I predicted that Catan, Connect Four, and Tickle Me Elmo would win. And I was wrong, as none of those three were selected to join the Toy Hall of Fame.
But I was hoping that the lightsaber, snow, and Trivial Pursuit would make the cut, as they were my personal nominees for this year’s class.
That being said, please allow me to get up on my soapbox for a moment.
How is snow not already in the National Toy Hall of Fame?
It’s not like natural items haven’t made the cut in the past. The stick is already in. And you’re telling me that snow — a free toy that falls from the sky AND CREATES ENTIRE DAYS FREE OF SCHOOL IN WHICH TO PLAY — is not a Hall of Famer?
Blasphemy. Battleship can’t create days off.
And so, fellow puzzlers and players and appreciators of all things play, I ask you on this day to join me in my new movement.
#JusticeForSnow
Oh yes, I’ve already started the hashtag in my reply to the announcement of this year’s inductees. And it’s just the beginning. I intend to correct this injustice with all of the influence I can bring to bear. (Please note, that amount of influence is minuscule, as The Strong National Museum of Play has refused to return my calls on several occasions.)
But I shall not be deterred!
Will you join me on this glorious endeavor? Or has the whimsy and wonder of playing with snow been whittled away by years of shoveling driveways clear or stepping in slushy puddles on the way to work?
I tell you, friends, my whimsy has not abated in the slightest. I can remember staring out the window with my dad, watching wet snow cling to the trees, as if they were painted just so, picture perfect for Christmas card art, right in front of us. And despite the fact that we knew it would royally suck to shovel that snow later, we still smiled as we watched it accumulate.
So, National Toy Hall of Fame, better make some room on next year’s ballot. It’s gonna be snow’s time to shine.
[Note: I received a free copy of this game in exchange for a fair, unbiased review.]
Playing games and enjoying snacks have gone hand-in-hand forever, so it’s only natural that games about making snacks would evolve over time.
Today’s game from Crab Fragment Labs, Bread Basket, is a brilliant example.
Bread Basket is a card game all about earning points by building sandwiches with the cards in your hand. When I thought about shuffling cards and making sandwiches, it brought to mind Dagwood from the Blondie comic strip or Garfield from the cartoon, ready to unhinge their jaws and take an enormous bite!
You see, building a sandwich isn’t just a skill, it’s an art. You need to balance your ingredients, flavors, tastes and textures, all while making sure you can actually take a bite of the sandwich at the end.
And it’s the same idea with Bread Basket, but with point values instead of flavors.
There are rules to your sandwich making. Your sandwich must have bread (matching cards on each side) and the ingredients in between must be lower-numbered cards than the bread. But with each player adding only one card at a time to the shared sandwich-making space on the table, you’ll need timing, strategy, and luck to make a sandwich and score points.
A sandwich consists of a string of cards where two cards match on either hand, and the cards in the middle are of lower value. If you complete the sandwich with your bread, you collect the point value of the cards contained between the pieces of bread.
For instance here, the bread are the two steak cards, and the points earned in this sandwich would be 15.
Once one player is out of cards (or the deck of available cards to draw runs out), the hand is over. You get points for all of the sandwiches you’ve made, but you LOSE points for all of the cards remaining in your hand.
This mix of strategies adds to the challenge and the fun of the game, since you’re trying to form sandwiches to earn points, but also to eliminate cards from your hand. (This mimics a dual-play mechanic from one of my all-time favorite card games, 12 Days.)
You can use high cards to start potential sandwiches, but you can also use them to block sandwiches.
Here you see a string of cards played. But the following move does NOT complete a sandwich, since a sandwich can’t contain a higher number.
The gameplay changes rapidly as each new card is added. Do you shift from trying to make a sandwich to trying to block one, or do you prioritize dropping high-value cards from your hand, so you’re not penalized later? (Or do you drop a Ten in the middle of the string, accomplishing both in one move?)
For a game with only 55 cards (5 each of the cards 1-10, plus five onion cards valued at -5 points) and only two options on your turn (play card or draw a card), there is so much strategy and replay value packed into this deck.
And since you can play with as few as two players and as many as six, the gameplay is very different depending on the group.
With six players, I found myself focusing more on emptying my hand, rather than making sandwiches, because the sandwich-making space changed so rapidly. In two-player games, there was more time to strategize the sandwich building, grabbing more points.
(We also played several house-rule versions we came up with, like using the first card as the highest possible card in a sandwich, or using Onions like Aces to capture and remove Tens and other high cards from the board.)
Like all great card games, Bread Basket is very quick to learn, but not so easy to master. After playing for two hours with family members, they’ve requested it make an encore appearance at Thanksgiving. How apropos!
I’d recommend picking up a deck from DriveThruCards; the colors are warm and vibrant, the deck is made of quality card stock, and printer ink at home can be pricey.
They went as common crossword answers! This jumpsuit made of Halloween grids is loaded with crosswordese and familiar vocabulary in picture form. Can you name them all?
So fun to see people getting into the Halloween spirit in a puzzly way. Nicely done, both of you!
Now let’s check out some other creative costumers as we reveal the punny answers to last week’s game!
One of the best things about Halloween is guessing what people’s costumes are. Clever costumes can be great fun, and I’m a huge fan of costumes that only cost a few bucks to put together, because they really let your creativity shine through.
Punny costumes lend themselves to the low-budget costume genre brilliantly. So it’s only appropriate that we celebrate Halloween in the puzzliest way possible — by looking at some punny costumes!
It’s simple. I post a picture, and you guess what the costume is.
For example:
She’s the family breadwinner!
I’ve compiled ten costumes for you to figure out. Some are mashups, some are straightforward puns. Let’s see how many you can get!
PuzzCulture’s Punderful Halloween Costume Game!
#1
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#4
#5
#6
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#10
How many did you get? Have you seen any great punny costumes we missed? Let us know in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you. And Happy Halloween!
Setting the mood for a proper spooky game night is essential. And you’d be surprised how much atmosphere you can get out of a few simple choices.
Obviously, lighting is the first choice. Candlelight, or dimming the lights in the room is easy, but does a lot to establish mood. Careful lamp placement could throw interesting or menacing shadows across the wall, and you’d be surprised what a few layers of colored Saran wrap can do for throwing reds and greens across surfaces for splashes of color to help set the tone.
Scent can also be a help. Autumn candles with smells like fallen leaves, or the hint of smoke from a fire in the fireplace. Anything people associate with the fall or with a spooky scene!
Music and sounds come next. Hide a speaker or two, offering spooky music, or even better, sounds of a rainy night with occasional booms of thunder or crashes of lightning. There are whole soundscapes out there you can use with creaking doors, footsteps, animals howling in the distance, and even played low, it adds so much to a properly seasonal gaming experience.
If you’re feeling particularly devious, you could prerecord lines and play them through the hidden speaker or through your phone. The simple act of having players hear a voice and not seeing someone speak can be delightfully immersive and spooky. (I know someone with a foot pedal they use for roleplaying game nights, so they can trigger sounds and voice clips without betraying any movement at all!)
You could also dress up! You don’t need to do full costumes, but some dark clothes, some makeup to add a goth touch to the proceedings. Every little bit helps set the tone.
And you can do the same thing if you’re gaming online! Send everyone the link to the same music or sounds to play in the background of the game.
Actually, playing online is great, because you can do a jumpscare without actually startling or sneaking up on someone in person. (Always make sure you know who is okay with being surprised and who isn’t. Game night should be fun for everyone!)
Secretly adding someone to a zoom call or a video chat creates a fun spooky moment. (Especially if you have the screen arranged so they can sneak into the lineup without immediately being spotted.)
Here, simple body language does so much to enhance a masked figure…
This worked like a charm during a roleplaying session I ran online years ago. The players had been warned about a masked figure for the previous few sessions, and they were expecting to cross paths with him soon.
But what they didn’t know was that I’d recruited a friend to make the exact mask I’d described, and I secretly added them to the chat. It took a second for them to notice a sixth person in a small window at the bottom of the screen, and when he delivered the short speech I’d written (as if he’d hacked into their feed to jumpscare them), it was fantastically effective!
With a little simple preparation, you’d be amazed at the engrossing Halloween gaming experience you can share with friends.
Do you have any suggestions for enhancing a spooky game session, fellow players? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.
But it occurred to me that you don’t necessarily need to pick up a new board game to get your ghostly gaming and unearthly playtime in. You just need to add a little Halloween spice to those classic games on your shelf.
So here are some house rules for board games we all know and love that will add an eerie or monstrous touch!
Clue: Restless Spirits
In this version of the game, the spirit of Mr. Boddy is still around, and has a role to play in the game.
He appears in a square in the center of the house, rolling a die and moving towards the closest player. If the spirit of Mr. Boddy enters a room with a player (or lands on the same space), they try to possess the player.
You can make an opposed dice roll to see if the spirit succeeds, or you can have the player sacrifice a weapon card to defend themselves. If they don’t have a weapon, or they lose the opposed die roll, they’re possessed, and now they serve the spirit as another figure on the board for three turns, pursuing the closest player while the spirit of Mr. Boddy does the same.
(Some people use similar rules, except Mr. Boddy is a zombie, and he turns the players he bites!)
Either way, it’s a terrific spooky element that pushes the game forward.
Candyland: The Hungry One
Candyland isn’t much of a game to begin with, since once the deck is shuffled, the game is already decided. (It’s like the card game War that way.)
But what if you needed to succeed as a group? What if the Hungry One was lurking, gobbling up the path behind you, and potentially your slowest companion?
In this version, you’re trying to get your whole group to the end, and you can’t get too far apart from each other without consequences.
Separate the deck into four stacks, facing upward with the colors showing. On your turn, pick one of the four available cards and make your move. (Once you take that card, it reveals a new choice underneath for the next player.)
You’re trying to move ahead, but if you get more than 12 spaces ahead of the player furthest back, you lose your next two turns!
Oh, and after all the players have gone, the Hungry One takes their turn, gobbling up the first three spaces — and any players on those spaces! (Or four, or five spaces, depending on how dangerous you want the Hungry One to be!)
Can you get your group safely to the end, or will someone fall into the waiting maw of the Hungry One?
Connect Four: Secret Summoning
Each player worships a different dark lord and secretly creates a pattern of 5 discs in a row in whatever colors or pattern they wish, hoping to recreate that pattern on the board.
Instead of trying to stop your opponent from getting the four-in-a-row, you need to be the first to complete your 5-disc pattern and summon your dark lord.
While playing the game, be sure to warn your opponent of how great and vengeful and terrible and ridiculous YOUR dark lord and why it’s better than their dark lord. A little sinister smack talk never hurt anybody.
Guess Who: Profiler
This one is pretty simple. Normally, you get a card for your opponent to narrow down with questions, and you do the same for your opponent’s card.
But in this version, you take your card and choose whatever quality about the character made them a victim of a mythical serial killer. So on your opponent’s turn, you tell them one person to flip down on their board, representing another victim of the killer.
Then they try to guess what all the victims have in common. Each round, another victim, another chance to figure out what they have in common.
The winner is the person to guess why the killer targets their victims first. (And for a bonus point, they can try to guess which card you pulled that inspired the crime spree.)
Battleship: The Monster Below
This tactical game is all about making the most of your guesses to track down and destroy your opponent’s fleet, but what if there was something else lurking under the water?
In this supernatural edition of the game, there’s a greater consequence to your misses. Three misses in a row triggers an awakening from the deep, and your opponent gets to pick a 3×3 square (on your board) that includes that last miss.
If part of one of your ships is in that 3×3 square, the monster from the deep emerges and takes a bite from your ship, marking it as hit.
(If more than one ship or more than one spot on a ship is inside that 3×3 square, you only need to mark a single hit, and you DON’T tell your opponent the exact spot. You only say MONSTER! to indicate one of your ships has been bitten.)
Not only does it add a monstrous element to the game (and a consequence for misses), but it also adds a new layer of strategy to the game!
Is it Godzilla? Ebirah? Cthulhu? The Beast from 10,000 Fathoms? You decide the monster!
Hungry, Hungry Hippos: Poison Pellets
Here’s a bonus one cooked up by my marvelously devious friend, Lisa Mantchev.
It’s Hungry Hungry Hippos with a dark twist: a single, differently-colored marble in the mix with all the regular marbles.
It’s a poison marble, and you’ve gotta eat up all the regular ones and not get the poisoned one. If you do, you’re done for, and you’re out. Then the remaining players try again, and you keep going until there’s only one survivor.
So be hungry hungry, but not TOO hungry hungry, or it’s curtains for you!
Do you have any Halloween versions of classic board games you enjoy, fellow players? Or do you have a spooky house rule suggestion? Let us know in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you.
PuzzCulture 