Topic of the Week: Away From Table

Boardgames
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This week, it is time for my vainglorious return. I’ll freely admit, that’s a rare word I’m not 100% comfortable defining with precision but this seems equal parts vain and glorious so here we are.

Probably due for a “How are things going” post… but this is not that post!

I want to know what you play when you are away from a table. Cases like:

  • In a long line
  • In the car
  • On a train / plane
  • Out in nature
  • At a party or large dinner table
  • At a bar with unreliable table size or cleanliness

Or just away from your boxes, when it’s time to game and you don’t have your collection.

What do you play? (And we may want the full rules if it’s a good one…)

Bonus: Prove a credible but incorrect definition for “vainglorious.”

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Solo travel in hotels: Sunset Over Water pocket edition, and Herbaceous pocket edition. Just because I did it once when I was ill, and now it’s a tradition.

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  • In a long line: I get really really bored
  • In the car: Black Stories works really well, except for the driver of course. I‘ve been meaning to get a new fresh set at some point.
  • On the train: With friends we‘ve successfully played Top Ten because it needs no table space really.
  • At a party: That‘s Not A Hat. Just One. Tinderblox are the last games I played at parties. Deception Murder in Hong Kong has also worked in the past.
  • Waiting at the doctor‘s office I play the Ganz schoen Clever series on my phone.

I have a lot of games that travel well and get taken on vacation. But I think that‘s not the question here, or is it? If so: I rarely go anywhere without Sprawlopolis or Naturopolis.

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Slice and Dice on my phone mostly.

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I often play around with avoiding certain types of thing in the pavement/sidewalk. In the UK we have squares that come in 1s 2s and 3s. From when I was a teenager it was bad luck for the 3s it was said. By extensions 1s were avoided and 2s sought out. Add in avoiding slabs with cracks and or not standing on any lines between slabs and I’m left with a game to play when walking anywhere aimlessly and being in need of diversion.

When I last visited my sister in Aus we played a lot of 20 questions. However we devolved pretty quickly from animal, mineral or vegetable as a first question type to always choosing celebrities convicted or accused of sexual offences. A sadly far too deep pool of answers. That specific aside 20 questions style games are my preference over I Spy amongst grown ups for using just words to pass some time.

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Unlocks are our travel games. We play them in airports, on airplanes, and in hotels. My husband refuses to play them at home.

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Yeah, we should talk favorite apps though. Another time!

Impossible to turn this off. Even if I 95% overcome it there is still a part of my brain at least recording what I’m stepping on as I tell it to shut up.

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Let’s see… car and line games? Those are pretty interchangeable.

We generally default to the Alphabet Game - the one where you try to find words starting with each letter of the alphabet. First one through wins. I’ve houseruled the game over the years to transform it from a stupid time passer to something we find quite enjoyable.

Alphabet Game Errata
  • Basic rule is that you have to see a word that starts with a letter of the alphabet. A first, then B, and so on.
  • Acronyms are ruled in split fashion - if you don’t know what ABF stands for you can only use it for the first letter (A). If you know that it stands for Arkansas’ Best Fleet, you can use any of the three letters.
  • On vehicles, you cannot use anything from the government or manufacturer. So no License plate, no “Honda,” no “Kompressor.” You can use any words affixed by the dealer (license plate frame), corporate branding, bumper stickers, etc.
  • For X and Z, you can find three different words that contain the letter rather than one word that starts with it. But you can’t find three different Exxon stations, it has to be different words. And we generally ban “Exit” as one of them.

A second Alphabet game is more like reverse Scattergories. We pick a topic (Countries, cities, foods, animals, sports teams) and you run through the alphabet and try to find an entry for each letter. Something like “animals” we might expand to find four animals for each letter. Once we did it for “food that is in this car,” while traveling with my wife’s family. I kid you not, we did it (well, maybe no Q or X).

This crew could do it for board games… Anachrony, Brass, Concordia, DuneImp…

Drinking games tend to play well here. I’ve enjoyed BizzBuzz. You basically count from 1 to 77 or so and replace 7, any multiple of 7, or any number that contains 7 with the word “Buzz.” Then there’s a lot of variants out there for where you put in Bizz or BizzBuzz. Whatever the ruleset, when someone messes up or takes too long, you have to start over (or drink.)

Drink While you Think is pretty mundane. Everyone just spouts off celebrities, or characters, or famous entities. Like if I say Carl Weathers, the next name has to start with a W. William Shatner is S to the next person. If they say Stephen Spielberg (double S) it reverses. In real life you pass a pitcher and everyone has to drink from it while it is their turn, but it’s still fun with no pitcher.

I’ll stop there. Other thoughts for more bar/dinner party later.

(but for here, also a lot of “guess the animal” variants now with kids in the car. And let’s not forget the dozens of “how hard can I hit your hands” games we played as kids.)

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Nothing. Just wait, or chat, if I am with somebody else.

Yellow Car. This has been going on with my children for years now. Daily games, no repeats allowed for 24 hours.

Used to play cards on the ferry between Tenerife and Gran Canaria, likely Mus or Pocha (with Spanish Cards). Now I don’t play, although the last couple of trips between NZ and Europe I played some sort of Aztec themed version of Candy Crash that was on the TV modules.

If anything, football in the park, or frisbee. In the beach, maybe volleyball rondos? But rarely.

Werewords, Just One, Codenames have become favourites lately. I have to get a copy of Tellestrations

Nothing. I hardly frequent bars any more these days, let alone play anything in them.

Whatever is available, preferably if I don’t own it already (except Killer Bunnies: f**k that)

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Ooh, I have answers for this question!

Interested in getting:

Tangentially:

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Shiritori is the default goto. It’s simply a game of one player says a word, then the next says a word starting with the letter the previous word ended with. This works much better in Japanese than it would in English for a couple of reasons: “a letter” is a longer sound, usually a consonant+vowel pair, which makes things both more restrictive and less repetitive, and there’s one consonant exception to consonant+vowel, which is the “n” without an accompanying vowel. Lots of words end with this “n”, but no words begin with it, so if you slip up and say a word ending with this “n”, you lose. (The other lose condition is repeating a word, of course.)

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now I want to be able to speak Japanese. That sounds really cool.

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“So what drew you to studying Japanese?”

“Uh, I wanted to play shiritori…”

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I don’t bring solo games when I go. I often play on the phone: TTA, RFTG, and Minesweeper

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Drink While You Think may not harness the power of the Japanese language, but it will scratch that itch for all of us on the Roman alphabet :slight_smile:

It reminds me of another game where you take turns saying a letter, and whoever finishes spelling a complete word loses. But if you say a letter that can’t complete any word, you lose instead.

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I thought of some of those types of games this is apparently about …

We have one called Teekesselchen apparently known under the name Teapot in English.

You need to have a homonym and give clues to both of the meanings of the word you are thinking of.

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The Alphabet game of choice here would be „Stadt Land Fluss“ where you have a bunch of categories—for me they all started out as geographical ones (city, country, river) and someone names a letter and everyone has to fill in all the categories on their sheet. I think there is now even preprinted versions of this game available at game stores.

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There’s a similar English folk game, along the lines of:

I love my love with an A because she is Admirable, and hate her because she is Avaricious.
I took her to the sign of the Amoeba and fed her on Apples and Absinthe.
Her name is Annie and she comes from Andover.

and so on (one may bow out of X if one is a wimp).

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This reminds me a little bit of Kiitos | Board Game | BoardGameGeek which is a card game in which you’re trying to get other people to continue a word you’ve named (which they must do if they can), otherwise they need to change the target to a different word but still using the letters played so far. If they can’t do either of those things, they lose points. You gain points whenever someone finishes a word you declared.

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I keep meaning to bring Push It to the pub, but haven’t managed yet.

(I did read about a pub in London UK with a crokinole board on the wall which is available to use, will try to get there and have a go).

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Had a few last thoughts here:
Yaniv is a 52 card version of Cabo (also originally a plain deck game) that doesn’t require cards on the table. I think it was made for backpackers who wanted to play Cabo. It’s reasonably good when you want to kill time, have a deck, but not much of a playing surface.

Hive and Radlands (deluxe) are my two waterproof games. Definitely played Hive on a bar, good fun. I’ve seen Hive all sorts of places.

And I haven’t really executed on any of these, but I have a mental checklist of windproof games that could work outside. Tigris & Euphrates, Keyflower, and Lancaster are some good games with no paper or cards, just wooden tokens and heavy cardboard.

Regarding parties, I’ve had great luck playing Spyfall around a dinner table after everyone has eaten. One of the better sessions, period.

I’m not sure I’ve ever played Skull with the actual coasters? It generally just comes up, and we’ve played with a deck of cards, with marked advertising flyers, and even with sugar packets. I love this because it is the opposite of what American cities (maybe all cities?) have become - it can make any room feel positively Irish. Suddenly everyone is part of the same community. People swing by to watch, strangers start talking to you, everyone takes note when there’s an outcry around the table. Ireland is the only place I’ve felt that (outside of a Skull game) where strangers are suddenly family simply by nature of being in the same room.

I always remember the time that one guy (turns out he was a very good poker player) drew a penis on the back of a flyer and we all flipped his card all…night…long. Can’t forget that one.

Lastly, before Don’t Get Got was a thing I homebrewed a very similar game for our own party. Everyone got a dare on the way in and you simply scored for each time you executed it. Someone had to convince people that, technically, they were a Baron. Someone else had to slip as many different types of trees into conversation as possible. The absolute winner was the gentleman who was tasked to ask someone a serious question and then see how many hors d’ouvres he could fit in his mouth before the answer was finished. He executed amazingly.

In a similar vein, a SUSD podcast talked about a game called Sad Room. I don’t remember the particulars, but it’s for introverts at a party. You choose a room, and whenever someone enters the room, no one can talk. You can gesture and grunt and stuff, but you go until someone is forced to say something. Sounds like players had a great time and, usually, after the round was lost the victim would be clued in and would stay in the sad room for whoever came in next.

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