Play Journal: July 2019

by Thom Kiraly

If July didn’t get me, I doubt August will. In the middle of heat waves and thunder storms, I still managed to get some games in. The job setting up and facilitating games for kids had me playing more boardgames than in a long time, so I broke that off into a whole section of its own in this entry. I also had the chance to get into some good local multiplayer hangouts. All of this goes in my gratitude book, wherever the hell I put that.

August is back-to-school time so I expect to scare my new students with a bunch of physical games. Wish me luck on that, nerds.

 


LIVE ACTION

Malmö Play Club Session – Another modest Play Club session came and went at the local library. We were in competition with a particularly warm afternoon and general vacation period but here’s what the brave few that nevertheless showed up ended up playing and playing around with:

Sound and Fury; One Behind; Come Here, Go Away; Color Call; Quick Draw; Aura; Sausages; ChipChipoi; Competitive Blessings.

The most interesting game was when we modified Competitive Blessings to be played with three people. Instead of two people one-upping each other in a duel, we had one player ask to be blessed and the other two trying to outdo each other in response. The blessed would then end the game by saying “amen”, thus setting the pace of the game.

Here’s the Play Club Facebook page. Keep an eye on it for future dates and such.

Sesame Street Family Play – I still fire this little app up from time to time. Most recently, I played “Eyes-Closed High Five” wherein you and another player try doing a high five with your eyes closed. If that’s not enough of a challenge, you can level up to touching each others nose with your thumb. Here’s hoping you don’t get poked too hard in the eye!

Labyrinth Walk – After swim class, me and the kids head outside to the small hedge maze and run around for a bit. I made an instagram video that I think captures how I feel most times I’m in a labyrinth (tried my best to embed here but wow, Instagram and wordpress are not my friends):

 


TABLETOP

Spökskogen – I try to not let the kids fight each other too much in running away with the gnome (this makes sense if you know the game, trust me). They end up fighting anyway and I win even though I’ve tried to help them. It feels like this game needs a very specific coin to drop in terms of the children understanding some fundamentals of cooperation and trust. On that day, I won’t stand a chance.

Goblin’s Gold – More labyrinths! Always more labyrinths! Here’s a particularly nasty situation my oldest offspring ended up in:

Goblin’s Gold, with every false move mapped out.

Splits – It’s impressive how you can level up your evening if you don’t watch Netflix and instead make some tea and play a quick boardgame. Splits is one of my all-time favorites. I see the limitations in the design but I just think it’s so nifty and simple that I want to show it to everyone.

Splits

Heckmeck – Another month where I got to play Heckmeck is another month I can count myself as lucky. Unfortunately, that luck is of the general, life-affirming, kind and thus did nothing for me in actual play. On the other hand, I got to see my children get into that very specific Heckmeck-mindset and mood together with me and two other “grown-ups”. Few other games can immediately establish that, yes, you are indeed playing THIS GAME and nothing else. There’s a special, whimsical tension when a game of Heckmeck is on and only a fool would say that it’s exclusively due to the die numbers and chits on the table. It’s all social and it’s all beautiful. I’m lucky to have Heckmeck in my life, and to have people willing to play it with me.

 

COMPUTER GAMES

Kopanito All-Stars Soccer – I couldn’t tell you what specific cup we’re working our way through, but Kopanito is still popular with the kids. Now that another world cup is over, I think the interest in soccer is waning slightly. Expect that to change in the fall, when soccer practice resumes.

Overwatch – Irony is hard. I picked the name Capitalism for Overwatch way back when. My thinking was that it’d be funny to have other players read “Eliminated Capitalism” whenever they figured out how to put a couple of bullets in me. It is indeed funny and I still get great reactions from people. I’d say maybe 2/3 get the joke and the rest are triggered so I guess that’s also cool. What’s not cool, however, is how my kids now cheer for Capitalism when I play (and even unprompted during dinner or whatnot). So that nick has to go. 
In terms of play, I still mostly play Mystery Heroes. It’s a fun challenge and people are significantly less toxic when they know you didn’t actually choose the hero you’re playing at the moment. 

Kind Words (lo fi chill beats to write to) – I worry that my life is turning into the kind of twisted nightmare that only true muzak will be able to heal. Until then, lo fi chill beats will do just fine. Kind Words is hardly a game, though the interactions are somewhat playful. Set to a chill hop soundtrack, you can either make requests (ask strangers for help/opinions) or respond to other people’s requests. Being a loyal Street Fight listener, I wanted to hear stories of Small Business Tyrants and I got this little gem, among other things.

Kind Words

Road Redemption – it’s been on my wishlist for the longest time, but I never got around to buying it, so lucky me that Road Redemption was included in this month’s Humble loadout of games. I played Road Rash a lot as a kid and I feel I never quite got the same itch scratched by other games since. I’m not crazy about how Mad Max some missions in Road Redemption feel, but maybe I missed that part in the original game world. The music is also very much generic videogame hard rock, so “meh” on that front. The fighting and driving is what matters and those work very well. It’s still incredibly satisfying to wait to get close to a billboard sign only to kick your friend into it and see their map marker turn into a skull.

Move or Die – Kind of a sneaky little bugger, this one. When I played it in June, I didn’t think much of it, but now that I’ve put another hour or two into it I can see how it’s a good amalgamation of tried and true local multiplayer party games. The added twist of sometimes changing the rules slightly makes every game feel fresh. It’s been a while since we screamed this much out of wild excitement in this apartment.

The Yawhg – Story games are lousy games and even worse stories, aren’t they? No, not really. I’m often the first to scoff at storytelling in games because I believe it somewhat cheapens the power of play untethered from narrative constraints. Is that true? Of course not, I’m just grumpy and dumb (but also a bit right, actually (just kidding (not actually kidding (? (!))))).
Anyhow, In The Yawhg, players get to go on a little story journey together and much of the fun comes from the urging on of your fellow storytellers to steer the action in a certain direction. I won’t give away exactly what happened, but though I feel that there wasn’t much you could do to affect the storylines of the other players, it was enjoyable enough. For instance, I decided to take a man up on the offer of tagging along “back to his place” (nudge nudge etc). On the way there, however, we drifted into long conversations on art, philosophy and the like. The image below shows what happened once we spent the night walking the streets of the soon-to-be-Yawhged city all night:

The Yawhg – “The man apologizes for the lack of sex, but thanks you for the chat.”

 

 

PLAYING AT WORK

Toy Box – This is almost exactly what I want from VR. I want to stand in a room and wreck everything around me. I want to set off little explosions and start small fires and just feel the calm wash over me. Toy Box is not necessarily made for that exact experience (i.e. the destruction is very tame) but it’s a step in the right direction as far as I’m concerned.

Guitar Hero – Now this old gem was a welcome addition to the drudgery of kids screaming about Fortnite skins (not my own kids, mind you). I can’t deny how much fun it is to be totally mediocre at Guitar Hero while nonetheless allowing yourself at least a sliver of the rock star fantasy. The mistakes I made were, of course, entirely due to the buttons not working properly on the old, old, old guitar controller. I have rhythm! I can jive! And floss! 

Overcooked 2 – The issue with setting up games so kids at work can play something new is that you yourself won’t get to play more than maybe the first six levels of a game like Overcooked 2. Regardless, I adore Overcooked and had a lot of fun finding my way to whatever seems like fun for my partner-in-play. Much sashimi was made. Slightly less was served. 

BBC Home VR – Wanna climb around the ISS? Wanna fix solar panels? Sure, you can try doing those things, but eventually there will be a storm of space junk and you’ll be sent hurtling away from the space station. Playing this in “astronaut mode” is seriously disorienting, but still kinda cool.
The most fun I had, unlikely as it sounds, was actually guiding kids through the short game. At several points, you could have looked over at the VR station and seen me desperately holding a kid under their arms, trying to keep them from falling over while the game spun them around.

Super Smash Bros Ultimate – I haven’t played Smash since N64 and I think it’s rather obvious if you see me try today on the Switch. I’ll say this, though: controllers matter. The Switch allows you to plug in USB controllers so we set up four game cube controllers through a hub and went to town. This actually made the actions a bit more understandable for me and I even squeezed out a special attack or two by the end of my run.

Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled – Not much to say about CTR. I never played it way back when and only went through one cup this time. It’s mostly here for completionist reasons.

Super Mario Kart – On SNES mini. Only played two or three races. Same reason for inclusion as CTR above.

Battle Sheep – Back to Splits! This is the evolution of my darling  two-player abstract game. The theme of sheep taking over some sort of pasture doesn’t quite make sense to me, but I’m willing to go with it. For a game with three or four players, you simply expand the playing area by 50% or 100%. It’s pretty unforgiving and can be brutal when you slip up, but luckily it plays quickly and you can always have another go at it before long.

Battle Sheep

Letters from Whitechapel – It’s been a few years since I played this, but once I’d skimmed the rulebook I was good to go. It’s a neat little game set during a series of grizzly murders. One player is Jack the Ripper, everyone else plays the cops trying to catch him. Like many cooperative games, there’s a point at which more cops really doesn’t add anything to the game. Especially if you, say, have someone who can step in and become a dominant voice in the investigation. Someone like maybe, perhaps, who knows… me? Honestly, I held back on talking over the other pigs and I think the game was better for it. Even though Jack got away.

Rhino Hero – Hey! It’s our old friend, Rhino Hero! What are you doing in the section where I talk about work? We usually meet at my place, where my kids and I try to stack high buildings for you to climb on.
Well, it came time for Family Day at work (where we basically tried to trick parents to tag along and play games with their kids) and I brought a game I know is popular at home. Almost no kids ended up playing, but they were still a factor. In one especially wobbly game of Rhino Hero, a kid walked up and just randomly punched the table making everyone building the tower on that table jump and do that quick inhale through the teeth, you know? After we kindly guided that specific windmill of a child to a different part of the room, I made the tower fall when trying to move the daring Hero to his next level in the building. Oh well. 

Azul – Not only is this game pretty, it’s also good-looking and nicely made. Oh, and it plays pretty well too! A few simple patterns give rise to complex strategies that nonetheless never spiral out of control due to the short round-length. I won’t explain every detail, but I’ll admit I enjoyed it quite a bit and it became one of my favorite games to introduce people to.

Azul

Betrayal at House on the Hill – One nifty thing about this game: I like how the betrayal part is calculated (based on what you’ve already found and what people have done so far). Other than that, I’m not blown away. There’s no actual betrayal, btw. Someone is just chosen as traitor by the game and that’s that. It’s more like a Curse at House on the Hill, really.

Betrayal at House on the Hill

Exploding Kittens – Not much to say here. I don’t care for the theme a lot and the russian roulette mechanics are only… fine. Not a favorite and seems much more driven by the recognizability of the creators than the actual experience of play. 

Tsuro – My other favorite game to run for people (apart from Azul) was Tsuro. I wrote it up last month, but I’ll just say that it’s a great pick-up game. The only drawback was that I found it hard to pull punches without being obvious about it. When I showcase games I want to give new players the sense that they could actually win, even though they’re playing against someone who’s apparently played a whole collection of bunches of times before. In Tsuro, this was a bit hard since you often make an okay move or a really bad one.

Tsuro

 

MOBILE

Dots Series – Idle game. Listening to podcasts. Same as it ever was. Again.

Quiz Planet – Blesses and curses to the person on Facebook who tricked me into playing Quiz Planet. It feeds a certain, somewhat unsympathetic, sense of superiority that I feel is largely unearned. Also, there’s a terrible UI thing that happens sometimes when the game tells you to skip to the next screen but isn’t quite as responsive as you’d like and you keep clicking and end up randomly answering a question. That kind of stuff makes me want to never play certain games again. Assassin’s Creed: Origins, I’m looking at you!

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite – I can’t honestly say that this took off for me. Maybe it’s because it feels a bit more involved than Pokémon Go and thus a worse fit for me to play with my kids. Maybe it’s the lack of other people to play with. In any case, I’ve let HP:WU rest in July.