Category: Quick games

Games that can be learned and played quickly, typically under 30 minutes

Quick, Cover it Up!

Cover Up is, in essence, Connect Four with depth. There are three rings in each well, with corresponding sized tokens. Each player has five of the smallest tokens, four medium, and three large. Here’s how it works:

You can never place a smaller token over something larger than it. The smallest tokens can only go in the smallest well, so if there’s a medium there already, you’d need to place a large. Tokens must always be played on top – no slipping something under a piece that’s already there. The first token of the game can’t be placed in the center, but after that, anywhere is fair game.

The goal is, of course, to be the first player with four of your tokens in a row, be it vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. To that end, you’ll likely be blocking your opponent’s rows and covering their tokens with yours. Just be careful – once you place a small or medium token, it can’t be moved again. Large disks, on the other hand, you can pick up and relocate. The trick here is remembering if your opponent had anything under it! If lifting your large disk creates a row of four for your opponent, they win immediately. I know I’ve lost that way before!

Cover Up is a pretty simple game, but, like MixUp, it adds a bit of flavor to the even simpler Connect Four.

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Tic Tac Chec

Tic Tac Toe meets chess in Tic Tac Chec, a short and simple strategy game that can be used to teach new players how chess pieces move, or to shake things up a bit for more seasoned players. I’ve been playing chess for years, but adjusting to new mechanics is always a bit of a learning curve, and our first round was actually kind of embarrassing – we were both so busy setting ourselves up in chess terms, we forgot the Tic Tac Toe part. But I’m getting ahead of myself… again.

Each player has four pieces: a pawn, a knight, a bishop, and a rook, all of which move the same as they do in chess, except the pawn switches directions when it reaches the end of the board. Tracking that is a little tricky, so I’d advise having the pawn on the side of its space closest to where it’s going next, instead of centered. We figured that one out the hard way, too.

The board is a 4×4 grid, and the goal is to align all four of your pieces vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. The first step of this is having pieces on the board – on your turn, you may place any one of your pieces on any open space. Once you have three pieces on the board, you may begin to move and capture as you would in regular chess; captured pieces are returned to their players and “can immediately be played again on any open square.” It’s up for interpretation whether than means “they get to place it as soon as you hand it back to them” or just “there’s no cooldown before they can use a turn to put it back on the board,” so sort that out with your opponent before the game begins. It’s also up to you whether the “three pieces on the board before moving” rule applies to more than the beginning of the game. The rules on this one are pretty loosely defined, so there’s a lot of room to experiment and see which way is the most fun for you!

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Eldritch Pairs

Pairs is a press-your-luck game as simple as its name. The deck is triangular – there’s one 1, two 2’s, three 3’s, and so forth, all the way through ten. At the beginning of each round, every player is dealt a card face-up. Whoever has the lowest number goes first! (If there’s a tie, those players draw again, and so on until it’s resolved.)

On your turn, you may either hit or fold. When you hit, you’re drawing the top card of the deck and placing it face-up in front of you, alongside any other cards you’ve collected this round. The goal is to not get a matching pair. If you do, you take points equivalent to the number on the card (keep the card in front of you as a reminder) and all other cards in play are discarded. It’s time to start a new round. Folding also ends the round, but because you chose to stop, you score the lowest value card in play… even if it’s your opponent’s!

As you may have guessed, points are a bad thing. The first person to reach the target score – which is 60 divided by the number of players, plus 1 – loses. There are no winners in this game, just one loser, but I imagine you could play it elimination style if you have patient friends.

What we have (and what I linked to) is the Shallow Ones deck, illustrated by John Kovalic. As always with John’s work, the art is fantastic and frequently hilarious! It’s hard to see in the picture, because the card is upside down, but what Cthulhu and… I think that’s the Formless Spawn? From Cthulhu In The House? (…how have I not blogged that yet?)… regardless, what they’re watching in card #7 is, in fact, the contents of card #9. And card #10 is definitely the Shoggoth going to an optometrist. Poor optometrist.

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Time For A Penguin Rescue!

To nobody’s surprise, the game Adventures of Riley: Penguin Rescue is about rescuing penguins. The characters are all part of the same rescue team, so it’s a very friendly competition… it’s just a matter of who can collect all 5 colors of penguins first!

The penguins’ colors match the colors on the dice, and the spaces on the board. Movement is simple – follow the arrows to the nearest of each color you rolled. You get to choose which order to resolve them in, though, so use that to your advantage! There’s a bit less choice involved when you roll two of the same color, but you do get to roll again once you’re done! Some spaces are slides, which you can use to skip sections or slide back to Start in the middle of the board. If there’s a stranded penguin on the slide, you can take it with you! There are also Rescue Zones, which let you collect any one of their remaining penguins when you land there. If you’re lucky, you might be able to hit it twice in one turn! Just remember, you can only have one of each color penguin, which are also differentiated by size and numbers, so it’s pretty easy to tell!

The sixth side of the die is the Wild side. If you roll this, or land on a Krill space on the board, you must immediately draw the Krill card and resolve its effects. Most commonly, these have you move forward or back a certain number of spaces, but they may also send you back to Start, end your movement for the turn, or have you un-rescue someone else’s penguin. (Unfortunate, but sometimes warmer ocean temperatures around the Antarctic Peninsula are endangering Uncle Max’s colony, and a penguin flees to safer ice. It’s for the best.) If you roll two Wild sides, though, you get to move anywhere on the board! Including a Rescue Zone, if you so desire.

Once you have all five of your penguins, you still have to make it back to Start. And honestly? We found this to be way harder than collecting all the birds. There were several rounds where both of us had achieved a full iceberg, but we kept passing over all the slides home. I suppose that’s when a double Wild would have been really useful, huh?

It’s a simple game, fun, and the cards are clearly aimed to be educational. The little penguin figures have also been kitten-approved as extremely entertaining! (No penguins or cats were harmed by this fascination, but she did bat them off the board several times. While sitting in the box. Because of course she did.)

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This Game’s Gone Globle!

A few months ago, I posted about the suddenly ubiquitous game Wordle. Since then, I’ve been introduced to quite a few variants (at varying levels of masochism), but the handful I consistently come back to are foreign language Wordles (Duolingo‘s blog has a list of those here) and Globle.

Globle is effectively the geography edition of Wordle. Each day there’s a mystery country, and as you guess each nation it gets color-coded by its geographical distance from the correct answer. That distance is listed numerically as well, under the map and the list of your previous guesses. Your list can be organized by order of input or by which is closest; personally, I’ve found the latter quite useful when dealing with island nations, where I can at least approximate which continental areas it’s closest to.

Since there are so many countries in the world, this game has no guess limit; you only lose if you give up. Because of that, I consider it to be a low-pressure, fun and challenging sort of educational resource: I’ve become a lot more familiar with where countries are in the world – and in relation to each other – and even learned about countries I hadn’t known existed. It’s fantastic!

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Can You Pick Up Those Sticks?

Pick up Sticks is another classic, of the Jacks and Tiddlywinks variety. I actually have a combo set of all three, which is why they’re getting posted in such quick succession.

Setting up Pick up Sticks is really easy. You take all the sticks, save one, hold them upright in one hand (hand on the table) and then you just… let go. Whatever crisscrossing spread they’ve landed in is what you’ve got to work with!

The goal is to pick up the sticks (shocking, I know), one at a time and without jostling any of the other sticks in the process. The exception to this is the stick you set aside at the beginning, which you can use to help pick up the other sticks. When your efforts move any piece other than the one you’re trying to remove, your turn is over and the next player gets a go at it.

I suspect scoring varies by set, but for mine it’s color-coded: 10 points for yellow, 25 for red, 40 for blue and 50 for green. This can serve to even out the game, if all the easy pickings for the first player are yellow and red, or pretty much settle it from the get-go if they’re blue and green. Depends on the luck of the draw… or more accurately, the luck of the fall. Beyond that, it’s sort of like Operation, without the buzzing and with a lot more angles to go at it from.

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Agent 299, Report!

Agent 299 is a great game I was introduced to at GameholeCon – it takes a little strategy, a little memory, and a little deck. Seriously, the whole game is 10 cards, 9 if you exclude the rules. It’s a pocket card game!

It’s also a game of the rarer sort, where you don’t look at your own cards. Cards are instead laid out face down, split evenly between the players, with the leftover card (in a 2- or 4-player game) face down in the middle. Who goes first is up to you to decide – we flipped a coaster – but whoever that is gets the rules card, which doubles as a First Player marker. Starting with them and working around the table, each player must perform an Interrogation. This can work one of two ways: firstly, by peeking at one face-down card in front of another player, and swapping one of their own cards (face-up or face-down) for any one of that player’s. Alternatively, in a 2- or 4-player game you may instead peek at the card in the middle and swap it with any card.

After all players have performed an Interrogation, the person with the First Player card must flip one of their cards face-up. Some of these have abilities that are usable once revealed, but only for so long as they’re in front of you… and again, face-up cards can be stolen! (Ok, swapped for, but if you’re getting a Blown Cover worth negative 3 points – and nothing else – for your super useful ability card… it’s not exactly an agreeable trade.)

The game ends when the active player can’t perform an Interrogation (everyone else’s cards are all face-up) or a Disclosure (all of their cards are face-up and they don’t have Secret Documents, which would let them skip this step), at which point scores are tallied from the cards you have in front of you. Check them all – most cards only score when face-up, but the Blackmail card gives you a 2-point bonus if you have it face-down at the end of the game. In the case of a tie, the winner is whoever has the Top Secret Documents card face-up… or, failing, that, the Secret Documents card face-up, or failing that, the Blackmail card, regardless of where its face is. It’s a very thorough hierarchy.

I like this game a lot, mostly for how portable it is – I’ve actually taken to keeping it in my phone case, in case the opportunity for a game arises. And don’t they always?

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What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

Those famous last words are, as it turns out, an excellent basis for a card game. The Worst-Case Scenario Card Game, to be exact. This game is all about comparing hypothetical bad scenarios and trying to guess how your opponents will rate them from 1 (bad) to 5 (the worst). Since many of these scenarios can kill you, the player to go first is whoever has the worst survival skills.

The active player, entitled “The Victim,” starts their turn by spinning the Victim Wheel – this will affect scoring later. Next, they’ll draw 5 scenario cards from the deck and lay them out face-up in the middle of the play area. For instance, your five scenarios might be “only eat one food for the rest of your life,” “wake up to find tarantulas in your bed,” “snowmobile off a 100-foot drop,” “recurring nightmares for weeks,” and “exposed to high amounts of radiation.” At this point, everyone will grab their numbered chips – color-coded by player, with X’s on the backs – and The Victim will rank the disasters by which they deem the worst, while everyone else will rank the disasters by what they think The Victim deems the worse. This is very much a “how well do you know your friends?” type of game, and it would probably be morbidly fascinating to play with people you don’t know. Yet. Because all good friendships start with uncovering one’s deepest fears, right?

…Alright, maybe not. Regardless, each player places their chips X-side up next to the corresponding cards, ideally with The Victim’s chips on the far side from everyone else’s. Once everyone has placed their chips, The Victim will go through one card at a time, first revealing everyone else’s rankings, then their own. The goal is to match numbers with The Victim! For each successful match, a player gains one point… unless the Victim Wheel landed on Score Your Chips!, in which case each match is worth the number of the rank. Other Victim Wheel effects include Double Up! (all players double their points for the round) and Bad Is Good! (players who match The Victim’s #1 chip get a 1-point bonus). The Victim’s score for the round equals whichever other player scored the highest, including bonuses, and a score sheet is included in the box. In a 3, 4, or 6 player game, there are 12 rounds, while in a 5 player game there are 10, so everyone gets an equal amount of turns being The Victim. And whoever has the most points at the end wins!

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Check! …ers

I mean, it’s the same board. Though if you were really hoping for a post on chess, don’t worry! You can find that right here. (Why did it take me so long to write about checkers, especially when it’s the same board? I’m glad that you asked, imaginary other half of this conversation! I forgot that I knew how to play.)

How To Play Checkers, a strategy-free overview: each player starts with three rows of four pieces, all on the same color of space. Taking turns, players move their checkers to one of the forwardly diagonals of the same color; if there’s another piece in the way, you’re stuck, unless it’s your opponent’s and the next space down the line is empty. In that case, your checker can pole-vault themselves over the enemy, gloat and send them to checker jail – that’s how you capture pieces! If you’re really lucky, the space you landed in yields the opportunity to do that again, and you don’t even have to wait for your next turn. Just chain reaction your way down the line! Once a checker reaches the opponent’s back row, it becomes “crowned,” (flipped over to display ridges or wearing another checker as a hat, depending on your set) which means it can now move backwards, too… still only one space at a time, like a pawn that got promoted to branch manager instead of queen.

The game is over when you’ve captured all of your opponent’s pieces, when one of you gives up and surrenders, or, occasionally, when the traffic is so backed up that none of your checkers have anywhere they can legally move.

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Tiddlywinks, Go!

Who’s that- Wait, no, sorry, Tiddlywinks may sound like a Pokémon, but it’s actually another classic game! Where Jacks requires speed and coordination, Tiddlywinks is more focused on aim. And physics, if you want to be technical about it.

As you can see in the picture above, the play mat looks sort of like an archery target if archery targets were smaller, thinner, and laid flat on a horizontal surface. You may also notice that players are seated on corners, not sides, and that we each have a little felt rectangle over our arrows – these are the launchpads from which the “winks” are fired.

Winks are the small, color-coded disks you see scattered across the play area. You turn starts by placing one of these on the felt pad. Then, using a larger disk of the same material and thickness, players press down on the edge of their wink, launching it forward. Once players have alternated their way through all their winks, points are determined by the values of the rings they landed in. The cup in the center is a valid target, and if you manage to get a wink in there it’s 50 points! It’s a challenging angle, though, with a significant potential for overshooting – a lesson we learned the hard way.

There’s definitely a learning curve to the amount of force you use and the angle it’s applied; whether you approach that with physics equations or trial-and-error, it’s a neat new skill to learn! Besides that, the game is quite simple, making it perfect for a lazy afternoon of uncomplicated fun.

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