I love board games, card games, and Tabletop Roleplaying Games (like D&D). Last night I went over to a friends house, and we played four different games, and I thought it would fun to break down these games that I hadn’t heard of before, and spread some interesting games for your group to try out. All of these are fairly short, we spent an hour on average on each, sometimes playing one multiple times in that hour, others not actually finishing the game, but getting the idea.
Nothing here is sponsored, just a suggestion on interesting games.
Deception: Murder in Hong Kong
This game was like an update on Clue, where everyone is working together to find out who murdered Mr. Body. There are three characters you can play as. The first, is a Forensic Scientist, who knows who the murderer is, and can leave give clues as to who they are. They get a few cards with a subject (Cause of Death, Location, Time of Death, etc), but they cannot speak, they can only show which option from each subject they believe is a clue. The second are the Investigators, which are the rest of the players, who must work together, based on the clues, to find the answer. But one Investigator, is the third player, the secret Murderer, who acts just like the other Investigators, but their job is to throw the other players off their scent. The Forensic Scientist knows who the Murderer is, but they can’t say anything, they can only give clues. It’s a fun game, a great twist on Clue, and one of the popular subgenres of tabletop games of “Who’s good at lying to their friends?”
Burke’s Gambit
The rest of the games were all alien sci-fi games, which became an unexpected theme of the night. However, this game also involves lying to your friends, and is basically the same plot to Alien. You all are the crew of a space freighter, but somehow a deadly alien organism has found it’s way on board. The team is split into people that want the parasitic alien to be blasted into space, and those who are loyal to the corporation, and want to bring it back to Earth for profit. There are two interesting twists though. The first, is that while it might be a good idea to kill someone on the opposing team for getting in your way, if you kill the person infected with the alien parasite, it will merely go into someone else’s body, you have to eject them into space. The other, is that the person infected, DOESN’T KNOW THEY ARE INFECTED. Only your teammates can tell you whether or not you are, but you don’t know if they are allied with you or not. It’s a great twist.
Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space
Have you ever wanted to play Among Us as a board game? Well, we’ve got your answer. In this game, the players are once again split into two teams, aliens, and humans. You each start at your teams home base, and the human goal is to get to the escape pods, while the alien goal is to get to the humans, and turn them, zombie style, into an alien as well. However, you aren’t sure where everyone is. Everyone has a hexgrid, with multiple options for each game, and depending on the luck of the draw, you either can not tell anyone where you are, tell them exactly where you are, or you can even lie about where you are. It has a constantly shifting version of Battleship, because people don’t know where you are, but have a vague idea of where you are going. It is a very intense game, that is mostly silent. When everyone in a round doesn’t have to say where they are (“Silent in Sector”) it can be maddening, because you have no idea where the threat lies, on this massive board.
Cosmic Encounters
This might have been my least favorite game of the night, but that’s more of a personal preference, than a comment on the quality of the game. In this game you are an alien species, who wants to create colonies on a number of planets. You are responsible for five planets, and you want colonies on five more. This can be done with an invasion, which is randomly generated who you’ll be invading, or through a series on negotiations. The coolest aspect of this game, is that every alien race gets their own special ability. Some we saw included not dying after a failed invasion, being able to bring dead failed invaders back from the dead, bonuses for helping someone defend their planet, and more. There are 50 different species in the core game, but 197 across all expansions. This adds to a strong replayability, as each species has it’s own tactics to win, and how they interact with the others at the table.
The Nerdd 
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