Niamh and I had a boardgame night with six people as a sort of housewarming! With six players we were limited in what games we could play, so we played two games suited for the big group.
In the recent Reddit Gifts Boardgames Exchange, I received a game called Codenames. It’s a team-based game, so I’ve had to wait until we had a reasonably large group to break it out. Each team has a “Spymaster” who gives one word clues so that their team picks the correct cards on the table. The trick to the game is linking multiple cards with a single clue, which I had great satisfaction doing – e.g. my team’s cards were “Telescope”, “Airplane”, and “Parachute”, so I gave the clue “Sky 3”. It was very good fun and very funny to see the wrong trains of thought that people went on for clues that seemed foolproof! Very fast turnaround for each round too – there were six of us, so we did three rounds, taking turns to be the spymaster and that took us around an hour in total.
The Settlers of Catan was my first “proper” boardgame and I had good fun with it for a while, but it has a serious problem with luck deciding too much of what people can do, so I hadn’t played it in a long time. Niamh gave me a gift of the 5-6 player expansion at Christmas last year, so it seemed like a good occasion to break it out. My verdict – it still suffers from the same probability problems as basic Catan, but it’s definitely more interesting with six people! It introduces a building phase at the end of every turn to allow for the longer waiting times between turns, which meant something was always happening. it took longer than normal Catan because of the six players and because of this extra segment to each turn – we were playing for over 3 hours and got a bit sick of it. I won though – a first for me and Catan!
Overall a good fun night and we broke in our new coffee table into the bargain!
