Games night with Justin and Alan

When we stayed longer for the games night, I was in a group with Alan who played some quick games with us to show us how game mechanics work and how the theme can be irrelevant as long as the mechanics work well, it's enjoyable no matter the theme. We played guillotine, camel up and different versions of snap.

Guillotine is a card game that takes place in the French revolution. Some cards have nobles on them, those ones are placed in front of the guillotine in a line. The players have to save them from getting their head chopped off and part of the game is to take the first noble in the line - unless you have an action card that can change the order, then you can pick a different noble, but pick one you must. Every noble card has a certain number of points from -1 till 5 and the player with the most points wins the game. The nobles and action cards balance each other out and create a thought-through game that is very enjoyable.

Camel up is a betting game in which 5 camels race around the track and the players decide each round whether they want to roll the dice to move a camel, bet on this round or bet on which camel will win the whole race. It's a game that explains the theory of betting in a simple and easy to remember way. It has clever mechanics as only one camel moves at a time and the dice is 1-3 so all the camels are likely to be in a certain range of each other, especially with the twist that the camels stack if they stay on the same square and move with if the camel underneath them move. This keeps the game entertaining and randomized with an uncertain ending.

The third game we played was Dobble, a game alike to snap where every card had random items on it, in different sizes. The main objective was to quickly recognize the items that your own card and the one on the main stack shared and shout them out, so the player could add their own to the middle and slowly lose cards this way. The first player to lose all their cards wins the game. Dobble teaches you about speedy recognition of items despite varying sizes and is great fun, especially for quick games with the family or on train or car journeys.