Board Games

Board Games
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Lots of people have been talking about
favorite board games [0][1][2] and prob-
ably many more. I figured I'd jump on
the bandwagon.

Here are a few games that I like. I
don't know if they're my favorites, be-
cause I don't really play very many, but
they are ones I want to share.

Crazy Eights
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This is a game that I found on pagat
[3]. It's not exactly a board game,
given that it's played with a standard
deck of cards, but it's close enough.

Crazy Eights is a pretty simple game and
there are many variations of it. The
goal is to get rid of all of your cards
by placing one card per turn (with some
restrictions).

You can only place a card down if it:

1. Matches the suit of the top card.

2. Matches the rank of the top card.

3. Is an 8 (wild card, you choose the
new suit).

There are 4 special cards.

1. Wild card: 8s. You can play an 8 on
any other card and you announce the suit
that it's acting as. e.g. you could play
an 8 and it could act like a Spades.

2. Draw two: 2s. If there are two play-
ers Alice and Bob, and Alice plays a 2,
then Bob has two choices: he either
draws 2 cards or he can play his own 2.
If he plays his own, and Alice doesn't
have another 2, then now she draws 4
cards. With three 2s in play, they
would draw 6 cards.

3. Skip turn: Queens.

4. Reverse order: Ace.

I play this game a lot with my fiancee
and lose at it a lot, but it's good fun
and doesn't require too much thinking.

Secret Hitler
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Secret Hitler [4] is a fun "social de-
duction" game that's a lot of fun with a
large group of people (like 8 or so).

The idea behind it is that there are two
teams of players: the fascists and the
liberals. The liberals have the majori-
ty (in an 8 player game, there will be 5
liberals). The fascists have one member
that is "Secret Hitler."

The liberals want to pass as many liber-
al policies as possible, because they
win if enough get passed. The fascists
want to pass fascist policies, and after
enough of them, a special win condition
is unlocked (in addition to being able
to win with enough fascist policies).

Each round consists of somebody becoming
president (in order, around the table)
and that president chooses someone else
to be their chancellor. The president
then draws from a pile 3 policies which
are either fascist or liberal, and dis-
cards one of them, then hands the re-
maining 2 to the chancellor. The chan-
cellor chooses a policy out of those two
and it becomes law. Once enough fascist
policies are in play, if Secret Hitler
ever becomes chancellor, then the fas-
cists win.

Throughout the game, no one really knows
who the others are, whether they're lib-
erals, fascists, or Secret Hitler. You
have to try to deduce who is on your
team and who isn't.

The rest of the game is in the social
nature of it. Pretty much everyone
wants to make themselves known as a lib-
eral, so you're constantly trying to
sound in favor of liberal policies even
if you aren't.

If you play this, one of the best things
to do is choose someone to pick on and
try to convince everyone that they're
Secret Hitler. "Oh of course you'd do
that, Hitler" or knowingly hand them two
fascist policies so they look like the
bad guy (of course, cover for yourself
with "oh no, look I'm really sorry but
it's not me"). Just try to hide that
evil smirk as you do it.

Snake Oil
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Snake Oil [5] is another fun game that
we play a lot. This game is compari-
tively much simpler: there are no teams,
only two types of cards, and a simple
task. The goal of each round is to con-
vince people to buy a product that
you're selling, made up of cards from
your hand.

Each game starts with dealing every
player 7 "product" cards. These make up
each player's hand and are things like
"meat," "disaster," "moon," etc.

In each round, a player gets a turn be-
ing a particular role of person like
"baby sitter," "cheerleader," or "couch
potato." It is every other player's job
to try to come up with a product using 2
cards from their hand and try to sell
that product to the main one.

For instance, if Alice is a cheerleader,
then Bob might try to sell her "disaster
meat" which he markets as "There's al-
ways that one person on the cheer team
that you don't like. And as a cheer-
leader, you want to find the easiest way
to ensure they don't come to practice to
steal your boys! I present: disaster
meat. On the day of cheer practice, you
can just sneak this into their dinner
and everywhere they go, they'll be fol-
lowed by disasters!"

Of course, there are other ways you
could sell each product. Maybe disaster
meat just gives them a stomach bug? Or
maybe you'd rather sell a meat disaster,
which manifests itself as a tornado of
meat.

With a large crowd of creative people,
this game is a blast.

[0]: gopher://baud.baby:70/0/phlog/fs20190528.txt
[1]: gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20190529-board-games
[2]: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/board-and-card-games.txt
[3]: https://www.pagat.com/eights/crazy8s.html
[4]: https://www.secrethitler.com/
[5]: https://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-C0900-Snake-Oil-Game/dp/B01HH0NTOE