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Four Games I Won in a Raffle Make a Post
Dec. 31st, 2017 08:59 amThe gaming group has a fundraising raffle that it runs every few months. There's a table covered with games, and each winner comes up as their ticket is drawn and gets to pick one game of their choice from the pool. (People are allowed, and encouraged, to buy more than one ticket, and if they get a second ticket drawn they get to pick a second game, but third and subsequent tickets aren't counted. Also, the really popular games are a maximum of one per customer.)
I've done pretty well with the raffle; with the possible exception of the first time I went in, when I had one of the last tickets drawn and the only thing left on the table was Game: Most Popular Game in All Mother Russia (Not Really), I've always come out with a game or games with a face value higher than the money I put in for tickets, and what's probably more important, I've enjoyed playing them.
These are the games I've won:
. Game: Most Popular Game in All Mother Russia (Not Really), of which I have written previously. Still haven't played it.
. Lucha Jefe is the kind of short two-player card game that it's good to have on hand to fill a few minutes between longer games. You start with a deck of cards representing wrestlers, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and go through a process of drafting and discarding cards until each player has a team of two wrestlers. Then the teams are matched against each other, and one team wins; that player scores a point, and you begin again. The matches are entirely determined by the strengths and weaknesses of the wrestlers, such that any given pair against another given pair will always have the same outcome; the challenge is in trying to figure out which wrestlers your opponent is likely to play and choosing your own wrestlers accordingly. (The drafting process has a few quirks in it so that no player has complete information about the cards available to the other player, to prevent winning the day by straight-up card counting.)
. Codenames Duet is the collaborative variant of Codenames, which I've played before (at Swancon, which means that like everything I did at Swancon I never got around to posting about it). The game, in either version, begins with dealing out an array of cards with random words printed on them; some of the words are the codenames of secret agents, while others represent innocent bystanders, and one is an assassin. Two players are designated the spymasters who know which cards are which, and have to convey this information to their teammate(s) by means of single-word clues. (For example, if two agents were "Eagle" and "Helicopter", you could give the clue "flight".) In the original competitive version, there are two separate groups of agents on the board and two teams of players, with the winners being the first team to identify all their agents. In the Duet version, each player plays the spymaster role to the other; each spymaster starts out knowing the location of two-thirds of the agents on the board, and everybody wins if all the agents' locations are known to both players before a set number of turns elapses.
. Ankh is another quick-playing card game. The theme is collecting treasures to present to the Pharoah. There are four kinds of treasure, and each treasure card says what kind it is, and a value from 1 to 4 points. At the beginning of each round, a card is set out declaring what treasures the Pharoah is currently interested in: at the end of the round, one type of treasure will score double, one will score nothing, and one will score negative points. The trick is that the rest of those cards are shuffled into the treasure deck, so as well as accumulating treasures you accumulate opportunities to change the Pharoah's mind, making your own treasures more valuable and your opponent's worthless.
I've done pretty well with the raffle; with the possible exception of the first time I went in, when I had one of the last tickets drawn and the only thing left on the table was Game: Most Popular Game in All Mother Russia (Not Really), I've always come out with a game or games with a face value higher than the money I put in for tickets, and what's probably more important, I've enjoyed playing them.
These are the games I've won:
. Game: Most Popular Game in All Mother Russia (Not Really), of which I have written previously. Still haven't played it.
. Lucha Jefe is the kind of short two-player card game that it's good to have on hand to fill a few minutes between longer games. You start with a deck of cards representing wrestlers, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and go through a process of drafting and discarding cards until each player has a team of two wrestlers. Then the teams are matched against each other, and one team wins; that player scores a point, and you begin again. The matches are entirely determined by the strengths and weaknesses of the wrestlers, such that any given pair against another given pair will always have the same outcome; the challenge is in trying to figure out which wrestlers your opponent is likely to play and choosing your own wrestlers accordingly. (The drafting process has a few quirks in it so that no player has complete information about the cards available to the other player, to prevent winning the day by straight-up card counting.)
. Codenames Duet is the collaborative variant of Codenames, which I've played before (at Swancon, which means that like everything I did at Swancon I never got around to posting about it). The game, in either version, begins with dealing out an array of cards with random words printed on them; some of the words are the codenames of secret agents, while others represent innocent bystanders, and one is an assassin. Two players are designated the spymasters who know which cards are which, and have to convey this information to their teammate(s) by means of single-word clues. (For example, if two agents were "Eagle" and "Helicopter", you could give the clue "flight".) In the original competitive version, there are two separate groups of agents on the board and two teams of players, with the winners being the first team to identify all their agents. In the Duet version, each player plays the spymaster role to the other; each spymaster starts out knowing the location of two-thirds of the agents on the board, and everybody wins if all the agents' locations are known to both players before a set number of turns elapses.
. Ankh is another quick-playing card game. The theme is collecting treasures to present to the Pharoah. There are four kinds of treasure, and each treasure card says what kind it is, and a value from 1 to 4 points. At the beginning of each round, a card is set out declaring what treasures the Pharoah is currently interested in: at the end of the round, one type of treasure will score double, one will score nothing, and one will score negative points. The trick is that the rest of those cards are shuffled into the treasure deck, so as well as accumulating treasures you accumulate opportunities to change the Pharoah's mind, making your own treasures more valuable and your opponent's worthless.
