Game 78: No Thanks!

 No Thanks is a game that was introduced to us by Adam back in December at a math conference.  David got it for me as a late Christmas gift, but by the time it got here all our kids had left again.  This is a 3-7 player game, so we had to wait to get together with friends in order to play.  The game is incredibly simple to learn, but we are still struggling with what the most successful strategies might be for the win.  We played this a couple of weeks ago with a group of 4, and we played it again this last weekend with a group of 6, and we've found that it has a rather different feel depending on the number of players.
My set (above) has a different style than Adam's set (below).  The chips in his set are more like mini-poker chips, and in our set they are like Go stones.  Also, the cards in my set have quotes surrounding the center that kind of taunt players regarding whether or not to take the card.
 I'm not sure how well you can read the slogans around the outside of my set, but I've taken a few pictures of cards just in case.  Below this picture is one of a single card.

 We have found we can tend to do phenomenally well in one game and then disastrously poorly in the next.  I posted a picture similar to the one below in my previous post - David admitting his loss.  When we played this past weekend, I won the first round with a score of 6 (low score wins), but in the second round I had 40, and the winner had a score of 3.  Go figure!
 We're eager to play more and to see if we can come up with strategies that hold up game-to-game and even independently of the number of players. We shall see how successful we are!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

BONUS: Special Events - CMC^3 and Thanksgiving

Image
These days it is me, David, and Jacob in the area, but it is rare that I get a photo of all three of us, as one of us generally has to take the picture.  This weekend we had the chance to meet fellow gamer Adam, a  math professor at CSU Fullerton, who gamed with us and took a picture of our family.  He was a keynote speaker at the CMC^3 Math Conference in Monterey, which is where we were this weekend.  I made sure to connect with him, as I had read in his bio that he has created a freshman-level class on problem solving based entirely on board games.  How cool is that?!?!?!?  I connected with him after his keynote address, and we decided to be in contact after dinner to see if gaming would work out, and it did!  As had we, he too had brought a bag of board games along "just in case."  Below you see them all laid out on this table in the hotel lobby.  It was fun to see that so many of his games were ones we were familiar with (For Sale, Code Names, 7 Wonders, etc.), but som
Read more

Game 4: Huggermugger

Image
My son Jacob and I are the ones in the family who particularly enjoy word games, and since he and I were the only ones gaming tonight we reached for Huggermugger.  It's kind of a mash-up of Hangman, Trivial Pursuit, and Balderdash.  It's a game for 2 to 4 players or teams - though we've played with more in the past by simply adding an extra token. There are four categories: definitions (key), spelling (bee), unscramble (soup), and miscellaneous (horseshoes).  For miscellaneous you might be asked to find 12 words using the letters of another word, to find 10 words that rhyme with a given word, to complete a quote, etc. When you land on a numbered spot on the edge of the board, if you answer a question correctly, you get to look under the dial labeled with that number.  The goal of the game is to be the first person to determine the mystery word on the mystery wheel. If you guess wrong, you lose, but if you wait too long before guessing someone else might beat you t
Read more

Game 118: Cities and Knights of Catan

Image
  Cities and Knights of Catan is an expansion to Settlers of Catan .  It's been on our shelves for a LONG time (probably as long ago as 1998 when it first came out), but it's also been a long time since we played it; it's probably been over a decade at this point.  Normally if we're going in this "direction," we just grab the original Catan off the shelf.  I do remember playing this one quite a bit, though, in the early days, especially with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law Tony and Stacey.  I think this expansion is a very nice addition to the original game, but over the years David has tended to get more and more tired of extra complication, which is probably part of why we haven't played this in a long time.  Of course we have lots of other options of games to play too, so it's not JUST that.  Among the things this expansion adds are knights (and I've always been one for chivalry, so I'm all about that!) and barbarians and walled cities.
Read more