Still working on that patch, just cleaning up the loose ends. In the meantime, here's an update on some Hamumu board game ideas that may or may not ever happen, so you can drop me comments to say what you think of these ideas! All titles are temporary, just what we've come up with offhand.
- Dramedy - A party game where players divide into two teams, and one person from each team goes up to be an actor. The two actors act out a scene together (the scene chosen by combining phrases from cards), and each one has an emotion card which tells them which emotions to be using during the scene. Their team has to shout out what emotion they think they are seeing to earn points. But there's a tricky bit... either actor can yell "Cut!" at any time to end the scene and collect their points (only the one who cuts gets points), so you want to hang on to get more of your emotions guessed, but you also have to cut the scene before your opponent!
- Arthouse - Another party game. Every player but one draws a picture, then they must present it to the one who didn't draw (the Critic), who ranks all the pictures secretly, then auctions them off to the players in a standard bidding system. Then the next player becomes the Critic, and the same thing happens, until everyone has been the Critic once. Then the rankings of pictures are revealed, and the person who has the most critically acclaimed art collection wins! It's a game of guessing how a given Critic will like a given piece, and outbidding your opponents.
- Art Attack - Moving slightly more towards strategy, but still pretty partyesque. Inspired by the previous game, in this game each player gets a hand of cards with things on them such as "Eye Beam - All monsters with two or more eyes fire eyebeams at a chosen target, doing 1 damage for every 4 eyes they have (minimum 1 damage)". They study the hand of cards they're dealt, then have 60 seconds to draw a monster any way they like. Then they all slap their monsters down on the table, have a good laugh, and go around playing their cards in order to hopefully kill the other monsters. The meat of the game lies in the arguments over what exactly is an eye, or whether that whiplike appendage counts as an arm, or especially on some of the more unique cards, questions like "which monster looks the most like it needs glasses?".
- Thanksgiving Dinner - A solitaire game of laying tiles. You draw tiles and place them to create a thanksgiving dinner table and the people sitting at it. You score points by putting people together that would be happy chatting, keeping enemies apart, avoiding lefties bumping elbows with righties, and putting hungry people near the turkey and vegetarians near the salad. Try to beat your high score!
- Allowance - A card game where each player is a kid from the 50's, trying to save up money for the toy you really want during the summer. Which toy that is is drawn from a deck of cards, so one player may need to save up for a bike, while another is just going for a yo-yo. That would be unfair, but the one saving for a bike has much more Motivation, which is the 'currency' you use to bid on chores you're willing to do to earn the money. Other special cards like friends that come over and summer jobs that provide a steady income add to the mix. First person to save up enough for their toy wins... but watch out for Fads, when suddenly everybody wants the newest thing!
- High School - A very unique and fairly abstract game of laying down cards. Each card has a bunch of people on it - Punks, Goths, Nerds, and Jocks. The goal is to make large groups of one type of person - a Clique. But to claim a clique, you need to play a special item adjacent to it: a Switchblade, Skull, Calculator, or Football, depending on the type of Clique. There are also Principals that disrupt Cliques, and Lockers that just take up space. Each Clique also has special bonus point rules, like Jocks are bullies, so you get a bonus point for each Jock in the Clique that neighbors a Nerd.
I haven't test-played any of these games, and most of them don't even have all of their cards designed. I'm really exploring different avenues and ideas, and I can't wait to see what happens this Christmas when I try to get my family to play the two party games. What do you think of them all? There are a bunch of others too, but these are among my favorites, and the ones that are easier to describe (there are a few others I
really like, but they'd just be too hard to explain, given my exceptional verbosity). Later, I'll post complete rules to one of them that can be played with a standard deck of cards. I still have never had a chance to try it, because it requires at least 4 players, so I have no idea if it's even playable, but maybe you'll try it and let me know!
