I recently started a new part-time job as an educator for the Huntington Learning Center. After two years working from my computer, I was grateful for the whole spectrum of experiences this opened me back up to. The most rewarding, of course, has been connecting personally with the students I’m helping, but there’s another one that’s more pertinent to this series: the need to fill time.
About once a week, I have a 90-minute break between shifts. I don’t eat out much, and it doesn’t leave me enough time to go anywhere, so I’ve gotten into the habit of packing a solitaire-suitable game in my bag to pass the time.
The results have been surprising. You’d think I’d focus on the same games that grace my table at home, but bringing a game to work introduces all sorts of constraints: It has to be portable, small enough to fit into my satchel. More importantly, it has to be quick to set up and put away, just in case I get called back early. It should take no more than three quarters of an hour to play, or else it should be easy to “save” my progress and pick up from the same place later. Finally, while I expect a certain degree of intellectual stimulation from all my games, it can’t be too complicated, since a work environment is a hotbed of distractions.
After some experimentation, here are same games that earn my play-at-work seal of approval:
The World on My (Break Room) Table
Designed by perennial nutcase Friedemann Friese, Friday would be my desert island game if my job was living on a desert island and I had to pick a game to bring with me to work. It travels in a light but sturdy 5X5-inch box and can be unpacked faster than you can say “Gilligaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!” Best of all, it hits you with juicy decisions every turn without ever demanding the player’s complete attention.
Friday is an old favorite of mine, the first game that made me realize playing solo can be just as fun as multiplayer. A twisted retelling of Robinson Crusoe, it puts the player in the role of Friday, guiding the soft-bodied, dim-witted castaway Robinson through various challenges in an attempt to toughen him up and, ultimately, get him the hell off your island. Every turn, you draw two hazards and pick one, discarding the other for now. The hazard allows Robinson to draw a few cards for free in an attempt to reach a combined target fighting value. If you win, you spin the hazard 180 degrees and add it to Robinson’s deck. The problem is that, at the start of the game, most of Robinson’s cards actually have a negative fighting value, and as the game goes on, he’ll get some even worse cards as the years on the island wear on his feeble mind.
That’s where Friday gets really clever. You start the game with a set of Life Pips. When you run out, it’s game over. Until then, however, you can spend a life pip at any time to draw an extra card, as many times as you want, until you beat the challenge. Or, you can decide to give up on the challenge, pay the difference in life pips, and permanently get rid of some or all of the useless cards you played this turn, making Robinson more reliable in the future. It’s a fantastic system that really captures the theme of putting your faith in a complete imbecile.
I’d been focusing so hard on newer and more detailed games that I’d forgotten how engrossing this juggling act can become. Now, it’s the first thing that goes in my bag each Wednesday. Even better, several kids at the Center got hooked the moment I brought it out and have been begging for a go at it. It’s not strictly an educational game, but you could do a lot worse–there’s no complex math, but it reinforces basic arithmetic, probability, and problem solving. Double win!
Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective isn’t quite as portable as Friday, fitting in an average-sized game box, but it has one clear advantage: you don’t need a table to play it. This interactive mystery game is played completely with books, newspapers, and your own powers of deduction. You’ll get a case and a series of resources: a map of London, a directory, and a newspaper excerpt, which may or may not contain information relevant to the case. Then, you’re on your own. Follow leads by finding the “Clue Point” of the building or person you want to question, then look it up in your Case Book, which has brief snippets of story for each encounter. Some will give you new information essential to solving the case, but the overwhelming majority will be red herrings.
As a travel game, this one’s brilliant. I played the first case over a span of three weeks, checking out a few Clue Points each day. You can play it on the bus or in the waiting room. And, like Friday, one of my students, a particularly bright 10-year-old, got hooked the moment it appeared. This would be a great educational tool, since it’s all about paying attention to details and making inferences. We’re working on another case together, but it’s difficult to find the times when neither of us are supposed to be working. Maybe it’s time to institute a student game day….
Finally, I can’t tell you how much mileage I’ve gotten out of Stowaway 52, a 52-card poker deck with a choose-your-own-adventure story printed on the cards. The setup is simple: somehow, you’ve snuck aboard an alien spaceship that is on its way to destroy Earth. You start at a random card (you’re supposed to choose, but I find it more fun this way), which has a 1-sentence description of where you are and gives you two options, each leading to a different card in the deck–say, the 5 of clubs or the Ace of diamonds. If you choose the 5 of clubs option, you add that card to your discard pile, read the new room description, and make another choice. Some cards are items, unlocking alternate choices on other cards, and there are multiple ways to reach every room. Your goal is to visit every card exactly once–if you are ever forced to visit a card you’ve already been to this game, you lose. This one true path will unveil the hidden story.
This was someone’s first-time Kickstarter project, so it could have been good, awful, or somewhere in between. Luckily for me, it turned out good. Playing the game over and over, I feel like I’m learning the layout of the ship and using it to my advantage to evade capture. And this is the perfect game to play when you can’t play anything else, since it’s pocket-sized and playable without any surface at all. The other two games can be found at whatever board game retailer you frequent, but I strongly encourage you to contact Project Danger about Stowaway 52 here if it sounds intriguing.
The World Beyond
Some red-hot Kickstarter projects this month, so let’s start there.
I love me some cooperative gaming, and that’s just what this batch delivers. The Apocrypha Adventure Card Game comes from Mike Selinker and a stable of other people who’ve worked on the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, a game I’ve described as more addictive than it is fun. It is really addictive, though, and Apocrypha is different enough that I’m happy to ride the hype train to doomsdayville. Functional either as a 1-6 player cooperative card game or a card-driven GM-led RPG, it’s set in a world where “saints” can see the invisible monsters lurking at the fringes of everyday life and fight with repressed memory fragments, so 100x cooler than Pathfinder.
The Siblings Trouble is a very different approach to a card game/RPG hybrid. Inspired by sources like The Goonies or the Hardy Boys, it’s a 30-minute storytelling game playable by 2-4 players. As the rascally Trouble kids, who have names like Mischief and Danger, the players explore some spooky location, having dangerous encounters and finding useful treasure, hoping to defeat the boss before they all get Sent Home for an early bedtime. As a storytelling game, the main idea is to cooperatively weave a tale of adventure with your fellow players, and many cards reward you for your descriptiveness, but it looks like there’s some actual game here, too, with die rolls, items, and special abilities.
Finally, Project ELITE belongs to an increasingly broad subcategory of games: the real-time cooperative game, in which players are competing against the clock to defeat whatever dangers the game throws at them. In this case, it’s an alien invasion, and the look of those aliens (in over 80 plastic miniatures) is the first thing you’ll notice, capturing an H.R. Giger grotesqueness even better than the Alien series itself. The other thing that sets Project ELITE apart is the way it splits between untimed planning phases, where the group has all the time they want to form a strategy, and frantic 2-minute execution phases, where they’re desperately trying to roll the dice to actually accomplish what they said they would. The worst part is that every time you reroll, you have a chance of rolling an alien activation, bringing the bad guys one step closer to your dropship and Game Over, man.
That’s about all the time I have for this month. Until next time, keep playing!
