Perverse Access Memory: WISH 69: Non-RPG Games for Gamers
Recommend three non-RPG games for RPGers. Why do you recommend these three?
Unlike a lot of the gaming groups I know, there’s actual social stuff going on sometimes that doesn’t involve RP gaming (directly, anyway) — most notably, outside of forcing Dave and Margie to watch DVD’s of shows they should be watching, there are various board and card-games that we play when all the gamers get together (why? because, as I’ve mentioned before, you can’t get ALL the gamers in our group into one RP Game and hope to get anything done).
Here’s a few of the good ones:
– Lunch Money: Kids beating up kids for pennies on the playground. Brutal. Tons of fun. Always good for killing about 30 minutes (and several of your friends). To please RPGer’s, make people come ‘story’ together their moves as they play their cards 🙂
– Apples to Apples: Kovalic designed this card game, one of the few that I can honestly recommend for groups of 8+ participants. Good stuff and highly recommended. Replayability is good, simply because you can play ‘opposites’ when you get bored with the standard way.
– Balderdash: You make up… fake definitions of dates, places… basically Encyclopedia entries. Often pretty fun with the eclectic mix of useless knowledge at the command of gamers.
– Ebola Monkey Hunt: Placebo Press (very much like a Cheapass Game) — Hunt down infected monkeys in a lab, but you have get more than the other lab assistants or you lose your job… and hey, these tranq guns work on them, too… The scent of bananas and death lingers in the air. Heheheheheh.
– Uno: Yeah, sue me — people always raise their eyebrows at Uno, but we never fail to have a good time and laugh a lot while playing. Good, clean, vindictive, vengeful fun. Add in some of the optional rules that various members of our little cadre have used in the past and things get ugly very quick, but personally I can play the standard game all night and be perfectly happy.
The Fake Encyclopedia game sounds like Balderdash. I agree, it’s quite fun.
That’s it. Thanks!
Oh, those are good. I love Uno. I should have remembered it—better choice than Pinochle.
When I was growing up, we called Balderdash “Fictionary” and played it with real dictionaries. A lot of fun, esp. around 2 in the morning amongst a lot of highly educated college kids who can actually write plausible sounding definitions.