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My first board game night with strangers crashed hard
I finally got the courage to host a board game night at a local cafe here in Austin last Saturday. I picked out like 5 games I thought were pretty beginner friendly, stuff like Ticket to Ride and Codenames. But about 20 minutes in, I realized I picked totally wrong. One guy kept zoning out during Ticket to Ride because it was too slow for him, and another girl got overwhelmed trying to explain Codenames to her friend who never played before. I basically had to scrap my whole plan and just pull out a deck of cards to salvage the night. We ended up playing Spades which everyone actually knew, but I felt dumb for not checking the group better beforehand. Has anyone else had their game night plan totally backfire like that?
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the_emery20h ago
I was just reading about how Emma from the Dice Tower had a similar thing happen at her first meetup. She brought like six gateway games and ended up teaching someone Catan from scratch for an hour. Feels like the real trick is having a backup plan and not overthinking it. Spades is actually a solid save because it's so universal, especially down here in Texas. I've seen people ditch their whole planned lineup for just cards or even a simple party game like Werewolf when things go sideways.
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felixw6818h ago
...and here I thought I was being clever bringing a curated selection of "safe" games. My first meetup, I brought like six different games, all carefully chosen for mixed groups. Turned out three people had never played anything besides Monopoly and one guy was a hardcore eurogamer who brought his own copy of Brass Birmingham. We ended up playing a game called "Pass the Parcel" with leftover gift wrap from someone's birthday because nobody agreed on anything. Your Spades save is honestly way smoother than my attempt to teach Codenames to a friend who kept saying "uh, the word that sounds like a frog but isn't." I've learned the hard way that having a plain deck of cards is the ultimate backup plan, especially down here in the South where everyone knows some kind of trick-taking game.
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