Your favorite pickup game?

[Grunk]

Here, here. Fiasco is great, messy fun!

 

[amnuxoll]

Well, contract bridge is my favorite game (after D&D of course) but it's hard to find people under 60 who know how to play.

Barring that, Liar's Dice (sometimes called Dudo) is a fun dice game and if your night's session has been cancelled everyone has dice in front of them anyway.

 

[Maddach Urquhart]

Zombie Dice and Cthulu Dice are both fun ways to spend your time when the plans for the evening change unexpectedly. Both games are quick and extremely easy to learn. I'd say either of those is a good place to start.

How long do your sessions normally run? What system do you play?

Gotta love Zombie Dice! Can't go wrong with a game in which you want to be the first player to eat 13 BRAAAAINZZZZ!!!

 

[GrimGent]

For actual RPGs rather than card games or such, I tend to go for Maid or Over the Edge. At its simplest, with the "completely random" playstyle (characters, locations, events... all rolled randomly from charts), the former is designed to take up maybe half an hour when the players happen to have some free time on their hands. The latter combines an extremely light system (each PC is mechanically defined only by four freeform traits) with a setting which doesn't really require the players to learn anything in advance (a modern-day Mediterranean island that's home to every imaginable variety of weirdness).

 

[Argyle King]

Gotta love Zombie Dice! Can't go wrong with a game in which you want to be the first player to eat 13 BRAAAAINZZZZ!!!

It's very easy to learn too. It also has broad appeal. I've had non-gamer friends of mine sit and play the game; I've even had my grandmother play a game. ...quite a few good games over at SJG. I recently picked up Frag.

 

[GandalfMithrandir]

if you have multiplayer video games that works for my group just fine, otherwise we can play regular cards, otherwise you could possibly make a one shot adventure to run them through that might be an easier time, or tough, depending on how many people you have.

Just my two coppers.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Now it's Old School Hack

Yep. Soon as I saw it a week or two ago I pretty much pegged it for last-minute pickup sorts of stuff. However, it just goes into the bag-of-tricks with other gaming options like board and card games.

Generally nothing too complicated. Risk, Axis & Allies with house-rule tech charts, and Supremacy used to be our fallbacks for board games. Nuclear War is the primary card game we use for a change of pace, we don't have a quorum of players, or when the DM wants a break.

 

[Nexilis]

One of my favorites is Fluxx, easy to learn and hilarious once it gets going.

 

[IronWolf]

Gotta love Zombie Dice! Can't go wrong with a game in which you want to be the first player to eat 13 BRAAAAINZZZZ!!!

It's very easy to learn too. It also has broad appeal. I've had non-gamer friends of mine sit and play the game; I've even had my grandmother play a game. ...quite a few good games over at SJG. I recently picked up Frag.

I keep hearing great things about Zombie Dice. I checked out the demo on the SJG site the other day - I think I will end up picking this one up. The ease of learning it, fast play makes it a great game for when IronPup and I are trying to fill time before dinner or something when we should be helping Mrs. IronWolf!

 

[Kaffis]

I'll have to admit, my bunch isn't much for traditional board games. Some board games are designed so that they encourage interaction between the players, and the action of playing them is the fun bit, and the "game" part of it is largely an excuse - such games would work well.

Given this, the lack of love in this thread for Munchkin surprises me. Sounds perfect.

Alternately, if I can get buy-in from the other guys, I've been considering using Spirit of the Century as a fill-in. Rules for on the fly character generation, a setting that excuses player absences (in case you want to opt instead for just running it as a backup campaign of one-shots with characters carrying over and popping in and out based on who's missing) easily, and the pulp, get to the action vibe it wholeheartedly embraces seems like a great fit for a back-up.

As it is, though, since all of our current group play wargames, too, we just bring our 40k along.