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I already covered what to bring down your local boozer in Top 5 Pub board games but this time I want to talk about the office lunch.
Foil-wrapped sarnies and a packet of walkers in the cafeteria or local café with people you mostly like. It can be all too easy to fall into the dreary pattern of complaining about your boss and reminiscing about the old filing index system. The remedy to this, and most other things, is games.
The criteria I settled on are play-times comfortably under an hour, small-box, fast set-up/tear-down and themes that’d tempt the normals: no goblins or lazers here.
Start Ups
This theme went over well considering I work in finance. Try to dominate the stock market for cold hard cash. That theming falls apart fairly quickly but hopefully they won’t notice.
There are 6 start-up companies (basically suites) each with a differing amount in the pack, the elephant Mars Travel Agency have a whopping 10 cards whilst Giraffe Beer has a miserly 5 and several cards are randomly discarded at the start so you’re not working with perfect information either.
You’ll be collecting sets of these cards and at the games end the majority stock-holder gets paid by any other player stuck with a lesser amount of that stock in their portfolio. If there's a tie for majority then nobody gets paid.
Your singular action is simple: either draw a card for free from the market (other players discarded cards) or divest yourself of your precious coins onto these same cards to make a blind draw from the deck. Then add a card either to your portfolio or back in to the free market.
Oh yeah, and there’s monopolies. If you’re the current majority holder you get lumped with a token that blocks you from taking any more of those shares from the free market. If you want more of that stock you have to hope to get lucky with some blind draws or someone else buys big into that company and takes the token off you.
The final spicy bit is when the game ends; the 3 cards in your hand, whose identity has been a closely guarded secret, all get added to your portfolio.
I said your action was simple but it’s anything but easy. The decision space is suffocating. Secretly holding a rare stock in hand is powerful but you have to lay down something. Add a stock too early and you get lumbered with the monopoly token, wait too long and miss opportunities. Did your neighbour dump that stock into the open market because it’s worthless or does he already hold a lot in hand and wants to tempt in other investors to milk them at games end?
Come scoring time there’ll be plenty of bull runs, and some black-Mondays.
High Society
One of Reiner Knizias evergreen titles (having been in circulation since 1995) and a title I think may be a perfect game. 16 tarot sized cards and 55 poker-sized money cards. A rule set you can voice in a single breath: bid for points cards numbered 1 to 10, reverse-bid for negative cards and the poorest player is out.
So it’s a game you can play with practically anyone, from pre-schoolers to pensioners but that doesn’t mean there aren’t layers here. Ultimately it’s a game of judging the right cost, what are you prepared to pay and what are your opponents prepared to pay? And can you bait them into overpaying.
The spiciest part are the special cards. Three of them double your points; a dramatic change of fortune depending on what you can pair them with. Then there are the negative cards such as the Faux pas that cancels a card or the minus 5. These always illicit a groan when they turn up and people spend money like crazy not to get them.
For a game you can fit in a coat pocket and deal out in less then a minute it packs a vicious right hook and is likely to set IT against HR.
1%
This game is dumb. It’s a mash-up of bidding and push-your-luck that shouldn’t work but, as long as you lean in, it can provide some real highs.
2 decks of cards and 2 dice is all you need. The first deck is comprised of 5 cute little suites like sharks or clovers, all numbered 1 to 5, each player randomly gets 3 of these in hand and the bidding begins: the first player makes a bid of what they think is the combined total of all cards at the table, such as “4 sharks” or “6 lucky clovers” then the next player has to bid a higher number (in any suite they like) or call out that player on the bid they just made.
Here comes the first spicy bit: the rest of the table need to pick a team, team bidder or team accuser. Then everyone downs their hands and the truth of it is revealed, just how many sharks where there?
The winning team gets to go on to another round of bidding with fresh cards whilst the losing team sulks and throws around recriminations. Sure, this is player elimination but it’s offset by the speed and the dumbness of the game.
This repeats, bidding, calling out and picking sides till it’s winnowed down to one survivor. Then the game shifts gears completely. The remaining player gets to roll two 8-sided dice, the dice of destiny we called them. If they roll double-zero they win the game free & clear. The chances of pulling that off are, well, 1%. Get it?
To prevent the game going on all day they can trade one of their 3 rolls for a power card that can give them another dice face to aim for or an ability like re-roll or stealing another players card.
I once taught this game to the full compliment of 6 players on a pub lunch. On our 2nd game I grabbed the dice on the first round and immediately rolled double-zero. I was a God in the office for the rest of the day.
Plus, come October 2024, the publisher is releasing an Evil Dead2 version just in time for Halloween. Groovy!
Tinderblox
This one you can play whilst holding your meal-deal coronation-chicken sarnie in one hand. It’s basically reverse Jenga but in a form factor you could smugle into prison and a couple of quirks.
You are tasked with building a campfire comprised of teeny tiny rectangular logs and yellow or red blocks of fire. You draw a card which tells you what needs to be added, then you use a pair of tweezers to take out the bits & bobs and add them to the fire. If anything falls off the fire you’re out.
There’s something quite Zen about building up this little pile of fire: everyone trying to add to it whilst maintaining structural integrity. Just like in Jenga half the fun is watching someone else struggle, especially if they haven’t noticed, whilst composing the little pile that they need to add to the fire, that the fire cubes are ever so slightly wider then the logs.
For hard mode play by only placing new pieces on the top. For ultra-hard mode play outside on a windy day.
Tussie Mussie
Set in the thrilling Victorian custom of telling someone just what you think of them by presenting them with a flower arrangement.
Tussie Mussie is a drafting micro-game of 18 cards, the aim is to collect a set of 4 cards that combo off each other the most effectively. On a players turn they have a simple choice, they draw 2 cards then offer them to the next player: one card face up (a bouquet) and the other face down (a keepsake) that player chooses one to add to their set and the player who presented them gets the remaining card.
Some cards scoring conditions are dependent on whether they were selected as keepsakes or bouquets.
For such a small form factor and rules base there’s a satisfying heft to this: trying to bait your neighbour with a face down keepsake card alongside a particularly tasty bouquet card “If their willing to show me that card then the face-down one must be even better!”
Lining up a set comprised of Carnation, snapdragon, hyacinths and forget-me-nots in just the right arrangement can be quite satisfying and the whole game can be busted out in 10 minutes then shoved back in your pocket next time the company server goes down and your manager’s in the loo.
