Thanks to Caleb we have a new game on our shelves. Caleb, whose "love language" is "the giving and receiving of gifts" ignored David's Christmas list and bought him this game that was absolutely a perfect fit! Those of you who know David know that you can hardly speak for 5 minutes in his presence without him making a pun out of something that was said. We had such a ridiculous amount of fun playing this game that most of us commented on not having laughed that hard in a very long time. I certainly can't remember the last time I laughed like that; my abdomen was still hurting the next day from how hard and how long I was laughing! This game is very much like Apples to Apples but with a significant twist, rather than just tossing cards face-down to another player who has the "descriptor" card, players first make a change to the card they are going to submit - in this game called the "punnable cards." Also, ALL players have a descriptor card, known as a "category card" in front of them, so rather than just submitting to one player about one category you can submit for multiple categories. And the submissions just keep on going. It's not one card to one person per round but rather it's as many cards as you want to each person/category until each person has had at least 4 cards submitted to them. Once all players have at least 4 face-down cards in front of them the reading and the judging begins.
A round begins with the one category card being dealt to each person. They range from seemingly bland, such as "Animals" or "Men" to potentially disturbing, such as "Uncomfortable Thoughts" or "I Shouldn't Have Eaten That." (There are a couple of racy ones; I seem to remember there being one we decided to set aside. Mostly it's fully family-friendly.)
The punnable card submissions can really pile up! Not everyone ends up with the same number of cards since some categories are more of a draw than others, so, again, the timing is that submissions stop once everyone has at least 4 cards (but there might be 15 cards in front of someone else!). Below are the cards submitted to David for the category "I Shouldn't Have Eaten That." To him the best submission was "Twenty One Tater Tots" (altered from "Twenty One Pilots"). The person who makes the "winning" submission is given the purple card, and the person with the most purple cards at the end is the winner. (But we were having so much fun that we totally didn't care who the winner was.)
It's probably a "you had to be there" sort of thing, but the one that just pushed us all over the edge with laughter was the category "The Elderly." We'd been playing for a while, so we were already chuckling and primed for laughter, but we completely lost it on some of the submissions for this category. As Anthony read them one-by-one and laid them out we just cracked up more and more, to the point where Caleb was wiping tears from his eyes, Jacob had his head in his hands, and David had to get up and leave the table because he was in pain from laughing.
The first two that Anthony read out in this category were "Mighty Morphine Power" and "Ace Dentura: Wet & Defective" at which point we totally lost it.
So then "Dude, Where's my Ear" seemed completely hilarious. I really liked "A Wrinkle in Me" from "A Wrinkle in Time." But I think the best was "No Continence for Old Men" taken from the book title "No Country for Old Men."
Here's the full lay-out for that category.
I actually decided to capture some of the laughter on video - not showing faces - just capturing the sound. Unfortunately I didn't think to do this until the laughter was dying down and we were in recovery mode, but I think it shows how hard we had been laughing. Also, on the far left, you can see that David is standing up because he was in too much pain to keep sitting down and laughing so hard.
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
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
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.
So then "Dude, Where's my Ear" seemed completely hilarious. I really liked "A Wrinkle in Me" from "A Wrinkle in Time." But I think the best was "No Continence for Old Men" taken from the book title "No Country for Old Men."
Here's the full lay-out for that category.
I actually decided to capture some of the laughter on video - not showing faces - just capturing the sound. Unfortunately I didn't think to do this until the laughter was dying down and we were in recovery mode, but I think it shows how hard we had been laughing. Also, on the far left, you can see that David is standing up because he was in too much pain to keep sitting down and laughing so hard.
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