What I Played Today: April 8

Spyfall, Codenames, Virtual Reality, You Don't Know Jack 

I went to a friend's place with the assumption that we were playing board games, but I was wrong! We would spending the evening on an adventure into the realms of VIRTUAL REALITY! Oooohhh Aaaaahhh!

Anyway, before everything got set up and everyone got really distracted, we played a couple of games I haven't played yet that got a lot of talk a few months ago, Spyfall and Codenames. Spyfall is a bluffing game, kinda, in which everyone gets a card saying they are at the same place, except for one person, who just knows they are the spy, and they need to figure out where everyone else is. Each player asks all the other players questions, until someone get suspicious of who the spy is or the spy figures out which of the 25 locations everyone else got.

It's a fun game! We failed a few times before I was the spy and everyone figured out I was lying out my nose, even though what I said was completely reasonable! But I like this game and I would like to play it more.

Then Codenames, in which there is a grid of random words, and each team has a leader and guessers. The leader says a word and number to the guessers, and the guessers try to discern similar words on the grid that are related to the leader's word. It's a fun, creative experience with a lot of interesting intersections of language that just gets me deep down as a linguist. It's really good and I love that this game is so open-ended. No game will ever, ever be the same. I probably should pick this up.

And then I was thrust into a world outside my very perception, into VIRTUAL REALITY! Someone had won a Vive in a contest, and so had all the stuff and goodies to play several games. It was a constant presence throughout the night, and I finally got to tap in and experience a few minigames, like playing first-person Angry Birds with funny goofs and a longbow simulator. I was not exactly overwhelmed with it (although I was still hesitant to, say, walk off a cliff in VR) but it is definitely a new experience. One you are aware of, of course, but I'm glad that technology has finally gotten here, because it's very, very interesting. And very very expensive.

I also suffered through a few games of You Don't Know Jack. Not because I don't like You Don't Know Jack, just that everyone was extremely distracted and I was bothered by this. There was a fun theme game though, in which the host really hopes that Paul Rudd will show up and builds the entire game around it. I like the writing of these games so much.

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