Get on a roll with these Xmas crackers!
In the last year, I’ve surprised myself by buying a lot of games. I always thought I left tabletop games behind me; they were something I used to do. As a kid, I played a lot of the standard games like Monopoly, The Game of Life, and Sorry!, but there’s something about tabletop gaming that speaks to the perpetual kid inside me, so much so that I’m buying them in my 30s. Here are three games for you to check out this holiday season.
Telestrations
Telestrations is a combination of two games: a broken-telephone game and a drawing game. It comes with cards plus dry-erase sketchbooks and markers. Everyone draws a card, which has words listed on it that match numbers from one to six. Roll a die and look at the matching word on your card; you write that word in your sketchbook and pass your book to the player on your left. That player then has one minute to make a drawing of that word, after which they pass the book to the player on their left.
Each player continues to pass the books along, alternately drawing or writing, until the books all return to their owners. Then you share the results in your sketchbook by telling everyone what the original word was and flipping through the pages, showing the progression from original word to whatever bizarre thing it became—cue laughter. There are scoring methods with which you can win the game, but this game isn’t so much about winning as it is about having a good time.
If you can’t draw, that actually makes the game better—trying to figure out someone’s stick figures or misshapen blobs leads to weird guesses, which then leads to weirder drawings and so on. It’s a great family game for all ages.
Ghost Blitz
This is a game that tests your reflexes. It comes with a deck of cards and five painted wooden tokens: a white ghost, a red chair, a green bottle, a blue book, and a grey mouse. The tokens are placed in the centre of the table. Each card has a drawing on it of two tokens—for example, a grey ghost sitting on a blue chair. To get a point, you have to grab an item on the table that doesn’t match the card in either object or colour. In this case, it would be the green bottle, because the ghost and chair were on the card, as were the colours blue and grey. If you grab an incorrect item, you have to give up one of your point cards to the person who did get it right. The game ends when the deck runs out. Whoever has the most cards wins.
It’s a counterintuitive game: when the card is revealed, your brain immediately wants to grab what it sees, but you have to trick it into doing the opposite. This one is better suited to adults and older kids.
Castle Ravenloft
This is a fantasy board game set in the world of Dungeons & Dragons. I say “board game,” but it doesn’t have a set board. Instead, there is a stack of interlocking cardboard tiles, which is shuffled at the start of each game. You start on a dungeon entrance tile, and at the beginning of every round, you place another tile on the table, linking it to a previous tile. This creates the dungeon area the players will be exploring, and it also means the board is different every time you play!
The players form an adventuring party by choosing one of the pre-made hero characters such as the human rogue or the dwarven cleric, etc. They choose a quest from the adventure book, set up pawns and various stacks of cards, and then the game begins. Throughout their adventure, players will battle monsters, dodge traps, suffer through environmental hazards, pick up treasure, and with any luck, defeat the big villain at the end of the quest. It’s a complex game and difficult to win, but that just makes the victory all the sweeter. I’d recommend this for the hardcore gaming crowd.
(Originally posted on mississaugalife.ca. The print version originally appeared in Spirit of the City/Mississauga Life, issue 22, 2013; the PDF of that is available here.)
Leo Graziani 