Holiday hibernation always leads to game recs.
🎲Left Center Right (1 min video)
This game is pure degeneracy and takes less than a minute to learn. Asian grandmas and 5-year-olds alike will lose their minds over it. Huge party hit this holidays. It’s actually an old game, but new to me. It has zero skill so when I heard how it works I immediately poo poo’d it but playing it in a group of 15 for a little cash is amazing.
If you want to make it skillful just create an open outcry side-market on who the winner is. Let’s say “Ann” is playing…Ann futures settle to 0 or 100 depending on if Ann wins so you can bid, offer, or trade any integer price between 0 and 100 based on your assessed probability of Ann winning. It’s a faithful simulation of mock trading (and really similar to the StockSlam game I was playing a couple years ago).
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💻Turing Machine (link)
This deduction game offers a unique experience of questioning a proto-computer that works without electricity or any sort of technology. (It uses punchcards!)
The Goal? Find the secret code before the other players, by cleverly questioning the machine.
This game is impressive. With 95 punchcards and 48 “verification” circuits (these are the logic gates you use to test your hypotheses against) they generate over 7 million problems! After one round you are just sitting there wondering how big-brain the designers are.
You can play competitively, solo, or coop. The game is beautiful and stimulates that part of your brain that’s trying to nail the logic for a complicated array formula in Excel. The game says 14+ but I’d say it’s fine for any middle-schooler that likes games.
Zak taught me how to play and then cooked me.
