I had five friends visiting over the weekend, which meant actual, in‑person gaming.
Trying to Spark a Magic: The Gathering Habit
I started by teaching one friend Magic: The Gathering using a pair of starter decks I’d bought ages ago. I’m not sure I managed to hook them. Part of the problem was that with so many people around, only two could play at a time given I only had the two decks.
I checked online stores and instant‑delivery apps to see if I could get more decks delivered on short notice. No luck. I’ll probably try again with a smaller group.
A Rare Victory in Catan
Next up was Catan, and I think this may have been my first actual win. It comes with a major asterisk: one player was brand new, and another doesn’t usually take the game very seriously. Even with those advantages, for most of the game I was one of the worst performing players.
“9” was rolled an absurd number of times — and I was the only one without anything on 9. Meanwhile, “6,” which I had two settlements on, barely appeared.
The turning point came from a perfectly timed Monopoly card. The map was stone‑starved, but after a couple rolls led to other players getting a significant amount and another player trading a large amount of resources for one stone, I played the card and scooped up a huge pile of stone. That let me upgrade two settlements into cities. Then the law of averages finally kicked in: 6s started appearing, my cities started producing, and the resource engine came alive.
The others embargoed me, but I built a 3:1 port, and between that and the cities, I kept the momentum going. I won with four cities, one settlement, and a victory point from a development card.
Early bad luck, late good luck — it finally came through for me.
Jackbox Chaos
After Catan, we moved to Jackbox Games on the Xbox.
- In Quiplash, I used to be one of the top performers back in the West. In India, my humor just doesn’t land the same way, so I get demolished.
- In Fibbage and Murder Mystery, the opposite happens — they’re built around Western trivia, so I end up with an unfair advantage.
- We wrapped with Drawful, where my favorite trick is telling new players that “two fingers erase.” Watching them panic as they try to undo the damage is always good for some laughs.
Dumb Charades in the Age of Infinite Content
We ended the night with a 3v3 boys versus girls edition of dumb charades, but it struck me how much harder the game has become. The fragmentation of media — streaming platforms, niche fandoms, hyper‑targeted content — means there’s no longer a shared cultural pool to draw from. I was given a Korean film to act out. It turns out it was released under different names in different markets so the game collapsed under the weight of encyclopedia arguments about what the correct name should be.
Still fun though. Despite, or maybe because of, the arguments.