2345: Keep Talking

0345_001

I went over to my friend Tim’s house this evening for our semi-regular games and food event that we at least attempt to have on a fortnightly basis. Tonight it was just three out of our usual five members, so we spent the evening playing VR games on Tim’s HTC Vive.

The most interesting experience we had was with a game called Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, which I’ve been curious to try for a while. This is a game that doesn’t actually need VR to play, but keeping one player quasi-isolated with a VR headset adds a great deal to the experience and makes it considerably more fun. It’ll be even better when full support for the Vive controllers is added; at present, the room-scale movement works, but you have to interact with it using a standard gamepad.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a party puzzle game in the Spaceteam mould in that it’s asymmetrical in terms of player roles and requires good communication in order to be successful. The player with the VR headset on is faced with a bomb consisting of a number of discrete modules, while all the other players (which can be literally as many as you want) are “experts” telling the VR player what to do. The twist? The “experts” can’t see the bomb, so the VR player has to describe what they see in the hope that the experts can decipher the rather garbled instruction manual and make the correct decisions.

The bombs start off simple with modules such as collections of wires, which require you to read a sequence of logical statements and cut the appropriate wire according to which one is true. There are also buttons that require you to first of all determine a specific condition and then, in some cases, press and release the button with appropriate timing. These are pretty easy to work out and execute.

The more complicated modules range from a memory test that requires you to push buttons according to one of four logical statements, some of which refer to things you did in previous steps, to working out a five-letter password using the available letters in each position to determine what it’s most likely to be from a list of possibilities. Then there’s a more advanced wire-cutting exercise that requires deciphering a ridiculous Venn diagram according to the colour of the wire and whether or not lights and stars are lit up, and a maze that the VR player has to navigate without being able to see where the walls are.

After a little while, it’s possible to “learn” how all these modules work, so at this point the game starts introducing distractions. Initially these are simple: the lights occasionally go off, meaning that you can’t see the bomb (but can still interact with it if you remember what you’re doing), or an alarm clock starts bleeping obtrusively. Later there are so-called “needy modules” on the bomb which can’t be disabled and keep doing inconvenient things during your defusing attempts, so you have to divide your time between taking care of these persistent pests and making progress on the actual disposal effort.

I really liked it as a game. It’s simple and intuitive to play, surprisingly immersive as both the “experts” and as the VR player, and has a real, genuine sense of tension to it all. Some of the modules are pretty difficult to work with — the Morse code one being the worst by far — but what’s a game without challenge?

I’m glad we gave it a go, and I’m looking forward to playing it again sometime soon. If you’re lucky enough to have a VR headset and at least one friend, I recommend grabbing a copy. Even if you don’t have a VR headset, for that matter, it’s worth a play — just make sure your “expert” players can’t see your screen!

#oneaday Day 907: A Party Game for Horrible People

I had my first chance to try out Cards Against Humanity tonight. If you’re unfamiliar with Cards Against Humanity, you can find out more and even print your own copy here.

Cards Against Humanity is a project that was initially funded through Kickstarter last year, but which has since gone on to make its money via direct sales of its core set and expansion. Unusually, though, the game is distributed under a Creative Commons licence, which means you’re free to download and print a copy yourself if you have the appropriate equipment to do so. It also means that you’re free to tweak, change and otherwise mangle it as you see fit so long as you don’t then decide to sell your modified version as an original work. Which is nice.

Cards Against Humanity is a very simple concept. The Onion AV Club described it as “Apples to Apples for the crass and jaded” and indeed the concept is almost identical: each turn, the “card czar” player (which changes every turn) draws a single black card that features a question or fill-in-the-blank phrase — this is the equivalent of Apples to Apples’ green cards — and players then submit a white card, each of which contains a word or phrase that could potentially fit whatever is printed on the black card. The card czar then shuffles them around so they have no idea who submitted what, and then reads them all aloud. After this, they choose which one is “best” by whatever arbitrary criteria they wish, and give the black card to the winning player as an “Awesome Point”. Play then continues until… whatever you like, really. You could play to a score limit, a certain number of cards or, as the game suggests, until the “Make a Haiku” card comes up. The exact rules are deliberately open-ended to encourage experimentation and a feeling of simply having stupid fun rather than rules lawyering. It’s a party game, not SRS BIZNZ.

It’s extremely simple and easy to play, and works with groups of four or more people. While the rules that determine who “wins” a hand are deliberately vague and arbitrary, after a few turns it becomes clear that there is a degree of psychology in play rather than simply everyone rushing to put down whichever card has the word “penis” on it. Does the current card czar find dick jokes funny, or would they rather you tried to do something clever? Would a surreal and incongruous answer make them laugh? Assuring victory is much more than simple luck, and sometimes you need to know when to give up on a hand and just submit your “worst” card for consideration in the hope of getting something better next time.

Cards Against Humanity is gloriously politically incorrect, but only occasionally explicitly obscene. A lot of the dark humour in the game comes from certain combinations of cards and the interpretations thereof rather than cards that are simply outright offensive. That said, there are plenty of white cards that are deliberately provocative — “Firing a rifle into the air while balls-deep in a squealing hog” is one particular favourite — but these are spread throughout more “mundane” offerings to balance things out rather than making the game a tiring journey through everything taboo. There are plenty of amusing pop culture references in the cards, too, though a few are a little too American for international audiences.

Cards Against Humanity is a great party game, then, that deserves to sit alongside titles like Balderdash and Eat Poop, You Cat! as a Fun Thing To Do After (or perhaps Before, depending on how late your host cooks) Dinner. I recommend getting some friends together and giving it a shot yourself as soon as possible, as there was plenty of mirth and merriment tonight, to the extent that one participant (whose blushes I shall spare) laughed so hard their drink came out of their nose.

#oneaday, Day 212: Eat Poop, You Cat!

When you’re in a dinner party kind of situation and the conversation seems to be drifting towards some sort of standstill, there are several things you can do to rectify the situation. You can bring out the “big boys’ alcohol”—the whisky, the brandy, the port, the strong stuff that only ever seems to come out at dinner parties. You can invite everyone to retire to a different room where you can regale them with tales of how you acquired each and every record in your substantial Bavarian folk music collection. If you’re a Cockney, you can gather around the upright piano and have a knees-up. Or you can resort to some sort of game.

Dinner party games aren’t quite the same as “board game night” games. Whipping out a copy of Power Grid or Agricola is inadvisable unless everyone at the dinner table is an avid boardgamer already. No; something that is either quick and easy to play, or something that everyone knows is what is called for. On the “something that everyone knows” front, there are mainstays like Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly and all manner of things like that. The downside to these is that they take quite a long time to play. So that leaves the other alternative: something that is quick and easy.

You could play Hangman. But that’s a bit primary school, as is I Spy. You could play Murder in the Dark, but you can guarantee that someone has forgotten the rules because there is no one person in the world who can remember all the rules to Murder in the Dark. You could play Musical Chairs, but there’s always some killjoy bastard who doesn’t want to get up and dance. (Usually me.)

Or you could play Eat Poop, You Cat!

This is not as sinister as it sounds. In fact, it’s a very simple, quick and easy game to play. All you need are enough pieces of paper and drawing implements as you have participants. The more the merrier, generally, but the optimum number of people is somewhere around six to eight.

This game is very straightforward. There are no winners and losers. It’s purely for fun and entertainment. The way it works is as follows:

1. Everyone around the table writes a short sentence on their piece of paper. For brevity’s sake, you may wish to limit the maximum number of words. But generally someone will go over the limit anyway, so that’s a largely pointless endeavour in most cases.

2. Everyone passes their piece of paper to the person on their left (or right, if you prefer going that way. You big freak.) and the new owner of the paper has to draw a picture representing the sentence.

3. The person who has just drawn a picture folds over the original sentence and passes the paper around again, so the next person can only see the picture.

4. This next person has to write a sentence representing what they think the picture is showing.

5. They then fold over the picture, so the next person can only see the sentence.

6. The process repeats until each piece of paper has gone right around the table and back to its original owner, alternating picture-sentence-picture-sentence.

7. The papers are then unfolded.

8. Hilarity ensues.

Like Chinese Whispers, the game often ends up in a rather different place to where it began. It plays on people’s imaginations and creativity, and it’s pretty rare—and actually fairly undesirable—for people to manage to keep the meaning of the original sentence intact.

There’s a whole website dedicated to this game with some fantastic example playthroughs. I can highly recommend you play it the next time you start boring your dinner party guests. Rather than being remembered as that deathly dull host, you’ll be remembered as a Super Fun Person! Which is good. Unless you really don’t like hosting dinner parties, in which case you may actively wish to bore your guests so much that they never return.