Let’s start out by talking about what a “party” game is. Party games are meant to be an activity that you can do while still being socially engaged at the table or wherever you are playing it. These games might be a little bit about keeping points, but they are mainly meant to be fun activities for people to do together so that you don’t end up spending all your time watching sporting events, movies, or being apart everyone doing their own thing.

Now, most common party games, the likes of Apples to Apples, Cards Against Humanity, What Do You Meme, etc. They have a few fatal flaws to them. One, some of them just won’t work in the wrong group, most of them in fact can have that problem. Apples to Apples might be too tame for some, while others might be too dirty. But taking that aside, they also have another issue, they are based off of what you are doing with the cards and the jokes already given to you on the cards. That means, in the most case, once you’ve played it a few times, you’ve gone through a lot of the cards and you now you know the jokes that are coming up and there are certain cards, in the meta of the group, that might always win. So eventually those games start to become stale. They also tend to be based more off of very specific types of humor and humor being the very important part to the game.

What I’m going to suggest are games that might not have the same humor, some very well might, but are a step up and provide more interesting things about them.

Wits & Wagers

One type of party game that I didn’t mention above, but has a similar problem, is trivia. Trivia games, while I can do okay at them, I did win $15 from work recently in a few trivia games, have one inherent flaw to them. You either know the answer or you don’t. If you don’t know your state capitols or you don’t know sports, movies, music, pop culture, you are going to get those questions wrong. I can’t tell you who is in N’Sync vs the Backstreet Boys, no matter how many guesses you give me to figure out who the bad boy in each group was. Wits & Wagers kind of solves that problem. In Wits & Wagers all of the answers are numerical. Now, that doesn’t help too much if you are asked to figure out what year the first car went over 100 MPH or how many goals Pele had in his pro career. But you don’t need to get it right, you just need to guess the best you can. Then, all the answers are placed out, and everyone bets on what they think the right answer, depending on what it is, you get a payout and you do that for seven rounds, whomever has the most money at the end wins. So if you think that I know cars, you can bet on my car date, if I think you know pop music trivia dates better, I can bet on yours, so you never need to know the correct answer.

Online: I think that this one can work online. To do it, the person with the game would need to write down peoples numbers and handle moving peoples bets around, but it wouldn’t be hard to do.

Stipulations

This game, for me, is a an upgrade from the Cards Against Humanity and Apples to Apples style game. If you want to have the game that has the jokes, this one is going to be a solid choice. The difference is, instead of getting an answer to use to the question, you have to come up with your own. How it works is that one person, the person who is it, picks from either a super power, dream job, lifetime supply, or dream fulfilled and everyone writes a Stipulation for it. Because you are coming up with your own answers, you can tailor the humor to your group. If someone picks the super power of flight, you can make it as clean or as dirty as you want for the stipulation. This also mean that the game is less likely to become stale as well because you are using your own creativity to come up with something, let’s use the flight example, one time I could say that your stipulation is that you can only fly when naked, another time I could say no more than 3″ off the ground, another time it might be only in rooms with 8′ ceilings. The joke changes every time versus some of the other games where you might see the same joke or same style of joke played in multiple games.

Online: There are two ways this one works online, the first being that everyone reads out their own answer, that’s just fine because people will just pick their favorite. If you’re worried that person X might only pick person Y’s answer or not pick person Y’s answer, you can have all the answers privately messaged in a chat window to that rounds reader as well.

Hues and Cues

This is a new one for me, but one that I had success with last game night. In Cues and Hues you have a board that is basically just a massive color palette with an insanely large number of colors. The person who is it is trying to get people to guess what color they have based off of a card. The it person picks one of the colors and gives a one word clue, everyone else then places based off of where they think that color is. Then the it person can give a two word clue and everyone guesses again. Then it’s scored, if someone gets it right on, they get 3 points. if they are in on of the surrounding spaces directly around it, they get two, and the ring further out they get one. The person who was it gets one point for each person on the spot and in the inner ring. It goes around and that continues until someone reaches the end. This game is more challenging than you’d think, mainly because there are so many colors on there and the variations in the gradients of the color. That said, a lot of fun, and has that feeling when someone takes your spot of “nooooo” but also that you might have figured out the clue better sometimes. A lot of fun and easy to play.

Online: This one works pretty well, now, only the people with the game have the card with 4 colors, but everyone else can just pick a color on their turn. I will say that everyone should be playing off of a monitor so that colors are as consistent as possible, so that’s an issue. Also, this game is by nature very not colorblind friendly.

Just One

This one was a big hit last year as it’s a cooperative party game where you are all working together to try and get the guesser to guess the one word that they have picked. The guesser picks a number between one and five without seeing the corresponding word on the card. Then everyone else writes down a one word clue for it. So, for example, if the word was Karate someone could write down the clue “Kid” or “Martial” or “Discipline”. However, if two people wrote down the word “Kid” those two clues are cancelled out. The guesser than looks at the remaining clues and tries to guess the word. This one works well because you want to be clever with your clue, but not so clever that you lead someone down the wrong path. But, the more you know the people at the table, the more you can tailor a reference or a clue to the person. I really like this one for the cooperative nature as it means that no one who is too competitive will ruin the fun, or be as likely to, because you’re all in it together.

Online: This one needs a little, but just a little bit of work to make it work. The guesser needs to say a number and then stop looking at the screen so that they don’t see the corresponding word. Then they can’t look until people have compared their words. Once you get into the rhythm of it, it’s easy, but you just have to know who should and shouldn’t be looking when.

Cross Clues

This one is a new one for me this year. After seeing the Dice Tower play it, I knew it was going to be one that would hit the table a lot for me. In Cross Clues, you have an easy 3×3 grid to a hard 5×5 grid of words out, with columns of A-E for hard and rows of 1-5 for hard. Everyone has a card in their hand, and it has coordinates on it, for example it might be E5. Now, the person who has that card needs to get the other players to guess their coordinates so that they can progress in the game. To do that, you give a one word clue. So let’s say that the word for E was “Witch” and the word for 5 was “Stick”, you might go with a clue like broom. Broom handles are wood, and witches ride on brooms. Easy enough, but maybe instead it was “Witch” and “Broom” as well as the word on 4 is “Spoon”, what clue do you give, one word, that would get people to guess E5? You can’t go with wood or stick because of wooden spoons might get confused with your answer. But you could maybe go with fly, as long as that doesn’t sound like another answer. It’s a fun and thinky game where you get a lot of really cool and clever answers.

Online: This one works, but only kind of online. The people who aren’t there with the game can’t really give clues, because it’d be tricky to show them a coordinate card one at a time. Instead, it has worked well for my wife and myself to be the clue givers (and we can guess on the others clue) and everyone online to be a guesser. It’s less ideal, but it works.

Codenames Pictures

Now, for some people regular Codenames will do as well, I just prefer the pictures one for a few reasons that I’ve talked about before. I feel like it’s more dynamic because it isn’t language dependent. And I feel like there are way more opportunities to be clever with it. In this game there are two different teams trying to get a spy to all of their spots before the other team gets all their spies out onto the board, all while trying to avoid the one “you lose” spot. So the clue giver has to figure out how to connect abstract and absurd pictures, like dog jumping through a doughnut or a flower that is growing out of a diamond, things like that, so that their team can get as many of them as quickly as possible. And again, a one world clue. Codenames Pictures, because of the oddity of the pictures, gives you more of a chance to give interesting clues. This one can be a bit slow at times as people puzzle out what they think the clue means, but pictures is a lot more fun because you can get to guesses faster.

Online: If you have two people in the same location, it works well enough, those people are it and handle the clue giving. I know that people have found ways to make it work for the clue givers not to be in the same location, generally it involves setting up another camera and sharing that with just the players who are clue givers and is a bit more work.

Now, there are a lot more games a well that can be great. And maybe your family likes playing Apples to Apples once a year over Thanksgiving or Christmas and New Years Holidays. But if you are looking for something new, I think that all of these games offer some really interesting things, and as you can see most of them can work well online as well. I would say out of all of them, Hues and Cues and Codenames: Pictures are probably the hardest to do digitally.

What newer party games have you found that work well with your families and friends whom you get together with around the holidays?

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5 – The Reckoners
The only YA (young adult) series on the list, and one of the two series by Brandon Sanderson. The Reckoners is a super power series, but done in an interesting way. Super powers became a thing, but they weren’t heroes, in fact, they were all villains. There is a team, called The Reckoners who are out there figuring out the weakness of bad guys and trying to take them down to basically free the normal people from being under the super powers thumbs. David, isn’t a Reckoner, but he desperately ones to become one. Is he going to be able to help them in a way to get into the group? It’s a well done series and while it’s a bit darker in how it handles super powers as compared to Marvel or DC, it doesn’t beat you down with bring dark.

4 – Stardust
The lightest book on the list in terms of tone, Stardust is just a fun romp through a wild and crazy fantasy world. I generally like Neil Gaiman’s works, but they can be pretty big and heavy, Stardust is a much smaller work, but tells an interesting and light story. The blend of the real world and this amazing fantasy and how they interact is interesting. There are a few lines that just crack me up when I read them in the book, and you really do feel the sense of adventure that is being created in the book. The movie, while different, is also not bad and keeps a similar tone to the book. If you want a lighter fantasy read, Stardust is a lot of fun.

3 – The Stormlight Archive
Another series, I kind of feel like I’m cheating by putting them on the list, but I feel like sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts, and if I were to talk about it separately, it wouldn’t fully tell the story. The Stormlight Archive is an epic fantasy story by Brandon Sanderson. You get prophecy, you get visions, intrigue, and so much more, but it’s all put together well. Sanderson is probably better known for Mistborn, but I like Stormlight Archive considerably better. The scale is just so big, but the story is well done, and the characters are flawed. You’re going to see this as a theme, characters who are flawed who feel more real, and in Stormlight Archive, you have heroes who do great things, but they are still flawed characters.

2 – IT
I love Stephen King. And IT is my favorite out of the books that he’s written. The structure of interweaving the kids and adults stories together works well. It’s an interesting horror story but also has an epic story as well. Pennywise is a great antagonist. I sometimes, also, have an issue with Stephen King’s work because he doesn’t always land the story as well as he could in the end, and I think in IT, you get a good complete story. Again, with complex characters who have flaws and because of those flaws you care about them more. Now, IT is a beast of a book to read and is definitely weird and disturbing, so it isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you are interested in trying horror, I highly recommend it

1 – The Dresden Files
I’ve talked about this series before, and I’m completely caught up series finally this year. Thus far, there are 15 books in the series, and it’s a ton of fun to see the series come together. The start of the series is a bit more of a stand alone, but when Jim Butcher hits his stride, the story is quite complex and well written. It’s a massive fantasy world with interesting characters and flawed characters, which I think really makes the series work. Harry Dresden is a good guy in general, but he has his flaws and you get to see the character grow in realization without fixing all of his problems. To me, that’s what I want in good story telling, good depth of character and characters who feel real. The series, since it is so long, does have a hiccup or two in the storytelling, but as a whole, it is telling a very interesting story.

Nothing new to this year, besides finishing off The Dresden Files this year, but let’s see in the honorable mentions?

The Wheel of Time
Harry Potter
Ascend Online
Lord of the Rings
Daughter of Smoke and Bones

Any books from my top reads that you love? Any that you’ve been wanting to check out? Let me know in the comments below.

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The premise of the book sounded very interesting to me as it is a story. I don’t know that I would call it massively unique, but it’s a topic that is interesting to delve into. So I picked up the first volume and gave it a read, and I thought I’d do a review on that as well as some first impressions on it.

The idea behind Freeze is that randomly, one day, everyone in the world freezes, stops moving, but isn’t dead, just isn’t moving anymore. That is, except for one man, Ray. Not only that, but Ray has the power to unfreeze people by touching them, which he figures out by accident. However, he quickly finds out what sort of responsibility comes along with that.

Obviously, the landscape of the world changes a lot when something like everyone freezes, planes are fell out of the sky, there are a lot of accidents. You can still very much die when you freeze. However, that isn’t an aspect that they dwell on too much in the story. They focus more on the human side of things, like what it would be to be one of the people that Ray unfreezes, but also how the decisions are made as to who to unfreeze. While you could certainly go around unfreezing everyone you run across, which I think that a lot of people would be tempted to do, they realize that with the disaster that this is, that they need to slowly reintroduce people back into the world as the world can handle it, starting in there area.

That then brings up the question of if the people helping Ray actually have the best interest for the world. And who has the power to make the judgement as to who should be unfrozen. Those who are helping Ray talk about not unfreezing bad people, people have criminal records, people they believe to be doing something wrong in life, but are they actually making a true judgement on that? I think the book opens up a lot of interesting questions and does a pretty good job dealing with them.

I will knock the first volume a little bit though. While I like the concept and while I like getting into the story or at least a brief first arc of the story, I think that Dan Wickline glosses too quickly over the fallout from the freeze. We get to see the freeze happen and a scene or two to really tell us how this is going to work and how big this is, but then we leap forward a few months or more, I forget exactly. I would have liked to see some more of the house keeping and the freaking out that happened with unfreezing people and them finding out what the world is like now, and how they were making their decisions.

Also, I think the storyline for the first arc, while it is well done, it a little bit predictable. I won’t go into details, but it’s kind of the low hanging fruit of the story where one character has a special power. I am fine getting the story out of way, but I’m hoping, if and when I pick up another volume of the trade paper back (tpb) for Freeze, that the story has a bit more depth.

Finally, I will say that it reminds me some of The Walking Dead. Now, you don’t have the threat of the “walkers” like you do in that series, but it’s a series about a disaster that isn’t so much about surviving the disaster, but is more about the human element of dealing and coping as survivors. That’s another reason that I wish the story hadn’t jumped ahead like it did, you feel like you end up missing some of that information, which is a real shame.

Overall, I liked the book, and I think that I’ll likely get another volume and see how that tpb holds up. It’s a very interesting concept that has a lot of things to explore which I enjoy. I suspect that it’s going to become more and more intense as more people are unfrozen and the challenges that come from that.

If you’ve read this comic run, what do I think of it? Does the premise sound interesting to you?

The Reckoners is a book series about normal people in a super powered world. Those with super powers, known as Epics, are all bad. They want power, they want to rule the world, and most of the time, they do that quite successfully because, a lot of them have what are known as “prime invinsibilities”. By that, it means that they are nearly impossible to kill, because either they heal quickly, or they are impervious to damage, or generally can avoid damage. These are the ones that rule, but they often have lesser epics under them. The Reckoners are normal people who are trying to stop the Epics and weaken their grip on society. David, the main character, however, is just a teenager who wants to kill one main epic, Steelheart, because Steelheart killed his father. He’s also not a Reckoner, just obsessed with them and with epics. He’s looking to find his way into the Reckoners, which, since the series is called The Reckoners, happens. Now, can they take down Steelheart and change the world?

I really like the concept of this series. A lot of the time you have a situation where it’s a hero and a normal sidekick, or hero versus super villain, but there are almost always super heroes. In this case, everyone is bad who has powers. The main reason that they don’t kill off each other constantly is because they still have some self preservation and because they want to rule. So, the Epics use each other to get places of power in the world as it exists now.

Another piece that is interesting is that all the epics have a weakness, or that’s assumed anyways. So there is something you can do, or something that can trigger an epic’s powers to fail or falter. As you’d imagine, especially the “high epics” with “prime invinsibilities” like to keep those hidden as they are impossible to kill otherwise. This keeps the battles different, because the Reckoners when fighting the Epics have to figure out these weaknesses. It means that a whole lot more thinking has to be put into what they are doing, and a whole lot more planning. As compared to a lot of Marvel or DC comic books, that focus in on fighting and maybe some in the super teams, the Reckoners spend a lot of time in the world.

Beyond the epics in the world, the cities in the world are fascinating. The various epics rule the cities, but often have changed the cities to what they want or because of their powers for some reason or another. In Steelheart, he’s turned Chicago into a city of steel, including some of Lake Michigan. There’s also an epic in Newcago (as Chicago is now called) who keeps the city in darkness. Other epics have made Atlanta into a city of salt that is constantly moving and rebuilding itself. And yet another epic has raised the water level of New York City so that only the tops of sky scrapers are sticking out of the water, but the water slopes up towards the city, so it isn’t like the coast is flooded as well. This gives the various books in the series their own unique feel, and makes me want to know what more of the cities are like.

That’s a lot about the world, and not so much about the characters. I’ve mentioned David whom we following around as the main character, and we get the books from his perspective. I also haven’t mentioned the author, Brandon Sanderson, who does a good job of creating not only the world but also interesting characters. David, Megan, Tia, Abraham, Cody, and Prof, the main Reckoners who you will meet at the start of the book,  make interesting characters, and it’s a well balanced team. Sanderson does a good job of giving them all their own personalities, foibles, and ticks for dealing with this new world of super villains. It would be pretty easy to get kind of card board characters surrounding the main character and his love interest, but everyone has their own developed personalities, and their own moments to shine in the books. And the characters and world both feel more developed than a lot of YA (young adult) books do. I suspect that is because of Sanderson’s epic fantasy books that he turns out with massive worlds and many tied together characters that are all extremely important. Not saying that other writers of YA don’t do that, but Sanderson maybe does it more so.

Now, like I said, since I was dream casting this series, it definitely is one that I enjoyed. I don’t think that it’s without it’s weaknesses though. There are times where the story just feels like it doesn’t deliver as much as it could have. It almost plays it a little be safe at times in odd ways. Not like it detracts much from the story, it just doesn’t feel as big as it could be and as big as other Brandon Sanderson works. I think some of that is the target audience, but I also think it’s more so because he was trying to tell a simpler more straight forward story than a lot of his other works as well. The start of the second book, Firefight, is also a bit slow as well, and you kind of get an idea of how the whole book is going to work. There’s also a bit of a feel that the second book, falling to the classic trilogy flaw, is more of a bridge to the third book and setting up things for that than I’d prefer to see. Whereas the first book stands strong on it’s own and could have been a stand alone book easily and the final one Calamity wraps up  the story that was set in the second book.

Overall, the books and story is definitely worth checking out. It does a number of unique things and it’s well written. Like I said, it’s one of the first super power stories that I’ve read, and while I only have one to compare it against, The Reckoners is easily better than it (I don’t remember the name, clearly it was so great). It’s also a series that I wouldn’t have any issue having kids read. I would say that kids as young as 13-14 could read and still enjoy a lot, possibly even a little bit younger. However, I’m a terrible judge at this sort of thing, so maybe read them before a kid reads them. There’s some super powered violence, but nothing is to violent and while there is romance, nothing is explicit about it, it’s just standard YA sort of writing on both accounts.

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