Overthinking by the Yellow Meeple:- Top Ten Party Games

Party games are not a genre that we are typically drawn to in our household, so we don't own that many. However, there are actually many occasions when we use these games. I typically find them to be a hit when introducing non-gamers to board games, before moving on to something bigger and more complex. We can enjoy them with my parents and when you have a large group they're sometimes the only genre that works.

Even though we don't own all of the titles that will be in the list, we've played many of them multiple times with friends or at board game cafes. So here's my top 10 recommendations for party games that aren't only for a party setting.

Thoughts from The Yellow Meeple:- Delve

Game: Delve

Publisher: Indie Boards and Cards

Designer: Richard Launius, Pete Shirey

 
Year: 2017



Delve is a competitive tile-laying game for 2-4 players which throws in a small story-telling element. Each player is takes a fantasy themed team of adventurers and you are all exploring a cave or dungeon and dropping of members of your delving team to try and obtain the gold and tresures that lie within, guarded by different monsters and characters.

Each player takes a team of delvers, each with slightly different fighting abilities. You have a hand of three room tiles and on your turn, you choose to take one and add it to the dungeon with the only placement rule being that you cannot block off the black corridors. You can place one adventurer token onto a room on the tile you placed. If you finish a room then it 'scores'.

I'm going deeper underground:- Delve

Game: Delve

Publisher: Indie Boards and Cards

Designer: Richard Launius, Pete Shirey

Year: 2017

Delve is a 2-4 player tile laying game where you control a group of delvers seeking to enter a dungeon and loot as much treasure as they can get their grubby hands on. You’ll have to fight off the resident monsters of the dungeon of course, but you’ll also have to fight other groups of delvers who don’t seem to understand the idea of “finders keepers”.

You start the game with a choice of 3 tiles in your hand and one of the 4 delver teams, each comprising of 5 tokens. Each turn you will place a tile, decide whether to place a delver on one of the rooms in your placed tile, and the draw a new tile to replace your used one. Play continues this way until a room is completed at which point one of two things happens. If you were the only player in that room then an opponent draws an event card, reads its story and presents you with a choice. Each event has 2 options, typically one of which results in success, but requiring a roll off, the other in either lessened success or failure. However if there was another player in the room then instead all of your present delvers fight their team, the winner taking the lion’s share of the treasure. At the end of the game the person with the most gold wins.

The Yellow Meeple's First Impressions:- 7th - 22nd September 2017

As you can see - this blog will include two weeks of first impressions, including some games I played whilst exploring board games cafes in Winnipeg, Canada. My new job has recently got very, very busy and we just aren't getting the chance to play new games very often. However, who needs to play lots of new games when you find one that you can see becoming a new favourite? Mainly we've been playing some of our older games, but here's the Yellow Meeple's first impressions;

Thoughts from The Yellow Meeple:- Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

Game: Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

Publisher: USAopoly

Designer: Forrest-Pruzan Creative, Kami Mandell, Andrew Wolf

 
Year: 2016

Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle is the first real hobby game I’m aware of with the Harry Potter Intellectual Property. It was released by USAopoly and is currently only available in North America. This exclusivity is part of what peaked my interesting, as well as the deck-building mechanics in the game. Luckily there is a UK company who must’ve imported a huge order and a number of lucky people in the UK got a copy, myself included. I have noticed that it is now appearing for wider preorder in the UK on a number of sites, including Zatu Games, where we are now part of the blogging team.

Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle is a co-operative deck-building game for 1-4 players, where each of you plays one of the main characters from the books and one of you plays Neville. Together you take on villains before each location in the game is overrun by evil forces. One of the elements that I find exciting about the game is that each of the 7 years at Hogwarts has a box full of new components and rules that you open before you start a new year. I won’t give major spoilers, but if you read the rest of this review you’ll get some hints about what’s inside those boxes.

Draw a card, any card:- Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

Game: Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

Publisher: USAopoly

Designer: Forrest-Pruzan Creative, Kami Mandell, Andrew Wolf

 
Year: 2016

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is a 2-4 player cooperative deckbuilding game in which you play as one of the 4 main Harry Potter characters (well... 3 main, and Neville), and attempt to survive the 7 years of schooling that Hogwarts provides. Hogwarts Battle is progressive, with every game you complete you open up a new box that contains more cards and mechanics for your next game.

A quick word on spoilers; I’m going to try and keep this as spoiler free as possible, but I consider anything in the year 1 box (ie your first game) to be non-spoilery. In addition if the game board makes something ridiculously obvious that it could happen then I’ll also consider it fair game.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is, at its core, a run of the mill deck builder, you’ll start with a deck of not very good cards that give you a little bit of influence, you’ll spend that influence to get better cards and then those better cards will let you actually win the game. However the game board does add a twist to this basic gameplay. As you play through a mission you will have locations that you are fighting in, these form a mini deck which can be depleted if too many villain control tokens gets added to them. Villain control is largely generated by the dark arts deck, which you have to draw from at the start of every round, but can also be generated by anyone running out of health. If the last location in the deck is filled with villain control tokens then you lose the game.

Thoughts from the Yellow Meeple:- Ticket to Ride Germany

Game: Ticket to Ride Germany

Publisher: Days of Wonder

Designer: Alan R. Moon
 
Year: 2017

Ticket to Ride Germany first caught our eye at the UK Games Expo 2017. Seeing the Ticket to Ride map covered in passenger meeple was new to us, although I have heard that the passengers were a feature in Ticket to Ride Marklin -  a version of the game that is now longer in print. The German language game appears to have been around for a couple of years, so it’s interesting to see it hit wider distribution although I wonder if it has the legs to really take off as a new base game on the shelves of game stores outside Germany. We’ve played a number of times with two players and also introduced the game to my mum, who has played Ticket to Ride Europe with us before, and here are my thoughts.

All aboard the number nein:-Ticket to Ride Germany

Game: Ticket to Ride Germany

Publisher: Days of Wonder

Designer: Alan R. Moon
 
Year: 2017

Ticket to Ride Germany is a 2-5 player standalone version of the Ticket to Ride game series set in Germany. While it follows the same formula of set collection to claim routes to complete tickets, it also adds in a couple of new rules not seen in the original, while keeping the gameplay simple enough to be taught quickly. The new passenger system makes the game that much more tactile to play  and rewards what were previously sub-optimal strategies.

Ticket to Ride Germany is a game with very quick turns, as every turn you get 1 action. This action can be taking new train cards from either the 5 on display, or blind off the top of the deck. Alternatively you can use these train cards in coloured sets to claim routes, each route needs a certain number of trains in a specific colour and rewards you with points based on the length. When you claim a route you place your plastic train pieces along it to mark it as yours, each route can only have 1 player’s trains on it. In addition you get to take a passenger meeple from each city your new route connects. The final option is to take new tickets, tickets give you points if you successfully connect the two cities on the card with your train routes, however they penalise you for failing to connect them by the end of the game.

The Yellow Meeple's First Impressions:- 31st August - 6th September 2017

After a huge pile of new arrivals in recent weeks I actually feel like we're making respectable progress on our shelf of shame, as well as making some tough decisions to sell or trade a few games out of our collection. It's been a mixed bag this week in terms of the new games we've enjoyed and not enjoyed so much, so here's the Yellow Meeple's first impressions;

Thoughts from the Yellow Meeple:- Codenames Duet

Game: Codenames Duet

Publisher: Czech Games Edition

Designer: Vlaada Cvatil & Scot Eaton

 
Year: 2017

Codenames is the massive hit party game that won last years Spiel des Jahres award and is being brought out in multiple different versions following it's broad appeal and popularity. The most recent addition to the line is Codenames Duet, which is a two player implementation of the original game. Codenames has been really popular within our friendship groups, with my work gaming groups and even with my non-gamer parents, but it's always been about having a fun experience with a larger group of people, so how successfully has this been transferred to a 2-player experience?

Fi's Mum's First Impressions of Ticket to Ride: Germany

I've invited my mum to write a guest blog for The Game Shelf...She wanted to call it "Thoughts from the Menopausal Meeple" - let me know if you think this sounds like a catchy name?

I really appreciate that she's happy to play games with us when she visits and it was great to introduce her to something new. So, here are Gill's (un-edited) thoughts on Ticket to Ride: Germany after her first play!

Double the agent:- Codenames Duet

Game: Codenames Duet

Publisher: Czech Games Edition

Designer: Vlaada Cvatil & Scot Eaton

 
Year: 2017

Codenames Duet is a 2 player card game in which you play as members of a spy agency attempting to contact their sleeper agents, while avoiding assassins sent to hunt them down. Codenames Duet plays much like the original Codenames, but instead of 2 groups competing against each other you have 2 players who must work as a team to find all the agents. To make things more complicated there are 3 assassins on the board and you’ll be working to a strict time limit of guesses.

As in the original game you are presented with 25 words of which you have to guess from. Each player has a private grid that dictates which of the words are agents that have to be guessed, which of the words are clueless bystanders, and which are assassins who kill you should you alert them to your presence. Each turn you have to give your partner a 2-part clue, one word and one number. The word should be a link between words on the grid that are agents, while the number is the number of words that need to be guessed. Your partner then guesses as many words as they like 1 by 1, if they guess an agent you cover the word with a  green agent card and may continue guessing, if it’s an assassin then the game ends as a loss. At any time they can stop guessing and take one of the green checkmark tokens, alternatively if they guess a bystander then their turn ends immediately and they place a bystander token on it. These tokens are double sided with each other and act as an in game timer, with each passing turn you’ll be taking one token or the other.

The Yellow Meeple's First Impressions:- 21st - 30th August 2017

It's been a challenge to try new games this week because we had my parents visiting for the long weekend. They're happy to play games, but prefer something simple and it's definitely best if we teach a game that we know inside out and aren't looking at a rulebook whilst they're becoming impatient at the table. We were actually so bus sorting out new board game shelves and new shelves for our retro video game collection that we hardly played anything over the weekend. Nevertheless, I have a few games to talk about, so, here are the Yellow Meeple's first impressions;