A lot of people get to play games regularly during lunch. I know some of local folks at IBM play several times a week. That must be cool. I've also seen people playing games at some of the client sites I've attended. One cafeteria also had jigsaw puzzles out and people would come by and work on them while they ate and leave it set up for other people to work on next.
Last week a student in class who has been in many of my classes suggested I bring games during lunch. Games? During lunch? See, I'm really a food person too. I ran out to grab a quick Quiznos and came back in plenty of time to play a couple of games.
I brought
Pico 2, a "war"-like game that's much better from Doris and Frank. It's a simple game with cards 3-13 and 16 with one being discarded face up. Each person plays their card face-down and the highest number wins. They take their card and put it away for scoring (dots on the cards) and the other person places their card back in their hand. The catch with this one is that if the other person plays double your card or more then you win. You switch cards and play it again and total your score. It's a decent game that takes all of 7 minutes to play including switching cards and playing again and it's usually even faster than that. This game is so small that it can always be with you for those times you want to play with someone else and not just play Scrabble on your Iphone.
Afterwards, we played one of my favorite two-player games called
Subulata. Subulata is a Cwali game that reminds me of "pins" in chess. Your crickets have numbers on the back that you are trying to get into your opponents "home" area diagonally across from your home area in the modular board. Your piece can exactly one, two, or three places depending on whether it's on water, a flower, or a leaf. You can only go backwards unless you are capturing. We played with 7 subulatas instead of 9 like they do in the online version of the game. This speeds things up a little and we had 30 minutes total for our game session. In addition to the point value on back of your subulata, you gain one point for each subulata you have captured. I really should teach this to the kids. They both enjoy the chess club at school and this migh help scratch that itch in a quick game that's always different due to the modular board. I also took
Clocktowers from Alan Moon but we didn't play it. It's the portable card game version of Capitol. The next day I brought Hive but my opponent had a test to study for. If I worked at the same place each day, I'd definitely start a lunch time games group. It was a fun break in the day.
We played
Tichu for the first time in forever last night. Nick and Wayne came back from a huge deficit to beat Traci and me. I think this is the first time I've played Tichu all year. We've had several attempts but switched to games three-players can enjoy like
King of Siam,
Wasabi,
Colossal Arena, and the like. Four more Tichu games and I'll hit 100 recorded Tichu plays on Boardgamegeek.con. That's a lot of plays for me. The online BSW Tichu fiends probably hit that each week.
