Ranking Ten Games We Attempted to Play While Holding a Baby!

0:02 Hi everybody.

0:03 Hello. I'm Ryan. I'm Bethany.

0:04 And we are Ryan and Bethany Board Game Reviews.

0:06 And we have an updated list for you guys.

0:11 That's right. Uh we recently had a baby and

0:15 got a baby. It's a boy.

0:16 Shout out. If you are a millennial and you remember that commercial, put it down in the comments below. Especially if you remember the company that it's from. By the way, uh never mind. Okay. So, we had a baby and this baby is now 3 months old. We 3 months ago made a video saying uh we were proposing 10 games that we thought would work well or work okay.

0:40 Yeah.

0:40 While holding a baby, whether feeding it, nursing it, things like that, and still be able to play the game with around the table as a family.

0:46 Yeah.

0:47 What 10 games would work for that? And we just proposed 10 games, uh not ranking them because we didn't know if they were going to work or not. and then 3 months later give an update on those games ranking them. This is that update. This is us saying which games worked, which ones didn't, which circumstances did we have to use? What special accommodations did we use to make them work? And maybe that might work for you and your family situation as well.

1:10 All right, so we're going to start. One of the games we proposed that really didn't work out as well as I thought it would was Project L.

1:19 Yeah. Lots of small pieces, lots of fiddly bits.

1:22 Yeah. Um, math.

1:25 Well, you just when you're when you're when you're holding the baby, you have to Okay. So, when we play games, we don't always play ahead of people, but we sometimes play ahead of people and we couldn't do that like because I would need people to get me things. So, it just didn't quite Well, they're also working on their own thing. So, it didn't the the way I thought it just didn't come to fruition.

1:49 Yeah, I think this was it's a fun game. It's a fantastic game. Too fiddly, too much going on from a piece standpoint and management and training things in and out and constant motion in order to make that easy with holding a baby. All right. Then what I want to talk about next is periodic. This is from Genius Games and it's all about teaching the periodic table. Uh as you're kind of going through and kind of it's almost like a set collection thing. You're trying to land on various elements on the periodic table fulfilling some kind of a a goal like maybe it's all of the elements that Murray Curie discovered. Go go go go find them. Go collect them around the board. Yeah. Whatever the case is. Excellent game. I really enjoy it. It teaches you kind of the different elements and the different categories and the different the way the periodic table's organized.

2:32 Uh there's a whole book teaching you the science behind it. Uh in addition to the rules of the game, love it. But the same kind of situation's happening. You have to consider quite a bit of things of which direction do I want to go? What do I want to head towards next? What do I want to beat my opponents towards? Yeah,

2:47 lots of little cubes that are on the board kind of tracking your progress of where you've gone, where you've been. Um, there's kind of a couple different variety of tracks going on. It's it's not a heavy game, but it's one of the parameters we talked about is you're probably going to be sleeping the scenario. And sure enough, we are sleeping in the scenario. It's a little bit more thinkiness than we wanted to do while we're actively holding baby as well.

3:10 Okay, so the next on our list, and this one kind of worked, it was ticket to ride. I want to caveat the only reason why it worked is because we had um

3:20 card holders.

3:21 Card holders. I think if you didn't have call card holders, it might be a little frustrating. Um but you can definitely just say I want, you know, the green card and the blue card. Um and just go from there. Like it people have to help you obviously, but so far it's the only competitive game that I felt like actually worked in this situation. If, like I said, you have a card holder, then I I think it's a lot smoother.

3:46 All right, so the number this is the number 10, nine, eight, seven game on our list. I'm going to put a little asterisk on it because we cheated a little bit on this one a lot,

3:56 but but it works. Uh, this is the game is Castles of Burgundy. The reason we put it on our list was it's kind of a placeholder for any game, even a complicated one that you are extremely familiar with. You know the rules inside and out. even when you are a little bit exhausted,

4:12 you know exactly a good path that you want to take. You know what cards are in the deck. You know all the whatevers to it.

4:17 Um, and this is a game that we're both extremely familiar with. We've played it probably a hundred times each, you know, at this point. And, uh, the other idea being, you know, other people playing could help you out a little bit. Hey, can you give me the chickens and hey, can you give me the whatever? I'm going to place this on the whatever.

4:34 But why did this game work really well? Really well. It did sort of work on the tabletop. They talked about it's a little busy. It's a little bit to a maneuver, but it does work. The reason it's this high on the list, which is not even like high high, but it's because uh we've been playing it a bunch on boardamerena.com. So, we've been playing it digitally even we're in the same room or in the same couch or whatever. We have the opportunity to play board games together against each other. uh which or friends from across town or whatever the case is. We really like Board Game Arena. This is a phenomenal website and it gives us a chance to play um a full tabletop board game in the palm of your hand or you're requiring one hand.

5:20 Uh so as you're sitting and and feeding a baby or doing whatever the case is or even if we're half tired, half asleep, we can still kind of scroll and and find a little piece, click on the thing that we want to grab that turn and move on. So, we play asynchronously, not always live games, but you know, turnbased and, you know, might be one turn a day or whatever is all all you do, but it's still a great way to get some fun games in in a situation like this. So, it's a little higher than maybe it would have been otherwise, but because our little asterisk, our little caveat, and we just wanted to bring up the fact that you can still do some really high quality fun gaming interactively with your friends and family while you are either a away from them or b while you're kind of tied up holding a baby. So, um, great resource. Highly recommend it. If you haven't played on BGA before, uh, go check it out. There's some great games for free and then even better games if you wanted to premium.

6:08 Um, our number six on this list is top tier.

6:11 Hashtag not a sponsor, by the way.

6:14 And this worked really well. The the only reason why it's not higher on the list is because there is a point in the game where you have to write a lot. And if you're the person um ranking everything, you can't ask somebody else to do that for you. Like if you're filling out the cards, let me let me go back. This is a party game. You're filling out cards and then um you're trying to figure out how the how somebody is going to rank those according to a set criteria. So you fill out the people first. You just fill out all these different people, real or fake, whatever, characters, doesn't really matter. And then a criteria comes up like person to survive the longest in the zombie aop aopolis apopocalypse

6:56 apocalypse

6:57 you know and you put something like you put Ryan and Bilbo Baggins and just like Captain America just all of that but you don't know that beforehand and you rank and then

7:07 I'm first to go I'm sorry I'm first to go

7:10 and then you try to figure out how the main person is ranking them. So, if you're the main person that round, um you will have to write just a little bit on a card, which could be difficult. Whereas, if you're writing the the characters down, you can say, "Hey, write this down." That's the only really caveat in the game. Besides that, it works really well.

7:29 All right, so the next thing we want to talk about, this is Vegas Dice. You may have heard it as the Vegas Dice game or Las Vegas. A couple different names it's gone by over different editions over the years. The premise is though, you have a handful of dice, you roll them, separate them into the numbers that you rolled, and then you kind of take over casinos. Uh, if you have a whole bunch of ones, you put those ones on the number one casino. There's money on that casino, and if you have the most dice there at the end of the round, you get to take the biggest dollar amount there. Uh, and ties are really funny because, uh, they cancel each other out. So, if Beth and I both have two dice in a in a spot, but our daughter has one dice there, we cancel each other out and she gets the money, which is just always really funny to see. And it gives you a reason to go to some place. Even though it may not be the winner there, you can try to try to cancel out someone who is going to get money, which is just a hoop.

8:16 All right, so this worked out pretty well because it's just takes one hand to roll the dice, kind of sort them out, and place them wherever you need to go. Uh any dice game would work really well here if you're like an old school like Yatsi fan or Farle or any of those kinds of classic family games would would be a blast here. Um but this one for us was one that was just really easy to just manipulate with one hand and get the things out there that you needed to get down there. Ramsburg has a new addition and has some uh new special rules and different things like that too. Kind of sped things up a little bit which made it even all the more attractive in this scenario as we're trying to enjoy a game while still take care of a baby. All right. So, next, our number four would be deep dive. And this is the game where you're penguins and you're trying to get the best food to eat. Every layer that you're diving is um you're trying to go for set collections. And every layer that you're diving, you're going to get more points worth for the for the um

9:08 tastier, better foods at the bottom.

9:10 Exactly. But then also the deeper you go, there's more predators. So, it's just that push your like aspect of it. The reason why this works and I even think we put it on a different list when I when we told this story before, but the reason why this works is because you can literally just hold your child and tell somebody, "Okay, go to the next one. Okay, get me a piece from there." It's all chance anyway. So, where wherever they're grabbing really is, it it doesn't really matter as long as they're in that same tier. Um, so it actually worked out really well as long as you didn't mind somebody basically handling everything for you. you were still making all the choices.

9:48 All right, so we are kind of in party game territory for this one. Now, our number three is I'm kind of a big deal. Why did this work for us? This one worked really, really well because it's almost 100% verbal.

10:00 It's just a verbal kind of talking party game. The concept is you draw a card, it gives you a category and you're going to tell a little story about yourself and how you you relate to that category. There's a caveat though. there's this bag of modifying tokens going from negative three uh up to positive three uh and there's also a zero. And before you start telling your story, you're going to pull one of those tokens and it's going to be a modifier to your story. Let's say it's a plus one. So, and you're given a category, you would give a a small little one or two sentences giving a story about how good you are at a specific thing or how often you do a specific thing, but you modify it by plus one. You do it a little bit more. do a little bit better than what your normal thing is. Now, everyone else at the table, what they have to figure out is what token did they pull out.

10:48 They have to know who you are, how good you are at that thing originally, and how your story modified,

10:56 adjusted. So, yeah,

10:57 adjusted to the number that you pulled. So, if you're really good at something and you pulled like a negative three, you might say that you're average at it because it's like, you know, whatever. But if you're really bad at something and you pull a plus three, you might say that you again are average at it or whatever. And you're trying to get everyone to get what you're guessing what the token was that you modified things with. It's just all about you have a chance to kind of ask questions around the table and the person get who's getting the clues uh gives funny responses. Again, trying to get people to get closer and narrow in on what token they pulled out of the bag without, of course, saying it. Very funny. Again, all verbal or 99% verbal, so it's just really easy to just kind of hold baby and tell a story.

11:35 Speaking of verbal, our number two is deception, murder at Hong Kong. And the reason why this worked out really well is because you're just accusing each other while you're sitting at the table. Like, you don't have to get up. You don't have to move a piece. You don't have to do all this stuff. You're just sitting there looking at the things and being like, totally that person, 100%. So, the game the game's on the table for you. All the information is out there, and as long as you're just one of the guessers and you don't have to like deal with the bullets at all, you don't even need your hands for this game. Um, and it it just works really well in that setting.

12:10 Yeah. Again, almost an entirely verbal game, and it gives you a chance to do some deduction, do some deducing of who did what, some accusations, all that stuff. Uh, so you can have your hands completely tied up and had would have not any effect on the game at all outside of the initial setup. And that's it. All right, the last one we want to talk about, this is a game that we played that's a little bit of a bigger game. There's more things going on, but because it's cooperative, which is a hint, um, we could all help each other. All the information was open, so we just kind of just verbally said what we wanted to do and everybody else around the table did it.

12:46 Yeah. the game we chose in this category. A couple games could have worked in this obviously, but Horrified. Horrified is one kind of one of our go-to uh cooperative games um with has open information. It's a nice fast-paced game with especially with the players that we play with.

13:02 Yeah.

13:03 And uh there's so many different modifications and and different variants of it uh and different monsters that you can throw in, different levels of difficulty. All that stuff makes it highly variable. We played this and it was as simple as, "All right, could you move me to one cluster, step closer to that thing, and pick up those ingredients for me?"

13:22 It was really that easy.

13:23 All right, I'd like to fight that boss over there. Oh, okay. Roll those dice for me, please. You know, and it was that was it. It worked really well. Um, as long as other people knew that that's what they're getting, they they had a little bit more onus on them to kind of move stuff around.

13:37 But because it was a cooperative game, it just lent itself to that. So, a lot of the games that were lower on the list were competitive games and it was kind of a bit more difficult or you didn't want to put that much of an onus on a person to do that, but you at the table are all competing are are all competing against the board. So, it just lends itself to that.

13:57 All right. So, this is not an exhaustive list of the 10 best games to play with a baby, but it's just 10 games that we tried that we wanted to report back to you and rank them. Uh, so if you got experience in this category, again, it's been 10 years since we had to since we had to play with a baby. So, we're really starting it from scratch as far as this goes. Lots of games have come out in the past 10 years. So, if there's if you've got a young one or have recently, what are some of the games that you tried in this scenario? Uh, when you're exhausted or when you only have one or two hand, you know, one or two hands already kind of used up. Yeah.

14:27 What worked for you? Uh, how did you enjoy your time around the table as a family or as a couple or with friends? Let us know in the comments below. We'd love to hear those stories.

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14:43 You guys, thanks for watching. We will see you next time.

14:47 Bye

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