Month: May 2016

Salut! Château Roquefort is a wonderful game full of twists and turns where a bunch of competitive mice split into teams of 4 and race to get 4 pieces of cheese. There is, however, a catch. The rooftops they’re running on are shifting under them! They risk falling into a mouse trap!

The roof tiles are only uncovered when the mouse is on that tile, so these blissfully oblivious rodents with unusually small man-made brains* could be set up to fall in a hole! The rules with the cheeses are that each mouse team may only have 1 of each type of cheese. On your turn you may choose to push the blocks once as one of your 4 moves.

When you push blocks, you take the spare piece and push a row. This pushes all the blanks, mouse traps, and cheeses in that row. Otherwise you could use 4 moves to move and uncover roofs. Once you are done with your turn, if there are unoccupied, uncovered roofs they get recovered.

Château Roquefort is the rodent equivalent of the Hunger Games, but with official teams, not just a “You don’t kill me, I don’t kill you” scenario. Instead of finding weapons, you are searching for cheese, for the 1 with 4 cheeses rules them all!  (So long as they don’t cut their cheeses,)

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*I’m not sure whether they actually made brains in the mice, but wouldn’t it be cool? Besides, it’s a cute jumble of words, right?

Snake Oil Elixir is a game kind of like Apples To Apples, but with a few changes. For instance, instead of choosing a random adjective as the subject, you get to pick between 2 “customers”. The other players then chose 2 of their cards which they put together to make a product for you. They throw a sales pitch and you chose which you think would be better.

Choosing has a few options. You could be practical, but where’s the fun in that? I know people who vote for the most random, crazy thing possible. I personally go for the most wild, crazy, but distantly relative choice.

The person who wins the round gets the Customer card. The person to the left of the previous Customer gets to be the new Customer. The process repeats until everybody has been the Customer. Then the person with the most Customer Cards wins, unless there’s a tie, in which case you keep playing. In both games we played my mother won.

I like this game because you stretch the boundaries of reality to make the most ridiculous, odd and amusing inventions to please our customers. Of course, its nothing I can’t handle as I effectively do that every time I write fiction. Some things we came up with included Fairy Pickles and Pearl Musket. One thing to note is the more people, the better the game play is.

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