A work party and some board games
My friend’s brother had a work party at his house last weekend, and he wanted to play board games. So my friend invited me and another guy as reinforcements to teach some games to about 20 people who don’t board game at all.
I loaded up my Big Frakkin Bag (it literally says that; it’s a Battlestar Galactica promo bag from the mid-2000s) with all sorts of party games and shorter games. My board-game friends did the same. We had no idea what people wanted and figured that it didn’t hurt having a lot of game options.
We laid out our games on the dining table so that people could take a look and see what piqued their interest. People were immediately like, there’s so many games! A few picked up a couple of boxes and read the back but nobody was definitively saying, let’s play this.
So my friend whose brother owned the house took charge and said, Codenames is a great game. It’s easy to learn and plays a lot of people. About a dozen folks followed him to the kitchen table.
My other board-game friend and I then kicked off a game of Tsuro with a few other people. Tsuro is a quick tile-laying game that can play up to 8 people. On your turn, you place a tile in front of your token and your token moves along the path printed on that tile. The goal of the game is to be the last person alive by not falling off the board or hitting another player. The new folks who were playing Tsuro got the gyst of the game pretty quickly, and we ended up playing the game twice.
We then stepped it up a little bit and introduced our table to Splendor. People really liked the poker-chip components of the game, and they all seemed to be getting the hang of it as well.
Meanwhile, Codenames wrapped up in the kitchen, and they had moved on to their next game CaSh ‘n Gun$. This is always a fun game with a large group, especially a group who knows each other well such as these co-workers.
Next up was the biggest hit of the night: Happy Salmon! There were many, many rounds of this game, both the regular version and with the silent variant. It’s so amusing watching people frantically run around a table and Happy Salmon each other!
By this point in the evening, most of the folks had left but we still had enough for a couple games of Saboteur, which is a hidden-role card game.
In Saboteur, you are dwarfs mining for gold. On your turn, you play a card that helps mine an uninterrupted path toward the loot or, if you’re a saboteur, you can play cards that create cave-ins, break equipment or make the path toward the gold harder to achieve. As a saboteur though, you don’t want to be too obvious at the start as other players will try to break your equipment. As with most hidden-role games, it’s always fun to accuse those plotting against you.
The last game of the night was by no means a party game. There were five of us left, and we decided to start a game of Power Grid at 11 p.m. Us three board gamers had played this game before so we taught the two new guys how to play.
The game was very tense and no one person ran away with the game. I still love the bidding aspect of this game. It’s seriously so fun trying to raise the price of a power plant so that the one person who really needs it will pay that much more acquiring it. It’s also so very satisfying when you’re the first to purchase resources that you buy up so many that it makes is very expensive for the next 4 people.
We finished playing 2 a.m. I tied for 1st place, but alas, money came down as a tie breaker and I had $10 fewer dollars than the winner. A few days later, I saw this on Instragram, and it totally made me laugh. Womp womp …
Anyway, I had a great time at my friend’s brother house, and I love teaching non-board gamers about the world of board games beyond Monopoly and the like. One of the guys I was playing with sounded intrigued by these type of board games and asked about where to buy them, and that totally warms my heart.