Tabletop Tuesday — Lighter Fare

I had a pretty wicked headache and migraine last night overnight, which made me think of how sometimes we gather our gaming group on a Tuesday and we all admit we’re so not up for Frosthaven or Earthborn Rangers and in fact, need an easy go of it.

That’s when we break out the lighter fare games, ones that don’t necessarily require a great deal of braining, or require a different kind of braining that’s way, way less intense and makes us laugh. We had one of those gaming weeks last week (well, we finished off a day in Earthborn Rangers and then decided we just didn’t have it in us to start the new day) and brought out two tried-and-true boxes to play with.

Um, Actually… It’s hard to see in this image, but the airbrushed nature of his face, and the oddly shiny-and-over-pink of Mike Trapp’s face make us believe he wronged the graphic designer who came up with this box.

The first is a kickstarter game I backed based on a YouTube series my husband introduced to me by the same name. Um, Actually… is a nerdy trivia game that’s got a very simple premise: a statement or two about a particular nerd-beloved thing made by one player, followed by the other players jumping in to correct what’s wrong, but much like Jeopardy where you have to phrase the answer in the form of a question, in this case, you have to start with “Um, Actually…”

There’s two things about the tabletop version of this game I really enjoy. The first is an in-born rubber-banding effect where whoever wins a particular round reads the next statement, which allows those who didn’t score the last point a round to catch up, helping to fight what we only semi-jokingly call the “Brennan Lee Mulligan” effect (we skip any episode of “Um, Actually…” he appears in because he’s way too competitive, wins every time in a way that’s just not enjoyable to watch, and his schtick rubs us the wrong way).

The other cool thing is you get to pick your own categories as you put together the rounds of the game, with everyone taking turns, so if you’re solid in your Cartoon lore, you can pick Cartoon cards, while the Horror junkie of the group can chose their forte, and so on. This also leads to laughter when—as seems to always happen—you end up being the Judge on the turn the card you chose comes into play, but them’s the breaks.

The game does also have Shiny Questions and actual real-life applicable knowledge questions, just like the show. The markerboards are used to track points as well as answer those shiny questions, and we almost always, unilaterally, fail the life-applicable questions, to much amusement.

Game-play is quick, and fun, and it’s fun to guess at random on ones you have zero knowledge of (especially when you win doing so).

The Foot Explosion Game

The second “let’s just do this” game in our group’s arsenal is Monikers, which I don’t own but the other people in our gaming group bring over (I think they also have the Serious Nonsense expansion). This is a fun charades-esque game played over a number of rounds where first you each choose a certain number of cards from a deck that forms the pile of cards you’ll be playing through. Those cards have people, pop-culture references, or the like (and also a scoring system of how difficult they’ll be, though we almost never bother keeping score) and so, for example, you’ll end up with a deck of cards like: Slimer (from Ghostbusters), Khan! (from Star Trek), Sad Keanu Reeves (from the meme), Rapunzel (of the fairy tale), and Teddy Ruxpin (the creepy ass bear with a tape-deck in his back).

Once you build a deck you begin a number of rounds. The first time through the deck, you can use any words other than the actual words listed in the card. So, to use a not-so-random example, “that creepy ass bear with a tape-deck in his back” was, indeed, enough to get the other people at the table to say “Teddy Ruxpin!” Once all the cards have been guessed, they go back into the deck, get shuffled up again, and you start over.

Only this time, you only get to say one word. You can be emotive, you can certainly ham it up, but you’ve got one word to make the others guess. Now, they’ve already heard each of these cards once, so there’s also that level of familiarity involved, and given everyone contributed to the deck, there’s also that memory involved as well, but it’s fun as people try to remember said cards if the clue isn’t working for them. (Though everyone got “Teddy Ruxpin” again when I said, “CREEPY.”)

Then you shuffle all the cards up a third time and do charades. No words at all. Finally, if you’re up for it, there are truly strange cards giving you even weirder options for a fourth round—such as “reverse charades”—where only one person gets to guess and everyone else does a group charades activity to try and get them to guess the card. We don’t always do those, but when we did—and did that exact one—Max the husky got very excited to be involved, jumping and barking as the three of us tried to get the guesser to say “Teddy Ruxpin” while I mimed putting a tape in my husband’s back.

It’s low-stress, funny, and has led to a recurring joke or two among our group. The most recent time we played, we had “The Shoe Bomber” as one of the cards, and during the charades round, I stared in confusion at my husband as he mimed things and said, “Foot explosion?” and the look on his face as he realized I was SO CLOSE but hadn’t figured it out made me wish I’d had a camera for the moment.

And we totally call it “that foot explosion game” now.

What about you? What are your low-stress, go-to games for when everyone is ready for something light and easy?