If you are receiving this message, you are the perfect specimen for exposure to a challenging list of games and toys. You might or might not be familiar with some of them. This wunderkammer of entertainment is sent to you as an invitation to play wide, deep, and far. To experiment and enrich your life. Perhaps, to dream. Definitely, to have fun. We will not even mention VITRIOL this time around.
Piquet
When Char and I go to places – a thing we’re starting to do again – we like to have a pack of cards with us and a little book for score-keeping. Right now, our go-to card game is a French game from the 16-hundreds called Piquet. Easy to learn but just deep enough to take a while to master, this is a refreshingly snappy game.
Monikers
A party game that gets better the longer the evening gets. While you can buy a set you can also just use sheets of paper that you cut into cards. Monikers is a guessing/deduction game that understands what a meta-game is and how group dynamics work. You repeatedly give hints about what is written on a card and someone else has to guess which card you’re talking about. While you originally give verbal hints, the game strips you of means of communication over time. And you can take that as far as you please. We once played a game that ended with us tearing up the self-made cards to hint at their content. And a lot of them were guessed correctly.
The Golden House
Char and I spent days trying to decode the solutions encrypted in the episodes of Ross Sutherlands’ puzzle podcast The Golden House. In fact, we listened to, especially, the first episode so often that we still quote it nearly every day. The story is a humorful take on the new age cult-like practices of tech startups and wonderfully presented.
Turtle Wushu
A super simple physical game that you should use to reconnect with the idea of touching other people once that’s a thing again. You can use coins instead of turtles.
Fiete World
A toy collection for noodling around. My daughter, 4 years old, loves it. There are a lot of similar toys out there but this one has a treasure map that leads to a treasure. I am not 100% sure about representation and stereotyping in this one – you gotta simplify and abstract when you show different places, though.
Set
I’ve never seen a game that exploits your natural ability for pattern recognition better than Set. Basically all you do is point at similarities across cards that are right in front of you and everyone else. Pretty sure when you play it long enough it’ll rewire your optical system. You might find yourself with a superhuman ability to spot faces in clouds afterwards.
Strohmandeln
A two player Tarock game from Austria played with 54 cards. While the rules are too complicated to explain here (and hard to find in English), the interesting aspect of this particular Tarock variant is that your hand grows like in a deck building game. Also it’s for two players, whereas most similar games require three or four. This is a very sophisticated card game that requires your full attention. But we feel like we have barely scratched the surface after two years of playing.
The Quiet Year
Build a civilization together. A cooperative card-based game to explore your minds together and fantasize a different place. Every round is memorable. Every map, the result of your shared imagination, a memento.
Thanks to Philipp Ehmann for introducing us to a couple of the above games. See, we didn’t mention VITRIOL.