We’re in Canada! Also quite jetlagged. Andie flaked out pretty early and went to bed, but I powered on through and played a bunch of board and card games before being introduced to Adventure Time (hilarious) and Polar Bear Cafe (also hilarious, but in a completely different way).

We played a few games this evening, including Love Letter, Magical Athlete and Say Anything. All of them are pleasantly lightweight, quick games that can easily be slotted in to an evening, and they’re also particularly friendly to casual players or inexperienced gamers.

Love Letter is an exercise in simplicity. Each of the players are a prospective suitor to the princess, and they’re trying to get their love letter into her hands. The card they have in their hand at any one time represents who has their letter at any given time, and the numerical rank on the card represents how “close” to the princess the love letter is. When the deck — which is made up of just 16 cards — is exhausted or all players except one have been eliminated, the surviving player with the highest-ranked card is declared the winner of that round. Play then repeats until someone has won four rounds.

The interesting part of Love Letter comes in the special effects all the cards have. Each turn, you draw a second card, and you must then “play” one of your two cards by discarding it. Discarding any card causes its effect to occur, and these range from swapping hands with other people to being able to peek at their cards or potentially eliminate them from the current round. As you might expect, the princess card is the strongest if you survive to the end of the game, but if somehow you find yourself having to discard it, you’re immediately eliminated.

It’s a very simple game that is easy to understand, and there’s a surprising amount of hidden depth to it — card-counting, bluffing and working out the best way to pull the wool over the other players’ eyes.

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Magical Athlete, meanwhile, was described to me as “Snakes and Ladders with special powers”, and that’s a fairly apt description. The game unfolds in two phases — firstly, each player must assemble a team of five magical athletes, each of whom have their own special abilities, and secondly, everyone then has to compete in five rounds of roll-and-move racing using a different one of their chosen characters each time. The player with the most points at the end wins.

While roll-and-move games rely heavily on luck, Magical Athlete sidesteps the experience being completely random through the aforementioned special abilities, many of which are designed to either help the owner out, hinder the others, or sometimes both. Many of the abilities are also designed to interact with one another to various degrees, which makes for some interesting encounters. By far the most memorable race we had earlier included the combination of the Siren, who pulls every other player towards her — forwards or backwards — by a single space at the start of her turn; Cupid, who moves forward five spaces any time a male and a female character occupy the same space; and the Pirate, who can “kidnap” any player and bring them back to their space. Consequently, the race became a farce: Siren constantly pulling people onto her space activated Cupid’s power, which meant that Pirate would inevitably pull him back every turn.

It’s a fun game — perhaps light on the strategy, but a lot of entertainment to be had here from simply observing how the different cards interact with one another.

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I think my highlight of the evening had to be Say Anything, though, which has a certain degree in common with Cards Against Humanity, only with dry-wipe markers and less filth provided up-front.

In Say Anything, players take it in turns to read one of several different questions from a card, and the other players must then scrawl an answer on their own personal whiteboard and put it in the middle of the table. The asker then picks their favourite and secretly records their choice, then everyone else bets their two coins on which one they think the asker will pick. Points are then awarded according to whether players bet on the asker’s pick and various other means.

The beauty of Say Anything is that it “scales” to any type of social group — I’m not talking about difficulty or group size, but subject matter. The questions are all fairly “general” and you can literally write anything you want on your whiteboard as an answer — even if it’s not “true”. Like Cards Against Humanity, there’s an element of playing to your “audience” when providing an answer, but unlike that game, there’s no obligation to delve into depravity unless you really want to. Cards Against Humanity is as filthy as you make it to a certain extent, but there’s little denying that a card that reads “Pac-Man uncontrollably guzzling cum” is anything but questionable in nature. There’s nothing stopping you writing exactly the same thing in Say Anything, but equally you’re not forced into the less salubrious side of things unless you want to. This means it can be played with the whole family, as opposed to Cards Against Humanity’s well-deserved “mature” rating.

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I’d write more about all of these but I feel like I’m about to pass out from tiredness/jetlag. So, hello Canada, goodbye U.K. for a couple of weeks — expect updates at strange times for the next two weeks! 🙂