Gaming
- Wits & Wagers is a good short party trivia game, hypothetically for three to seven people, but I suspect one needs at least four or five; we played seven.
All the questions have a number for an answer, everyone writes down their best answers, the answers are then ranked lowest to highest on a board, and one has thirty seconds to bet on which is the "best" answer, Price-is-Right-style of closest without going over. Betting odds are higher for answers further from the median, to encourage people to avoid the wisdom-of-crowds effect; bonuses are further awarded for writing down the correct answer, presumably to discourage gaming the system and writing misleading answers.
The only downside is that the first six rounds are limit-betting, and the last round is no-limit-betting: with seven people, everything comes down to that "Final Jeopardy"-style question. Which is good in that it allows people to catch up (both games we played had that come-from-behind victory, both times at my expense), but bad in that the optimal strategy for winning is to guess at the final answer by picking an answer that no one else (with a higher score) is guessing. Everyone is forced to go all-in, and there's no benefit to going all in on a spot where someone is betting more, even if you think that spot is correct. Unless you play for money, but that has its own distortions.
I think the fix needed is to make the last round of betting secret, a la Final Jeopardy. It's fun in the earlier rounds to see what other people are doing as they place their bets, and move bets around as one sees what the more knowledgeable people are doing, but that last round needs secrecy to work. - I bought Slim A Game of Thrones, based on a fantasy series of books she had read and I hadn't. The game itself is a themed Diplomacy with more wargame elements and with the additional twist the combat has leader modifiers and one has to choose which leader (all characters from the books). Not having read the books, I can't comment on how well the game captured the flavor. It's a 3-to-5 player game, but it probably plays like Diplomacy as better with more than fewer players. We had a friend over, but our three-player game didn't last long enough for us to clash in combat: the bewildering number of moving parts and modifiers and unclear rules manual made us give up once we realized it's not a game that can be learned on the fly.
- After Game of Thrones fell apart, we played Powergrid, which deserves a longer review, but it worked quite well with just three players, so I can recommend it for 3 to 5 players easily. (Slim won.)