Memoral Game Day!

Hi! No, I’m not dead just haven’t had a lot of spare energy since I started a new job. But with the three day weekend in effect it’s time for an entry. To ease back into things I’ll start with something straightforward: talking about getting together with some friends yesterday for a gameday.

Spades: Bidding Part 2

Let’s continue our discussion of bidding, starting with my favorite bid: nil.

Spades: Bidding Part 1

I’m not exactly an expert on Spades, but I’ve played it a fair bit and am probably qualified to go over some of the basics. I’ll assume you know the general rules. If not, you can look at them here. You can see by scrolling through that link that there are about a million variations in scoring and gameplay, but which particular ruleset you’re using isn’t important for the purposes of this post.

Game Spotlight: Diplomacy

Even though I haven’t played it in well over 15 years, I still consider Diplomacy one of my all-time favorite games. It’s really unique and amazingly fun. And a bit stressful! My parents remember it as “that game where you all were running around the house having little conferences” and that really is the core of the gameplay

Personality in games

Recently my dad was talking about how you can really get a glimpse of someone’s personality by watching them play the game 10,000. If you haven’t played, it’s a dice game where as long as you keep scoring points you can keep rolling, but if you ever roll and don’t score you lose whatever points you had built up that turn. So there’s an element of risk involved, and that’s where personality comes into play.

Rules vs. Fun

There are a lot of people out there, both hardcore gamer types and people who just play games occasionally, that have this idea that the rules just sort of get in the way and keep you from having fun. It’s an attitude of “well I’m just here to have fun, I don’t care about the rules”. I believe that following the rules in fact makes games more fun, not less and I’d like to talk a little bit about why.

Game spotlight: Three Dragon Ante

I mentioned Three Dragon Ante, or TDA as my friends and I refer to it, in my last post. Like I said, I can’t believe I had never talked about it before that. It’s a really fun game and one that I can always get my gamer friends to play.

Stocking Stuffer Games

One of the things I found in my Christmas stocking was a new game called CLR. It stands for “Center, Left, Right” and is an easy little game involving dice and chips. I haven’t had a chance to play it yet, but it looks like a fun little game. That got me to thinking about other stocking stuffer games I’ve received over the years. If you’re looking for a small gift for a gamer friend here are some to consider. So I guess I should have written this post right before Christmas, not right after

Cassino tips and tricks

I’ve talked about Cassino before and given some general tips here. In this post I’d like to share some little tricks you can use to help improve your Cassino game. All of these will be assuming a 2-player game, because once you get into 3 and 4 player games strategy becomes pretty iffy. But this first trick will still work with more players, as long as you’re the dealer.

Game spotlight: Bocce

Ever played Bocce? It’s a pretty fun game. I sometimes describe it as “horseshoes with a moving stake” when teaching people how to play. Basically you have a little ball about the size of a golf ball and each team or each player has two larger balls about the size of a softball. The object is to roll or throw the big balls as close as you can to the little one. Closest one scores a point, or two if two of the same color are closest (you can also get two points for actually resting against the little ball but that’s exceedingly rare).