Board Game Friday: The Twelve New-to-Me Games I was Supposed to Play Over the Holidays (Plus Six I Actually Did Play)

Back before Christmas, I listed twelve games that I was excited to try for the first time over the holidays.  Now that the holidays are in the rear view mirror, I thought it might be fun to circle back and see what happened with the various games.

As I said, I listed a dozen games that I had interest in playing but (as expected) a large number of them did not get played.  In fact, the following games went unplayed:

• Frosthaven
• Food Chain Magnate
• Belfort
• Apex
• Great Western Trail
• Dinosaur Island Rawr 'n Write
• Dinosaur World
• Intrepid

Yep, eight of the twelve games on the list went unplayed.  Of the eight games above, realistically only Dinosaur World, Great Western Trail, and Apex probably had a shot at getting played.  The holidays were a busy time!

With the failures out of the way, how about the games I did manage to get to the table?

Green Team Wins:

I played this with my wife, brother, sister, brother-in-law, and my mother one evening during the holiday season (we also played another game that comes next on this list during that same gaming session).  Green Team Wins is basically a party game where you try to get onto the Green Team (since it always wins) and stay on the Green Team.  Mess up, you go to the Orange Team (and you don't win while on Orange).  The game sounds better than it is...we found it too mindless, even for a party game.  Whenever I decide to purge some games from my collection, this will be one of the easier ones to let go of, that's for sure.

*Update*  In between the time I wrote this post and the time the post went live on my blog, I decided to list Green Team Wins on eBay (and it sold in a matter of hours)!  Happy to have a bit of shelf space opened back up, plus some money to buy a new game at some point in the not-so-distant future.

Just One:

The other game we played during the same game night.  For all the "meh" that is Green Team Wins, the game Just One is awesome!  Basically, it's another party game but here you have one person who has to guess a word based on single-word clues from everyone else at the table.  However, the gimmick is that people come up with their clue privately and then the clues are all compared, any duplicate clues are thrown out and then the person guessing can only see clues that were given by "just one" person around the table.

For example, if the word to be guessed was "Volcano" people might write "hot," "lava," or even "Vesuvius" but if two people write "lava" and two others write "Vesuvius" then the person guessing will only get one word to help them (the word "hot" which I doubt will result in a guess of volcano)!  It's simple to explain, but has enough thinking in it to keep a table full of family members engaged long after dinner!

Fun Facts:

The third party game that I bought for the holidays - and the third one that we got to the table.  In fact, we played this one first as I was expecting it might be the best of the three.  In this game, you basically get a question where you need to give a rank for yourself.  Then, as a group, you try to arrange everyone's name in order from lowest to highest.  We found the game fun (though I did go through and eliminate some of the "mean/bad/boring" cards prior to us playing.  That said, it wasn't a game that people asked to play over and over (unlike Just One).  For now, this game will stay in my collection as it is a decent party game but I could see better options coming along eventually to replace this one too.

Keep the Heroes Out:

The one non-party game on my original list that I did get to the table and let me say, I loved this one!  It's a cooperative game where you control the monsters in a dungeon that is being invaded by heroes.  The goal of the game is to keep your main treasure chest safe and away from the invading heroes - do that for two cycles through the hero deck and you win.  Fail, and you lose.  

This game is great because you can play it at multiple difficulty levels.  On the "family" mode, I think the game is easy enough that I'm going to try and teach my four-year-old to play soon.  However, bump up even one difficulty level and all of the sudden you have a much, much tougher game (in fact, we never beat the first scenario on the middle difficulty level).  I have no idea how hard the highest difficulty must be but I imagine eventually I'll be playing at that level!

While that does it for my original list, I didn't want you to think that I didn't play much else.  In fact, in December alone I played a total of 44 game sessions (spread across 16 different games).  I had the chance to try a few other games for the first time including:

• Dinosaur Exhibit
• Galaxy Trucker
• Splendor Duel
• Tiny Epic Galaxies
• Unmatched:  Jurassic Park - Dr. Sattler vs. T. Rex
• Wingspan

Of those, I really liked Unmatched and Tiny Epic Galaxies.  Dinosaur Exhibit was a hit with my son (and fun enough for adults to play).  Galaxy Trucker was silly fun, Splendor Duel was alright (not sure if it's better than OG Splendor), and Wingspan was exactly what I thought it would be (fairly easy but beautiful looking board game).  

This is the second Friday in a row on the blog that ended up being board game themed.  Maybe I should try and make that a regular thing this year?  Let me know in the comments what you think about some board game commentary here at Nachos Grande!  I certainly have enough games to talk about to fill up a year's worth of Friday posts!