I’m about to move across the country, so I’ve placed myself on a games acquisition hiatus. Any game I buy now is a game I have to move thousands of miles, so it’s best if I hold off. This is extremely difficult for me.

When I play a game I like, I want to buy it. In an ideal world, every game ever would be available to play at any time. The closest I can get to this is having a stockpile at home, and possibly (usually) in my car as well, ready to be brought indoors at any time.

The most recent game I want to purchase (but won’t) is Dominion, which I’ve somehow only recently played for the first time, introduced by my friend and coworker (for the next week and a half) Tom. It’s a game I’ve heard about a thousand times before, but had never actually seen played because nobody I knew owned it. This is another reason it’s hard for me to keep from buying games: I am the primary source of new games among the friends I regularly see, so if I don’t buy a new game, I have no way of knowing when I’ll get to play it.

Fortunately I have plenty of games I can cycle through and not feel like I’m getting bored. And lately I’ve acquired a few games that are particularly good for introducing to new players and non-gamers, so I’m not short on fellow players either. Zombie Dice and Tsuro have been particularly popular with my coworkers and students.

Zombie Dice has been surprisingly popular as a bar game, because it is simple, it requires very little space and concentration to play, and the pieces (being only dice) are durable. Their only vulnerability is that they’re dice being thrown by drunk people and children, and my second least favorite sound on this planet is dice hitting a hard floor. (My first is the sound of a dentist’s saliva sucker when it gets stuck on the side of your cheek.) Turns out it’s even worse when the dice drop on the lawn in front of a middle school. Because that happened, and now I’m missing a die.

Tsuro, like Zombie Dice, only takes a couple of minutes to teach someone how to play, but it takes more space (and pieces) and a bit more concentration than Zombie Dice, so it’s not a bar game. I’ve yet however to find anyone who hasn’t enjoyed it. And unlike Zombie Dice, which is strategically very simple, I’m still figuring out the strategies for Tsuro, and I can actually claim to be decent at Tsuro. With Zombie Dice, I can really only claim to be lucky, which is actually another advantage to Zombie Dice: new players don’t feel intimidated by playing against the more experienced.