Saturday!
A million years ago, I talked about One Night Ultimate Werewolf. Around this time last year, I talked about One Night Ultimate Vampire.
Well, now I’m talking about One Night Ultimate Alien.
As I said back then, One Night Ultimate Werewolf is a game that I wholeheartedly recommend to *ANYBODY*. There are a lot of games that are good for people just getting into board games, and there are a lot of games that are good for people who have been playing the weird and obscure board games for years. This one threads the needle and is appropriate for both. A couple’s night where you get four people together? A regular gaming night where you get eight people together? Going over to babysit your friend’s kids? This game is awesome for pretty much any gaming situation.
One Night Ultimate Vampire? Well, that game is not for everybody. It’s pretty much for people who have played Ultimate Werewolf over and over and over again and have reached the point where they can’t play it with the same group anymore because everybody knows everybody else’s tells.
So what about One Night Ultimate Alien? They went back to basics and ran with the formula that made Werewolf entry level but just tweeked a couple of things to get the theme just right but then they said “hey… we’ve got a phone app… why don’t we use that to mix it up a little?”. The alien plays pretty much exactly like the werewolf… except that the app will tell you a different additional rule each game. The synthetic alien plays pretty much just like the tanner. The psychic plays pretty much like the seer… except that the app will tell you different cards to look at each game. The cow is a new character and the cow’s gimmick is to put a fist out in the middle of the table and, when it’s the alien’s turn, the alien will tap the cow on the fist (this “tips” the cow).
The app mixing it up allows for the game to be mixed up even if every person at the table had the same cards last time without requiring the players at the table to be intimately familiar with the game the way that Vampire did.
If you’ve been looking for a little something to mix up your gaming night *OR* you need something for the Johnsons coming over next weekend, you should pick this one up.
The only downside is that if you play it with co-workers, you might find out that some of them are better liars than you thought.
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]
I played Giant Killer Robots last week.
On the whole, I really enjopyed it a lot. There a neat mechanic where you build your robot’s abilities up out of a deck, so you get to choose weapons systems and a few special abilities for your big robot, and each one comes with a set of cards that put together make sup your deck of actions for the game, and also your robot’s hit points, so as your robot gets damaged, it loses capabilities.
One thing I’m not entirely sold on is the victory conditions – you win by either tagging four different building four different times each (thereby demolishing them), or if a player is eliminated by having the least damaged robot (more or less). I like the first victory condition, but in the three games I played it never came up, one robot was always destroyed making tagging buildings irrelevant. This would be pretty easy to adjust though.Report
I’ve had a lot of fun with Ultimate Werewolf, but sadly half the people I play with can’t bluff. I will say that using the phone app (paired with bluetooth speakers) makes things a lot better. The ambient music covers up the noise of people doing stuff, and it reads out the turns so no one has to sit out.
Considering the app is free and, well, I think I’m the only one of my friends who doesn’t own a portable bluetooth speaker, so it’s easy to ask someone to bring one along…
I also finally picked up Galaxy Truckers, which I have not yet gotten to play. 🙂
Yesterday I had a fun game night with my parents, my brother, and his offspring. We played Dixit (with a new expansion), Bang!, and some of Xmen Munchkin (my nephew got it for Christmas and hadn’t played Munchkin before.).Report