boardgaming in photos: Deepavali gathering

6 Nov 2018 was Deepavali, a public holiday falling on a Tuesday. It was an off day which was neither here nor there, so I invited some colleagues over for some boardgaming. This is Taluva, a game I like, and also a rather photogenic one.

When playing Pickomino with six, it is not easy to earn worms (points). You don't get many turns throughout the game, so you must treasure every single one. Also with more opponents in the game, there is a bigger risk of your tiles getting robbed by someone else. Scoring zero is very possible.

CK was rather unlucky this turn. He picked 4 on his first roll, and 5 on his second. By his third roll, he still had five dice. He rolled four 2's and a 4 or 5. He had no choice but to pick the four 2's, which was horrible. He was taking his fourth roll now. He had only one die remaining, and he must roll a worm or fail this turn. He failed.

One problem of teaching Taluva to new players is I always feel I am bullying them. This is an open information game, and the tactics take some time to work out. So experienced players have an advantage over first timers. If I play too mercilessly, that seems mean; but if I intentionally play sloppily, that is disrespectful and condescending.

I taught Yee Fon and CK to play. One good thing about teaching an open information game is you can discuss very openly. The board situation is open information. There are no player cards hiding information. You can analyse the board situation for the new players, pointing out the risks and opportunities, and options they have.

Kwe Long brought his son, hoping to expose him to more types of games. We only had one child that day, so Kwe Long ended up mostly playing the children's games with his son. I taught them to play. This game is Chicken Cha Cha Cha, a memory game. I have given many of my children's games to my nephew and niece, since my own children have outgrown these games.

At Machi Koro I lost badly to both the first time players Yee Fon and CK. We used only cards from the base game. However I was too lazy to sort the cards into piles, so I used the market mechanism introduced in the expansions. I'm not entirely sure whether this caused any problem. Supposedly when playing the base game, all cards are available to all players at all times, like in Dominion. The market mechanism makes only ten card types available to players at any one time.

Zee Zun brought two friends, and I taught them Azul. They also tried Dominion, which Zee Zun was interested to learn after having played Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle.

A la Carte is an unusual game. Everyone gets a stove and a pan.

Yee Fon, Kwe Long and CK were all new to Hanabi. This is a cooperative game in which you hold your cards inside out, so that you don't get to see them, but everyone else does. You rely on your teammates to tell you what your cards are by giving hints. Playing Hanabi with new players brings some extra excitement compared to when playing it with a bunch of old timers. With new players, you have not yet established any convention or unspoken rule, which would have been helpful. So the game is more challenging. Let's take an example. When one player hints that some cards are 1's, it can be interpreted in two ways. He may be saying that these are cards you can play, or he may be saying that these are cards you have to discard. For a group of friends who have played Hanabi together many times, they would have established a mutual understanding of what the hint would mean under this situation. The game becomes easier. With new players, you don't exactly know what they are thinking and what logic they are applying. There is a fresh challenge when you play with a new group. This is like playing those communication games at company team building events.

Kakerlaken-poker, a game about lying and pretending to be lying.