Fulla Game-y Goodness - Feb ‘20 Edition

Oh hey, my nerdy leanings also include board games because of course they do. If it’s a pretty standard nerdy box, I’m likely to tick it. I’ve talked about board games on here before but not for a long while so let’s round up a few of the games that have been gracing the various family tables and haven’t been mentioned before.

Throw Throw Burrito
The one thing that the makers of Exploding Kittens and Bears Vs Babies know how to do is make a stupidly silly yet highly entertaining game. This game is a combination of quick reflexes and sudden explosive foam-based violence in which you collect cards of the same type, all playing at the same time, and when someone gets a Brawl, War or Duel set of cards, the involved people rush to throw foam burritos at each other. It’s not a game to be played in a room with anything particularly valuable within throwing range...

Forbidden Island / Desert / Sky
All similarly themed but slightly different in their gameplay, these are cooperative games in which you play together to beat the board effectively. The jeopardy comes from the fact that, if one of you dies, the game is over. In this series, you’re rushing around the island / desert / launchpad to find all the pieces you need for your escape craft before the island sinks / desert overwhelms you, etc. There are a number of cooperative games out there (Pandemic probably being the most famous) - these are nicely simple introductions to the cooperative game as a genre.

Plague Inc.
Speaking of Pandemic, in which you group together in order to save the world from a deadly virus, this is the competitive flipside - you play competing viruses / bacteria attempting to wipe out the population of the world first. Based on a popular app, it works well as a head-to-head board game too. Probably not one that you’re going to find being advertised too much in the current climate, maybe…

Weird Things Humans Search For
A good solid Christmas time / drunken gathering party game, this one presents you with the beginnings of a Google-style search phrase and you get points for guessing what the possible options on the card are. Exactly the sort of party game at festive occasions that can prompt your prim and proper elderly relatives to reveal hitherto unsuspected depths of jaw-dropping rudeness.

So there you go, a couple of options to get you away from the screens and interacting with some honest-to-goodness human beings for a few hours. Don’t worry, the screens will still be there once you've reached your limit...