Game Nights- Look­back and re­flect

Last ar­ti­cle we dis­cussed the clas­sic party card games and how game nights are more than games it is ex­pe­ri­ence. This week we sort of did a to­ken ges­ture for a game and de­cided to rem­i­nisce about the games we chose to play. It was a lot of fun to play these games, to dis­cuss items of in­ter­est, and find out just what we all felt about each other.

This weeks game was “Ex­plod­ing Kit­tens” A card game that was over in about 15 to 20 min­utes. A fast paced, blink and you’ll miss it sit­u­a­tion where every card could be the card that kills you. 

The rules are sim­ple, there are cards in the deck that will make you “Ex­plode” or just lose the game. You draw it, you lose. You have ways to see what cards are on the top of the deck, cards to let you not draw, and cards to steal cards from friends. Try not to lose. That is every­thing. There aren’t even any real ad­vance rules, you can maybe home­brew some­thing but that’s re­ally about it. 

We played two rounds but ended in only about an hour so we spent the rest of the time re­flect­ing about just what made this ex­pe­ri­ence so good. To me it was the feel­ing of just be­ing able to play with friends with no ques­tions asked. Choose the game, set it up and play it. Each one we chose was a fun, sim­ple ex­pe­ri­ence that no­body seemed up­set at. It ce­mented our friend­ships and I think that says a lot about these ex­pe­ri­ences. If you have game nights with close friends, you are go­ing to have those peo­ple at your back. Game nights, es­pe­cially if they are go­ing for long times, means your friends, fam­ily, who­ever, will be mates for life. 

I pressed Barry for a quote about the ex­pe­ri­ence and he told me “Table­top Sim­u­la­tor re­ally is an amaz­ing way to ex­pe­ri­ence fun board games with your friends even if you can’t meet up with them. The sheer love the com­mu­nity has put into this is as­tound­ing, from mod­ded in clas­sics like vil­lain­ous, to some down­right ob­scure games like Ad­ven­ture­mart, to some in­sane games like Ex­plod­ing Kit­tens. I loved this ex­pe­ri­ence.” 

I also asked him about his fa­vorite game out of the col­lec­tion and he told me that “it was hon­estly Vil­lain­ous be­cause of how each char­ac­ter had a vastly dif­fer­ent play style” and I have to agree. It was what ce­mented this as a fun ex­pe­ri­ence for all in­volved, and was the only game we played mul­ti­ple days dur­ing meet ups. 

This ex­pe­ri­ence was a good show­ing and just fun to talk about, learn and en­joy some good com­pany. We’re now clos­ing up soon, the se­mes­ter is over, and times will be mov­ing on. I do hope you guys en­joyed read­ing my ex­pe­ri­ence as much as we did play­ing it and re­mem­ber. Drink some wa­ter, call your par­ents to say you love them, write that pa­per you have to do, and just be good peo­ple.