduce to people is wavelength. Wavelength is an excellent game for large groups. You could play it with as many people as you want, but I think that it works really well with like eight. That's an excellent number. Six is okay. Eight is great in the game. You are taking turns. There's some sort of device over here that sounds like a Geiger counter. And so I'm wondering if I'm getting exposed to something. I don't think so, but it's funny. So in wavelength you are on a team, the one clue giver. And then there's a couple other people receiving clues and you take turns giving clues. And what you do is you get a card and it has two things that are opposites or are on a scale. And it might be like one that says underhyped and overhyped, and you're what you do is you look at this slider thingy and there's an arrow sort of on a scale between zero and one hundred. And what you're trying to do is give a clue to your team that will get them to guess where the arrow is. So if the arrow is at like thirty percent and the clue was under hype to overhyped, you'd have to think of something that's underhyped. Somewhat. But only thirty percent of the way between underhyped and overhyped. Right. So at fifty percent would be exactly the correct amount of hype. So it's an interesting balance to walk. Especially because as the person hearing the clues, you have no idea. You have to try to figure out what do they mean by that. There's also some clues that are like hot to cold. And some people have hot be like those hot to cold in terms of temperature of the air on in weather. And other people will do hot to cold between like absolute zero and the surface of the sun. So like these are, you know, wildly different scales that you're on. And if you were to say to somebody one hundred degrees, if you're on the scale of temperature outside in Fahrenheit, Then that's hot. If you're on the scale of Kelvin to the surface of the sun, that's pretty middling. So, um, or actually it's probably pretty low. So wavelength is really interesting. It's a fun game, definitely worth playing. And again, it makes for a lot of chatter, a lot of conversation, a lot of good times. All right. There's three more games I wanted to mention today. The first one is Incan gold. Incan gold is an excellent push your luck game that plays up to eight. In it, you are trying to get the most treasure by exploring a collapsing temple. Of course, you're going to donate that treasure to a local museum. The gimmick is each. Each turn everybody decides independently and secretly whether they're going to continue running through the temple or whether they're going to leave. When you leave, you lock in all the treasure you've earned, and you also get to take the treasure that's sitting on the trail. So like if the group, let's say you're playing with a group of eight and you find a treasure of nine. Everybody gets one and the ninth one, you leave sitting on the trail and the first person to leave by themselves takes that ninth treasure. So there's a there's a push your luck element of you could leave. You could stay and try to get more treasure. Or you could leave and try to grab the treasure that's on its way out. But if other people leave at the same time you did, you get nothing for the most part. The other push your luck element is that there are bad things in the temple as well. There's treasure cards and then there's perils. And if there are, there are, I think, five different kinds of perils and three cards for each peril in the deck. If you get one peril of any given type, that's fine. But if you get a second peril of that same type, then that's when the. That's when the deck busts. And anyone who's still in the temple when that is drawn, loses everything. They've earned that round. You play over five rounds. It is excellent. Incan gold is top notch. Banger of a game. Really fun. Easy to play. Very enjoyable. A winner every time. There is an alternate version of it called Diamant, which I haven't played, which I believe is basically the same. It comes with slightly nicer pieces, but either one is a winner. That's Incan gold. Next is Skyjo. This is one I. I might play with six. I wouldn't play with more than six. I think the game box caps at six. This is essentially a commercialized version of the card game golf in which you have a grid of cards that you are revealing and you're trying to score as low as possible, while also removing cards from your grid. All right. Then finally, uh, one game that I've seen be reliably fun, but I think works best at about six players is [The] chameleon. Chameleon is from big potato games. It is a grid. When you play chameleon, there's a grid of like fifteen terms or maybe sixteen terms in a category. So it'll be like Disney movies, or it'll be school subjects or whatever. There's a grid and each person gets a little card with a specialized map on it, sort of. And you roll dice and the card tells you which of the terms on the grid is the term for the round. Then won. One player gets a card that says, you are the chameleon, and they don't know which card is the grid for the round. So then the gimmick is everybody says and says something to sort of prove to the group that they know what's on the grid, but they can't be so obvious about what they're saying that they reveal it to the chameleon. Because if the chameleon can guess which answer is on the grid, then the chameleon wins. Otherwise, the group has to try to figure out which person didn't know the answer on the card. It's excellent. Really fun. I was at a game event one time. We played this for like two hours straight with more than six people. I think we were at the eight is the max. So we had like ten and we were just rotating people out every round. It was fantastic. That is the end of part one crowd pleasers. These are games I would I would bring if I were asked to bring games to a party event, and where I wasn't sure that many of the people were gonna know anything about games. Thanks for joining me on my walk today. I hope your next walk is pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. [ Exit music ] Brought to you by Rattlebox games.