Category: Quick games

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

Monkeys? In a Barrel???

I’ve previously blogged a story by the name Barrel of Monkeys, but not the actual game… which struck me as an oversight, so guess what I’m talking about this week?

Barrel of Monkeys isn’t as old as Jacks, but it’s definitely another classic. Your container is – surprise – a barrel, and the contents are a set of monkeys*, each with arms curling in opposite directions. To play the game, you hold one monkey by its upper arm (Pick a side. Congratulations, that is now the upper side) and hook another monkey’s arm through the first one’s lower. Continue to make a chain in this fashion until something drops! It’s not at all complicated, but for young ones it practices fine motors skills, and even older players may find their arms protesting the static hold. That, and if you have cats they will definitely contribute their own Challenge Mode. If you don’t have cats – or they’re not interested – you can make it harder yourself by combining multiple sets!

While the amount of monkeys in a set varies, the official scoring for multiplayer is has each monkey worth a certain amount of points. When you stop (either because someone fell or because you ran out of monkeys), you score however many monkeys are still on your chain, and the first player to reach the victory condition (points equivalent to completing the full chain) wins. Though as kids, we always just went for “whoever can make the full chain first.” It’s your choice by which rules you play! The objective for single-player is more along the latter lines, as you time yourself making the whole chain and try to be progressively faster.

*Monkeys are not required to play this game. You may alternatively utilize a Barrel of Pterodactyls!

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Ready for some Adorable Pandaring?

This game functions on the principal that while all pandas are cute, only some are Adorable — sacrilege, I know, but for the purpose of gameplay it makes perfect sense! Scoring is governed by the ever-shifting Panda Laws (aka Laws of Adorableness) that dictate which cards are adorable at a given time. There’s ten panda types, numbered, and four laws/categories to divide them into: odd pandas, even pandas, high pandas, and low pandas. The challenge? Having plenty of whichever is currently in style… or changing the Law to fit your hand!

Each player has four cards in hand. On your turn, if scoring conditions haven’t been reached, you’ll play one Panda from your hand face down, ignoring its effect, one face up, which you do resolve, and then you’ll draw back up to four. Panda powers are designated by type, some examples being #8 Cat Panda’s “Change the current Panda Law” and the #10 Party Panda who demands all hidden (face down) pandas be immediately revealed.

To understand the impact of the Party Panda, we need to revisit the beginning of the turn, specifically “if scoring conditions haven’t been reached.” See, the very first thing you do each turn is check the Red Panda in the middle of the table. If its quota of Adorable Pandas has been fulfilled – a number which varies on amount of players – a scoring round takes place. The quota only accounts for pandas that are face up, though, hence the Party Panda’s power!

To be clear, scoring isn’t the end of the game. It’s more of a… resetting intermission. All hidden pandas are revealed (if there are still hidden pandas to reveal), anyone with two or more Adorable Pandas gets one bamboo, and whoever has the most gets a second. The back of a 1-value bamboo is a 2-value bamboo, so just flip it! If there are at least three Banana Pandas in play, those each score a bamboo as well, and then all Adorable Pandas (plus successfully activated Banana Pandas) are reshuffled into the deck. All other pandas remain in play, and the active player chooses a different Panda Law to reign… which they’ll surely use to their advantage, since this all happens before they officially take their turn. Convenient, that!

As for victory, the first player to five bamboo wins the game! This is an pretty quick play, I’d say no more than 15 minutes once you’re familiar with the rules, so it’s great for when you’re short on time.

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Can you Catch The Monkeys?

Catch The Monkeys is one of those games like Tic Tac Toe or Hangman where you can get a printed board, or you can just draw one yourself. You could probably adjust the size as you like for longer or shorter gameplay, but the version I found is an 11×6 array of dots with ten monkeys in between them.

On your turn, you draw a line between two adjacent dots. That’s it! Then the next player draws a line. Simple, right? But also not – whoever completes a box (draws the fourth line to make a one-unit square) puts their initial inside it. Regardless of who drew the other three lines, the player who finished it gets the point! While normal boxes are worth one point, boxes with monkeys in them are worth five, and when all squares are drawn whoever has the most points wins.

Catch The Monkeys definitely isn’t hard to learn, but the strategy that goes into it will get you thinking. If deceptively strategic games are your cup of tea, you might want to give this a try! All you need is paper, a writing utensil and someone to play with.

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What’s behind The Secret Door?

Combining spatial recall and luck with teamwork, The Secret Door is a cooperative rendition of the classic Memory matching game. In this version, players are detectives trying to determine which three Valuables are behind the Secret Door, using process of elimination… and they’re up against the clock!

Like Memory, there are two of each Valuable, ranging from a treasure map to a statue to a stack of cash. However, unlike Memory, three of these are chosen at random and hidden under the Secret Door, and the rest are shuffled in with the twelve Time Cards before being laid out face-down on the board.

Once it’s all set up, players take turns revealing two cards. Any Time Cards discovered are set face-up along the top of the board, while matching pairs of Valuables go to the Vault at the bottom. Mismatched Valuables are then returned to face-down before the next player’s turn. Try to remember what’s where!

If you have enough paired Valuables in the Vault that you think you know which ones are missing, you can (collectively) decide to make your deduction and check it against the cards under the Secret Door. You only get one guess, though, so use it wisely!

If the twelfth Time Card is revealed, the game ends immediately. Time’s up! You’ll have to take your chances now, regardless of how far from a definitive conclusion you are. How many of the hidden Valuables can you guess right anyways? We seem to have a 2/3 trend, whenever time isn’t on our side. (Or is on our side… of the board. The photographed game above somehow had Time Cards on all three spaces of the astronomy tower, which was a very disappointing couple turns.)

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Captain Carcass

The name certainly invokes a sense of foreboding, doesn’t it? This game isn’t actually about dead bodies, but the suspense is well deserved, because Captain Carcass is a press-your-luck game! And like all luck games, there’s no knowing when yours will run out.

There are 10 suits in the deck. The lowest value cards of each are placed in Davy Jones’ Locker, while the rest are shuffled to form the Loot Deck. On your turn, you’ll draw these face-up into the Exploration Area, choosing each time whether to press your luck or Return to the Surface and empty the Exploration Area into your Hold. But wait! Each suit has its own Effect, and you have to resolve the card you’ve just drawn before you decide whether to keep going. Some of these are extremely helpful – for instance, the Anchor safeguards everything you drew before it, so even if you dive too deep, some of the loot is yours. Others, like the Giant Squid, are much more inconvenient… the Giant Squid forces you to place two more cards in the Exploration Area before you can choose to return to the surface.

A Diving Incident is triggered when you draw a suit you already have in the Exploration Area. Instead of relocating to your Hold, the whole lot goes to the Locker! (Listen, it’s a luck game. Sometimes, you were greedy and went for a seventh card. Sometimes, your first card was a Giant Squid, your second, Squid-mandated card was also a Giant Squid, and fortune is just not in your favor today.)

The game ends when the last card of the Loot Deck is revealed and that player concludes their turn. Scoring in this game is interesting: instead of adding all the points in your Hold, only the highest value card of each suit is counted. Add ’em up, and whoever has the most points wins!

Once you’ve got the hang of the core game, there are also some optional additions. There are Variant cards, which offer alternative rules surrounding gameplay or scoring – one such example is Over Troubled Waters, which triggers Incidents by matching value rather than suit. These help to keep the game fresh and new, even if you’ve played several times. The other optional set is Diver cards. Each player gets one, and with it, a special ability that changes the Effect of some suit. (Unless you’re playing the Saboteur, in which case your ability is bound to another person instead.) Some suits have multiple variations, such as The Romantic (1) and The Romantic (2) – the first draws Mermaids straight into their Hold instead of the Exploration area, and the second gets bonus points for having at least one Mermaid at the end of the game. If there’s any suit overlap between players when the Divers are dealt, the duplicates are simply discarded and replaced.

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Have You Heard The Word(le)?

I know, I know, it seems like everyone is talking about Wordle lately. But hey, there’s a reason for that! That reason being that it’s actually pretty neat.

For anyone who doesn’t know what Wordle is, here are the basics: you get six attempts to guess a five-letter word. Your guess has to be a real word, and when you hit enter its letters are color-coded as grey (not in the word), yellow (in the word, but not where you put it), and green (yup, that’s where that goes). Unless you’re using Color Blind Mode, in which case those are still-grey, blue, and orange; I think it’s neat that they have a high-contrast option!

There are also statistics, so you can see how many times you’ve played, what percentage of those you’ve successfully guessed, your max streak, current streak, and, my favorite, guess distribution: how many times you got it in one try, two tries, three, and so forth.

It’s not a particularly complicated game, and I think that’s a lot of the appeal, as well as the fact that there’s only one word per day – it’s a fun mental challenge that doesn’t take a lot of time, and you don’t fall prey to the compulsion of doing more because… well, there isn’t more to do. Not today, anyway! (There’s actually a Dork Tower strip about that, here. The previous and following are also Wordle-related, because John Kovalic knows what’s up.)

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Tacocat! (Spelled Backwards!)

Tacocat Spelled Backwards is a simple two player game that’s quick to learn and, surprisingly, has nothing to do with spelling — though you should definitely read the palindromes on the cards anyways. Along with the wild wordplay, the box actually is the board, which I think is awesome; all you have to do is empty it, leave it open, and voila! the hinge of the lid is now your starting space.

But on to the actual game! First off, Tacocat starts in the middle of the board, on the letter O. The space Tacocat is on determines how many cards you draw and who leads the discard phase; for the first round, you start with 7 cards and can discard as many as you want, drawing to replace them. For future rounds, who discards first is indicated by the arrow on Tacocat’s space, and the other player may only discard up to as many cards as their opponent did.

Who goes first each round is determined by a duel: both players choose a card and reveal them at the same time, and whoever played the higher value card attacks first. (If it’s a tie, discard those cards and duel again.) Attacking is done by playing another card from your hand, which your opponent must either defend against – play a card of equal or higher value, in which case they’ll get to attack next – or sacrifice their lowest value card, which means you get to attack again.

Once you’re each down to one card left, compare them; whoever has the lower value card wins the round. (These ties go to the arrow’s favored.) Tacocat moves one space towards the winner, the previous space is covered with a (palindrome-infused) tile, indicating that it is no longer an available space for Tacocat to move to, and the deck is reshuffled for the next round. The only exception is if Tacocat has landed on the “Wow” or “Yay” end spaces – congratulations to the player on that side, because they’ve just won!

The first time we played this, Mom mentioned of the tile mechanic that “There’s no such thing as getting an early lead, because it can go either way each round,” and personally I think that’s one of its selling features; there’s always the chance for a comeback. Additionally, there are some advanced rules that let you attack with multiple cards at once, but we haven’t actually played with those yet.

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Caves & Claws

Caves & Claws is a cooperative board game, marketed for kids but fun for anyone. The premise – much like Quetzal, actually – is that you’re archaeologists trying to recover ancient artifacts.

First, you lay out the board. This is actually part of gameplay – from a shuffled set of path tiles, players take turns drawing one and setting it in their choice of orientation on an open space, until all spaces are filled. There are four spaces that don’t get paths: the two Temples in the middle of the board, and the two Caves on opposite corners. These are the Gathering Places, which will each have a face down pile of cards, four on each Cave and five on each Temple. The goal of path placement is to have as many routes between these spaces as possible, as well as at least one path leading off the edge of the board.

Next comes the part where you actually look for the artifacts. Starting from one of those entrance paths, each player will bring their pawn onto the board and into one of the Gathering Places, where they flip over the top card there (you can choose not to, but functionally, there’s little point in not). This card will be either a Treasure that you place on the Tent, or a Danger, in which case it blocks one of the open paths into that Gathering Place. If there are multiple open paths, you get to choose which one to block; this is no longer a viable route into or out of that space.

Finding yourself trapped? Don’t worry – the team has five Remedies that you can use to remove Dangers. This is done before you move, and both the Remedy and the Danger are set aside as out of the game. Be careful which Remedies you use, though, because they each only work on certain Dangers! There are also a few Dangers you don’t technically need Remedies to escape. These are the Door, the Tree, and the Boulder, which each have a gap you can squeeze through… at the expense of a Treasure already found.

Once you have all eight Treasures, have gotten all the Treasures minus those you sacrificed to escape, or have decided that collecting any more is too dangerous, all pawns exit the board through an unobstructed path off, and your rate of success is determined by how many Treasures you successfully recovered. Didn’t get them all? What can you do differently next time? On the flip side: was that too easy? Try playing with fewer Remedies! Or if you’re feeling really dangerous, no Remedies at all!

This game is great because it’s short, simple and adjustable in difficulty level… and who wouldn’t have fun scaring off monsters with Broccoli?

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It Seems There’s Been A MixUp

Have you ever thought maybe Connect Four needed a remix? Well someone definitely did, because they invented MixUp!

MixUp a little more complicated than regular Connect Four — instead of having two colors of pieces, one for each player, it has three colors (blue, green, and red) in a mix of three shapes (moon, lightning, and raindrop), which both players are free to use.

At the start of the game, the players choose their objectives – one will be aiming for four in a row of the same color, while the other will be trying to do the same with shapes. (For anyone not familiar with Connect Four, this is done by taking turns dropping one tile to the bottom of its column, wherever that may currently be, until one of you makes an unbroken line of four in any direction.) The result of this is that victory conditions are no longer in direct conflict, so something your opponent placed may become the key to your success, especially if you’d both forgotten that two-by-two squares are a valid victory condition in this version of the game. Whoops. On the flip side, it’s a lot easier to miss when someone’s getting close to winning. (I staged the above game for photo purposes by playing against myself; I was legitimately trying to strategize for both sides, and set up an amazing ‘whichever spot you block, I’ll win with the other’ situation… completely by accident. It was wild.)

All in all, I think the MixUp mechanics make Connect Four much more interesting; just be aware that it’s more challenging, too.

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Tenzi!

Tenzi is a fun dice game, with flexible rules to be as simple or complicated as you’d like! In the base version, each player gets a set of 10 dice (hence the name). For the first roll, someone will count it down and everyone will roll at once; looking at their roll, they’ll pick a number to target, usually the one they rolled the most of, and set aside all the dice with that number rolled. Afterwards, they pick up all the remaining dice and roll again! This is a speed game, so you don’t have to wait for the other players. The first person to roll their chosen number on all of their dice shouts (or exclaims at a reasonable volume) “Tenzi!” and wins.

As I mentioned before, there are several variations on this. There’s Target Tenzi, where instead of picking your number after you roll, you declare it ahead of time (either individually, or you can have everyone go for the same number), Splitzi, where you instead of ten the same, you roll for five and five of two numbers, Mega Tenzi, where you each have twenty dice instead… though that only works for two-player or solo play. “Solo play?” you ask, “But it’s a competition! How do you do that with one player?” Well, the rules also have Timed Tenzi, with a guideline for your rank depending on how long it takes you to win!

I’ve never played these variants, but the rules also outline Team Tenzi – your team can all go for the same number, or different ones, your choice-, Tenzi Tower, where instead of just setting aside your successful rolls, you have to stack them, and the one I’m most intrigued by, Stealthzi. By Stealthzi rules, if you see another player roll the number you’re going for, you can steal those dice, giving them an equal number of yours in return. The only constraints on this are that you can’t steal on the first roll of the game, nor can you steal from someone going for the same number as you.

Of course, you can also come up with your own versions. We play one that the creators would probably have named Sumzi, where we choose a number, and only set aside dice that add up to it. So we might say 7, and then set aside a five and a two, or a six and a one, or a three and a four. I imagine you could also take out the speed factor, if you wanted to, having it so everyone always rolls together, and whoever hits the goal in the least amount of rolls wins.

Whatever you choose, there are plenty of options to keep gameplay fun and fresh. And if you really want to get crazy, there’s also Twisted Tenzi, aka ‘mix ‘n match your favorites for even more dice-borne chaos!’

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