Ending the year with a family game

 The last game I learned (and played) in 2023 was Santa Cookie Elf Candy Snowman. It’s the holiday version of Cat Taco Burrito Goat Cheese. With a name like that,  I am convinced that the game originally started life as a drinking game.

The game itself is a variation of Slap Jack. The big difference is players say the words in the total as a sequence. The starting player says Santa as they lay down a card, the next player says cookie, etc. If the word and the card match, that’s when the slapping starts.

There are also some special action cards: reindeer, silent night and drum. When those cards come out, everyone does a silly action and slaps.

Last person to slap the stack of cards adds those cards to their personal stack with the goal being to empty your hand.

The designers also played the Jungle Speed trick of having some cards look like different suites, like Santa dressed in elf colors.

Santa et al is a silly, little party game. It isn’t a game that I’d pick instead of Catan or Agricola or even Food Chain Island. There are gamers who I wouldn’t recommend it to. But it’s clearly not meant to be. 

More than that, by building off of an established game and adding special cards that guarantee the board will get periodically cleared, Santa et al has a solid mechanical design. A lot of that design is ‘don’t fix what’s broken’ but that mantra gets ignored a lot more often than you’d think. (To be fair, I look at a lot of prototypes)

Santa et al gave us a cozy game to play and have fun with. That alone gives it lots of value and I think we will return to it.

Parry games and creating your own content

A few years back, I found a nine-card PnP game called Cryptic that was a party/social game. At the time, I found the idea of a game like that fascinating, a party game broken down into nine components.

(Which is kind of odd, since charades has probably been around since time and memorial and doesn’t require any components at all)

Since then, I’ve played other games that at least can be party/social games like Word Chain and Flipword and, more recently, the Apropos family of games, that are all also micro games. All of which were better than Cryptic, by the way. 

I realize that a lot of the party games from my childhood had a lot of content. Games like Facts in Five or Pictionary or Cranium or, in particular, Trivial Pursuit came with buckets of cards. Plenty of more modern party games like Dixit or Wits and Wagers or Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity also come with tons of cards.

And, while there have always been tons of party/social games that don’t require five pounds of cards, it was still part of my concept of how they work. (No, it’s not rational)

What I noticed with Word Chain is that the tiny handful of cards create a framework. You’d have to add the content yourself. And the same can be said for Flipword or the Apropos family.

And I quite like this. Having to actually add the content yourself to a party/social game forces you to be clever and to reach into your reference pools. Which is the complete opposite of Apples to Apples, which gift wraps the thinking for you.

And, no, clearly these recent games didn’t introduce the idea of supplying all the content yourself. Not by a long shot. Charades, which I keep on coming back to, can be played that way. Really, adding a stack of questions or topics is actually quite new in the grand scheme of things.

I’m not too big on party games, although I definitely see their value. But I do like being forced to be clever.

We have taken steps to have better party games

I don’t see myself playing a lot of holiday games this year but there is one game that I have come to associate with the holidays. Apples to Apples, since it’s the party game you can play with anyone. The party game that I have seen played at more Christmas parties than any other game.

I have two strong opinions about Apples to Apples. First, it’s a very strong game design. Second, I could happily never play it again :P

Back when I was a young one, Trivial Pursuit was the ‘great’ party game and I think it’s a terribly flawed game. Trivia is dangerous because it’s so binary, either you know it or not. (Wits and Wagers figured out how to make that work which is amazing. And pub quiz adds booze, which changes everything. You can decide if it’s for better or worse) And it had a meh implementation of Roll and Move.

So, when you consider that I came from a place of charades and Trivial Pursuit, Apples to Apples was a revelation. It was accessible to the point where you could play it with just about anyone and people didn’t get punished for not knowing the capital of Zanzibar or how to mime Christopher Walken.

I know Apples to Apples wasn’t the first ‘designer’ party game (Barbarossa came out before it did, for example) but Apples to Apples was my first experience with it and the first experience for many folks I know. I really think it changed the party game genre.

BUT I think that the ideas that it introduced have been done better since it came out. I would much, much rather play Dixit than Apples to Apples for example. And, yes, I know that tells you how old I am :D I really do think that Apples to Apples paved the way for better, more innovative party games, games that surpassed it.

I’m not big into party games but I do sometimes play them and I’m glad they have gotten better.