Dude! Take Your Turn!
A Gaming Life
Friday Night Shots – Filler Games
Welcome back to the bar! It’s been a whole five weeks, so sorry about that.
One of the kegs exploded and we had beer all over the floor.
Spent a number of weeks trying to save as much as possible rather than cleaning it up, until we realized that’s probably unsanitary!
So here we are, though, and I’m glad you noticed the Open sign in the window while you were walking by.
Nobody else has.
It’s even a Saturday!
Have a seat and I’ll get you a drink of your choice.
Completely debris-free!
Let me turn off the jukebox.
For some reason it’s stuck on the MacLeod Clan playing the bagpipes 24/7.
Nobody can stand that.
So what are we going to talk about?
How about filler games?
I had no idea that we hadn’t talked about filler games before. I thought we had!
Recently, in the welcome return of the Heavy Cardboard podcast, Edward and Ken talked about filler games, both their definition of as well as some great examples of them.
That got me to thinking about how that word sometimes has negative connotations but it really shouldn’t.
No game should be dismissed as a filler.
It can be described as such, but dismissal is just plain wrong.
Fillers can be great!
So what’s my definition of a filler?
The most common definition, which I think I pretty much share, is any relatively short game (no more than 30 minutes) that can fill space during a game day, and that you’re not building a game day around.
Say you’re waiting on a couple of people to arrive, or maybe you’re playing two different games so some of you are waiting for the other game to finish before moving on to the next game.
Filler games “fill” that gap perfectly!
Or maybe it’s a game to just wind down after a long session where your brain has been burning.
Perhaps you’re at a convention and you’ve had two 5-hour games and you just want to give your brain a rest before calling it a night?
That’s when you trot the filler out.
A lot of times these are card games, but not always.
I’m going to try and avoid card games below, though I may not be successful.
They are also, by definition, lunchtime games, though they shouldn’t take the full lunch hour.
Unless you play it twice!
Let’s say your game day has been divided into two 3-player games, and you’re done early.
One of your players has decided to leave, so you have two left, waiting for the other game to finish.
Do you like deduction games?
Then Orapa Mine is a great idea for this time period.
It takes 15-25 minutes, does tax your brain somewhat but in a good way, and it’s a great 2-player game!
In the game, you’re secretly placing all of these coloured shapes on your board, hidden from your opponent.
Then you take turns shooting a white laser beam into your opponent’s board, choosing an entrance point and your opponent will tell you where it comes out.
After bouncing off any objects in the way and possibly changing colour depending on what colour the objects it hits are.
Once you’ve deduced where all of your opponent’s pieces are, you make your guess.
If you’re right, you win!
If you’re wrong, you lose!
A great game, very short, but it still makes you use your brain some, and it’s perfect if you only have two players.
Do you like Poker? Do you have a bunch of players?
The Gang is not a filler in the “waiting for the other game to finish” sense of the word.
Instead, it’s a “get the juices flowing” game for the beginning of game night or a “wind down before everybody leaves” kind of game.
The Gang is basically cooperative Texas Hold ‘Em poker, but in a way it’s a deduction game too.
You have to read the other players’ actions, as there is no talking about what cards you have.
Each player is dealt their two hole cards and then players try to estimate how strong their hand is compared to everybody else.
Each round (pre-flop, flop, turn, and river), players will silently choose a ranking token from 1 to 6 (or however many players you have, up to 6).
If somebody takes the 6 token but you think you have a better hand than they do, you can take it from them instead of from the table.
This can result in a lot of token-stealing, but this is also telling everybody something.
After the tokens are distributed, then the flop comes out and you do it all again.
If somebody took the 2 token but this time they took the 6 token, then the flop really helped them!
Keep that in mind.
Play continues with this same ranking judgement done after the turn and the river, until everybody has their final tokens.
Then reveal from 1-token to 6-token, and if the strength of the hands (lowest to highest) matches the tokens, everybody wins the round!
If anybody is wrong (they have the worst hand but they took the 2 token, for example), then everybody loses the round.
After each round, a card is turned over that’s either good or bad, depending on how the previous round went.
If you failed, it will make things a bit easier.
If you succeeded, it will make things more difficult.
Either three fails or three successes determine whether or not everybody wins or loses.
This is the perfect type of filler game because it can involve everybody, though as I said, it doesn’t help the “waiting for a game to finish” moment.
But at 20-30 minutes, The Gang fits the bill!
Yes, this is a card game, but I see it more as a social deduction game involving a card game, then an actual card game.
Yes, it is. So sue me.
The third one I’d like to talk about is Twilight Imperium, the 4th edition of course.
Oh wait…sorry, wrong article!
I meant Bang! The Dice Game.
Bang! The Dice Game (damn, I wish they’d stop putting punctuation in game titles. Makes it really hard to write about!) is a sort of hidden role dice game that can play up to 8 players, but plays perfectly well at 5-7. I don’t think I’d play it with fewer than that, though, so it’s kind of like The Gang in that it’s not an in-between-games filler.
One player is the Sheriff and all other players are either a Deputy, Renegade, or Outlaw. These last roles are hidden so nobody knows who’s who except they know the Sheriff!
Why the Sheriff wouldn’t recognize their Deputies, I’m not sure. Maybe they’re new in town?
The Outlaws win by killing the Sheriff. The Sheriff wins if all the Outlaws and Renegades are dead.
Deputies win along with the Sheriff if they’re not already dead.
Renegades win if they are the last one standing (which means they have to kill the Sheriff last).
On your turn, you roll the dice and it’s kind of a push your luck game because you can roll three times, keeping whatever you want to keep (and all dynamites since you can’t reroll those), but if you roll three dynamites your turn ends.
Those dice can help you shoot other players, maybe heal yourself (or others), maybe force you to take Indian arrows (which can be really bad if the arrows run out), or get the Gatling Gun which lets you shoot everybody and gets rid of your collected arrows.
Play continues until one of the victory conditions is met.
This game took maybe 20-30 minutes at most. We played it twice at Bottoscon, to howls of laughter.
It’s a great filler for starting or ending a night, or just taking a break in the middle of a long convention day!
I could talk about a lot of card games in this post, but I think these three games are great examples of non-card game (yes, I know, The Gang) fillers that are excellent games and will reward you for your downtime.
What filler games do you like to play?
What is your definition of a filler?
Let me know in the comments.
Dude! Take Your Turn! 
I like your definition of “a game you’re not building a game day around” because it has a lot of grounding in the practicalities of gaming! That said, something being a filler (also in the varieties of a palate cleanser and whatever is the equivalent term for the game that gets the party started while you’re still waiting for Joe and Maria who are, as always, fashionably late) should not be seen as derogatory. I’m not eating an entire meal made of cheese bites, but that doesn’t mean that cheese bites aren’t delicious!My two favorite short games these day are Love Letter and 1848 – which have thus also reliably been in my most-played games over the last years.
Btw, great that one can directly share WordPress posts via Bluesky now! This one deserves to be read widely 🙂
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