Day 12 — 4 Tabletop Games I Bought This Year that You Should Try
Hey there! I’m Rob Keleher, an American living in Tokyo and working as a front-end software developer for HENNGE!
For this year’s 🎄 HENNGE Advent Calendar 🎄 blog post, I was tempted to write a continuation of my etymological deluge from last year. (Look forward to a follow-up post of that nature sometime later!) However, this year, I’ve been leaning into a new obsession that I’d rather write to you about: playing (and ultimately buying) new board and card games 🎲.
Every Wednesday night at HENNGE, we hold a Board Game Night where any of our colleagues can gather after work to eat dinner and play a few hours of games together. When we are working remotely, we sometimes play online versions of these games together instead. Either way, the games we choose are usually easy-to-medium difficulty “tabletop” games — that is, board games and card games — or even party games like Jackbox or Gartic Phone when we’re online. We even have a huge collection of games at the office that HENNGE employees have provided from their own personal collections.
Our Board Game Nights are a great opportunity not only to socialize with my colleagues and guests but also to learn about games that I haven’t played before. In the past year, I’ve been introduced to some great games, so much so that I had to buy some for myself. I also enjoy teaching others how to play games, so I thought I might teach you all about some games I’ve gotten into this year!
Here, in no particular order, are some games I think you should try out. References to the popular tabletop game info site Board Game Geek are included below with each game.
1. Cat in the Box
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If you’ve ever played a trick-taking card game like Hearts or Spades with a standard deck of cards, you’ll take quickly to this game, which takes the structure of those games a quantum leap further.
Touting itself as a “quantum trick-taking game”, this game uses 4 colored suits (red, green, blue, and yellow) and cards numbered 1 through 9.
But there’s a twist: the cards in your hand actually have no suit at all — until you play them. You get to decide the suit of a card as you play it from your hand.
Players keep track of what has already been played with a colored board and tokens. Once a player claims a color with their numbered card, no other player can choose that number & color combination for the rest of the round. (E.g., if a red 3 was already played this round, I can’t assign “red” to the 3 in my hand; I’m forced to choose another color.)
To make things spicier, there are 5 copies of every black card in the deck, but only 4 color suits to assign them to. If you are forced to play a card but no colors are left for it, it causes a “paradox” that immediately ends the round and scores negative points for that unlucky player.
The name of the game and the gameplay are references to the famous quantum thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat, which involves a theoretical cat in a box. (See the relation?) If you’re not familiar with the concept, here’s my oversimplified attempt to sum it up:
Put a cat in a box and close the lid. After a while passes, can you really be sure that the cat is still alive without looking into the box to check (or otherwise interacting with it)? Quantum theory states that the cat could be both alive and dead at the same time, and only when you observe it can you know its final state — either 100% alive or 100% dead.
So it goes with the black cards in your hands. In your hand, the cards simultaneously have all colors at once. Only when you play them and players observe the cards, do they obtain their single color.
Other than the above, gameplay follows the rules of Hearts, with an extra bonus included if you match the bet that you made at the beginning of the round.
2. Scout
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Oink Games is a Tokyo-based indie game producer that I’ve only recently learned about. They’ve produced a plethora of small-boxed, card or tile-based games that are available for purchase in stores and online. Better yet, they produce Japanese, English, and German versions of most of their games. Gameplay is usually short and can involve several players. And their games don’t take too long to learn.
Many of their games are worth checking out, but I want to highlight Scout as one I’ve gotten into the most. The premise of this game doesn’t directly relate to gameplay, but is still enjoyable.
Each player acts as a competing ringmaster, trying to put on the best circus show around. You and your rivals are constantly scouting performers from each other, trying to build up the best act that can’t be beaten by the other players. If no one can beat your best show, gameplay ends, and your rivals get negative points for the remaining cards in their hands while you get to brag about your great performance 🎪.
An interesting gimmick of this game has to do with card handling. Each card acts as a circus performer with two skills, represented by two numbers written in opposite orientations on the cards. Your goal is to make sets of performers that can outperform others by following poker-esque rules of trumping. For example, a set of cards [2][2] beats [1][1]. But [1][2][3] beats [2][2], because three cards are more than two. And [1][1][1] beats
[1][2][3] because three-of-a-kind is stronger than cards that are in order.
The other interesting gimmick is that, as a rule, you can’t rearrange or reorient your cards! Your hand must stay in the order and orientation you started with. The only way you can alter your hand is by scouting other cards from the center of the table and inserting them in your desired position/orientation, or by playing sets of cards from your hand.
Gameplay goes around in a circle, and on your turn you either play a set of cards in the center (“perform a show”), or you scout 1 card from the set that was played by another player. Aim to make a super strong set of cards like [1][2][3][4][5][6] and outperform your opponents!
3. Regicide
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This is a fun (and difficult to win!) collaborative card game where you act as commoners trying to usurp and defeat evil royalty (4 Jacks, 4 Queens, and 4 Kings). It adds a novel twist to the standard suits of cards by assigning special powers to them. ♥️ Heart cards are healing cards; ♦️ Diamond cards let you draw from the deck; ♠️ Spade cards reduce your opponent’s attack power; ♣️ Club cards do double damage.
The great thing about this game is that you can play it with a standard deck of playing cards — no purchase necessary! However, if you’d like to support the game makers or enjoy their lovely card art, you can purchase an official deck of Regicide cards here.
Even if you use your own deck of cards, there is a free assist app for smartphones that I definitely recommend using to help you keep track of your score and gameplay.
Your goal is to defeat all 12 royal cards before dying yourself. As a team of players, if any one of you can’t defend against a royal attack, the whole team loses. You play normal cards (cards numbered 2 to 10) and attack the royal card with the strength of your number, applying any special powers; if the royal card survived, it has a chance to attack you. You must defend their attack by discarding your own cards. If you defeat the royal, you move on to the next one.
For example, I could play a 6 of Diamonds card against a Jack of Hearts. My card would do 6 damage to the Jack and also allow the players to draw 6 cards from the deck with its special Diamond power.
After defeating a royal card, you can eventually recruit them to work for your team to help bring down the stronger royals. Also, killing a royal card with exact damage (i.e. not overkilling it) will result in you being able to recruit them to your side quickly, so try to aim for exact damage as much as possible!
This might sound a bit complicated for a card game, but the companion app really simplifies gameplay a lot by doing the attack math for you. The success rate for winning is also a bit low, but that makes the times you do win feel all more satisfying 😁🔪.
4. Wingspan
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Wingspan is well known at this point and has gained major popularity among tabletop gamers. (There is also an online version available on Steam and other platforms!) It’s an engine-building game with a bird theme using information about hundreds of actual birds. The base game starts out with North and South American birds, but there are expansion packs available to add birds from other regions.
Players play the role of ornithologists (people who study birds) who are trying to gather the most / best birds for their habitats. Each bird has its own characteristics (how many eggs it lays, what kind of nest it lives in, its point value, where it lives, etc.), and many of them have special powers as well.
The more birds you have in habitats on your board, the more resources of a certain type you can claim. But the game is very well balanced, and there are many ways to achieve victory. The winner of the game is determined by how many total points they have at the end, which includes any stretch goal bonuses, the number of eggs they’ve accumulated, the point values of the birds they’ve played, and so on.
Gameplay can take about 90 minutes and is relatively independent, even though it goes in rounds around the game table. Watching which way your opponents are strategizing and choosing a competing path may help you clinch victory in this game!
Honorable Mention: Katakanashi (カタカナーし)
I included this game as a bonus in this list because it requires some Japanese comprehension to play — I recommend it specifically for Japanese language learners!
This game’s name is a pun, which means “without katakana words.” For those who aren’t aware, katakana are simpler symbols in the Japanese writing system that are used to write foreign loanwords, names of people and places, etc. Basically, things and concepts that are not of Japanese origin. They’re often learned first when studying Japanese, which makes this game somewhat accessible to new language learners.
The gameplay is similar to Taboo. Your goal is to get the rest of the players to guess your katakana word — for example, “hot dog” (ホットドッグ) — by describing it in Japanese, but without using the word itself or any other katakana words. That means you can’t say words like America (アメリカ), bread (パン), game (ゲーム), stadium (スタジアム)… It forces you to flex your Japanese skills to describe the concept in unusual ways! This would be an acceptable prompt:
米国に野球の試合でよく食べる食べ物です。手で食べる。肉が入っています。
A food often eaten at baseball matches in the USA. You eat it with your hand. There is meat inside.
The first person to guess your clue correctly gets a point, as do you for successfully describing your concept. But if someone notices you using a katakana word, you’re caught! That person gets a point instead, and gameplay moves to the next person.
Whether or not a word is written with katakana is mostly thought about when writing, not when speaking, and so even native Japanese speakers will find this game’s premise both challenging and amusing!
In Closing
I hope the above explanations have inspired you to try out some new tabletop games if not these ones!
If you are living in Japan and looking for games, the chain hobby store Yellow Submarine (Japanese link) should have all of the ones I’ve listed above and more! Some of the games above are also available at Loft department stores (Japanese link).
Games like Cat in the Box, Scout, and Regicide are not language-specific, so you should be able to play those games if bought from brick-and-mortar stores in Japan. However, games like Wingspan that feature a lot of text are usually only in stock in their Japanese versions here 😿, so you may want to opt for buying them on the internet / shipped from abroad.
If you’re living outside of Japan, translated versions of the above games (except Katakanashi 😅) are usually available for purchase online, if they exist!
Thanks for reading and happy game-playing!
Check out other 2023 HENNGE Advent Calendar articles here.
