The Good Stuff: Connecting Groups Of Four

I never got into the Wordle hype way back when. The game just didn’t really appeal to me. I did play Heardle (guessing a song based on a few seconds of it) for a good few months, though, until it got shut down. RIP. Otherwise, that’s it.

Fast forward to about a month ago, when a friend brought up a game called Connections. Honestly, I don’t remember what we were talking about at the time to prompt it, but I’m glad she did because I am obsessed. My boyfriend and I play it every day to the point where we have a phone reminder set so we can play it ASAP.

Like Wordle, Connections is also a free-to-play New York Times game, so a new game is released at midnight every day.

The game is simple: you’re presented with 16 words that you must evenly group into 4 secret categories of varying difficulty. Sometimes they’re easy and obvious, and sometimes they’re tricky, making me sit and stare for minutes on end, hoping my brain gets it together. It’s a fun little exercise in word association and patterns.

I find it’s a good mix of challenge and fun. A knowledge of pop culture, common phrases, and wordplay is often useful but you don’t need to be a master. Anyone can play and probably succeed most days.

There have been days when I run out of guesses and completely lose. There are days where the categories are particularly stumping us, so my boyfriend and I work together. It’s fun, and it never takes more than 10 minutes to play.

Even if you’re still a loyal Wordle player, you may not be aware that NYT has other games, most free. So here I am letting you know! Connections is my favourite, though, so I highly recommend trying that one. The others are fine.

So go forth and connect!

That’s all for now!

 

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The Good Stuff: All The Google Doodle Games

Everyone once in a while, there’s a fun little design in place of the standard Google logo. You’ve seen them, the Doodles, as they’re called. They celebrate some person or event around the world and links you to more info. And every once in a while, the doodle is an interactive game. Those are my favourite.

Me playing a new Google Doodle game.

The games are by no means complex. They’re simple, colourful, and short, but always so fun. And always a huge stealer of my time. Note that I didn’t say waste of time. I do not think they’re a waste of time at all. Like, sure, do I have more productive things to be doing? Yes. But I do not regret playing a Google Doodle game for ten minutes when it always brings me such joy. Throughout the day, I’ll go back and play again a few times, just having a good experience, as intended.

Fun fact: the first interactive Doodle was in May 2010, and it was celebrating the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man by letting people play Pac-Man right there in the browser. An even funner (yes, I’m using that not-a-word word) fact is that the world spent a combined 4.82 MILLION HOURS playing that game, costing 120 MILLION DOLLARS in global productivity. That’s the power of Google and Pac-Man.

If you weren’t a part of that, don’t worry, your opportunity to play is not gone. Though the doodles usually last a day, they’re archived for perpetual play and viewing, which I think is a great idea. Check them all out here. Sadly, there isn’t a way to sort just the actual playable games from the other slightly interactive ones, but at least there’s a lot of nice stuff to look at as you go through them.

I’ve always been a fan of the Halloween games the best, so seek those ones out for sure, and the Champion Island game for the 2020 Olympics is also a standout as it’s open world with several games inside, so it genuinely takes a lot of time to explore and complete it all.

It’s great knowing that I can go back and play these cute little games at any point, all for free, and I wanted to ensure everyone knew about this. While writing this blog post, I was constantly stopping to play a game or look at a cool Doodle!

That’s all for now!

 

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Shouting Out Free Tools I Recently Used

If you read my post last week, you’d know that for nearly three years, I co-created and ran a series of virtual quidditch games. One aspect of this project that we were always proud of was that as much as we put a lot of time and effort into it, we didn’t put a single dollar in. Every tool we used, we used for free, and in the process, I learned of some very cool websites, tools, and software I otherwise would have never touched. While you’re probably not looking to run your own gaming league, these tools may be of interest to you for whatever you do in life, so check them out because I really loved getting to learn something new and have our ideas come to life through them.

The communication tools

• Discord – originally, our communication was done in a Facebook group because everyone had an account, but eventually we realized Facebook wasn’t the best tool for finding info and having discussions, so we moved to a Discord server. With great UI, separate channels for every aspect like schedules, game info, or general chat, and features like roles and tagging, it was an easy switch that really made communication with the players easier.
• Doodle Polls – we used Doodle for scheduling. Each week, players would fill out their availability and we would be able to match teams up. It was simple. The only issue was eventually Doodle started making email addresses mandatory, but we worked around that by just copying and reusing old forms.

The gameplay tools

• Roll20 – our game was made and played on this site, a place known for DnD play. It was highly customizable, so we could import assets of any shape or size, and there were so many great features that we used aside from the dice like coloured auras, token markers, and the pencil tool. We had to make several accounts to have enough space for all three years worth of assets and uploads, but it worked very well.
• Storyboard – twice we held a small “Quidlympics” of minigames, and one of the games was a team-based choose your own adventure game. By making specific choices, players would go to specific pages, all customized with text and buttons to fulfill our story’s needs. Storyboard allowed for us to tell a quite expansive story and manipulate the flow to suit it.
• Cognito forms – we did use Google Forms as well, but for more in-depth surveying where we needed flows and more customization, Cognito was much more in-depth and useful. We used it to mostly to make inventory order forms for players looking to boost their team up with some potions and items.

The automation and moderation tools

• Apollo – once we made the move to Discord, I looked into bots and found one called Apollo that made scheduling games nice and easy. Mods could create an event with its simple interface that would be presented to players to accept or decline. Apollo could even tag roles and send out reminders, which were super helpful!
  
• Zapier – for a while when we were mid-transition from Facebook group to Discord, I wanted to eliminate the need to manually post in both places, so I found an automation tool that would post to Discord every time there was new content in the Facebook group. Zapier was pretty easy to set up and only had a few-minute delay, so it was useful during the transitional period.
• IFTTT – there was a point where we wanted game rule updates from a WordPress site to automatically post on Discord too, so I used IFTTT to set up the webhook to update.

The creative tools

• Canva – bloggers and artists may know of this one already. It’s a classic and easy art tool I used to make little awards at the end of each season. I could replicate templates and upload logos easily.
• Flourish – taking data visualization to the next level, Flourish was a fun and interactive way for us to present stats and graphs in a clear and customized way. There are some very cool formats available for free. I even used Flourish to make sneeze count charts a few months ago.
• Imgflip – this meme generator was super easy to use and had so many iconic blank templates allowing us to fulfill our goofiest meme needs.
• Jigsaw Explorer – this is a great virtual jigsaw puzzle site. You can upload your images to be puzzled out, so we would use this to release clues about upcoming tournament themes and let people do the puzzle.
• Mii Studio – once, to create little character icons, Nintendo’s free online Mii Studio was used. Not only was it a fun and easy throwback to our childhoods with a Wii, but it was a perfect way to recreate some iconic characters.

  

  Pay no attention to their goofy names. It was a running joke.

I respect that businesses want to make money, but shoutout to these above sites for offering free options that allowed us to do our thing at no cost and for fun. As I said, I don’t know what you may need any of these tools for, but I recommend and appreciate them. Thus, I wanted to use this small platform I have to share them. They served us well and allowed us to bring happiness and order to our friends.

That’s all for now!

 

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The Good Stuff: Scambaiting On YouTube

I don’t know how these videos make their way to my YouTube recommendations, but I’m not mad about it. Scambaiting is the act of purposely baiting scammers into wasting time, revealing information, or sometimes stealing money or data back. There are people who do this a lot and make YouTube videos partially for entertainment but also to raise awareness of how in-depth and scary these scammers can be.

I’ve never been scammed. I’d like to think that I’m smart enough to avoid that, but I know how prevalent scams can be. We’ve had to train my grandmother to never reveal information over the phone. I regularly get scam texts trying to get me to click shady links. I don’t trust some ads on social media. Scams are everywhere.

Kitboga is a YouTuber who goes to great lengths to waste scammers’ time. He believes that the more time he spends on useless calls with scammers, the less time they’ll have to scam real people, so he’ll use a wig and a voice modifier to become a chatty old woman who is very uncooperative over several hours. It’s very interesting to see how the scammers fare against this and also very interesting to see just how the scams work. From fake banking websites to threats to carefully timed text, it’s quite an operation, and it’s understandable how less-techy people easily fall prey to this. Kitboga also often has screen mirroring of some sort so we can see the scammer’s computer sometimes, showing quite clearly what they’re doing. He does a decent job explaining what the goal is and how they trick people, but often he’s interacting with scammers of the same variety (accidentally transfer too much fake money, and real Best Buy/Google Play cards will fix it), so the methods and ‘scripts’ don’t change too much over his videos.

Here are a few to give you an idea of his ways:

Jim Browning is another YouTuber who scambaits to some extent. He doesn’t waste as much time and instead tries to intervene and resolve scams quietly. He’ll gain access to scammers’ computers to find contact info for victims, photos of the scammers, and more, so he can use his technical skills to stop and report them.

And the last YouTuber I want to share is Mark Rober. He’s an engineer known for putting cameras, fart spray, and glitter bombs in fake Amazon packages, knowing they’ll get stolen off porches. He then has insider video and audio of the thieves as they realize that they haven’t gotten away with anything.

I think it’s cool that people are putting in so much time and effort trying to fight scams, and I like that it can entertain me at the same time. And hopefully you too. These are pretty niche videos, so unless you had a specific interest in engineering or computers, I can see videos like these passing you by, but I hope you give them a chance and enjoy just how interesting they can be.

That’s all for now.

 

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5 More Free Online Games My Friends And I Love

Last year, I wrote a blog post listing 7 free online games that my friends and I had discovered and been playing remotely during the pandemic. Since then, more games have entered our realm, but I hadn’t thought about making a new post until I received a comment on that old post from someone who said they and their friends enjoyed my list and wanted more. And I am a people-pleaser.

1. Yahtzee
   This classic game is on a site called BuddyBoardGames that my friends and I are big fans of. If you already know how to play, it’s easy to start, but there are rules there too. This site is easy to navigate and the sound of dice rolling is fun. My friends and I also invented a variation of Yahtzee that we call Yahtzee Mode where you must always aim to get a Yahtzee and only take what you can get at the end. BuddyBoardGames also has other games, and we’re big fans of Farkle, Oh Heck, and Azule, so try those ones too!
   
2. Gartic Phone
   This is a game, but it isn’t competitive by any means. It’s a collaborative drawing game where drawings are passed around and added to by everyone, resulting in hilarious images. It’s like the game of Telephone but with art. There are a bunch of different game modes to try to shake up the game.
3. Bingo
   It’s a basic game, but this site not only has a bunch of free templates you can use or add to, but you can easily make your own with whatever you want. My friends and I imported a list of the 100 worst Pokemon to play Bingo with, and it was fun. Someone will need to be the caller and read things out, but otherwise, you can play how you want with up to 30 people.
   
4. Phase 10
   This is a real card game that is essentially a rummy. Players try to complete each phase of card collections, of which there are 10. Playingcards.io here has many game options, but we found that the board for Continental Rummy worked best, and we just used this image of the phases to play. The cool thing about Playingcards.io is that it’s highly customizable and lets you do your own thing once you’re in the game, so feel free to go into the board settings and change what you want to make your game better.
5. Votes Out aka Quiplash
   This is basically Quiplash but free and quicker than having someone screenshare Jackbox on Steam. Votes Out is easy to jump into, and the questions are fun. There are only 12 free game packs, though, so while we enjoy this game, it can’t be played too many times with the same friends.
   
   Bonus: Scrabble
   This isn’t a group game, but I wanted to mention it still as it’s a solid two player game. No accounts needed and no need to read the rules either, since it’s pretty self-explanatory and common.

Go forth and game! Though COVID restrictions have loosened a lot, my friends and I don’t live near each other, so we still heavily rely on these online games to connect us and amuse us for free! I’m so glad others are enjoying these games too!

Let me know what games you and your pals like and if there are other games you play that you think I should try!

That’s all for now!

 

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