This year we celebrated christmas at my fiancés parents groups. That is why I playtested a couple of games before hand and took Second Chance, Welcome to… with me. My fiancé also brought along Skip-Bo, a game where she wins atleast 90% of the time.
First we got to my fiancés mother and her husband. My plan from the beginning was to introduce them to something new and then up the difficulty a little bit. We started out with Second Chance, a simle flip and write where you flip up 2 cards and chose one of them to put on your grid. We played a couple of rounds and they got the bug.
Then we took out Skip-Bo, I think most people are more comfortable with something recognisable. Numbers on cards. You get a number of unknown cards in a pile that you want to get rid of. The only card you can see is the top card… (I will write about it in another post. This makes no sense…)We played a couple of rounds of that. They realised I was not lying about not veing able to beat my fiancé in this game. The closest I came was 1 card of 15. I asked what they thought about Second Chance and if they wanted to try something similar, but a little more complicated and a lot more fun. They were on board.
We explained the rules for Welcome to… and there were a few furrowed brows but we decided to start playing. A bunch of questions during the first round, but after calculating the points they immediately wanted to play again and again! We played 6 games of Welcome to… so I think they liked it. 🙂 They even talked about buying their own copy. So I know what I am getting them the next birthday they have.
Next on our trip was my Fiancés dad and his wife. Here we went straight for Welcome to… It might not have been the right choice. We played a couple of games of it, one really liked it but the other not so much.
This is where we mostly play quiz games, but I think they both were pretty tired after all the christmas hubbub. Insted they took something out that I have not played for… I don’t know how long. Yatzy. I don’t know if you know this, but I am bad at rolling dice. This makes Yatzy a game I fear. But it actually went not terrible! I was not last and wasn’t THAT far behind. But Yatzy maybe is not a game that I would suggest to play… But still fun to play a game that I haven’t played for many years and seeing the role reversal to them being confident in the game and me asking for the rules for a game they find really simple.
Then we started to play the card games. These are games they play alot and are very good at. Palace and Oh Hell. A couple of games of Palace went by really fast when you are four people. I will write more about card games later on, but it’s a “don’t be the last guy with cards” game. Where the twos are jokers that start everything over and then tens get rid of the pile. With four people each game takes around 10 minutes tops.
Oh hell on the other hand I am notoriously bad at when we play. It’s a “trick taking” game where you guess, based on your cards, how many tricks you can take. Which means every players gets a certain numver of cards and guesses how many times they will have the highest card of each color. I have never won. I have never been in the top three of four people in it… My fiancés dad has won 90 percent of the times we have played and I have always been last. So he was a bit cocky and wanted to end rhe night on a win. But this time I won! I was amazed! How? Why? I don’t know. He demanded a recount of the game. I demanded a recount of the game. But it was right. I went to bed with a smile on my face and he went of muttering something about a no good guy being with his daughter… 😀
What have you been playing with your friends and family over the holidays?
Play more games!!!
Boardgames and such 