Picture this: it’s the weekend. You want to try something new with your barkada. This activity has to have an accessible location, a fair price, and lots of fun for the whole group! If, like me, you’re looking for an activity like this, then try visiting Dyce N Dyne. They have a wide array of boardgames to choose from.
I asked help from the GRO (Game Relations Officer) to handpick boardgames that are suitable for newbie players like me. These boardgames must be easy to learn and quick to play, so that you’d be able to try a lot of games in just one visit. They must also be fun and exciting! My friends and I spent hours having fun with the boardgames Dyce N Dyne had to offer. Here are our top eleven picks.
11.) Telestrations
Gameplay
Dyce N Dyne has their own way of playing Telestrations. Each player gets a whiteboard marker, a notebook, and a card. In the card, there’s a word which you are not allowed to share with others. You write down the word and pass your notebook to the player on your right. The person on your right attempts to draw that word. He or she passes his or her drawing to the person on the right, who then takes a guess. The cycle repeats itself, until you eventually get your own notebook. Here’s a collage of how my friends interpreted “tiptoe.”
I wrote tiptoe on the first page and handed it to my friend on the right. She attempted to draw tiptoe (no letters and numbers are allowed). The person on her right thought her drawing was an ugly foot. The fourth person attempted to draw an ugly foot. The next person guessed that the drawing was simply a foot. Eventually, the last guess was an amputated leg! Who would have thought that “tiptoe” could eventually become an “amputated foot”?!
Why We Recommend It
There are no winners in this game, but it’s hilarious when you look at all your friends’ drawings and see just how close or how far they were from guessing your word. I recommend this game to start off the evening because it’s relatively calmer than the rest of the games in this list. This game is like Pass The Message meets Pictionary. It kicks of the evening with such a good laugh.
10.) Cards Against Humanity
Gameplay
The person who most recently pooped begins as the Card Czar and plays a Black Card. The Card Czar reads the question or fill-in-the-blank phrase on the Black Card out loud. Everyone else answers the question or fills in the blank by passing one White Card, face down, to the Card Czar. The Card Czar shuffles all of the answers and shares each card combination with the group. For full effect, the Card Czar should usually re-read the Black Card before presenting each answer. The Card Czar then picks the funniest play, and whoever submitted it gets one Awesome Point. After the round, a new player becomes the Card Czar, and everyone draws back up to ten White Cards.
To give you an idea of how it goes, here’s a sample of how it goes. The Card Czar plays the black card: White people like___________. The rest of the group answer using the white cards.
Why We Recommend It
Cards Against Humanity is extra fun to play it with close friends because you already get their sense of humor. The best part is when the “Card Czar” reads the full sentence aloud. The cards contain the most random phrases, which later make up the funniest and oddest of sentences.
9.) Dixit
Gameplay
Each player starts the game with six random cards. Players then take turns being the storyteller. The storyteller makes up a sentence or phrase that might describe one of her cards and says it out loud.Each other player then selects from among their own six cards the one that best matches the sentence given by the storyteller. Then, each player gives their selected card to the storyteller, without showing it to the others. The storyteller shuffles his or her chosen card with the cards received from the other players, and all cards are then dealt face up. The players (except for the storyteller) then secretly guess which picture was the storyteller’s, using numbered voting chips. If nobody or everybody finds the correct picture, the storyteller scores 0, and each of the other players scores 2. Otherwise the storyteller and all players who found the correct answer score 3. Players other than the storyteller score 1 point for each vote their own pictures receive. A large part of the skill of the game comes from being able, when acting as the storyteller, to offer a title which is neither too obscure (such that no other player can identify it) nor too obvious (such that every player is able to guess it). The game ends when the card deck is empty. The player with the highest point total wins the game.
Here’s how it looks like inside the box. There’s the board on the left to monitor the points, the cards on the right, and the voting chips at the bottom.
Why We Recommend It
It’s a game of wordplay and wits! Unlike most games in this list, this game doesn’t have much to do with speed. It focuses on strategizing. It’s also really fun to see how differently the rest of your friends interpret the same phrase. This game is a constant balancing act of revealing and holding back, and figuring out how others reveal and hold back.
For example, if it’s my turn to be the storyteller, and my card is the third one, I could say something as vague as “Harry Potter.” The other players would lay down a card that they think may relate to “Harry Potter.”
8.) Word on the Street
Gameplay
In Word on the Street, players – either individually or in teams – try to claim letter tiles from the game board. To set up the game, seventeen letter tiles (all the consonants in English other than j, q, x, and z) are placed in a strip down the center of the game board – the median strip of the street, if you will, which has two “traffic lanes” on either side of it. On a turn, one team is presented with a category such as “types of fruit” or “something a player is wearing”, and that team has thirty seconds to come up with an answer in that category, then move the letters in that word toward their side of the game board. Any letters in the word that are not on the game board are skipped. If the answer were “pineapple”, for example, the team would move P, N, P, P and L. If a team moves a letter off the game board, it has claimed that letter and that tile will not move for the remainder of the game. The first team to claim eight letter tiles wins!
The category we got from the deck is something shiny or reflective:
We could use the word “mirror.” We move M and R to our side of the board. You could see that we moved R two slots towards us because we used two R’s to spell “mirror.” You could think of this game as a tug of war using words.
Why We Recommend It
This game is more exciting than it looks! I know the board looks like a tamer version of Scrabble, but it’s not. When my friends and I played it, a lot of screaming and elbowing ensued as we argued about what words to use. We also found out that time pressure makes a person (very) horrible in spelling and vocabulary. The time pressure and the competition could easily make you panic.
7.) Animal Upon Animal
Gameplay
Each turn, a player rolls the die and either places one or two animals on to the stack of animals, passes one of his or her animals to another player for them to place, or places an animal on the table, extending the base for other players to build upon. If any pieces fall off while you are building, you get up to two of them back. The first player to have used all of their animals wins.
Why We Recommend It
This was the most challenging game for me! If you’re familiar with Jenga, you could imagine Animal Upon Animal as a much more challenging version. In Jenga, the blocks you pile on top of each other are of the same shape and length. But in Animal Upon Animal, their shapes are so varied. These different shapes leave the most awkward of spaces. Tensions rise once the easier slots are filled with more animals by other players.
