Saturday!
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a game that involves two people. One is in the VR helmet describing the bomb to the person with the bomb manual. The other is the person with the bomb manual explaining to their partner how to defuse the bomb. (Seriously, check out the bomb manual and you’ll get a good idea of how to play.)
So any given game goes something like this:
“Okay. Um. I’m looking at a keypad with four buttons on it? It’s got, like, a star, um, an X with an I in the middle? Um, a copyright symbol, and like a lambda with a little x in it.”
And, if you’ve got the bomb manual, you flip through and find page 7 of the bomb manual and find the right column and then give the instructions on which order to push the buttons.
Then, if you get that one right, you can move onto the next module and hear the person in the headset say “I’ve got four wires.”
And, if you’ve got the bomb manual, flip to page five.
It’s an absolutely brilliant experience. They have all sorts of interesting things going on for the person who is disarming the bomb such as the lights going out for five seconds or an alarm clock in the room starting to alarm so you have to press snooze to turn the alarm off (don’t worry, there isn’t enough time on the bomb to make you press it twice).
The bomb that I was trying to defuse blew up when I was trying to deal with the module found on page 11 in the bomb manual. (So you may want to play with a third person who has a whiteboard.)
This is a very stressful game to play and a fascinating game to watch. “How can you be so poor at communicating?”, you’re tempted to say as you watch two people play… and then you get in there and, oh my gosh, the person defusing the bomb is the most inarticulate person when trying to describe a symbol (um… “it’s like the Cyrillic letter Zhe?” “what the heck does a Zhe look like?”) and the person with the manual absolutely can’t do so much as read a sentence without screwing it up.
I recommend it absolutely for co-workers and don’t really recommend it for couples who are dating.
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]
They also have a non-VR version that two people can play if they have, say, a laptop and a printer available.
But the VR version allows for such things to happen as “oops, I dropped the bomb, let me pick it up…”Report
So, I finally broke down and got myself a laptop I can install and play games on.
For the first time in 20 years, I’ve got a non-Mac.
Windows 10 is… kind of tolerable. The keyboard is really good, though, unlike the one they’re sticking on the MacBook Pros these days. Those keyboards are some junky-ass shit.
But once I got my own machine, I immediately ran out and installed Opus Magnum. Let’s just say that @jaybird was totally right about this one.Report
Awesome. I’m so pleased that you dig it.Report
I was introduced to a little card game called Phase 10 by my student workers at our party last night.
And by introduced I mean participated in a 5 hour gruelling bout of an 8 player game involving multiple sub-ins and sub-outs, people subbing out, and then coming back an hour later and starting from phase 1 all over again, etc. It was a lot of fun. Seriously, A LOT. We laughed way more, and more loudly, than one might sterotypically think people are allowed to laugh in a library.
At the time, I said it reminded me of when I was a kid and we’d get bored of our normal games of Go Fish, War, Rummy, Crazy Eights, Hearts, etc., and start digging around in the fine print of Hoyles for something else to do. Since Wikipedia just told me it’s actually a variant of Liverpool rummy (which is a type of contract rummy), I guess that was pretty accurate :D.
Anyway, if someone asks you if you want to play, say yes, but if there’s more than 4 people playing it might take a long time. Stock up with food and beverages first.Report