Board Games
Decrypto
For a quick minute, Codenames was the hot party game on the block. You’ve got a pattern of words, and you give a clue to your partner(s) to try and have them guess as many as possible. It’s great! And Codenames Duet, the two-player co-op version, is even better.
I haven’t played Codenames in ages because I bought Decrypto in 2020. Codenames doesn’t work well above 4 players. Only one person can clue, and one person can point. The extra players are largely vestigial. Decrypto fixes this problem.
If you like Codenames, trust me and play Decrypto. If you’re still not sold, I’ll try to explain it, but bear with me: the game’s biggest drawback is that it’s easier to just jump in than to try and explain the rules beforehand.
You have 4 words that never change. You need to clue three of these words to your opposing team in a specific order. The other team can also hear every clue you give, and after each round they learn which words you were pointing to.
Your team has the advantage of knowing what the words are, but the other team starts to gain a picture. They don’t know your word is “Santa”, but they know that you’ve clued it as “Chimney”, “Coal”, and “North”. If you give “Reindeer”, the jig is up and they’ll know the word. Maybe play it safe and give “Red” instead, hoping it’s enough to throw off the scent?
The twist? While you’re giving clues and dodging your opponents, they’re doing the same thing to you! Try and figure out their clues before they get yours.
You don’t need the words to win (in the example above, it doesn’t matter if you figure out the answer is Santa, just that you know that “Jolly” will go with word #2).
For added fun, grab the Laserdrive expansion. At least one of your clues has to fit a theme category that changes each round. “Famous living people” “Movie title” “School supply”. If all of your words fit the theme, you can try to guess an opponents word. Diligence pays off!
Scythe
Decrypto is great for crowds and lighter fare, but I’m a sucker for heavy games, and Scythe is one of the best-designed board games I’ve ever played (alongside Terraforming Mars).
Thematically, it’s a bit odd: you are warring countries trying to rebuild in the wake of world war I. And you have mechs. Gameplay wise, it’s effectively a game of solitaire. You can fight each other, but that’s not the point. You’re building up your own little engine, and racing to certain points on the main board — if you care! You can ignore those objectives entirely and still win.
Scythe is a race to do six different things at once, with each faction playing slightly differently. Of all the games in our collection, Scythe is the one we’ve taught most. We can teach and play a game in 3 hours flat, or crank out a game with our regular group in half that time.
It’s a hefty game with a fairly hefty price tag, but if you like optimization and engine-building, you won’t be disappointed.
Movies
Grand Budapest Hotel
I was supposed to watch this movie in college at a local free cinema. I didn’t know anything about it, except that I’d seen the trailer and it looked colorful, quirky, and unlike anything I’d seen before.
I wouldn’t watch it until many years later, but I instantly fell in love. It WAS unlike anything I’d seen before. The world feels real and lived in, despite being almost entirely unlike our own. The story folds in on itself with layers building in outer frames.
It’s a move about storytelling, and it tells a wonderful story with incredibly memorable characters. This was my first Wes Anderson movie, and I’m sad to say that none have lived up to it since.
TV
Andor
What can I say about Andor? It’s the rare piece of modern television that respects the viewer. At no point does it tell you that Syril is a rule-abiding narcissist. It trusts you to figure that out from the moment you meet him, when his boss asks him why he tailored his suit, or when he refuses to drop the case that sets off the show.
THe stakes here aren’t small, but they are personal. In the first few minutes, our lead gets into a fight with a cop. He runs home, realizing that his life is over if they catch him. He’s scared and on the run. And then things tumble.
The writing here is smart and it trusts the viewer. When Syril tries to motivate his men, he flops, invoking a closenes with them he hasn’t earned. “There’s no one I’d rather be doing this with than the ten of you” he says to people he’d met moments before. It falls flat, and the long, close camera pulls on the soldiers shows that more effectively than someone wryly turning to the screen and saying “That went well!”
Andor is Star Wars, but it’s not Star Wars like you’re expecting. There are no lightsabers or flashy dogfights here. It’s not that kind of show. It’s about one man and the ripples his actions cause.
The highest praise I can give this show, aside from saying that it’s worth your time, is to say that it’s the first physical piece of media I have purchased since probably 2016.
Video Games
Tetris 99
In 2020, Donald Trump bought my wife a Switch. That’s not entirely true, but it’s not entirely false either. Covid was rampant, stimulus checks went out. Switches were in high demand. A check came, an exchange was made.
I didn’t touch the Switch for a long time. It was, after all, my wife’s. She used it for Animal Crossing, like so many others in that incomparable era, until that game lost its grips on her. And there I found it, discarded in the living room, calling out for attention.
And there I found Tetris 99.
I’m not especially good at Tetris, but the pitch of the game is so simple, and so compelling I couldn’t turn it down. It’s Tetris, that game your grandpa loves, but played in real-time against 98 other opponents. As you clear lines, they get added as garbage to an opponent of your choice until only 1 remains.
It’s Battle Royale x Tetris, and it’s incredibly addictive. I’ve been the first one eliminated, and I’ve been the third one left. A game takes a matter of seconds, minutes if you’re especially good or lucky. And then it’s time to queue again.
Did I mention it’s free?
To the Moon
RPG Maker games are often maligned for their lack of depth. To The Moon is the single best RPG Maker game I’ve played, and I count it among my top 5 video game experiences.
It’s not a game. Discard that notion. It’s closer to a visual novel, and it’s incredibly worth your time. At a mere 4 hours, I’ve purchased and played through this game more times than I can count. I’ve given it as gifts, I’ve watched my friends play through it. It’s just that good.
Why is it good?
The writing. Okay, the writing in this game is sometimes terrible. Minute-to-minute, the characters speak in unusual ways. One of them substitutes increasingly-unlikely vegetables in place of profanity. But it works! It works because of The Big Picture.
I often say that there is a difference between being a good writer and being a good storyteller. Some people are both! Brandon Sanderson can tell a great story. As a writer, he’s passable. But he gets the job done!
The story here is sublime, and the moments of writing that matter are pulled off expertly, like a master guitarsman goofing around until the solo.
The pitch? An old man is dying. A company comes in with a fancy machine (think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) that lets any revisit their memories, changing them slightly to recreate a better world, if only for their dying moments.
It’s expensive, and maybe unethical. But, it pays the bills. This man’s wish? He wants to go to the moon, of course. So you dive deeper into his memories to make the smallest change you can to set his life on that course.
As you go deeper and earlier, you get to know the man better, racing against the clock to make his dreams come true.
Books
The Animorphs
Preamble
Remember earlier when I wrote about how great To The Moon Is? To The Moon encouraged me to read Animorphs.
Let me back up.
When I was in 4th grade or so, I started reading the Animorphs, and I loved them! I would grab the next one off the shelf at my library whenever I saw it.
But I wasn’t very good at using the library, and I didn’t keep good track of which books I’d read. I know I read the first two, and one in the 20s. But I didn’t read them in order, and I wasn’t sure if it was a Magic Tree House situation where the order didn’t matter super much, or more like a traditional book series where the order matters a lot (not: it’s the latter!)
So I stopped reading them at some point. I loved the ones I did read, but it was too hard to find the next one in order, so I never went back. I thought about them off-and-on, but wrote them off.
Until I played To The Moon, where a character reminisces about how great those books are, and how he wishes he could read them again. Another character points out: you totally can! Enjoy kids things as an adult, it’s fine!
This was one factor in me taking the plunge.
Amble
The other factor is that the author released all of the books for free as ebooks! You can download them right now on your e-reader of choice! The books are short, you can knock one out in an hour or two!
Okay but why should I?
These books aren’t kids books the way you’re thinking they are. In the second book, someone is processing PTSD form the events of the first. These books deal with stress, grief, war, suffering, and morality. And sometimes they get a bit silly, too.
I encouraged my wife to start reading them and she was extremely reluctant. Once she started, she finished the whole series in a month. They really are excellent.
The story goes like this: five friends take a shortcut home after school. They witness an alien spaceship crash down, as you do. The dying alien inside gives them a gift and a warning: the invasion has already started. People around you are being mind controlled by aliens. There’s no way to know who is infected. The only way you can stop them is by turning into animals and beating them up. My people will be here in a year. Survive until then. Good luck.
!!!!
That’s book one!
I will admit that the first book suffers a little bit from “main character is a young boy” syndrome, where some things are really obvious to the reader but he doesn’t realize until way later. They are middle grade books after all. But they get better. The characters stop being naive very quickly.
Some of the books are bad. Others are legitimately among the best sci-fi I’ve ever read.
The only cost is time. Check ‘em out?