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Board game talk

Had some running around today so I stoped by a few of my usual thrift/2nd hand stores and found this one. I had to laugh as it was sitting next to RISK, but it was missing a bunch of pieces so I didn't buy it too.
I have a friend in Oshawa and he has many obscure board games that we end up playing late into the night. He buys them cheap even if they have pieces missing as he has had quite success using his 3d printer to print off the pieces many are online.


 
Of all the things I have used my 3d printers for over the years, it never even occurred to me to use it to print game pieces as I put it back on the shelf yesterday lol. The risk game did smell a bit musty though, which is hard pass for me. I'll keep my eyes out for another one, but now I won't shy away from missing figures as much. Thanks.
 
Family has played most of these, but some recent favorites are Code Names (challenging!) and recently discovered Ransom Notes (potentially hilarious!). Another that many like is Wise and Otherwise. Certain of the grand kids especially go for adventure and D&D type games, such as Above and Below.

The favorite of the extended family is 6-handed Euchre, which I have not been able to find in Hoyle's or anywhere else, but a BIL has written up rules (PDF) which I can share if anyone is interested. (That branch of the family may have invented it!?) While it shares some of the same analytical and statistical challenges as Bridge I find it more interesting, in part because there are 5 other hands which can only be inferred, not viewed, by each player, and two of those belong to your partners.
 
Another memory just cropped up through the fog. At a place I used to work at in the early 90's, we always played 31 during coffee & lunch. Quick enough game to be able to play a few hands in 15 mins for coffee.
 
We play a lot of games, sequence, skipbo, crib and yahtzee being common if it’s just the two of us. If it works that we have four players we’ll play euchre. (And would be interested in the 6 player rules.)

Others are spoons, president (asshole), milles borne, a card/board game we call peggy that is a bit like trouble, rumouli, and a baseball game that uses dice.

Occasionally we’ll break out battleship, trouble and some other ‘classic’ type games. Oh and wizard is another one we’ll play. We have the cards against humanity set from when it was first out, and yes, it needs to be the right group of folks for that.

Often for us the number of people and the ‘who it is’ determines some of what games we can roll with.

Back to chess, played a lot in school, hadn’t played in 30 years, now started playing some online, just against bots though for now.
 


Apparently that game was popular. Years later Parker Bothers tried following up with another game that wasn't so popular:

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Pictionary has always been good for a laugh, too. Nice thing about it is there really is no minimum number of players or level of skill other than reading the card and holding a marker. No need to be a trivia nerd or remember all the rules about how many dice to throw when you are attacked by Kazakhstan or any strategy BS. Hell, I can play it and still be drinking glue and licking the window.
 
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Back to chess, played a lot in school, hadn’t played in 30 years...
That reminds me of a story from university. I'd played a bit of chess w/ a buddy of mine over the years, nothing too serious, just something to do on Boxing Day every year, accompanied w/ a box of beer.

The uni mainframe was an old IBM 360 running DEC 10 software that you would terminal emulate to via VT100 or VT220 dumb terminals. You could also use DEC Pro350's to connect (still have one of them in the basement, BTW. Anybody want it?). I got to know the Sysops pretty well & one Friday evening a couple of us came up w/ this brilliant idea that we presented to them.

Have the mainframe play chess against itself, drop the moves into a text file for future retrieval & give it a 60% run time guarantee (60% of the CPU power applied to this one task). We also set other parameters like how many moves to look ahead, etc. Ready, go!

In about 90 seconds we froze up the entire mainframe and they literally had to shut it off & reboot, something that never happened. Needless to say, no more favours after that. To this day I'm sure Judy hasn't forgiven me.

There were about 20 moves saved in the text file & we had fun tracking the game up to the system freeze-up.
 
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