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  • Confessions of a Board Game B***h — The Treehouse

    Confessions of a Board Game B***h — The Treehouse



    Hello and welcome to another instalment of the Treehouse’s agony aunt column! This one is slightly unusual because instead of a ‘Dear Auntie Chella’ letter, today I have a conversation for you which I had with a friend who approached me about her issue in person. 

    I will now relay this conversation to you, dear readers, in case it helps someone else.

    BGB: You’re writing an advice column for the Treehouse now?! Can you help me out with something? 

    Chella: Sure – go for it. 

    BGB: Help! I’m a board game bitch! 

    Readers, I blinked a few times. We took the rest of the conversation to text messages later that day, in a conversation that the aforementioned ‘BGB’ has happily agreed that I can share. 

    Chella: So you say you’re a what now?

    BGB: A board game bitch.

    Chella: And you are happy for me to call you this in print?

    BGB: Yes, I own it.

    Chella: And let me just check, can anyone of any gender be one of these?

    BGB: Oh definitely, but I claim the crown.

    Chella: What are your worst symptoms of board game bitchiness? Bitchery? Bitchdom? Bitchhood? I am not used to saying this word. Please stop me. 

    BGB: My worst symptoms? Irrational squeakiness, incandescent fury, and lengthy sulking. I get far too mean and loud and competitive and make my husband hate me. We are only able to play Monopoly once a year. I just lose my temper and can’t control myself.

    Chella: Okay… which games are your worst culprits?

    BGB: Monopoly, of course, and Dobble and Snap I get far too into.

    Chella: Well are there any games that I don’t know… soothe you? 

    BGB: Any that soothe me? Not sure I’ve really found any yet 😂  I do like Fungi though. Who can get angry about pans of butter?

    Chella: That is an excellent point. OK, I think I can help you. Usually the letter is anonymised by me naming the person after an alliterative part of Sheffield, in traditional agony aunt style. Are you happy to be The Board Game Bitch of Broomhill?

    BGB: Sure… close enough.

    Chella: Very well, check the Treehouse blog for my reply.



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  • why card games rock — The Treehouse

    why card games rock — The Treehouse



    Pick a Dog

    Pick-a-Dog (1-5 players) (and its virtually identical sibling games, Pick-a-Pig, Pick-a-Seal and Pick-a-Polar-Bear) rely on high-speed matching, but with storytelling added in. You start by laying out a grid of cards that may match, but mostly don’t quite match exactly. Each player turns over their own starting card, which sets off a round of looking for matches in the grid. Though there are some exact matches, all the pictures are similar – they feature a dog who can be depicted with a number of binary qualities: looking pale or having a tan, holding popcorn or not, wearing sunglasses or not, standing near to you or far away, and using one hand or two hands.

    The twist in the matching portion of the game is that you can only match cards that are either exact, or follow a sequence where there is only ONE change per card (you can go from sunglasses to no sunglasses, for example, but not from far to near at the same time). The free-for-all ends when there are no more matches to make (but watch out – if you call it and there are still more matches available, you forfeit your hand and can’t score any points that round, while the other players can resume).

    Scoring is fun and unusual (or at least it is the way we teach it at The Treehouse!): to prove you’ve made a true sequence with only one difference on each card, you have to tell a story about your buddy the dog that reflects the pictures as you reveal them. It’s very cute indeed. If you discover mistakes in anyone’s sequence, those cards go straight into the discard pile. The players earn the cards they’ve proven are in a sequence each round, and at the end of the game, the winner is the one who has the most cards.



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  • Crowd pleasers — The Treehouse

    Crowd pleasers — The Treehouse



    Finally, Klask is pretty much guaranteed to score big with the sort of crowd who prefer bar room-type games like darts, pool or table football to more serious, thinky board gaming. Basically air hockey but with magnets and a ball, Klask involves enough skill to get the competitive juices flowing, but with rules that will immediately feel intuitive and super-appealing components that everyone will want to get their hands on. A staple of our traditional New Year’s Eve celebrations at The Treehouse, the festive season just wouldn’t be complete without a Klask tournament at some point!

    Find all of the above and LOTS more in our shop, or come and test-drive pretty much every game we have for sale in the café if you’d like to try before you buy! We’ll be posting more Top-5s to provide Christmas shopping inspiration throughout December… watch this space. For more ideas, you can also check out last year’s Treehouse Christmas games guide here.



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  • Stocking Fillers — The Treehouse

    Stocking Fillers — The Treehouse



    A Little More Conversation is something totally different. This card ‘game’ is barely a game at all, but more of a series of conversation starters, designed to get everyone around the table talking, reminiscing and generally enjoying each other’s company. Sometimes, we think that’s really the main aim of bringing a game to the table, and this one will take you straight there with no hesitation, deviation or repetition!

    You can find all of the above and plenty more in our shop. Use the ‘stocking fillers’ filter if you only want to browse the small ones! Check back for more ‘top 5’ suggestions in the run-up to Christmas…



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  • Family Games — The Treehouse

    Family Games — The Treehouse



    The Adventures of Robin Hood is another new one, this time an elaborate adventure game packed full of surprises. Players take on the roles of Robin Hood and his Merry Men and embark on a range of missions to help the poor and thwart the Sherriff of Nottingham’s evil schemes. A hardback story book and a great big board full of secret advent calendar-style doors to open are just a couple of the delights in store in this box!

    Browse the full selection of games in our shop here or use the ‘family games’ filter to narrow down your search. We’re hoping to manage one more ‘Top 5’ list before Christmas arrives… watch this space, and click back through our previous posts for more suggestions.



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  • The World of Solken — The Treehouse

    The World of Solken — The Treehouse



    Solken’s lands are made up of five main continents, briefly outlined below.

    Temorel. Once the home of many feuding kingdoms, the old Church united the Temorel Empire into a collection of parishes. While the Church is no longer an active force in Temorel, the political machinations of the parishes never truly went away, and the fields and forests of the continent often trade hands in strategic deals and counter-claims. Those outside of Temorel often take a dim view of its citizens’ intelligence, characterising them as rubes and simpletons.

    The Northern Territories. Connected to Temorel by a land bridge at its southern tip, the Northern Territories are thought of as cold and inhospitable by those beyond its borders. In truth, while the settlements of this area are few and far between, their clans are tight-knit and fiercely loyal. Far to the north the dwarf-kings sit alone in their palaces that once belonged to giants, making proclamations that echo through the vast tunnels below the earth.

    Aerix. The heat of the Timaron desert has forced the inhabitants living on its borders to find ingenious methods of survival. The multi-hued dragons of Whitewing have evolved against the sun, their super-sized city casting shadows of sanctuary. Further north, in the city of Angley, gnome inventors celebrate ingenuity and creative problem solving for the common good. However, since the coming of the Shards, great strides in technology have made some of the surrounding traditionalists nervous – particularly the rumours of living metal men…

    Yagora. Once a continent of thinkers and scientists, Yagora was ravaged by the Year of Catastrophe more than any other (arguably; see below), leaving it cracked and desolate. The fey courts, seeing an opportunity, began to twist the land in strange, surreal ways to suit their own ends. Perhaps if they hadn’t, the fall of the gods might have allowed Yagora to heal again – instead, the land remains as wild and dangerous as ever.

    New Elar (not pictured). The home of the Children of the Sun. New Elar is an island cluster that rose from the remnants of Elar, an old continent which sank into the ocean during the Year of Catastrophe. While it was never recovered fully, roughly a third of the continent was struck by a set of Shards and returned to the surface, where a community of idealists from across the world began to craft it in the name of New Elar.

    If Solken sounds like your kind of place, why not come and join us on our upcoming adventure, starting on March 3rd? Book your place here.



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  • Help! I want to play games with a narrative! — The Treehouse

    Help! I want to play games with a narrative! — The Treehouse



    Greetings, dear reader! Today is World Book Day, and to celebrate, we have an agony aunt question to help those who like storytelling in their games, but who prefer the role of reader to writer…

    Dear Aunty Chella,

    I love the idea of games with a narrative, but the thought of role playing gives me performance anxiety! I like the idea of coming away from a games night with a story to tell, but I’m just not up for writing a character as I play – I feel way too self conscious… but it’s hard to do one without the other… right?

    I want to know if there’s something else out there for me in the world of games. I enjoy lots of other kinds of board games and card games, from party games to the more serious kind. I’m good at quickfire word games, and escape rooms, and I enjoy games that have a frame story. I even find myself adding a bit of a story to games that don’t have one, imagining I’m a super-duper-spy-guy trying to get a real code word to my super-duper-spy-teammates before we’re all super-duper-killed by the assassin during an perfectly ordinary round of Codenames, for example.

    I’m keen and willing to try other suggestions, but something about playing a role in general, and actually about D&D in particular, is too daunting – designing a character, committing to a campaign, counting up numbers on dice, talking in a ‘ye olde’ voice and pretending to be casting spells… it all feels very not me. But making up stories round a table, particularly in a competitive way – that is definitely my idea of fun! Can you please help?

    Narrating in Nether Edge



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  • Welcome to the Pathfinder Society! — The Treehouse

    Welcome to the Pathfinder Society! — The Treehouse



    The Lore, The Merrier

    Something that really excites me about Pathfinder is the sheer tonnage of setting information available. The home setting for Pathfinder is the world of Golarion, a setting that has been slowly built up over the last decade and a half of game design to encompass dozens of countries and hundreds of diverse settlements.

    In this campaign specifically, players are agents of the Pathfinder Society, a group of individuals empowered to explore the distant lands of the world, report on what they find, and cooperate to ensure the tenets of good are upheld. With the resources of the Pathfinder Society behind you you can be whisked to any number of far-away locations, so every session offers something totally new.

    High Society

    What makes Pathfinder Society so exciting is not just the chance to explore a fantasy world, but the structure of the games themselves. Unlike a normally roleplaying campaign, where you’re expected to show up regularly to experience every beat of the story, Pathfinder Society is a totally commitment-free experience.

    Every session is a standalone adventure, but put together they begin to point towards a larger metaplot. If you want to just attend once to try it out, you can do that! But if you start to attend multiple sessions, whether consecutively or with gaps in between, you’ll be able to level up your character and acquire exclusive treasures! You might play with new players every single time or find new friends to battle by your side through multiple sessions.

    I feel like this flexibility makes it a great fit for Treehouse Worlds. We’ve always thought of ourselves as a way to build up community through RPGs, and through regular Pathfinder sessions we’re hoping to do just that.

    Let The Adventure Begin!

    If you’re as excited by the idea of Pathfinder Society as I am, then we can’t wait to see you for our first sessions in October! If you already know your stuff, you can feel free to build a character beforehand – I recommend skimming through the Guide to Organised Play to see what is and isn’t accessible to your character.

    If you’d like a little bit more of a helping hand, we’ll be running a free character creation session on Thursday 6th October. You can attend this session whether you’re planning to play in Pathfinder Society or not – just as with the rest of the Society, there’s no prior commitment required. I’ll be taking you through the basics of the system in a chilled environment alongside your fellow players, and we’ll have rulebooks on hand to help you create characters. Find out more information here!

    Tickets for our sessions go on sale two weeks before the event date, so keep an eye out on our events calendar to get your seat at the table. And, as ever, you can get in contact with me and the other Treehouse Worlds GMS (as well as your fellow Pathfinders) on the Treehouse Worlds Discord server, where we’ve created a special channel for Pathfinder discussion.

    Pathfinder Society is a brilliant bold new chapter in the Treehouse Worlds story, and we’re hoping you’re just as excited to see it come to fruition!



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  • Watch the Skies in retrospect — The Treehouse

    Watch the Skies in retrospect — The Treehouse



    A Bollywood remake of Star Wars?

    As outside observers, we don’t feel equipped to do this one justice, so here’s the inside scoop from two of the players:

    “My personal favourite moment was announcing the release of our eight-hour epic Bollywood Star Wars rip-off over the tannoy as a way to cover up the fact that we (India) were going DEFCON 1 as part of our unsuccessful plan to nuke the moon!”

    “My absolute favourite moment on my team (India) was our plan to cover up the alien invasion by using code words related to a science fiction Bollywood film. We spent $10M to realise our hit movie “Space Sabers: the Return of the New Hope”, an eight-hour epic featuring a two-hour-long dance section, which additionally starred the Olympic gold medal-winning UK Prime minister. Getting that published in the newspaper and announcing it over the mic along with our move to DEFCON 1 made my evening.”

    And finally, a perspective from Russia…

    We feel this gives an insight into the incredible number and range of stories told during a single game of Watch the Skies: no two players will have had the same experience or viewed proceedings in the same way.

    “Once our chief Russian scientist (somehow) managed to negotiate getting direct access to the aliens, we immediately decided they were a force for good and that the Chinese team had been right in trying to protect the aliens from hostile interceptors. From then on, we basically decided that anyone still attacking them was a threat to humanity and decided we’d take any action up to and including deploying our nukes to neutralise unforgivably short-sighted anti-alien aggression.

    After we defended some alien landings in Siberia and China, and heard that the USA had gone to DEFCON 1 after our foreign minister was assassinated, we were certain that we, China and Japan were about to face a full combined-arms attack led by the US. Without much money left to spend on defence, we pre-committed to trying for a first strike on America to leave their government in chaos.

    It turned out (I think?!) that the aliens lied to us, no-one was immune to the space-plague, and the US never launched their nukes at us after a global espionage surge disarmed them, so the end of the game left the US functionally in chaos, a deadly alien plague spreading in Europe, and Russia probably facing a conventional army attack by most of the Western world in retaliation for incinerating San Franciso…”



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  • LARP Comes to the Treehouse! — The Treehouse

    LARP Comes to the Treehouse! — The Treehouse



    If you had to give an elevator pitch to attract new players into LARPing, what would you say?

    Erin: At its core, LARP is about coming together with other people and exploring a story that none of you could tell alone. People come for lots of different reasons: wanting to act out a role; looking for something more immersive than tabletop or videogames; making music or other performances; crafting flashy costumes. But strip all of that away and there’s no feeling quite like your heartbeat racing as you wait to see the consequences of your actions, or just sitting back and bathing in the atmosphere of a group of people creating a world together.

    For those who picture LARPing as wearing costumes in a field, please could you explain a bit about chamber LARPs – what do these involve, and what do players spend their time doing during a game?

    Jon: The focus is generally on social interactions, which might be very political and strategic or just hanging out as your characters. There’s also space for very personal storytelling, one of the central themes of Changeling is having your life turned completely upside down by a magical, incomprehensible experience, and trying to make sense of what to do next. 

    That said, all those things are often possible in “field” LARPs too, so I suppose the biggest difference is that there are fewer rules, and no dramatic combat or spell-slinging. Problems are more likely to be solved with discussion, negotiation, and problem-solving.



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