So it's sort of like Mad Libs, but multiple choice?
Yeah, sort of. Everyone submits their best punchline, and then the dealer selects their favorite, and that person wins the round.
A nice part of Apples-to-Apples/CAH is that you're trying to figure out what will most appeal to the dealer of that particular round.
I suppose it's not MadLibs whatsoever, because you know the prompt before you submit your answer. Your answers are constrained by the choices on the cards in your hand.
Agree with the OP.
I thought this stunt of theirs was pretty good.
It' sounds like commenting on Unfogged except the limited range of options is explicit.
I was supposed to play it once, but over the course of several months I spoiled the invitation.
5: it was bad enough when we were just one bald 47-year-old in a basement, now you're saying we're a Chinese Room? I resent that in Wisconsin dot com.
The one gameplay element where it actually differs from Apples-to-Apples are the great multi-card combos. e.g. the obvious "1. ____ 2. _____ 3. Profit".
I've just seen it as more of an inhibition limiter then saying anything deep about what your sense of humor.
Sadly, it does tend to racism. Also, sexism. I think they've turned down some of the worst of it, though.
4: I was going to mention that. I knew it was a stunt as it was happening (I'm not that cynical), but didn't figure out it was Temkin until afterwards.
I played it at a party with some people a few months back. It is, as the OP gets at, throughly grounded in contemporary American white humor, which I find really tiresome. The Europeans there didn't really get it, and the one PoC there was noticeably uncomfortable.
As a counteranecdatum, I've played it at a majority-PoC party and it went as usual.
It's arguably not a counteranecdatum. Huge difference between being the one PoC among white people stamping around racial taboos, and doing the same within a group of PoC.
The best party game is "What's the worst thing you can say about someone in this room?" and then have everyone guess who you're talking about.
In fact, we play that game in the comments!
C got it for us all at Christmas. It's funny (and having the 11 year old playing too made it even more so), but I've played it about 3 times and that's probably enough for me. The kids like it, it seems to come out when there are extra teenagers in the house.
I played with a drunk Polish family. It was awful.
Also, I hate the feature of 2.2. "Engorged Anne Frank" wins? That's not funny and it doesn't even make sense. Fuck you.
It sure sounds like a teenager/hipster game, most of which leave me cold. Usually we play Carcasonne, or Castles of Burgundy.
My favorite game of all though is Diplomacy, which is sort of like reenacting The Game of Thrones in your own home, though usually with less blood. (In fact, now I think about it I'm shocked no one has done a GoT tie-in edition of Diplomacy.)
17: We played a game of Diplomacy in our office using a web interface where we gave two days per turn. Dear god the politicking. It was awful, far too intense for me. When I had to stab a coworker in the back I felt horrible about it for months.
Speaking of games in poor taste, I was going to make a joke about "Settlers of Canaan", but it turns out somebody made it for real. Except in their version, there's no PLO or Hamas.
Insofar as they substitute for real games like chess or bridge or Carcassonne or Diplomacy or Settlers of Catan or even Hearts for god's sake, Cards against Humanity and Apples to Apples are deplorable. I guess they're marginally better than just sitting around chatting though.
18 is a terrific idea if anyone ever wanted to destroy Unfogged forever.
Oh jesus no. I mean, real strategic games are good if you enjoy real strategic games, but Hearts just sucks. Silly social games are an entirely different thing, perfect for slightly not-very-fun kinds of social situations. It is a great thing when someone in Jammies' family suggests playing Apples to Apples.
20: I think that's a typing error. They're party games, not strategy games, and they're suitable for different purposes. My gaming group is in the habit of playing a strategy game and if we finish up early use a party game as a palate cleanser--the most popular recently is Telestrations, which is like dictionary meets the telephone game. Not very deep, but fun.
(For a more video gamey equivalent, clearly Mario Kart and Alpha Centauri have different and acceptable niches.)
22 and 24 aren't disagreeing with 20 as far as I can tell, they're saying that A2A and CAH replace chatting, not Catan. Which is reasonable but disappointing if true.
You know what's an underrated group activity? Laser tag. (And also Hearts, which is pretty fun.)
Ha. I really do hate Laser tag. I don't like the adrenaline of being hunted.
It's very popular with late teens/early 20s; playing it with your in-laws can be quite strange (but devolves quickly to standard CAH play).
It is fantastically popular, despite their horrible relations with retailers for their first couple of years. Some of that should improve as they're entering distribution... but I sincerely hope it's almost played out. (My cynical side suspects that it is, which is why they've caved and gone into distribution.)
It's on my list of games that I'll play to be sociable, but I never recommend it, and usually recommend something else (or several something elses) first.
Best group activities: Strategy games, anything involving physical activity (sports, hiking, swimming)
Second best: making something (food, art, etc.)
Third best: structured doing of nothing (watching something on a screen, Apples to Apples).
Worst: long unstructured periods of sitting (restaurant meals, dinner at someone's house, bars)
If you wrote up those categories a little more neutrally, I'll bet they'd be a good guide for your dating preferences.
Worst: long unstructured periods of sitting (restaurant meals, dinner at someone's house, bars)
That's pretty much what I do with free time.
30: Those almost work, except you have failed to distinguish unstructured doing nothing with good conversation from unstructured doing nothing without. The first is high on my list, but the last is rock bottom. (I also want to distinguish strenuous from non-strenuous physical activity -- hiking vs. strolling.)
30 is an awesome list if your main goal for group interaction is to not speak to anyone.
s/b not speak to anyone WHILE competing against them, which is the essence of socializing.
32: Drink until the conversation is good.
Especially given the chiding in 26.1 about how sad it is that A2A replaces small talk with my in-laws extended family.
35 is correct and invites the alternate scenario of puzzling out why you all got so mad last night, anyway.
Surely Star Fleet Battles is the ultimate party game.
I think you misunderstood 26.1. It's not sad to replace small talk with A2A, it's sad to replace small talk with A2A rather than something that creates deep, meaningful, emotional bonds, like chess or Diplomacy.
I guess it's no surprise that I haven't heard of any of these games. Did you play any of them at Unfoggedycon?
Maybe he only knows it as Chatrang.
A nice part of Apples-to-Apples/CAH is that you're trying to figure out what will most appeal to the dealer of that particular round.
I only played CAH once, but in that case it benefited from the fact that everyone clearly had different styles as far as what answers they would accept. There was one person who was completely game for stupid, crude humor, another person who was never going to pick the crudest answer me, me who wouldn't pick anything that didn't make logical sense, no matter how funny it was, and a fourth person who was sort of in the middle, but clearly had her own preferences for humor.
The thing that bugged me was that some cards were just going to be difficult to win with in any round, and as the game went on those cards started to clog your hand, so that you were only picking from 3 or 4 possibilities for most rounds.
Surely Star Fleet Battles is the ultimate party game.
SFB is on of the things that really makes me miss having the free time that I had in my teens or early 20s. There is something fun about being able to settle into a game and know that you're committed for the next five hours and can just get absorbed by it, but I don't know that I will ever have the time so that, if I did have a free block of five hours SFB is what I would chose to do with it.
Chatrang.
Shatranj is a better, if more unfortunate, transliteration.
Kid and better half play cribbage, mostly when on a train. We all play the music game incessantly.
I've never heard of these games (except chess, of course) and LB correct re hierarchy of social pleasures, except difficult for me to imagine certain family gatherings could be improved by introducing formalized competition.
I am not generally fond of strategy games, because if I am going to concentrate that hard, I should get paid for the effort. I do like Pandemic, though.
More seriously, jigsaw puzzles are great for family gatherings because you don't have to look at or talk to each other but it's still a little bit like you're interacting.
Once again reminded forcefully why better plan is to just avoid family gatherings.
We do lots of jigsaw puzzles at family gatherings, because people with early-stage Alzheimer's and small children can do them.
Jigsaw puzzles are difficult for me. I get obsessive about them, to the point where it's difficult to get anything else done. But I don't actually enjoy them much. So mostly I avoid them until I encounter one that someone else has set up, at which point I'm helplessly sucked in and no use to anyone until they're done.
51. I try harder with my family, because I'd prefer that my son did not conclude 51. in the future.
I was recently in Las Vegas. Clearly a popular place with Chinese, but I didn't notice much tailored to middle easterners. In particular, no way to bet on backgammon that I saw. Things that make you go hmmm.
We did a puzzle based on a Thomas Kinkade painting. It was a pain in the ass for two reasons.
My kid and my step kids are all much more enthusiastic re spending time with my family than I am, so perhaps my misanthropy will not carry over.
Hopefully neither reason involved Thomas Kinkade's penis.
It's funny, I have no interest in games or puzzles of any kind. I tried sudoku and other things for a while, have occasionally taken a stab at cryptic crosswords, and at various computer games. But all those 2048 type things, and similar, I have about as much interest in those as I do in knitting, or basket-weaving, i.e. none.
I'll play games with other people, Scrabble or chess, or whatever, or join in at quizzes, but that's a social thing. I don't care about winning very much, either.
Just to pick up the game described in 12, someone here, and I'm not saying who, fakes his Scottish accent.
For gatherings with extended family, some of those ridiculously massive 70s era war games based on the Eastern front in WWII might work. They can easily fill up an entire multi-day visit, and family gathering + genocidal war = big fun!
Everybody here should fake a Scottish accent.
18
Diplomacy does have the defect that sometimes you find out more about your friends than you wish to know.
53
This. I never start a jigsaw puzzle but when someone else does I'm compelled to finish it. For example, the 3D foam Eiffel Tower last Christmas.
I fake a Scottish accent at all times. I just do it badly enough that no one's noticed yet.
58 is me too. I just don't get the desire to win something that just doesn't mean anything at all in the end.
There are a few people in our friend circle who try, from time to time, to get a Carcasonne game going. To no avail. We had a couple over not long ago for dinner and Scrabble. Which was fun, and not just because I won (after being way behind for much of the game).
Traditionally, we play Hearts and Charades -- my parents played both a lot when they were young (and TV didn't exist), again when we were young (and TV was stupid), and now enjoy playing with the grandkids. We've played Charades a few times with our friend group here -- many of them, though, are just not very good at it. We should try again some time.
61 -- I played Panzergruppe Guderian and Afrika Korps with my uncle for a few Christmases. He's now estranged from the family, but that's not why. It is a little weird in retrospect how much more fun it is to play the Nazi side in those games.
I'm faking a Scottish accent as we speak, but I don't believe in eye dialect.
re: 66
Yeah, I usually say that the only thing I care about winning is arguments, and while it's just a line, it is basically true.
66: Huh. I care intensely if I win anything while I'm actually playing. I snap out of it immediately afterward, but the whole point of the game is pretending winning matters -- if you didn't, then yeah, games wouldn't work. (And of course caring too much wrecks them as well; Buck doesn't play games because he revs up to a life-or-death emotional state, and it's no fun for him.)
68: Sally was talking about some video game version of Stalingrad that a friend of hers has been playing obsessively, and noting that there's something weird about designing a game where you can only play the Nazi side.
GB introduced us to Richochet Robots, which is a fun game in that it's not a "party game" like A2A or CAH, but it very much invites dropping in and out, doesn't last very long, and seems almost impossible to lend itself to a friendship-ending argument the way, say, Settlers can.
73: That's a great game for people who have large mental stacks. A couple we know has been training there approximately nine year old son on it and while he's not up to our level, he's gotten surprisingly good at it.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes to the OP. There are definitely opportunities to make hilarious combinations, and the trick of appealing to the person whose turn it is can elicit some great jokes, especially when the person's sense of humor or delight is not totally on the nose with regards to the game's. (Nasty-cute works well.) But after a couple games, you should be embarrassed that you didn't come up with it first.
AWB put something up at the other place that was a variation on this, which looked fun. She recommended doing it Celebrity-style, everyone write fictional characters on scraps of paper, then use the cards in your hand to come up with the best romantic match for the card played by whomever's up.
Oh, also, these guys put out Werewolf, which is a super-fun-and-creepy variant on Mafia. At least I thought it was them until I saw that the link says it dates to 1986.
One-on-one Scrabble is great, multiplayer Scrabble not so much because it takes too long for it to be your turn again.
There really ought to be some sort of meta-game where you figure out who are the best paired people from a variety of games -- Taboo, A2A/CAH, Pictionary -- and then move on to a championship round. Of Seven Minutes in Heaven or something.
Buck doesn't play games because he revs up to a life-or-death emotional state, and it's no fun for him.
My wife is a bit like that. For a while we used to play chess fairly regularly, and we stopped for that reason. We are fairly evenly matched. Both of us aren't very good. So results were about 50/50 each way, and she'd get so annoyed/frustrated.
I quite like the social thing of games. Doing something together with other people. It can be a nice frame for drinking and conversation. But I can't ever really imagine either caring very much, or playing them on my own.
I suppose, as a teenager, I used to like winning at Trivial Pursuit, but that was largely because the fun was in running up the most rapid destruction of everyone else.
Sounds like game night at the LB/Buck household is an awesome bloodsport. I agree with LB that you have to play to win, and also that you then turn it off. The most fun I've had playing Monopoly was with a bunch of Harvard/Stanford B-school folks, because it was VERY VERY important to them to win, and they didn't think I was a jerk for trying to do the same. Of course, when it got late and we had to call it a night, the only other guy beside me who had a plausible shot at winning wanted to argue that of course he would have won. That was tiresome.
Buck doesn't play games because he revs up to a life-or-death emotional state, and it's no fun for him.
"I will not play such games...with Jake." -BMO in the Adventure Time episode "Card Wars".
I've been playing chess with Newt, and it's hysterical because we're both terrible. There is no such thing as a position you can't recover from, because the spontaneous errors come so often that anything could happen next.
Junta is the best, as long as you don't mind losing all your friends.
For a while we used to play chess fairly regularly, and we stopped for that reason.
My parents have a story of the last chess game they ever played, back in the early 70s while their marriage was becoming terrible but hadn't yet reached a steady state of terribleness. Dad had just taken Mom's second knight, and for some reason deciding to clown around, gloated "You are sans horsey" in a silly French accent. Mom flipped the board into his lap.
I remember jigsaw puzzles being fun but the big ones were rather a pain since they occupied so much space.
You really need a dedicated table that you're not doing anything else with.
My brother and sister both refused to play chess with me after the first or second time that they lost.
My sister in particular had beaten me hundreds of times before I won a game.
I'm sure I've told the story about Lee teaching me to play pool and then both trash-talking me and taking a victory lap after beating me during my first game a few minutes later. So far, she won't play board games or card games with the girls, and maybe that's a good thing.
Their favorite game is non-competitive, but Life Stories actually works really well as a way of getting to know people better and has been a way to naturally let them learn family stories while incorporating their own memories.
90: Yes, that caused quite a crisis at Goodwill when they needed the table that my stepdaughter was using for her jigsaw puzzle.
Their favorite game is non-competitive, but Life Stories actually works really well as a way of getting to know people better and has been a way to naturally let them learn family stories while incorporating their own memories.
Blah blah blah caring and sharing. Have they tried playing the role of a Nazi tank commander invading Smolensk in an incredibly complicated 1970s wargame?
I have that game at home. It's called Panzer Commander or something. Never played it.
94: No, but I got to pocket their allowance for yesterday because when you hit/kick/spit at your sister, you have to give her your money and when she does it back to you, it goes to a mom. That's almost as good as Nazis and perhaps an even bigger fail at touchy-feely peaciness.
Yesterday, I played a few games of cornhole, and one of my opponents was talking about other yard games. Frisbee Cup (which also apparently goes by the name "Fricket") sounds fun.
96 -- profiting from violence. I like it. You're like the Don King of the under 10 set.
So, back to the OP, I've never even heard of this game, but I would fear that it's "edgy" humor in the style of e.g. Seth MacFarlane and therefore unbearable. But maybe there's enough user control to make it bearable.
I've never played the game, but I can tell you from long experience that fantasy dictatorship is best played when you can make up all the rules yourself.
98.last: It entirely depends on who you play with. Play with people who like Seth MacFarlane and that's what you'll get. Play with people who don't, you won't.
Someone elsewhere pointed out that CAH is basically Apples to Apples with training wheels for offensiveness, which strikes me as basically true. (I mean, the first time I played Apples to Apples I managed to work in a 9/11 joke; if you have the right mind for it, you don't really need the game's help.)
Also, 81 is the least surprising comment ever. Dunked on any disabled kids lately?
100. There was a pretty interesting documentary about Iraq, where some high-level person explained how difficult a censor's job was. Basically, anyone who praised Saddam couldn't be taken off the air, even if drug-addled or obviously sarcastic.
I once, as an adult, played a game of five-on-five pick-up basketball with a bunch of 15 year olds. For that hour I knew what it was like to be Shaq.
It is a little weird in retrospect how much more fun it is to play the Nazi side in those games.
Among wargame players of the Avalon Hill era, there are two types: The British/Union/Axis players, and the American/Confederate/Allies players.
I was always the latter. In more modern wargames, I'd be the Viet Cong and Taliban.
Cards Against Humanity definitely has the potential for horribleness, so how to play it kind of depends on the crowd, but it's sort of hard to have black comedy without any risk at all of it being just a bit too black rude.
On a separate but related note, it always annoys me when I'm playing games with friends and the conversation gets in the way of the game. I'm not particularly cutthroat - the reverse, if anything, I think I often don't play my best out of conflict-averseness - but I can't multitask, or I don't like to. I can chat or I can play Magic or CoH or whatever, but don't expect me to do both at once.
You really need a dedicated table that you're not doing anything else with.
We all like jigsaw puzzles, and my family especially grew up doing them, but the only decent place to set up a card table is in the dining room, and AB doesn't really accept that during family gatherings.
When we do our annual trip to a cabin in the woods with another family, a jigsaw puzzle is a centerpiece, but it's complicated by the fact that the cabins tend not to have a proper second table. But it's really a perfect activity for chilling by the fire with a drink after a wintry walk.
24 the most popular recently is Telestrations, which is like dictionary meets the telephone game. Not very deep, but fun.
That was basically my whole last year of college. Except we didn't have that name for it. (I think it was sometimes called "Exquisite Corpse" although from what I understand that wasn't quite the same thing. And I later found it referred to on the internet as "Eat Poop You Cat.")
We almost never socialize in groups (that is, it's almost always us and another couple), so we never do games of any sort. But we did do Celebrity at a New Years thing where there were (IIRC) 3 other couples, only 1 of whom we knew, and it was an excellent, fun time-passer, especially since NYE goes on for a very long time.
104 is an interesting observation. I last played those games when I was around 9th grade, mostly still childish enough to want to play the Americans. I'd still recoil at playing the Confederates.
I have plans to play Twilight Struggle with a friend this summer (at three hours a game, you have to plan ahead). We have argued about who gets to play the Soviets.
My families had some good low-key times with the Timeline games this winter; they devolve easily into conversation about books or movies.
With those old Avalon Hill games, probably my finest hour was when I played the British in Third Reich and by the end of the game has lost everything except a few divisions holding out on Malta.
That one seemed to hard. I did use to regularly kill all my men through incompetence in Squad Leader or whatever that one was called.
Squad Leader was fun as hell. I remember pulling off some goofy trick where I had half my squad fire out a doorway and then drop prone, which allowed the half the squad behind them to throw grenades over their heads.
I remember pulling off some goofy trick . . .
That sounds totally reasonable actually. But it reminded me of Murphy's Rules which made fun of the bizarre implications of some wargame rules (link goes to a pdf preview which shows two pages of cartoons). Highly recommended!
For example, for those that don't click though, "On average 3 people in a day in a typical Runequest (Avalon Hill) city of 10,000 will be suddenly and mysteriously transported to the 'God Plane,' never to return."
|| I haven't needed to give a wedding gift in many years - is $250 chintzy? We are attending the wedding, the groom is a friend but not an incredibly close one, and we've never met the bride. (This would have been smart to ask in the thread where everyone counted up how many weddings they'd attended, huh? Good timing, me. |>
Holy shit is that an expensive wedding gift.
That feels like way too much unless you are clearly a rich person, which, unless you've been hiding stuff here, I don't believe you are. $100 or even $50 would be fine based on level of closeness.
@118: I'm sure a vintage edition of Advanced Squad Leader would be well received.
@118: I'm sure a vintage edition of Advanced Squad Leader would be well received.
Talisman.
$25 is kind of low even if, as you say, you don't know the people that well. $250 is... I guess there are all kinds of different social circles.
Oh, good! My standard in grad school was $100, last wedding I had to buy for was, uh, 2008 maybe? I was worried there was some kind of inflation that happened once folks started getting real jobs. Whew! Thanks!
Fifty dollars would get the bride and the groom a pigeon mask apiece.
($50-$100 would be plenty in my circles.)
$100 if there's an open bar. Call and ask.
I cannot imagine this guy getting married without an open bar. But now I know not to waste my money tipping!
126: Boo hiss. The implicit result of this kind of rule is that you get more expensive presents for rich friends than poor friends. Your present is calibrated by your finances and your level of closeness, their expenditure on the wedding is calibrated by their finances, and the two should be unrelated.
But what if people spend money on food or flowers or pointless stuff.
There was this one time when it was me and a bunch of white people and my (also brown) sister, and my card was "White people like ______" and I was like, "tell me what you like, white people! I have a 9/10 chance of getting it right!"
HB, I agree with your summary.
I don't know what normal is, but $250 would be near the high end of what people gave us a year ago. OTOH, we have a complete household and put a lot of inexpensive stuff on our registry. (And then relatives got sad that there wasn't fancy china. Not that they evidently wanted to buy us any, they just wanted it on the list. The power of cliche is something.)
$50 is what I aim for if I'm not especially close to the couple.
Personally I enjoy Charades the most at parties. There was a more complicated, card-using Arthurian version of Assassin we played at the same party which I rather enjoyed, b/c it got husbands and wives and old friends and strangers all speculating about each others lying abilities.
Huh, I wouldn't have expected Head Crossfit Bro to be a bigtime stoner. #keeponerolled
It's funny how these norms vary depending on location and social group. I gave a $75 gift to some of my college friends who got married and my parents were horrified that I spent so much. They thought $25 was about the most that was reasonable.
Last wedding gift we gave was a rehearsal dinner/party for 60, it was more than $250. But they are very close friends.
Also it is incredibly adorable for a group of 13 year olds to play charades as an after dinner game.
Someone elsewhere pointed out that CAH is basically Apples to Apples with training wheels for offensiveness, which strikes me as basically true. (I mean, the first time I played Apples to Apples I managed to work in a 9/11 joke; if you have the right mind for it, you don't really need the game's help.)
This is one of my objections to CAH—aside from the particular sort of humor it's attempting to lead you to, it seems to presume that you can't be funny, or make jokes, without help, so it makes all the jokes for you.
Isn't the answer to ferment the flowers?
I wonder if one could do CAH as a news-shuffling game; pull the answers from news headlines and meme text, rather than the prefilled cards. Like making a Boggle board from any text to hand (fill in alternate squares of the board, then go back and fill the remaining squares).
Someone not on a phone should post a link to the death & taxes site's explainer re the vox thing on solange knowles & jayz.
The mention of Iraq and Afghanistan had me idly wondering if there any counterinsurgency board games, or does board game military history stop at WWII? Some sort of Risk/Mafia hybrid might work.
Then I started to think through the rules and was overcome by a wave of boredom-induced nausea.
There are modifications to CAH. You should let people trade in their cards instead of playing, like in other card games. You can get rid of the more offensive cards, or in my case get rid of the stupid cards that mention celebrities. The Rando Calrissian adaptation works. And the suggestion in 142 is a great one as well.
Agreed that the game doesn't need the ethnic references. There aren't that many of them but we never know how to react.
One of these is not like the others.
True. But the Avalon Hill games were always very German-centric, and focused on the efforts of the allies to not get crushed early in the war. So you get games like "Panzer Blitz" or "Blitzkrieg" or, when they focus on the good guys, you get a game like France 1940.
I wonder if the guys who made those Avalon Hill games were actually Nazis. Probably not, but I imagine them as creepy dudes who smoked too much, lost a finger in some kind of industrial accident, and had way too much Wehrmacht memorabilia in the home.
God, I just realized that my stereotype unconsciously came directly from the Simpsons war surplus shop owner guy.
I have just the right amount of Wehrmacht memorabilia at home.
It didn't say how much Nazi memorabilia he had.
149: I knew a tabletop wargamer dude who was definitely in that demographic. Crypto-racist antisocial weirdo vet into guns and playing games with miniatures. Come to think of it the guy who owned the game shop both of us hung out in was pretty weird in read-a-lot-of-Heinlein-did-you sort of way, too.
counterinsurgency board games
Fortress America is pretty close (a Milton Bradley classic).
There's definitely a certain amount of creepy Nazifilia among a lot of WWII buffs. Apart from the obvious explanations, I think that the sort of people who get really into that stuff are especially fascinated by the fine grained technical operational level details of military history, and the Germans excelled on that level. Although they were pretty inept when it came to the broader strategic picture.
You have to remind these folks "You do realize that they lost in the end, right?"
156: Had a college roomie who bordered on that. Rommel and those scrappy Germans against practically the whole world! Wolverines! The Bismarck! Creative solutions to natural resource constraints! What's not to like? Unfortunately Hitler turned out to be a moron and fucked it all up.
Unfortunately Hitler turned out to be a moron and fucked it all up.
He does the same thing to all my internet arguments.
I once knew an old guy with Wehrmacht memorabilia, but I believe he had taken it from the Wehrmacht personally.
OT: I carefully crept down into a place where I knew there was a cave spider spawner, but now can't find my way out. So I stopped and will try tomorrow. It's like open heart surgery in that somebody involved should be sober.
I was recently in Las Vegas. Clearly a popular place with Chinese, but I didn't notice much tailored to middle easterners. In particular, no way to bet on backgammon that I saw.
My boyfriend's cousin is a semi-professional backgammon player.
That feels like way too much unless you are clearly a rich person, which, unless you've been hiding stuff here, I don't believe you are. $100 or even $50 would be fine based on level of closeness
I'm a poor grad student who goes to almost no weddings, so grain of salt. For me $50 is standard, and $100 if they're really close. If money was really tight, I would go lower but make sure I got something that seemed really useful off the registry, if no registry than something either cool or really practical (like pretty dish towels). When I got married, I feel like when I received cash from my older relatives, $50-$150 per couple was pretty standard. In terms of gifts, I'm pretty sure I received gifts with a monetary value of less than $50 (like dish towels) which was totally fine with me.
The best party game is "What's the worst thing you can say about someone in this room?" and then have everyone guess who you're talking about.
A friend of mine had a game called "We're So Better Than..." and we played it for hours on the drive from Austin to Miami. It goes about how you'd expect.
151
Although the obit doesn't mention it, I believe one of Roberts' first games was "Dispatcher," which was about running a railroad and getting all the trains to their destinations on time. It was so hard that the only people who played it were actual railroad dispatchers, or so the story goes. AH later put out "C&O/B&O," which was a simpler version playable by real people. I suspect dispatching is now done mostly by computer.
I remember a lot of the early AH games as being Civil War-centric, which of course presents a similar temptation to the WW2 games if you are a certain type of person. They also did WW1 games ("1914," "Jutland"). My memory is that if you played the German side in any of them you were going to lose unless you were a really good player: maybe that was the attraction for some people.
At MIT the Strategic Games Society played a Diplomacy-like game where each move was settled by playing an AH-style game for each province. The board filled a large room. Of course that was MIT, and that was the Strategic Games Society...
It wouldn't have been that hard for the Germans to have won in 1914. They just put too many troops in the east at the start because they couldn't bear to see Prussia occupied by the Russians until they could knock out France.
Keep the right wing strong!
The mention of Iraq and Afghanistan had me idly wondering if there any counterinsurgency board games, or does board game military history stop at WWII?
Funny you should mention that. The most recent Quarter To Three games podcast had an interview with a guy who specialises in designing counterinsurgency boardgames.
You know what's an underrated group activity? Laser tag.
Not for adults it's not. You know what you don't realise when you're a kid, or when you're no longer a kid and think laser tag might be fun nostalgia trip? That laser tag venues are built for kids and it's not fun to run around in the dark hitting your head on doorways and crawling through tunnels.
What kind of Watership Downy laser tag venues are you playing in? I'm 6'1 and have played laser tag pretty recently and had no such problem.
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Everything* is smaller in old Europe.
* not everything, laydeez
What kind of Watership Downy laser tag venues are you playing in?
Last one I think I played at was the Gloucester Green Laser Quest in Oxford, but it might have been the one at the Trocadero.
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ISTR that John Keegan thinks it wouldn't have mattered, in that the real problem was that actual human soldiers just couldn't keep up the rate of advance they needed to win in the West in six(?) weeks. The win-fast approach was because they needed to send the troops east to push back the Russians ASAP. More troops can't move any faster, and in fact would have clogged up the roads even more. I forget what he thinks the Germans should have done: not gone for an envelopment of Paris, maybe?
Barbara Tuchman popularized/promoted the "keep the right wing strong" story in "The Guns of August," so it's pretty widely known. I think Keegan is probably closer to right.
The problem in the game was that your giant piles of tiny cardboard squares kept falling over as you tried to execute the only strategy that sorta worked, which was to make sure you rotated your front line troops frequently.
Our family falls at various points from LB to Buck in 71. And it isn't so much winning ourselves that motivates as not letting another family member win. Very psychologically healthy! We signal acceptance of outsiders by our willingness to ratfuck them in a game.
Had a period when I was a kid where our family went big on jigsaws. Used the dining room table which was rarely used for eating. Culminated in doing one titled "Snow White Without the Seven Dwarfs" where you only had the shapes to guide you (it was round as well). My understanding is that there are hardcore folks who routinely achieve the same effect by turning puzzles over and doing the back. And complain to the puzzle companies if they don't change the cutting dies frequently enough.
Hearts just sucks
Incorrect.
Pitch is better than Hearts.
Correct.
The variation on Pitch that my family plays is even better.
Well, we don't allow handguns at family gatherings any more.