#pointsalad

When it comes to packing for anything it's safe to say I'm atrocious. I overpack for even a simple evening away (sorry, for those still following the 20th C, 'evening away's are something we used to do before we took up as permanent residents of our soft furnishings). I've often had this discussion with friends and colleagues - the simplest one is "how many pairs of pants do you need for x-time away"?  The obvious formula here is xdays + 1 for emergencies, but this thinking is waay too simplistic and covers a pitiful array of contingencies. I would argue that a sudden and catastrophic change of weather to downpour conditions needs to be considered, as does an unexpected drive-by of a large lorry thru an adjacent puddle, fall in a stream/burn or river, being unexpectedly caught in a fountain based celebration etc etc etc. This immediately doubles or even triples the amount of basic layers - pants, socks, trousers, tees etc. And then, we can relax into actual choices for formal vs casual, sudden wedding invitations whilst away and national or academic award ceremonies. It's a minefield. Unfortunately, this approach to covering the bases has translated thru to my boardgaming. I blame Ikea. Frankly their big blue bags allow the simple transportation of many, many titles, including some decent sized heavyweights. Never tried it, but I'd reckon you'd have a reasonable shot at getting TI4, Gloomhaven and possibly 7th Continent in just one of Ikea's capacious holdalls. As a result, I used to turn up to games evenings at work with at least 2 Ikea holdalls of big box games (for an evening that in honesty, we'll only really have time for 1 or 2 games), but with the added bonus bag now which includes what I call my 'grab shelf'. Games that are my usual suspects, these are usually my filler or party games designed to give us warm-up plays or while we're waiting for others to arrive at 7. (We did say 7 didn't we: I'm sure we said 7... was it definitely today?) So here's my round up of the games that we rarely leave home without - we actually do keep them on the top of a bookshelf in the games room and sort of 'scoop' them into a bag if we're in a hurry! These are in no particular order of favour, and most probably just what I can recall from the shelf next door, there will also be some crossover with a list I wrote a while ago on 'little' games...... 1) POINT SALAD - AEG Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich apx £16 This deceptively simple card game has become a house favourite since we were invited to play it at Airecon one night in the hotel. It's a simple set collection game with a little twist. The vegetable cards to collect have scoring criteria on the other side. A scoring card may be flipped and converted to a veg card once in your hand but not back to a scoring card. The scoring cards are achievements like 'lowest number of lettuces =10pts', 'pepper+lettuce+onion = 5pts per set' etc. The 'market' starts with 3 rows of cards, scoring side up and 2 cards are flipped to veg side next to each. Players will take either one scoring card or 2 veg. The game is tricky enough in terms of optimising your own tableau, but factor into that if you start paying attention to what your opponent is trying to do, the game soon gets highly strategic and gratifyingly dirty. 2) DEEP SEA ADVENTURE - Oink Games Jun Sasaki, Goro Sasaki apx £15 Oink Games produce some of my favourite small box games. They are usually simple, bright, fun and challenging. Though I would put in a good word for other titles in their range like: Moneybags, Fake Artist, Troika and Nine Tiles Panic, it is Deep Sea Adventure that stands out. Players are all treasure hunting divers departing a submarine, diving as far as they dare before their joint oxygen runs out. As a push-your-luck game, DSA is genius. It's that joint oxygen that is the real trick here, as your greed may end up costing other players the chance to get back to the ship safely. The deeper you dive, the more oxygen you use, and your treasure is collected blind for its value, so all your risk may have been for very little eventual reward. If the oxygen does run out, any unrecovered treasure you are carrying goes in a pile right at the bottom of the sea, adding to the temptation even more. DSA is a brilliant joint screw each other over game, and may be best avoided with very intense and serious players, but with an easy-going fun group, it's a true gem. 3) LOST EXPEDITION - Osprey Games Peer Sylvester apx £18 I'm a big fan of co-op games, and finding a small box filler co-op is always interesting. We bought the game for its artwork as 'er across the table was a fan of the Blake & Mortimer graphic novels which share a design ethic and The Rainbow Orchid which is by the same artist here, Garen Ewing. This game is beautiful to look at, but savage to play. Players must chop their way thru an Edgar Rice Burroughs style jungle to reach the lost city. Along the way they must face a relentless series of challenges that will demand careful management of very limited resources. The players are aided by explorers with useful skills, but limited health, and by the end of the journey it is entirely possible you will have had to have sacrificed at least one of your explorers to meet the demands of the jungle. It became even more horrifying to discover that these explorers are based on actual historical characters, so that choice to sacrifice the lovely little old lady Ines, is actually choosing to leave a real life character to the fate of leeches, tigers, swamps or quicksand! Another group favourite and a great pub game due to its fairly small footprint. This is also available as Judge Dredd - Cursed Earth which also features some very neat solo play rules. 4) DINOSAUR TEA PARTY - Restoration Games Rob Daviau, JR Honeycutt, Justin Jacobson apx £16 Restoration Games have been doing an amazing job the last few years refreshing classic older games and turning them into great new games. They are probably best known for the highly successful Kickstarter for Fireball Island, and their great new version of Downforce. Dinosaur Tea Party id probably their smallest game, but it's big on fun. At its core, it's basically an elaborate bonneted dinosaur version of Guess Who. The utter joy of this game comes when a really cool group goes for it and roll plays the social interactions of these wannabe socialite reptiles. There's a couple of extra little twist rules thrown in like dinosaurs who might always lie, always give the wrong answer etc, and these do spice up an otherwise straightforward deduction game, but honestly, when you are looking for a very light, simple, bright, and funny filler or end of evening game, you can't go wrong with this adorably drawn game. 5) CROSSING - Asmodee Yoshiteru Shinohara apx £9 Known fondly to our group as 'The Pointing Game', The Crossing is a brilliant yet almost painfully simple push-your-luck game with no downtime at all. Players vie for gem treasure on several mushrooms in the centre of the table by pointing at them. If only one player is pointing to a pile, they win it and place it in front of them. If two or more players point at the same pile, nobody wins any gems and the pile grows bigger next round. On the second round, players can either point at a new mushroom or point at the pile of won gems in front of another player. Players may also cover their won gems instead of pointing and thereby convert won gems to stored gems where they're safe. Not impossible with smaller player counts, but the game becomes utter chaos at higher player counts and games rarely end without collapse into hilarity all round. Each round plays in about 2 minutes and the game ends when the gems in the bag run out. Points are awarded for sets of colours, rare white gems and single points for any other gems. Crossing is tense, full of 'dagnammit' moments and gets played to death when it hits the table. Highly recommend though I understand it can be a little tricky to get hold of at the mo. 6) MONIKERS - Palm Court Alex Hague, Justin Vickers apx £20 It takes a lot to take an eye-rolling party game and transform it into something a bit special. Monikers basically takes the game of Charades and treats it to a much more anarchic edge. Starting with the topics to be guessed, Monikers is shamelessly nerdy and often needs a little more of a deep nerd-dive into net and popular culture, citing popular memes, channels, phenomena and personalities. Nyan cat, lightsaber kid, and Bob Ross all make appearances in the card decks. Monikers is a team game, and starts with a simple description round where players are not allowed to use the title on the card or any words in the description. Round 2 moves this to a single word, and round 3, merely a gesture (there are some hilarious community suggestions for other rounds eg glove puppets and shadow fingers). Again, with the right group, this game is brilliant, but I accept with the wrong group, could fall flat as a pancake. There are a couple of expansions which effectively play as stand-alone games, but I can highly recommend the completely insane Shut Up & Sit Down Nonsense Box as a good starting point. 7) CELESTIA - BLAM Games Aaron Weissblum apx £21 Sometimes a good filler game comes in a slightly larger box, especially if it features and adorable 3D skyboat! Celestia is a beautiful game to look at, and a brilliant semi co-op push-your-luck game. Each round, a new captain tries to convince the passengers on their ship to stay aboard and venture to lands anew. The further the ship goes, the higher the reward but the much greater the risk. Passengers have to decide if the de facto captain for that round has the resources in their hand to meet the challenges rolled on the dice for that journey.  Passengers can decide to leap off if things look too dodgy and gain lower rewards, but there's also betrayal and nefarious shenanigans to be had with skyhooks, rocket packs etc which may allow passengers to throw other players off the boat, or even the Captain using a jetpack to abandon ship. Celestia is a classic game, and though the rulebook can take a little interpretation at first, the game is fun, solid and a great filler game. 8) RAILROAD INK - Horrible Guild Hjalmar Hach, Lorenzo Silva apx £16 We play a lot of roll/flip/draw and write/build/draw games in our house and this slot could be filled by quite a large number of them which I might save for another list, but some notables are Welcome To, Roland Wright, Rolling Ranch, Dino World and Cartographers. However, despite all these great games, we keep coming back to one nose ahead title, Railroad Ink. We have the Blazing Red edition, but honestly, they are all great including the two new KS versions that recently funded: Forest Green and Desert Yellow. Each set has its own little foibles and unique mechanisms, but the core of these games are the same. What I love about Railroad Ink is that it constantly feels like you have a little more control in this game than some others, which is a 2 edged sword as therefore goofs also have a greater sense of ownership too. Scoring can be a little tricky to decipher the first couple of games, but the production of the game, wipe clean boards, and unique usage make this a stand out favourite. 8.5) An honorable mention.... I didn’t include this one in the list as it probably belongs better in the Roll & Write list, and it’s also more of a ‘big box’ game, but we nearly always take SUSHI ROLL everywhere with us now. It’s the R&W version of the Sushi series and is genuinely brilliant. The dice for a start look almost edible themselves, and it features some really smart little dice drafting that mimics the mini conveyor belt that caused so much hilarity in ‘that’ episode of Miranda. It’s a great theme, it’s immediately engaging, has great player aids and is one of those rare games you immediately want to play the minute you finish as you’s sure you can do better next time. I hope there's some games here to poke your interest glands and become your next favourite filler or "dinner's a-cookin" game. Happy gaming y'all