Games To Play While Holding a Baby?

0:02 Hi everybody.

0:03 Hello. I'm Ryan. I'm Bethany. And we are Ryan and Bethany Board Game Reviews.

0:06 And today we have a list for you. It's not even a top 10 list, even though there will be 10 of them.

0:11 We are proposing a top 10.

0:14 We are proposing a top 10,

0:15 but we don't really know the result of it quite yet. If you have been following our channel, you may know that Bethany and I are expecting our third baby. Uh by the time you watch this, we will have

0:24 we will have had that baby.

0:26 That baby will be out and about. uh and keeping us very awake, I am sure, and keeping us very busy. Um but that's changed the way we game.

0:37 Yeah.

0:38 Both as kind of in preparatory to this moment, but also as going forward.

0:42 Yes. So, we're trying to think of games that we would be able to play while you are holding a baby, whether you're nursing the baby, feeding the baby, or just holding the baby. games that are going to be easy to play during that.

0:58 I think there's two components for me that that follows this is a it takes only one arm because you're holding the baby. The other one is half of your capabilities because you are occupied.

1:11 Yeah. Maybe maybe like maybe like 75 like I don't know 25. We're just going to be really old parents. So this is going to be completely different experience than when we had our our girl. So

1:24 yes.

1:24 Yes.

1:25 So we are proposing these 10 games as great games that we think are going to work out well for us at least while we are taking care of our baby and still playing lots of games as much as possible so we can still enjoy our hobby

1:36 as we're doing this.

1:37 This is a part one.

1:38 There's a Yeah, there's a caveat.

1:40 We don't know. We haven't experienced this yet. So, in three months, uh, when maternity leave is up, yeah, we are going to re-evaluate and relist these 10 games and rank them. So, now we're just, we're not going to rank them yet. We're just going to tell you them, talk about them, and then we're going to tell you in three months if we were right or not.

1:58 Yeah. If it worked or not. So, we're just going to go through and we're going to talk about why we think these might work. So, I'll start. Um,

2:05 real quick, put in the comments below which ones you would recommend because if you've been through this recently, we want to know about it so we can enjoy this time.

2:13 Our youngest [clears throat] is nine, so it's been a little bit of time. Just a little bit.

2:19 All right, so I'm going to start with Castles of Burgundy. And I know that seems like an odd one for this, but you're really just rolling the die. You can point to the board, I'm hoping, and people will gather things for me. That's that is my hope in this

2:34 you there gather me those chickens

2:36 because yes because I'm so familiar with it that is a caveat to this one. I'm just so familiar with this game that I can see what's out on the board and I'm going to know how that's going to interact with my board and then if I have the one hand I can interact with my board

2:52 while other people are giving me things. That's my guess.

2:55 All right. So I'm going to go to a game called Top Tier. This is a party game where you are basically just kind of discussing and ranking and cooperatively thinking about what you think how someone else would rank very strange characters in very strange topics. It's absolutely hilarious. It requires almost no hands at all. You can actually even tell someone else to write down what you want someone to write for a clue.

3:19 Um and then everyone can rank them and then as you're given the clues, you can just rank them and tell people to rearrange them for you or whatever. There's a lot of help that can be given. uh and very little components you need to handle or manage other than just writing a single character down on a thing and then possibly ranking them.

3:35 Yeah.

3:36 Uh but all that is very manageable.

3:38 Um another one that we're thinking of is periodic. So this is another one where you are moving around a board. Um but I think I'll be able to tell people what to do. The the only thing about this one is you do have a special scoring card. So you might have to have access to be able to hold that as well. But besides that, everything else is out there. You're moving on the board. I think it's going to work. I'll [snorts] get back to you. Do you see how I'm holding the baby the whole time?

4:08 Preholding the baby.

4:09 I'm holding the baby as I'm talking about this.

4:12 Uh, next one I want to talk about is horrified. This is kind of a placeholder for any cooperative game where there's open information. Uh, I think that we don't like quarterbacking in terms of telling each other how to play games. Yeah. But we are totally okay with quarterbacking in terms of moving our components around.

4:27 Yeah.

4:28 Uh so that's kind of a not a trend that you've heard over the past four games or whatever is the ability to help each other out as whoever's not holding uh the baby can kind of help move things around a little bit. Um

4:39 because the information is available.

4:41 Exactly. These are open information. Not a lot of things that require you to like look at this hidden information then this other thing and then do this other thing. And

4:48 and it's usually open information for for all of these that we've talked about so far. You'll notice there's no deck builders on this one.

4:55 No shuffling is going to be happen. That's for sure.

4:58 Uh so yeah, Horrified I think is a great cooperative game that is open information that is going to be able to Hey, could you move me over there and uh fight that thing for me or whatever the case is. So I propose horrified.

5:10 Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Okay, the next one is Vegas dice. And this kind of would work with a lot of of um dice rolling games. So, in this game, you're just bidding on different cards that are out there. You are rolling the dice and then you're assigning the dice placement. So, I'm thinking

5:27 just one hand roll dice.

5:29 Yeah, I think it's it's going to work. It's going to work.

5:33 All right. Deep dive. This is a push your luck style game. I have a great story about this. Um, it requires people to help you out in this scenario. Um, but we talked about having half a brain and only one arm. I've had a scenario where I played this game with zero arms and 1% brain.

5:53 That might be being generous.

5:56 We were on a trip where we really wanted to play some board games. We packed a whole bunch of games, but I'd had quite the week um and quite the [clears throat] day. I was cashed out and all I wanted to do is play board games with my with my three favorite girls, our two daughters and and Bethany. And I just couldn't do it. I was cashed out fully. So, I'm in bed. I am My eyes are closed. We're playing deep dive and uh I basically just say, "Okay, um move me down." It's basically a pushout game where you're a penguin. You're diving down to get better and better rewards the farther down you get. That's super simple. And I basically said, "Okay, um yeah, dive me a little deeper and uh yeah, I'll take that one."

6:42 And then they tell me what I what I won or what I got. Yeah.

6:46 Okay, sounds good. You know, and then

6:48 Ryan was so much just a variant in that game, like changing the odds for us.

6:55 So, yes, those lighter pushup games work really well for this kind of thing because, uh,

7:01 the stakes are low.

7:02 Yeah.

7:02 And they're like hard and fun.

7:05 Um, our next one is ticket to ride. Basically, any of the ticket to rides, but there is a caveat to this one. You would need a card holder.

7:14 Yes, which we do have, which is nice.

7:16 So, we do already possess that. Um, I feel like if we didn't, this would definitely be a no-go because you have your routes and all of those tickets. But you can do that with one arm. People can hand you them. You can sort them like that. Put him this and then hand people your um I can't help it. I

7:33 just get used to it. This is the rest of our lives.

7:37 Like when he's 30 years old. Well, by then our our daughters are going to be having kids possibly. So,

7:43 yes. So, it is the rest of our lives.

7:46 So, I I feel like um and sometimes this happens anyway when we put the um trains on the board. Sometimes if they're not nice enough, Ryan's going to fix it anyway. That's been happening since we played this game. So, I could just like throw them on the board and he'll put them up for me.

8:05 Yeah. Uh I can't handle it when the trains are just scattered all over the board. It's drives me bananas.

8:10 Yeah, I know. I know.

8:14 All right, the next game I propose I think this one actually is a really This is if I had to rank them up ahead of time, I would put this at like probably number one or two. This is my one of my favorites. Deception, Murder, and Hong Kong. You once the setup is done, you have eight cards in front of you and you have a role that you've been given whether you're a good guy or bad guy. Basically, it's one of those kinds of social deduction style games. And after that, you're hands off. If you literally don't have to do anything other than talk, it's perfect uh for this situation. Uh basically, uh you have four items in front of you that are murder weapons or potential murder weapons. Four items in front of you that are um things that were found at the scene of the crime. Before the game starts, you are closing your eyes.

8:59 Everyone closes their eyes. There's one person who's the kind of like GMing the game. They're kind of in charge of things. Uh their eyes are opening. They're running it. And the person who was given the card that says that they're the murderer, they open their eyes and they point to one of their top items, one of their bottom items. So, one murder weapon and then one uh thing was found at the scene of the crime. Now, everybody closes their eyes again. Everybody reveals that kind of a thing. And then now basically over the course of the game, the person who who was GMing the game and saw what who the murderer was and what the murder weapon was and all of that, they're trying to convey wordlessly through the use of these tiles who the murderer is and what you know uh the how they what murder weapons they use and all that kind of stuff. So it's all from that point on it's just all talking. It's perfect. Unless you of course you are the the forensic scientist or whatever, but

9:51 other than that um

9:52 but even then you're just it's just a board in front of you and you're putting a bullet on

9:56 it's very very yeah very low

9:59 stress on that regard. So I think it's the games are heavier on talking are be perfect for this scenario.

10:05 This next one is the only one I think it's questionable and I understand it's questionable. This is project L. So, in this game,

10:15 choking hazard.

10:17 I mean, it is though, but so are all of these. Like, they're all choking hazards. Um, so in this game, you have different tiles in front of you and you're drafting pieces to fill the um the recessed part,

10:31 the polyomino puzzle basically.

10:33 Yes. Thank you. It's not recess. Recessed. Oh my gosh. This is what we call a pregnancy brain. Anyway, so you're drafting these different pieces in order to fill it out to score points and it's everything's out there, everything's available, but usually when we play this game, it's very snappy. And even though I think it would work, I think I still think it's going to work, but it might me needing all the help might slow the game down. So, I think it will work.

11:03 I think what works for it is it snappiness and we might lose the edge of that.

11:07 We might lose the edge of it. So, I think it will work, but I am curious to come back to this one.

11:13 Okay. Yeah,

11:14 that's fair. All right. The last one we want to propose is I'm kind of a big deal. Uh, which is another party game, and again, it's heavy on talking. Basically, you are given a you're taking turns being the the clue giver. And you get throughout a scenario, you're given a card that basically says this is the topic. Um, we just played it recently with the Christmas edition, the Christmas promo thing. It was like, "How good of a gift wrapper are you?"

11:41 Yeah.

11:41 Okay. So, then you draw a token out of a bag that ranges from negative -3 to positive three. And you have to evaluate you yourself, how good of a gift wrapper you think you really are. Now, you're going to take that modifier that you took out of the bag and modify how you yourself are by that amount. So if you are gift wrapper minus one, [snorts] you now have to tell a small scenario about yourself but modified in your mind negative one. So if you're actually a really really really good gift wrapper, subtract that to be just okay. Yeah.

12:13 Or but if you're a terrible gift wrapper, minusing that even further is like, you know, it can get really really silly.

12:20 Then now everyone else has to guess what modifier you drew. So it's a great kind of get to know you game. But even once you get to know someone, it's a great

12:28 It's even a better I know you.

12:30 How well do you know? Yeah.

12:31 Yeah.

12:32 Um because if you do well, that's the whole point of the game is to score points. And if you do poorly, then you get to go back and explain, oh, this is why I said that cuz in my mind I'm a whatever, but really it's because of this. And lots of great discussions happen. And again, it's mostly talking, which is why I think this is a good one for this uh category. So, that's our list of potential games that we think will play well in this scenario. Like Ryan mentioned in the beginning, we don't actually know. We haven't done this yet. So, we will come back to this exact list and rank them and discuss what worked and didn't work.

13:08 Yeah, the kinds of games that we play now are much different than the kinds of games we played 13 years ago. In fact, all of these were not even around or at least the majority of these weren't even around when we had our first daughter. Or at least we didn't have them in our collection at that point for the most part. Maybe take up the ride.

13:22 I don't know.

13:23 That might have been it.

13:24 Yeah.

13:25 Yeah.

13:25 But the point is, uh, our tastes have changed, our collection has changed, our kids have changed. Uh, but we never want to stop playing games. This is a hobby that can be done in those scenarios. And now our kids are gamer kids because we started playing games around them when they were young. So, they just wanted to be around us and want to be part of the action. And now they are sharks and so much fun to play with. So, um, we're not going to stop even if we've got a young one that's going to

13:51 another one

13:52 assist us as we

13:53 another one we get to do this with. So, it's all going to be exciting.

13:56 So, I'm sure we'll have much more uh lists coming as well along this kind of topic. Uh, but certainly part two of this coming in about 3 months.

14:05 Yeah. Everybody, thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to sub subscribe so you can see part two of this list. Until then, you can find us in all of these places.

14:14 Yes, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

14:17 Bye

14:17 bye.

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14:41 Bye.