Casual party games are a great infection vector for introducing tabletop gaming to our non-gaming friends. For experienced players, they're also fantastic palate cleansers between games of Puerto Rico and Power Grid.
If you like Say Anything, you'll probably like other casual tabletop games, like Apples to Apples, Cards Against Humanity, and the three quick casual games we've already played (Tsuro, Zombie Dice, and Get Bit!).
These games are easy to learn, play very quickly, and can be found just about anywhere, from your Friendly Local Game Shop to big chain bookstores.
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Awesome game! I’m hoping you play Magic: the Gathering and will cover that some time. Cards Against Humanity would be AMAZING!
Flapjacks and Sasquatches!
http://www.flapjacksandsasquatches.com/
I’m at the 1:23 time marker and I’m already online ordering this game. Wil Wheaton *is* awesome….(cuz…you know…)
Nice! Just a shame you have to bleep everything. :/
I’ll be at a small RPG and board game convention in Cambridge(UK) this weekend and hope to pick up a few new ones there. Oh, and to get a few signed pieces by Phil and Kaja Foglio, of course. 🙂
My favorite party game! I hang out with the NorthStar Games guys every time we go to a gaming trade show or GenCon.
We just sold another copy of Small World tonight thanks to TableTop. 🙂
Looking forward to seeing you at GenCon – and I have dice for you! lol
Excellent episode, hilarity ensued.
And since when has the Enterprise been a space station? O_o
My son actually loves the bleeps, he can’t not laugh at them.
Wil, I really love these TableTop videos, because I am both entertained by you and your friends playing them and because I get to learn about games I had never heard of that I might introduce to my friends and family. However, I’m worried that the most recent three videos have tended to use more simplified house rules. I can see that maybe this makes the videos more entertaining in that it lets you focus on the interaction between the players, but I feel like I’m not getting a good sense of the games themselves and how they would work with my own friends and family. Here are some examples:
1. Say Anything — You outright said that you were using house rules for scoring. You were clear on this, and I understand if you want to do this once in a while, but…
2. Fiasco — There were cards and tables that were flashed on the screen that never ended up being used. I get the idea that the play was simplified greatly.
3. Gloom — There were apparently illegal plays and parts of the cards that weren’t used correctly (acknowledged by you later). This was key, because from the video, I actually got the idea that Gloom was a pretty unbalanced game if the best strategy in all cases is to kill your family the fastest (rather than try to build on points, if possible) — and it seemed like you could kill your family really fast.
So that’s three games in a row where I feel like I didn’t get a good picture of what the games were really like (especially if you’re not playing with professional screenwriters and comedians who can make up detailed stories on the fly). I did enjoy the enthusiasm of the players and for that I did enjoy those videos, too. However, I would like to ask for a bit more detail on the games themselves — the way the videos for Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, and Castle Panic were done. Thanks!
One of my favorite games to play with friends is Loaded Questions (with modified rules of course)
Essentially the standard rules have players ask a question off a card, everyone else answers, and then they player gets points for correctly identifying who answered what.
The way we play is to pick a card and ask a question, then everyone writes the most offensive and messed up thing they can think of, and the play has to guess who said what. Instead of playing for points, we just play until someone says something so offensive that everyone else decides to throw in the towel….
Oddly, this works better with the standard version of the game rather than the “adult” version.
Last night I spent 2 hours with my sons playing Munchkin.
We were a family that never seemed to expand our gaming beyond Sunday night Settler’s and thanks to some sparked interest from watching Tabletop, we have been playing a lot of new games.
Growing up in a home where games involved torn Monopoly money or shoving pink and blue pegs into plastic Life cars, I never enjoyed board games. Winning felt random and the game usually ended when my little sister would start to lose and promptly shove the game board off the table and tell Mom we were all cheating….not something I felt a nostalgic desire to re-create with my own kids.
My 16 year old has been asking me to buy Ticket to Ride and I resisted because it’s a 50 dollar game, Yo. When we saw that you were part of a web show that played games and one of them was Ticket, I watched so I could see if it was a game I’d get him for his birthday or something.
I went out and bought it the next morning, we were playing it by lunch. Then we played it again. Then we watched another episode of Tabletop to see if you knew about any more cool games……
I look towards my dining room table now and see Forbidden Planet, Munchkin, Flux, Ticket to Ride, Apples to Apples and yesterday’s addition: “Small World. ” I know we have Bohnanza and Pandemic coming soon from Amazon and it all makes me smile. We are having such a great summer and my teenagers and I are talking again, just like we use to when they were small and I needed them to help me win Zelda.
Thank you, Tabletop, and all of those involved for your show. It’s not only entertaining as hell, but it has helped usher in evenings of laughter and fun here in our little household.
Thank you.
Island….Forbidden Island.
Please don’t tell my kids.