12/27 - Ferecon, Day 2

At long last, it's Ferecon day 2! Another full day of gaming, this one occupied mostly by party games. Weird.

Steam

Jim 43, Trevor 42, Chris 37, Bertram 35, Heather 31
Jim and Karen arrived first this morning with their twin boys Jeremy and Ethan. After trying out Steam the previous day, I was eager to try it again, and it seemed like the kind of thing Jim would like. We had fun playing it, but it did go a little longer than I'd anticipated/hoped, which meant that Karen got stuck watching the boys for most of their visit, which I felt bad about. At least Jim won, so there's that. Really need to play this again.

Wits and Wagers

Before Jim and Karen left, I managed to drag them into a game of Wits and Wagers, the trivia game for people who hate trivia games. At least when I say this game will take 15 minutes, I mean it. Players make Price-is-Right closest-without-going-over guesses on questions with large numerical answers, then bet on who gave the right answer. The further from the median the correct answer is, the higher odds you get for picking it, but that whole wisdom of crowds thing means that answers will tend to be towards the middle. I think it would be neat to try this with 15-20 players all guessing and see how close to correct the median (and/or mean) answer is. But I guess I'm just some kind of social statistics nerd.

Battlestar Galactica

Ted (Balthar) and Chris (Tyroll) (Cylons) lose to Grey (Tygh), John (Starbuck), Eric (Zarik), and Trevor (Adama)
At long last (OK, fine, after like 3 games), I got to be a Cylon! Yay! A number of new players and a lot of distraction meant a somewhat sloggy game of Battlestar Galactica, but the humans ended up coming through after being on the ropes for quite some time.

The Name in the Hat Game

Round 2 of our traditional name-in-the-hat game saw a return to usual form as Ted ran away with it - he just seems to be preternaturally good at this game. Must have to do with being Swedish or something.

Say Anything

It was getting too late for anything other than party games, so we took another spin at this Apples-to-Apples spin-off. I think we ended up in a multi-way tie for first, but we also learned that Aaron would write a book about computer graphics, and that Leslie's idea of a strange new year's resolution is -6 dpi. Right now, some of you are laughing, some of you are looking up 'dpi' in Wikipedia, and some of you think I accidentally put HTML in my text.

Telephone Pictionary

Soapbox time. Telephone Pictionary is the perfect name for this game. It describes it perfectly - it combines the "whisper something to the person next to you and see what comes out a the end of the line" of Telephone, and the "baby fish mouth/it's dignity Luann!" hilarity of Pictionary. I actually submitted it to the board game geek database with that name, and it was accepted. But now a couple years down the road *someone* had the clever idea to retitle it Eat Poop You Cat, which is non-descriptive and occasionally embarrassing to say. Boo. OK end soapbox.

Irregardless (take *that* lovers of the English language), Telephone Pictionary almost always ends with a lot of laughs, and this one was no exception. Somewhat bogglingly, I didn't take any pictures of the resulting game (which involves sentences and funny/terrible drawings thereof), so you'll just have to take my word for it.