A Wonky Board Game and a Chill Video Game
I've mentioned before that on Tuesday evenings my family gathers at my parents' house for dinner and game night. My cousin Darin is always buying board games, usually secondhand, so we try a lot of new ones. Here are a few we've collectively loved (all links take you to their respective pages on BoardGameGeek in case you want to check them out):
Last Tuesday, we added another one to our favorites list. It's called Wonky, and it lives up to its name.
It's Jenga-adjacent, but you're carefully building a tower instead of deconstructing one. You're given a series of blocks in three different colors: yellow, blue, and pink. They're unevenly shaped, or "wonky" as the name suggests. Some sides are flat while others are curved, and they come in three different sizes: small, medium, and large.
You're dealt seven cards out of a shuffled deck that dictate which pieces you can stack. Based on these cards, you try to keep stacking blocks without causing the makeshift tower to fall, and the first person to use all of their cards wins.
If you cause the tower to fall, you have to draw three cards and start anew. You also have skip and reverse cards that you can use in a pinch.
The strategy is to place blocks in ways that will make it difficult for others to stack on top of them, in hopes the tower will fall before your turn comes back around. But you also need to strategically use your cards so that you're not stuck with a card you can't use, which forces you to draw until you get a card that you can use.
It's as chaotic as it seems, and the act of successfully piecing building-blocks together makes something click pleasantly in my brain, so I loved it. We laughed a lot while playing.
When I was a kid, my sister and I would visit my grandmother after school on some days and spend the entire afternoon building Busytown with Wonder Blocks. Anything that involves blocks, whether it's Lego or a game like Jenga or Wonky, takes me back to that state of mind as a kid building an entire town on my grandmother's living room floor. It's a nice place to be.
So that was my Tuesday: a very Wonky one. Yesterday, the new free update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released, so I spent a significant amount of time playing that.
I feel like most people eventually dropped off from ACNH after the initial collective obsession with it during the pandemic. I've seen a meme circulating on Instagram about returning to your island after two years away. Personally, though, I've played the game pretty consistently since it was released. I've had some bouts of inactivity, but it's my go-to "comfort game" and so I play it quite often, changing up my island for different holidays and adding little things like a newspaper stand and a garden center. I've also put a lot of time into the Paradise Planning DLC, where you can decorate vacation houses for animals.
The new update is similar to the DLC, but instead of traveling away from your island, it puts a hotel right smack dab on your island's pier for tourists to come visit your town. You can decorate the rooms, and there's a slew of new furniture to use. The tourists staying there will venture out to explore your island, so you can bump into them while out and about, which is a really nice touch.
I'm really enjoying the update! I might show off some of my decor in the future. 🙂
