Episode transcript

JAMES: There’s a great onion headline that just says, "Board game rules explanation peppered with reassurances that it will be fun." And I am in perpetual fear that I am just living that headline all the time.

CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.

CAIRA: I’m Caira Blackwell.

ROSIE: I’m Rosie Guerin and you’re listening to The Wirecutter Show.

ROSIE: Hi friends.

CAIRA: Hi.

CHRISTINE: Hello.

ROSIE: I have a question and be careful how you answer this. Do you think I am a person who likes to play games, like tabletop board games, that kind of thing?

CAIRA: Yeah.

CHRISTINE: You don’t give me huge gaming vibes personally, I don’t know.

ROSIE: This is a litmus test. Just kidding. I kind of I’m not.

CAIRA: Really?

ROSIE: I’m aspirational.

CAIRA: Maybe it’s just the glasses. I’m like, "She likes board games."

ROSIE: Where are you all?

CHRISTINE: I would love to be super into board games and be like, "Kids, we’re not watching TV anymore. We’re just going to play board games at night." But when it comes to learning the rules and all the things that go into playing games successfully, I feel like I just never want to do it.

ROSIE: That trips me up too. I like the fun.

CHRISTINE: Yeah.

ROSIE: I like when I’m having fun.

CAIRA: Yeah, but you have to get to the part where you can have fun.

ROSIE: I don’t like that part.

CAIRA: Yeah. I’m kind of more, I think on the side that I like board games. And you’re right, the learning how to play the game is the hardest part, but then when you get through that, it is really fun.

ROSIE: If you take away, one thing from this episode is that none of us likes to learn

CAIRA: or read instructions.

CHRISTINE: I think that this time of year in particular when a lot of us are spending time with friends or families for the holiday, it can be a really cozy, fun thing to do. And I mean, every parent I know out there is trying to keep their kids off of a phone, off of an iPad, off of a tv. A board game, a tabletop board game can be a pretty fun alternative and it can also be a pretty fun thing. I have had fun playing games with a big group of people at the holidays.

CAIRA: And it creates memories and these kind of inside jokes that are really quintessential to the holiday times, right?

CHRISTINE: Yeah, absolutely. So we actually have someone on staff whose entire job is, I feel like I say it this a lot.

ROSIE: Of course we do. Yeah, of course we do.

CHRISTINE: Whose entire job is to play tabletop board games and make recommendations. Our staff writer, James Austin, who’s going to join us today.

CAIRA: I love James so much. He’s so fun. We’re going to talk to him about the best advice that he has for hosting a game night or just showing people how to get past the hard part of learning how to play a game so you guys can all have fun.

And then later in the episode, he will give us his best tips for bringing games for little ones. Everyone in between, people who maybe don’t all speak the same language. He has an answer for everything because this is his bread butter and we are so excited to talk to him.

ROSIE: He’s James Games. We’re going to talk to him after the break. Stick around.

CAIRA: Welcome back. This episode, we’re talking all about how to throw a really fun game night with tabletop games and we have an absolute expert to talk with. It’s James Austin who’s a staff writer at Wirecutter covering games and hobbies. He’s played nearly all types of tabletop games and he’s going to reveal the secrets to making a game night actually fun. James, welcome to the show.

JAMES: Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here.

ROSIE: James Games.

CHRISTINE: James Games. That’s right.

JAMES: James Games.

CHRISTINE: James, you cover board games for Wirecutter. You’ve done this for quite a few years now. Listeners might be wondering what does that exactly mean? Is that a real job that you play board games all day? tell us a little bit about what your job looks like.

JAMES: When I try to tell people my job, they kind of stare at me a little bit, because they think I’m getting away with something, and I do feel like I am as well. But no, I was at Wirecutter for a long time before I came to this beat and I got very enmeshed in the philosophy of Wirecutter, which is very deep into product testing, that sort of stuff. And I’ve been a big fan of board games since way before I worked at Wirecutter, and I sort of took that thought process and philosophy into actually trying board games and playing them and recommending them to people. So I play a bunch of games, try to find out what makes them tick, what’s the thing about them that I think most people will relate to, and then make recommendations based on that and hopefully give a little bit of a flavor in the guide as to which games work for which situations and which people.

Day to day, it’s a lot of reading board game manuals and I have a great group of friends here in Denver where I live who love to play board games, which is very helpful for my profession. But also, it’s hard to get them during the workday, so I tend to do a lot of games by myself, which sounds very sad.

ROSIE: James, what about testing games for kids or mixed age groups?

JAMES: I don’t have a lot of experience playing with kids. What I normally do when we’re trying to test for that guide is I try to find co-workers who have kids and send them games to try out, give me the thoughts and opinions on them. I normally check them out myself just to make sure they’re fundamentally a good game and then send them over to see how different kids react to it.

As for older folks, I have had a lot of family gatherings and I’m not going to call my family members old, but some of them are well-seasoned and they tend to play with the 20s and teens as well. So I’ve found some good games that work for those groups.

CHRISTINE: Reading board game instruction sounds like my personal hell.

CAIRA: Yeah, totally.

CHRISTINE: So I just want to get to the point where I know how to play already.

JAMES: Oh, totally.

CAIRA: Every job has those challenges.

JAMES: And some are better than others and some are worse.

ROSIE: How many hours of board games do you think you’ve played since you’ve gotten this job?

JAMES: It’s definitely, at least in the high hundreds. I was looking through my ... I have an air table of all the games I test for Wirecutter just to keep track of everything and it’s breached over 320 now.

CAIRA: That’s insane. I feel like whenever I play on my switch and it counts the hours that you spent playing one game, when I get to 70 I’m like, "I think I need a life."

CHRISTINE: We want to talk a little bit about how to set up a board game night or something during the holidays in a way that maybe can invite those people who are like me a little bit, who are not the people who are jumping at the edge of their seat to play a board game. In fact, if somebody puts a board game on the table, I’m kind of like, "Ugh."

ROSIE: The grouchy folks on the perimeter.

CHRISTINE: But I don’t really want to be that way. So James, what’s your best strategy for setting that up in a way that’s going to bring in all the various people in a way that’s positive and that they’re going to get excited about?

JAMES: So first off, deeply relate to what you were saying about the struggle to actually get the game to the table and play it. I have a perpetual fear. There’s a great Onion headline that just says, "Board game rules explanation peppered with reassurances that it will be fun." And I am in perpetual fear that I’m just living that headline all the time. So what I’ve done to sort of get around that, anytime you’re planning a board game night, treat it like any other party when you’re getting prepped. You want to be prepared, you want to make sure that people are welcomed into your house and you want to welcome them to the experience of the game. So that includes make sure you know how to play the board game that you want to teach your friends, because they don’t want to read rules. And if you’ve already read them, you should be able to teach it.

Also, get things like snacks and drinks, because people are way more inclined to sit and listen to a rules explanation if they can munch on some Cheetos while it’s happening. And then when you’re actually teaching the game, what you want to do is try to let your enthusiasm sort of guide it. People are a lot more willing to play something if you seem excited about it, they will get excited about it and then start to see the joy in it. As you’re going through the teach, try to focus on things like who we are, what’s the theme of the game, what are we doing, what are we trying to do, how do we score points, how do we win. And use the rulebook as a reference. It’s not a script. Do not read the rulebook to your friends. They will hate you.

CHRISTINE: The quickest way to alienate everyone at the party is to read the rulebook to your friends.

JAMES: A hundred percent. Yeah. So make sure you kind of know the rules or at least know the basic functions of the game. And you could do that by either reading the rulebook yourself, which is normally what I do. Or there’s a ton of YouTube rules explainers that you can watch for basically any board game that’s been published in the last 10 years.

CHRISTINE: Of course there is. YouTube’s got it. So is there a particular YouTube creator or website that you recommend to go to if you’re looking for great tutorials?

JAMES: I’m a big fan of Watch It Played and Good Time Society are both very good YouTube channels that tend to do rules explainers as they go through, but there are a ton of different ones. Usually, you start just put the name of the game in the YouTube search box, try to find a thumbnail that looks promising and then go from there. Also, if you’re not a visual learner, if you don’t necessarily want to watch a YouTube video to do it, a website called BoardGameGeek is a wonderful repository of any information you want about any board game that has ever existed. BoardGameGeek probably has it including rules that you can download from all of them.

And if you want to learn by doing and you don’t necessarily want to do what I do, which is set up the game at home and play by yourself, there’s a website called Board Game Arena that has digital versions of a growing library of games that also has usually tutorials for each one that walk you through the rules and show you on the screen.

CHRISTINE: That’s awesome.

JAMES: So those are all great websites to do that.

CHRISTINE: That’s interesting.

JAMES: Yeah. Board Game Arena is also a great way to play board games with people remotely. Me and my wife played that when we were first dating because we were long distance.

CHRISTINE: What if I, not surprisingly, am feeling a little intimidated about being the rule explainer? What’s your advice then?

JAMES: Teaching games is a very much a learned skill. So if you want to play a bunch of games, the best thing I can tell you is learn how to teach games in a way that your friends won’t run away. And then if you’re somebody who wants to get involved in games but trying to learn the rules, just boggles your mind, talk to your friends. I guarantee you, you will probably find somebody in a group of 10 people who is super excited about playing games, wants to play games more and is willing to put that work in to actually get the game to the table and play it. Yeah. And like all things in life, especially with friends or relationships, communication is very important. Talk to your friends, find out what you can and go from there.

ROSIE: You’ve done your prep work then, we know how to play the game. What are we meant to be thinking about while hosting to make sure the guests are engaged, you’re engaged, that everyone is actually enjoying themselves playing this game?

JAMES: As the game happens, it’s mostly monitoring vibes for me. If I know a lot of people around the table haven’t played the game before, most of my attention is focused on what they’re doing and sort of how they’re moving through the game. When you try a new game and you don’t quite know the rules or you haven’t internalized them, a lot of times it’s hard to actually figure out what actions to take and what to do. So often, I’m there trying to be like, "Well, here are some options. Here are your array. Here’s the menu." My friend group here is wonderful, but we have a joke because 90% of the time I lose the game, I don’t win the game that we’re playing, which they like to lord over me because I’m technically a professional board game player. I like to think that it’s because most of my intention instead of focused on an optimum strategy, for me, is trying to make sure everybody around the table sort of is having a good time and knows what’s going on because the best way to have friends play board games with you afterward is that they have a good time on this one. It’s a ploy to keep my friends involved.

CAIRA: You let them win so you end up winning every single time by having them come over and continue playing.

JAMES: Let’s say that I let them win, I think that makes me feel better.

CHRISTINE: How are you deciding what to play? Are you thinking of it as courses, or are you thinking of it more like this is the type of people that are coming and they might like this type of thing?

JAMES: Yeah, a little bit of both. It’s definitely crowd dependent. So if I have friends who are very new to board games, I tend not to do the very strategic or dry. I call them crunchy is a term that comes up in gaming all the time, which is-

CAIRA: What, like Catan ?

JAMES: So Catan is a lighter version of this is what I would say.

ROSIE: It’s a lighter crunch.

CHRISTINE: We can’t even deal with that amount of crunch.

CAIRA: Yeah, I think that’s intense.

JAMES: Yeah, when I talk about a crunchy game, this is a game that’s probably going to take two and a half to three hours and takes a little while to set up and get into. And so probably not going to bring that out for people who are just here to have a party-ish kind of time. And I do like the idea of thinking them as courses because there are a number of games that some people call them like starter games or light games, but they’re basically, they usually set up and play in about 20 to 30 minutes. They’re usually pretty light, very interactive focus and you can sort of get into a game night easier just by starting with a game like that. I think Anomia is great for that, Coup. A lot of those small box games.

CHRISTINE: So like a warm-up.

CAIRA: Yeah.

JAMES: Yeah.

CHRISTINE: I recently, somebody at work, you know who you are if you’re listening, told me this story about how they were trying to make friends in a town they’d recently moved to and they met a couple who was into board games and they were like, "Come over, we’ll have a board game night." And what they didn’t realize is this couple was super hardcore into board games. They really are serious about it. And our co-worker was more sort of like, "Let’s drink and chat and have fun." And wasn’t super into the board game aspect of it. And I think it actually like-

CAIRA: Solidified that they will never be friends.

CHRISTINE: Yeah, it kind of solidified that they weren’t each other’s people. So I guess my question here is, how do you ... There’s a mismatch of energy level or intent or something like that. How do you navigate that as a host?

JAMES: Yeah, I think as a host, what you’re trying to do is make sure that the most people possible have the best time that you can. And I think when you have that mismatch, what I try to do is have a couple games in my back pocket that everybody likes at least a little bit. And so we can do the compromise game. Codenames tends to be that in my little friend group, everybody loves Codenames. So you deploy those when that sort of situation happens.

I also think there is expectation setting is a little bit too strong of a thing, but you do want to, when you’re inviting people over to this, you’d be like, "Hey, we’re having this game night. We’re probably going to play a little bit more of an intense game. Please come over if you would like to play. If you don’t want to play, maybe this one isn’t for you, we’ll have a game night in a couple weeks, maybe you’ll come to that one."

CHRISTINE: You can come to my basic game night in two weeks.

JAMES: Exactly. Yeah.

CAIRA: The wine and cheese game night.

CHRISTINE: Yeah.

JAMES: Love a wine and cheese game night, honestly.

ROSIE: To recap what we’ve covered so far, if you’re having a game night, you want to think ahead at least a little bit and decide on some games that match the vibe of whoever you’re inviting. You also want to make sure that whatever games you’re playing, that the timing feels right. It’s not a three-hour game if people are wanting to play a 20-minute game and vice versa. You want to feed and you want to liquor up your guests. You want some propulsive rules teaching, let’s learn the rules and make sure we know them, but like let’s keep it pushing. And then as a host, you want to be monitoring the vibes and the frustration levels and kind of be making sure that everybody is having fun.

JAMES: Exactly. Yeah.

ROSIE: I think it’s also just important to point back to a couple of these resources that you mentioned for actually learning how to play these games. So on YouTube, you might check out Watch It Played or Good Time Society. And then for sites, you might want to check out BoardGameGeek or Board Game Arena. And that one, you can look at tutorials and play with your long distance lover.

JAMES: Exactly. Yeah.

ROSIE: I love it. All right, we’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, we are getting into the nitty-gritty scenarios that you might find yourself in this holiday season, and James is going to help us match the game to the vibe. We’ll be right back.

CAIRA: Welcome back. James, before the break, we talked about how to set up a really great game night. Now, we want to talk about actual games you recommend. So we’re going to throw you some really common scenarios that people might find themselves in and you’re going to give us some good game options. Are you ready?

JAMES: Hell, yeah. Let’s go.

CHRISTINE: Okay, this is one I can totally identify with. You have a bunch of kids under 10, what are you going to put on the table?

JAMES: So Rhino Hero or that’s expansion, Rhino Hero: Super Battle, great option for kids in that age range. It’s basically a house of cards game. You’re using these cards to build up this giant tower and you have a little Rhino that moves around them and you’re just trying to build the biggest tower without making it fall over. It tends to run fairly quickly, which is good for kids whose attention spans might not be fully up to speed yet. And it’s a big, what we call table presence. It looks really good on a table, so it tends to draw a crowd if you have people there. That’s a great game for that.

CHRISTINE: Yeah, I’ve played this, it’s got some similarities to a Jenga vibe.

JAMES: Yeah.

CHRISTINE: Yeah, that’s great. So what about if your kids are even younger than that, like under five?

JAMES: Yeah, we recommend a game called First Orchard. The age range on it is two plus and it focuses on teaching very basic game ideas like turns and actions to think about and things like that, and it’s really good about laying that out. It’s also cooperative, so parents or older kids can help out younger kids as they go through.

CHRISTINE: I had this game with my little ones and it was great. And also, the nice thing about it as I remember is it comes with these really nice wooden pieces, like little pieces of fruit. And James, for the listeners out there who aren’t familiar with what a cooperative game is, can you just briefly define what that means?

JAMES: So a cooperative game is when every player around the table isn’t necessarily competing against each other. We’re all trying to beat the game. We’re all trying to get a certain win condition or get enough points before the game makes us lose.

CHRISTINE: Which can be a great solution I found for especially kids who have a hard time losing or adults.

CAIRA: Or really, really competitive adults. I’ve definitely been at game nights where tables have been flipped.

JAMES: Oh, a hundred percent. Cooperative games also really help with the age range issue, because you can have older kids or older adults help the younger kids, which is very nice.

CAIRA: Okay, what if you’re hosting a holiday meal with people of varying and disparate political views and we want to steer clear of conversations that include politics, religion, or money?

JAMES: I love A Fake Artist Goes to New York, which is the full name of the game.

CAIRA: What?

JAMES: Yeah. A Fake Artist Goes to New York. It’s known as a hidden traitor game where everybody around the table is trying to collaboratively draw a picture that one of the people sort of ask them to draw and you draw one line at a time, so you go turn by turn, everybody draws a line. And there’s one person at the table who doesn’t actually know what everybody’s trying to draw but wants to try to fake it and look like they know what they’re doing. So they try to bank off the lines that exist.

It tends to be a lot of shifty eye, very suspicious like, "Wait, who doesn’t actually know what’s going on?" You tend to focus on that. And then worst case, if you really don’t want to hear from your family, there are games called The Gang and The Crew, which are lovely little card games. They’re both cooperative, but both of them you’re required to not talk during the game so you can’t communicate. So if you really don’t want to hear your family’s opinions, rock out those games, they’ll have a good time and you won’t have to get angry.

ROSIE: All right, so here’s another scenario, James. Hosting in-Laws you don’t get along with. And I just want to be very clear that I love my father-in-law.

JAMES: Important caveat. Maybe that’s the best scenario for The Gang and The Crew when you’re just like, "Nope, no talking, everybody is fine." But if you don’t want to do that, there’s a lovely little cheerful game called Sushi Go! where you have a hand of cards and you’re passing them around. It’s, number one, adorable. So you can at least all bond over the adorable little sushi art and also you can make decisions on how mean you want to be with your card placement based on what other people want. So depending on how the night is going, you can either be very conciliatory or nice, or you can be a little mean with it, which is a little helpful.

CHRISTINE: Let’s say you’re in a gathering, maybe it’s big family gathering with people that have a huge age range. You have five-year-old all the way up to a 95-year-old. What would you play then?

JAMES: We just did a guide to party games and this is what party games are made for. I really love Monikers, which is one of the picks in our guide. It’s sort of like a new take on an old parlor room game. So you start off, you’re trying to get your team to guess names on cards. You start in the first round. You can say as many words you want as long you don’t say the word on the card. Then the next round you can only say one word and then the round after that, you have to do charades.

The cool thing about it is because you’re using the same clues every round, you start to develop little in jokes and little secret language that you’ve developed for the game. So oftentimes in the second and third round, the clues don’t necessarily directly point to the card, they point to something somebody said in the previous round that everybody found funny and it comes back up as an inside joke, which is great. Another game I love for parties in this situation is Anomia. Very simple game. Flipping cards from a deck in front of you with card has a symbol and a word on it. If symbols ever match between players, they’re immediately in a duel and you have to yell out an example of the word that’s on their card, not the word that’s on your card. It tends to lead to a lot of brain short-circuiting in a very fun way. A lot of yelling, big high energy game, keeps people entertained and it’s also quick. Plays in like 30 minutes.

CHRISTINE: And would that work for a pre-literate kid who maybe hasn’t learned how to read yet?

JAMES: Probably not what you’d want for that would be more like a Dixit or something more visual focused. If you have a range where people can’t necessarily understand words.

CAIRA: What if you have a gathering with people who don’t all speak the same language fluently?

JAMES: Yeah. So this is also a time when you want something very visual or simple. So Carcassonne is a good example of a game that’s pretty basic, very fun when you actually play it, but doesn’t require necessarily any big discussion. Basically, you’re collectively building this little French countryside with some cities and stuff and you’re flipping over a tile, putting it somewhere, and then placing the meeple to get some points. Lovely little game, great way to pass the time. And then Dixit, like I mentioned earlier, which is all about visual association. So you don’t necessarily have to rely on clear language, you’re trying to rely on the visuals of the cards that are played. So either of those tend to help bridge some language gaps.

ROSIE: So how about a group of really boozy adults who are just going to ... They’re not going to be able to pay attention to the detailed instructions.

JAMES: Yeah. So this is another party game situation, which is great. For this specifically, I tend to focus on team-based games, because not everybody has to pay attention all of the time.

CAIRA: I love this.

JAMES: They can kind of pop in and out. The games I love for this are Codenames and Wavelength, specifically. Codenames, like I said, big hit with a bunch of my friend group. Essentially, you have a grid of cards with words and then you have two clue givers who are trying to connect the words together. It’s like live action connections in a really fun way.

Wavelength is similar in that you have a clue giver who’s trying to get their team to guess something, but instead of cards on a table, they’re trying to guess the percentage of a dial. And what you do to do that is you give opinions. So is something more wet or dry. Somebody might say spaghetti and that’s like, "Where is spaghetti?"

ROSIE: I love this game so much, because it really underlines how your brain is different than the brains of the people you’re around.

JAMES: Yes, people have to plant a flag on an opinion sometimes. One of my favorite instances of this game, somebody gave the clue good movie to bad movie, somebody gave Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and it was bad.

ROSIE: Bad movie, bad movie.

JAMES: It started a fight, because it was more towards the good side than the bad side and people freaked out.

ROSIE: That’s so fun.

CAIRA: What if you’re in a group of people who always wants to play Catan and you are dying to introduce anything that will get them excited? So maybe it has to be in the same vein of game, but you just cannot play that game one more time. And I am speaking from experience.

CHRISTINE: Yeah.

JAMES: Right there with you.

CHRISTINE: And maybe James, could you explain briefly what is it and what is the alternative?

JAMES: Yeah. So Catan is what a lot of people credit for the explosion of what people call Eurogames in America. A lot of board game culture grew out of Germany and Europe. When that sort of got ported over to America, Catan was one of the flagship, it was one of the first ones that everybody kind of latched onto. What it does is it’s a game about sort of resource distribution and sharing. So every turn, somebody rolls a dice, a game about sort of resource distribution and sharing.

So every turn, somebody rolls a dice, and then depending on that die roll, people get different materials. And once you’re there to build things and take actions and actually get points in the game, you have to use those materials to build things. But because of the random nature of the dice. Everybody around the table kind of has a different distribution of the things. So you’re encouraged and, in fact, incentivized in the game to trade with other players, try to negotiate, get all that sort of stuff done.

If you’ve been playing Catan for too long and you know your friend who loves it, but you want to play something new, I’d focus on why they love Catan so much. If they love that interaction and trading component, there’s a game called Bohnanza, which is also kind of a classic German card game that is all about trading and exchanging beans. That’s the whole game. You’re just trying to sell beans.

CAIRA: That doesn’t sound enticing to me, James.

JAMES: It doesn’t, but let me tell you, you get a hand of beans and you’re like, "Guys, listen, I have a java bean that I need to get out of my hand, otherwise it’s going to kill me. I need somebody. I will give it to you for free." It’s like that sort of negotiation happens, which is if you like that aspect of Catan , Bonanza is just that, but focused and more. I think it does that better than Catan does.

And then if I want a game that feels like intense, a step up from Catan is a game called Brass: Birmingham, one of my all-time favorite games. And it also doesn’t have a great pitch, which is you’re all British industrialists in the 1800s. But guys, it’s so good. Listen, there’s a lot of canals. You’re trying to move textiles and machinery parts. The cool thing about Brass is that the systems all interlock in a way that you go galaxy brain to figure out what a move is. And because every time a move happens, everybody around the board could benefit or could sell things based on that. So everybody is kind of always engaged and always in the turn of it. I love it. It’s so good. Also, it sounds pretty dry, but it’s not, it’s great.

CAIRA: Maybe I’m just not into this style of game.

CHRISTINE: No, I think I love this for you James.

JAMES: Fair.

CHRISTINE: And I actually know people in my family who sounds like they would love this game, but I actually think it just clicked for me that I’m not a Eurogame girl.

CAIRA: Yeah.

CHRISTINE: It’s not my style of game.

CAIRA: But now we know.

CHRISTINE: But now I know. Now I know. That’s true.

JAMES: And that’s fine. There are plenty of games. There are so many games for everybody. We don’t all have to play the crunchy Eurogames as much as I love them.

ROSIE: A couple more scenarios here. Here’s one, you have a deck of cards, that’s it. What game do you recommend?

JAMES: I am a huge fan of what is called trick-taking games. Trick-taking games are hearts, spades, bridge, anything that you’re playing cards all together into one thing. You take the trick and then it goes from there. My personal favorite is a game called, Oh Hell! It’s the game my family always played when we got together for the holidays, so that’s the game I know. It’s very fun. It leads to a lot of people yelling, oh hell, all the time in my experience, just because a card will be played into a trick and then it ruins their whole hand and everything goes bad. So love that game. Highly recommend.

CAIRA: I have a follow-up to this because I’ve had this experience a lot. I don’t know if this is a relatable thing, but I love gin rummy. That’s my game. I have had several situations where I will go into a room where apparently everybody knows how to play gin rummy, but we all play differently. How do you sync up when you’re playing a card game that everybody knows, but the rules somehow are always different for people?

JAMES: So this is a phenomenon known as house rules in the broader gaming settings. And normally, whoever’s house you’re at, that’s the person who gets the final call on the rules. They’re hosting, they get the rule call.

CHRISTINE: There you go. There’s motivation to host.

JAMES: Exactly.

CAIRA: That’s fine, I’ll give up my rules.

JAMES: And if you’re ever curious about rules of a card game that you’re not entirely sure where, there’s a website called Pagat.com. It’s the largest catalog of traditional card games that I have found that exist online. Highly recommend checking it out. It’s great.

ROSIE: Does it have instructions and tutorials and stuff like that?

JAMES: Yep. The full rules of every card game I’ve ever heard of and more that I hadn’t.

CAIRA: James, what about if there’s maybe only two people in the room, maybe it’s a date night or you’re just hanging out with one other friend, do you have any games for that scenario?

JAMES: A lot of games that are made for more than two can be played at two pretty well. I think Splendor is a great version of that. Just classic, what was known as an engine building game with gems. But the first actually guide I worked on when I got into this role was a guide to two player games that are exclusively two player. They’re only made for two.

One of my favorites from that is a game called Star Realms, which is what is known as a deck building game where there’s a shared market. You each start with the same deck of cards. And as you play, you use those cards to get more powerful cards that then go into your deck and then you play them. It sort of has this ramp up in power, which is very fun because you start off doing very dinky things and spending three money to buy a ship and maybe damaging your opponent once. And then by the end of the game, you’re both just throwing massive haymakers at each other and doing 20 points of damage in one turn and stuff like that. So that’s a very fun conclusion and finale, which is great.

CHRISTINE: Let’s say I would just want to zone out by myself. Maybe I have played solitaire in the past or put together jigsaw puzzles. What would you recommend then?

JAMES: So there is a whole genre of tabletop games that are just solo games. They exist only for one person. We did a guide to them this year, had a great time doing it. If you’re going for a similar board gamey like vibe, there’s a game called Final Girl, which I love. You play as the titular Final Girl in a 70s slasher horror genre movie. And your job is to try to defeat the killer before it kills everybody, including you. The art design is very fun. It leans into the genre in a way that I find very satisfying, and the game itself, extremely tense. A lot of really thematic thoughts and moves that you go through, which is great.

And then my favorite game that I like to play by myself is it can be a cooperative game, but I tend to play it solo, it’s called Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, which is the closest I’ve ever felt to being actual detective detecting things. You get 10 scenarios, you get a directory and you get a map of London. And as you go through the scenarios, you try to find clues at the different locations in London. So you make the choice, "Let’s go see the coroner." And talk to the coroner, and you’ll go there. You’ll get a little story blurb with more things that might lead you to more places in London. You just run around London trying to solve a crime, and then you get to the end and Sherlock Holmes tells you how stupid you’ve been and how you’ve missed everything and is a real jerk about it at the end, but I enjoy that.

CAIRA: And that’s a game that you can only play one time, right?

JAMES: Yeah. So it has 10 scenarios that once you’ve kind of knew the solutions, it’s a little bit less fun to play. But there are four boxes, so all told, you could get 40 cases if you buy all four, so it’s plenty of content there.

CAIRA: Do you find that you can read gift stuff like that, or are you writing on documents?

JAMES: Yes.

CAIRA: Oh, okay.

JAMES: No, I tend to take notes on a separate notepad. You don’t cut anything out of the books or anything like that. It’s a full game that you can immediately just give to somebody else and they’ll have a great time with it.

CAIRA: So the holidays are around the corner. We want to talk about gifting. Gifting a game can feel a little bit tricky. Sometimes, it can feel like you’re being given homework instead of being given something fun if you’re on the receiving end. What’s your general guidance around giving a good gaming gift? What do you need to know about somebody to even begin to think about that?

JAMES: You first have to know that they do enjoy tabletop games or have in the past. I have found trying to give a board game as a gift to somebody who has never really interacted with board games or whose conception of board games stops at Monopoly. They will be confused. And depending on your relationship, may be a little bit hurt, and it is not a great thing. So make sure they actually have played some version of tabletop games in the past.

And then based on the games that you know they’ve played, or if you talk to them and ask them what games they played to try to figure out what they tend to like, what they gravitate towards. That can either be in terms of mechanics of the game or the general level from party game to very strategic and crunchy game. And then once you do that, if you find a game that hits those boxes or checks those boxes or that you really enjoy and you have overlapping tastes, that’s always a good thing to be like, "Hey, I really loved this game. I think you will too, because we have very similar tastes," and go from there.

CAIRA: James, we’ve gotten to the very last question that we always ask our guests. What’s the last thing you bought that you’ve really loved?

JAMES: Oh, this is a very sentimental answer. It’s less about the thing and more about what it represents, but I bought a wedding ring. I got married last month and it’s been my favorite thing.

CHRISTINE: That’s awesome. What kind of ring?

JAMES: It is a tungsten carbide with rose gold on the inside from a company called Thorum. It’s called the Stormlight Ring. I got it before I got into The Stormlight Archives, which is what the name is based on.

CAIRA: It’s beautiful.

CHRISTINE: That’s gorgeous.

CAIRA: And congrats again.

ROSIE: Congratulations, James.

JAMES: Thank you.

ROSIE: I mean, for coming on the show, but also I guess for getting married. We’re really, really happy for you.

JAMES: Honestly, both an honor.

ROSIE: James Games.

CHRISTINE: James Games.

CAIRA: James Games.

ROSIE: He brought the recs, he brought his lovely personality. What are y’all taking away from this episode? This was chock-full.

CHRISTINE: It was chock-full. I feel like I am walking away with a handful of games that I’m thinking about getting for the fam this holiday season. And it was the first time I understood I don’t think I like those Eurogames. I don’t think I would like that bean game he was talking about. These party games sound like my jam and I think I’m going to try Codenames.

ROSIE: Well, I took away some guidance around hosting a game night that if you’re doing this, that you kind of have to be the shepherd of the evening. And then also making sure that the games you pick, not just the strategy of them, but how long they might take to play match with people’s expectations because that can be a thing.

CAIRA: And I think I’m going to take away that every year, my family either plays Taboo, which is outplayed or poker over the holidays, and I think both are pretty boring and I’m tired of them, so I’m going to introduce Wavelength. That sounds like something that’s more our speed. It’s something new, but it’s kind of in the same category as Taboo and I’m really hoping that it’ll stick.

CHRISTINE: That’s a great idea. And we have so much tabletop gaming advice on the site. James has written a lot of guides on all of this, so we’ll link to all of that in the show notes, not just to the games he mentioned in this episode, but lots of guidance on the site.

I also want to mention that if your style of games is more like…crossword —or you spend a ton of time on NYT Games, like my husband – our colleagues over at NYT Games recently released a book full of wonderful puzzles that would, honestly, make for a great holiday gift! It’s called: Puzzle Mania!: Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee, Minis and More! We’ll drop a link to that in our show notes. It was curated by NYT Games lead editor Joel Fagliano for puzzlers of every skill level.

ROSIE: And if you do want to check out the names of all of the games that James recommended, everything is in our show notes. We promise, you can head right over and it’ll be there. On Friday, keep an eye out on our feed for the second episode in our holiday gifting series where I’m going to get recommendations for kids’ gifts from the source, from the kids. Excited about that. And then stay tuned, because next week’s episode is going to be very fun. Christine is going to sit down with Kevin Roose, New York Times tech columnist and the host of the podcast, Hard Fork.

CAIRA: The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Maddy Masiello and Nick Pitman. Today’s episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, Catherine Anderson, Rowan Niemisto, and Diane Wong. Cliff Levy is Wirecutter’s Deputy Publisher and General Manager. Ben Fruman is Wirecutter’s Editor-in-Chief. I’m Caira Blackwell.

ROSIE: And I’m Rosie Guerin.

CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.

CAIRA: Thanks for listening.

CHRISTINE: Personally, I’m really all in on these quiet games. It’s just no noise, no talking.

Credits

The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Maddy Masiello and Nick Pitman. Episodes are mixed by Catherine Anderson, Efim Shapiro, Rowan Niemisto, Sophia Lanman, and Sonia Herrero. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, and Diane Wong. Wirecutter’s deputy publisher and general manager is Cliff Levy. Ben Frumin is Wirecutter’s editor-in-chief. Hosted by Rosie Guerin, Caira Blackwell and Christine Cyr Clisset.