Stalking My Sister

My sister and her family recently moved from Texas back to Connecticut! Yay! So she’s living now on the coast, just 45 minutes away! More yay! We’re going down for a visit in a couple of weeks to see how she’s settling in! Maximum yay!

Just one concern I have… which board game should I bring?

First I had to find the place. So naturally, I hopped into Microsoft Flight Simulator to quickly fly from New Haven to where her house might be, on Long Island Sound.

You know, after the > 100 GB mandatory downloads.

It’s really ridiculous.

Anyway. We’ll be visiting on a work night, so we can’t be too long. I don’t know if her daughters or husband will be there, but I imagine they will. I think I’ll be there with my BF and son, but there’s a possibility they won’t want to come.

So the potential is for between two and seven people.

Any potential game has to be pretty easy to set up, explain, and play. It should take about half an hour to play.

I’ve been playing “Mini Rogue” since I got it. It’s fun, and supports up to two players, in either co-op or competitive mode. The players deal nine cards forming a dungeon area each turn, then, starting on the top left, they solve the room (encounter, trap, shrine, merchant, etc), then reveal the two cards to the right and bottom, and choose one of them to travel to. Rinse and repeat. As they go through the dungeon, they will encounter bosses, until they reach the very bottom and defeat the ultimate monster, Og’s Remains.

It’s a little nerdy and definitely targeting people who love D&D and rogue-likes. I don’t know if my sister fits any of those. And it’s likely there will be more than two of us.

“Challenge of the Super Friends” is just a lot of fun. You take on the role of Superman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman or Batman & Robin, and try to capture villains before the rest of the Justice League can get to them, using your special abilities and avoiding disaster.

It’s super fast to explain, it’s really kooky (like the cartoon), and we both watched it when we were kids. It only supports up to four players, but it’s the kind of game I think would work really well. I mean, who doesn’t like DC comic book heroes and cheesy Saturday morning cartoons?

I’ve been forcing people to play this game for awhile now. “War with the Evil Power Master” is a Choose-your-own Adventure card game with a surprising amount of strategy but it still easy to explain — everyone has read a CYA book at some point, I bet.

Same thing.

There are five main characters, if you count the Evil Power Master. There’s a Kirk/Zap Brannigan captain, his logical alien sidekick, the practical second in command, and her friendly, multi-limbed robot. They bumble around the galaxy trying to stop the Evil Power Master from destroying all the planets in the galaxy — at once!

We act out the various parts. It’s hilarious… but a full game takes a certain amount of time. Unless, as in the last time we played it, not being able to make a critical die roll meant that we were unable to stop the EPM and the galaxy was destroyed.

It’s fun, but it’s really only for four people. The fifth person can play the EPM and handle moving the pieces around the board and stuff, but it’s not ideal.

“The Red Dragon Inn” is a long-running game series. The setup: You and your friends have just returned from an adventure. You all have too many gold pieces weighing you down, and you meet up with your friends and other scoundrels at the Red Dragon Inn, the place where when the adventure ends, the real adventure begins — DRINKING.

Each adventurer gets their own character and deck that they use to respond to the goings-on as they try to remain sober and solvent while trying to get their tablemates to drink themselves under the table.

It’s a fun game — we play it a lot. But, since each character plays entirely differently from any other one, it’s hard to really explain to someone how to play it. It’s important to get deep into character.

We played “Nyctophobia” a few times when we first got it. It’s more of a Halloween kind of game — it’s spooky. You play it in dim lighting. The story of the version of the game we have is that your car has stalled out in the middle of nowhere. A child in the car unexpectedly opens the door and dashes out into the absolute darkness. That’s bad. But, there’s also a vampire nearby who is also looking for the child. That’s worse.

One person plays the vampire, and is trying to elude the others. The other players are physically blindfolded. The players tell, in turn, what they want to do, and the vampire player brings their hands in contact with the clues they find. The players have to build the scene in their minds, together, in order to rescue the child and get back to the car.

This might be a game we work up to, I think. It’s very disorienting.

I think, in the end, I’ll just toss “Challenge of the Super Friends” in my purse and see what happens. You just can’t go wrong there.