Board games and card games ftw! :)

Last time I wrote about Mansions of Madness, Bona Dea asked about other games, which gave me the idea to blog about the ones we have. And it has become quite the collection! :P

Top shelf: I have never card game, Truth or Dare card game, Quidditch card game, "Hur fan visste du det?" card game, "Vuxenpoäng" card game, Spin the bottle quiz, 2 cups of Zombie Dice, 3 decks of common playing cards, Alias board game, spillikin, "Svarte-Petter", Cthulhu Dice, 2 expansions to Munchkin, Trivial Pursuit Nightmare Before Christmas edition, Munchkin Zombies, Spank the Monkey, Shot Roulette, Aye Dark Overlord!, Cthulhu Gloom, Gloom, Chez Geek, Chez Goth, Burn in Hell, Doctor Who card game, Once Upon a Time

Bottom shelf: Gamma world + expansion, Scrabble, Upwords, Monopoly Here and Now edition, Monopoly Nightmare Before Christmas edition, Labyrinth, Smallworld, Mansions of Madness, Lord of the Rings card game, Munchkin board game

I don't think that I need to talk about all of them. Everyone has played or heard of "I have never" and "Truth or Dare". "Hur fan visste du det?" and "Vuxenpoäng" are quiz games relating to knowing weird little things and points for adult behaviour respectively. Everyone knows "Spin the Bottle" and "Shot Roulette", and I assume that everyone knows how a common deck of cards works! "Svarte-Petter" and "spillinkin" (plockepinn) along with "Scrabble", "Quidditch" and "Labyrinth" are just games I've kept for nostalgic purposes, and we don't really play them. Then there are the games that we haven't gotten around to playing yet. Those are "Aye, Dark Overlord!", "Chez Geek", "Doctor Who card game", "Burn in Hell", "Lord of the Rings card game" and "Gamma world" (though I think the last one is in the making). "Upwords" is like "Scrabble" but in 3D so you can build words on top of each other. Everyone has heard of "Monopoly". The Nightmare Before Christmas edition is self-explanatory and the Here and Now edition uses credit cards instead of cash and has updated streets and markers. "Trivial Pursuit" is a quiz game and in this case all the questions are related to The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Alias is both a card game and a board game. It's incredibly fun if you're savvy with words. You need to be at least four playes and you need even numbers as you pair up into teams. The turn goes around clockwise and each team decides who's going to explain the word on the card and who's going to guess. You explain the word without saying the word or any part of the word. Translating the word into another language isn't allowed either. The explaining and guessing is done with an hourglass taking the time. The team does as many words as possible during that time. This game is very loud and a lot of fun. The best teams are two people who know each other and think in a similar way.

Zombie Dice is a fast game consisting of a bunch of dices with different colours and signs. There are three coulours: red, yellow and green depicting the difficulty of the dices. On the dices are three different sorts of signs: a brain, footsteps, and a shotgun. You play as a zombie and you want to get as many brains as possible (the game ends when the first person reaches 13). You scramble the dices in the cup, reach in and grab three without looking and roll all of them at the same time. The brains you save and the shotguns. The footsteps you re-roll along with a new dice to always make the number of dices rolled three. If you get three shotguns then you're shot and you're back down to zero brains. That's why you need to contemplate when to stop rolling and pass the dice cup. Then you need to remember how many brains you have. Red dices have more shotguns and green dices have more brains. Though there are all the signs on all the different dices.
Cthulhu Dice is similar but it consists of only one big dice (D20) and several markers to represent sanity. The game works like a duel. One player attacks you, then you get to retaliate, then the next player (clockwise) gets to attack someone else. The signs on the dice decide whether you lose sanity to Cthulhu, regain sanity, lose sanity to another player etc. The game ends when there's only one sane person left.

Munchkin is a card game usually (but a board game if you have that edition which we do as well). You're supposed to fight the monster, steal the treasure and stab your friends. It's really easy and a lot of fun once you've learned the rules properly.

Spank the Monkey is a crazy game to say the least. You're trying to build a tower of garbage of reach to spank the monkey. The other players are working hard to destroy your tower and be the first one to reach the monkey. The first to spank the monkey wins.

Both Gloom and Once Upon a Time are storytelling games. In Gloom you tell the story of a family and your goal is to kill off your own family in as a grisly way as possible before the other players kill their families. To prevent that you play happy cards on their family members and sad cards on your own. In Once Upon a Time you tell a story. Every player has a goal card and storytelling gards. Your job is to reach your goal before someone else reaches his/hers. You're allowed to interrupt the ongoing story if you have a card that you think fits, and thus take over the storytelling until someone else takes over or you play your goal.

Smallworld is fantastic. You choose your race and attribute and then you start conquering land. Either by taking over empty land or invading someone else's. Every area you own gives you money tokens by the end of your turn. The one with the most money wins.

Smallworld exists as a tablet game as well:

Finally, Mansions of Madness. You play as a group of investigators trying to figure out what's behind the mysterious happenings at the house. One player is the Keeper who basically plays as the house and all the monsters. The Keeper's job is to kill all the investigators or make them insane before the investigators figure out what causes the disturbances and defeat the monsters. And you build a new board each time and there's a new story each time so the game is never quite the same twice :)

There's a game similar to Mansions of Madness available for tablets: