Two or three times a year, my wife and I get together with a couple of dear friends to spend a weekend together. These weekends together usually center around the game table. Fun, light games (mostly word games), number games, and logic puzzles, sometimes trivia games and classic card games.
We stop for food, and sometimes a walk in the park or a movie. But mostly games, and the conversations that go along with them.
This is an account of the games we played as a foursome over a 2-and-a-half-day weekend…
Friday evening until mid-afternoon on Sunday. They are not in any particular order except how the list was written.
1. First to the table was Word Fluxx from Looney Labs (new this year). The Fluxx series has some winners and losers. I have 6 or 8 thematic editions of the game, but I hadn’t played this one before. I liked it. Coming up with words from the lettered keepers was a new challenge for Fluxx, and the goals were generally pretty clever. Definitely one I would like to play again.
2. Across America Fluxx, also from Looney Labs, published in 2023. This was a nice theme for Looney’s Fluxx, and inspired a bit of “oooh, I’ve been there” conversation. The game is Fluxx, but the keepers and goals are centered around natural landmarks — mountains, rivers, canyons, forests … that sort of thing. It was good. It was Fluxx.
3. Code Names from Asmodee (and a couple dozen other publishers) first hit store shelves in 2015. They have just come out with a new 10th anniversary edition. New artwork, but I haven’t heard that the content is actually different.
They didn’t fix the strange choice of faded lettering on the word cards.
But connecting words with clues is still a great exercise for the brain. The fact that we’ve all known each other for decades helps us come up with clues that people outside our circle would miss … priceless.
4. The Game, from Pandasaurus and others. We have a great time with this co-op card game from 2015. Despite its un-google-able name, this hit has been published by over a dozen different companies now. (Just try searching for “the game” sometime.)
Trying to stack numbered cards up from 1 or down from 100 sounds simple enough, but working together without being able to talk precisely about the cards you hold. So often we have heard “Sorry to have to play this card… but I have to play this card.”
it’s a blend of frustration and hilarity.
5. Push a nice little card game from Ravensburger, first published back in 2018.
We’d played this card game once before. I like push-your-luck games, and this one also has a take-that gimmick that can mess up your opponents.
If you’re playing with 4 players, you can’t quite reach the player on your right with your hinderances. And that’s the player that can destroy your advantage with a toss of the dice on the next round. A great game, and very portable.
6. Smug Owl, published in 2023 by Runaway Parade. This oddly-named gem has recently given a series of expansion decks, so it must be doing alright. It’s a card game with clever sentence structure at its core. A card that says “what” is followed by a descriptive word or phrase, then a card that’s another sort of connecting word or phrase, then another that’s a verb, then finally a question mark. Maybe you have to play it to get it. One player is the judge in every round while other players come up with things that satisfy the constructed sentence. No, really — it’s a good game.
7. Anybody’s Guess, a team-versus-team guessing game published by Golden games in 1990. Each team looks at a list of clues, then bets on how many of these clues it will take the other team to get the right answer. My cousin and I always seem to talk ourselves out of the right answer on this one. It’s been a favorite since we bought it new, and it always comes out when we’re together.
The board has some bonuses and penalties on it, but we ignore them. It’s really just a score track anyhow.
8. Finish Lines, published in 1997 by Games for All Reasons, LLC.
It’s another one that comes to the table often. Sort of a trivia game, it asks “can you finish this famous phrase or sentence or lyric?”
Being somewhat literate, we really do enjoy digging into our memories to dredge up the last few lines of a poem, some Shakespearian couplet, a famous speech, or even an advertising slogan. OK — it’s not for everybody, but we have a rousing good time with it.
9. Blank Slate, published in 2018 by Op Games.
This is a more recent “match your fellow players” game. Give a clue, everybody writes down their guess, and if you match in different ways you are awarded points.
It’s all been done before, but Blank Slate has this game distilled to its essence. If you like Things or Wits & Wagers or Fun Facts or Just One — it’s solidly in that category.
10. Picture Perfect from Arcane Wonders and a handful of others back in 2020.
The premise, if you haven’t had the pleasure, is to gather clues about a group of people posing for a photo. Each person in the group has very definite desires about how they want to appear in the photo. And your job as photographer is to satisfy as many of these desires as you can when it’s time to trip the shutter.
This unusual idea for a tabletop game really does work … if you like puzzling out random clues and sometimes contradictory goals.
It really is fun.
11. Ship Shape comes to us from Calliope Games, published in 2019. This is a very clever game design. Again, I might have mentioned this one in another video, but it’s worth mentioning again. It has a Pirate theme, but could easily be adapted to other themes, too, I think.
Players are bidding on puzzle shapes that stack up. Some puzzle pieces will cover parts of other puzzle pieces, and ultimately when you have a stack of 4 assembled, what you see from above determines your score for the round. But the bidding and the scoring are very … quirky. A fun kind of quirky.
12. Times Up: Family Edition was released earlier this year by R&R Games.
Time’s Up: Title Recall has been one of our favorites since it was published in 2008. I still haven’t played the original version of Time’s Up, but I really appreciate this new Family Edition. It’s a clue-giving game with 40 different answer cards each time. Each game includes three wacky rounds: In the first round, any sort of clue is OK; in the second round, only one word clues are allowed; the third round is charades + non-word noises.
Basically … hilarity ensues.
The Title Recall version has word cards which are titles — books, movies, and names of famous people. It consistently reminds me of how out of touch I am with the popular culture of 17 years ago. But this new family edition takes out the time-sensitive nature of the goal by using words that are common everyday stuff that nearly everyone will know.
A great new edition of a fun and challenging party game.
So, that was a weekend of game-playing. We played about half of these games twice, I think. We also played Get Bit, Quaro, and Silver and Gold, which I have covered recently in other videos. Just enough fun for four people to enjoy inside of 48 hours. Nuttin’ too taxing. 45 minutes is plenty. No cryptic icons to remember, no paragraphs of card-based powers, no cascading effects, no layers of complex scoring, no role playing, and no sprawling collections of bits, chits, dice, and meeples.