Sushi.
Exploding Kittens.
Throw Throw Burrito.(same designers and publishers as the last. Their theme is basically quick and easy games, fun, slightly overpriced for they they are.)
I’m not sure I’d agree with that, but I suppose it depends on how many people are playing and how prone to analysis paralysis they are. Definitely a good “filler” if you have up to an hour though.
Kanagawa plays fairly short, and has a lovely theme.
Fillers used by my group:
- Roll and writes in general. We enjoy Cartographers, Railroad ink, Ganz schön clever.
- For Sale - Fast auction game. Old, but still great.
- Arboretum - Card game about planting trees. Nice artwork, good amount of interaction.
- Oh my goods - Engine building card game. Not a lot of interation, but quite a brain burner with just a small deck of cards. Shame about the name…
- Sushi go. Drafting card game. The Party! edition is especially good.
It depends on the group for sure. Similarly I’ve never had a game of Arboretum go shorter then an hour, usually more like 90 minutes. Unfortunately that variability seems true of most fillers unless they’re timed.
So… Maybe FUSE is the safest suggestion? A 10 minute timed coop of insane pressure. The kind of timer pressure where fast is better than strategic. High adrenaline, lots of shouting, very simple rules. But it’s only fun with a group who are all invested in the experience.
I received my pledge of Burgle Bros 2 last week here at work and took it home and put it in my game room. Yesterday, I saw the box downstairs in my living room and wondered why it was moved but realized it was a 2nd copy…which I never paid for.
So, if anyone wants a new unwrapped Burgle Bros 2, pm me. No charge. I have free shipping out at my office so it wont cost anything.
Peace.
Edit — Sold and shipping out to a fellow QT’er.
Poots was courteous enough to e-mail Kingdom Death Monster backers an update today, a month after he charged my card, to say that 1.6 core and the update card pack won’t ship before October of this year. I’ve read that he’s infamous for taking a ridiculous amount of time to get orders to customers, so I don’t expect to see my order for at least a year. He’s one of the small number of people who found some benefit in the pandemic, which has given him a great justification for the delay.
You gotta get Incan Gold in that mix, Hassan.
the breakdown for shipping sounded good to me. Errors in prototype required a new shipment… I’m not in a hurry, I see it as an investment in the future
I have a lot of favorite filler games - a few have been mentioned already (Hanamikoji is one of my absolute favorites for 2 players), but I’d like to add:
5-Minute Mystery - This one is great for families! It’s a fun and fast paced teamwork game that sort of combines Guess Who? and “I Spy” into a chaotic and silly game.
Curios - This one plays in about 15 minutes, max. It’s a great warmup game and I think it plays at its best with 3 or more players.
Point Salad - This is such a great quick game, light and easy to learn, but not without strategy.
Roll For It! - Like Yahtzee, but better!
There was apparently a Kickstarter for a Prison Architect board game.
After a year of working on the game for publisher PSC, the designers, David Turzi (designer of Dice Settlers, et al) and Noralie Lubbers, have decided that they shouldn’t make a game about running a prison. They dropped out of development and asked not to be associated with the game and Kickstarter. After that, the Kickstarter was cancelled.
It’s a funny edge case in crowdfunded games: A game can turn out to be (in the makers’ estimation) a bad idea after the concept of the game has gone public but before it’s finished.
Their statement is thorough and sincere. They have an interesting analysis of why they think ideas that might be fine for a single-player video game are not appropriate for a board game:
Videogames are a different medium, for a different community with very different context. You play games in the privacy of your home, gaining enjoyment from whichever part of the game you want to. As long as nobody is getting hurt, as long as nobody is promoting hateful ideas, it probably falls under the “no harm done” category. And the community accurately reflects this: some people look at it as an engineering challenge, some are making (frankly disgusting) execution-factories, and some are using it as a colourful distraction where silly, over-the-top caricatures are doing obviously bad things. It is not our place to judge. And since a significant part of our creative team themselves are fans of the videogame, calling the videogame out on its theme would be hypocritical on our part. But our board gamer community is about interacting with other people in real life. We want a game on a table, we want to look each other in the eyes, we want to go down to the club or the shop, and put it on the table there too, and tell everyone how awesome whatever game we’re playing is, and that they should join in.
Yeah I got a warning from the BGG on that one for my view on it even though it was in no way derogatory, crude rude or demeaning of the other point of view of people.
Personally I think it’s dumb. I won’t go into it further, but if we’re going to cancel a game because of that theme they just opened a flood gate to board games that will need to be canceled. Maybe John Cena can apologize to the board game community.
Really? David Turczi specialises in single player modes for board games…
Maybe he recognizes that playing a multiplayer game with single-player rules is properly called “practicing”! :D
But seriously, there are a lot of single-player games and single-player variants of games, but I still think that the assertion being made is all but indisputable. It’s not a statement about the games, but about the community.
I don’t get it, there’s a pretty big single-player board gaming community too. Obviously they never want to be in the same room together, but they’re there! ;)
I dispute it. Board games are not just for groups of social people.
If the game would work and point out to issues with some incarceration practices, it would have been worthwhile. I don’t have any information what they had planned.
There are board games with serious themes, like This War of Mine, Underground Railroad and many GMT games. That Bosnia Wargame comes to mind. Or how Endeavour handles slavery.
Maybe they take a deep think and come up with an interesting concept. Running prisons for profit is really the issue here. I think that’s at the core of the videogame. I need to go back to it, though.
edit: reading the thread on BGG. I don’t approve if mods remove posts in a political discussion and only let acceptable posts be readable. I am an adult, I want to see where people stand, if you censor, it does not help a discussion.
If you want to see the full breadth of discussion about the game, the Kickstarter comments are unmoderated:
This is the general tenor of the side you’re not seeing on BGG:
Wow, just read David’s message on BGG, basically giving in to the cancel culture mobs. Enough. How on earth is he apologising to these idiots?
This is how the SWJ work. They get angry about everything for any reason. And they love to eat their own.
As I understood it, they deliberately avoided mechanics that would incentivize you to treat your prisoners poorly and e.g. did not include execution/death row because that felt like a bridge too far for them. They did (again, from what I understand) discuss the issues with prisons in the rulebook. I don’t personally think there was a problem with the game existing any more than I do the videogame, but I found the theme very offputting and was not interested in owning or playing it, and I never have played the videogame either (though I think I ended up with it in some bundle or other). And while I don’t really want a game about being a horrible prison profiteer, I’m also not sure if theming a game around running a for profit prison without representing the perverse incentives that make for profit prisons such a terrible idea and routinely abusive in reality is the right approach either.
The KS itself wasn’t cancelled so much because the designers changed their minds, I don’t think (they don’t run the company that was publishing the game and that company owns the rights etc, so they really had no control over whether it happens or not) but because it was a long way from funding and unlikely to make it. That might have been the backlash, but it could just be something not enough people wanted. Like I say, I didn’t, and I never yelled at anyone about it.
so they wanted to make “just a game”, good that it got cancelled. If you don’t take your subject matter seriously, then why even start. Thanks for the information…
There are some hospital games out there, maybe they are worth to check out. But I bet they don’t tackle issues with the current hospital crisis around the world (low wages, high pressure, profit, profit, profit etc)
I own the videogame and have put a few hours into it. It doesn’t bother me and I don’t think the existence of this board game would either (though I wouldn’t own it probably.)
I think it’s a hard line to walk. I used to own a copy of Freedom: the Underground Railroad. That’s a game that is intensely concerned with presenting history and examining the political and economic dimensions of the abolition movement. And it tries really hard to be sensitive to its subject matter; it’s intended to be educational. It’s also a game where you move AI-driven tokens around the board that are trying to capture escaped slaves. I played the game once in a coffee shop with 3 other white dudes, and it was very uncomfortable explaining the rules and moving a slave catcher around with a couple of black college kids sitting at the next table working on their computers. I never played the game again and got rid of it soon after.
I think the social dimensions of a game like this can be hard to grok (particularly for clueless people like me) until you actually experience them in social context. And it totally matters, as the designers pointed out, that you play the videogame at home and not usually in a social context. It’s clear that in repeated discussions about the game they got more and more uncomfortable trying to justify their involvement and eventually backed away. That’s ok, and it’s ok for different people to draw their own line in different places.
So was one of the goals of the boardgame to put players in competition with one another regarding their prison-building abilities? (I realize that’s a super-general question, but vaguely is that sort of the outline?)