the housewarming happened. i’m still not entirely sure what to do with that information.
i had constructed it, in the weeks before, as a singular event — a threshold to cross, a night to survive, an evening after which we would be able to say that the apartment had been officially inhabited. julian made a chili he described as “good,” which in his vocabulary translates to “i put real effort into this and would like acknowledgment.” we played all four of the games from the february catalog until nearly one in the morning. someone threw a foam burrito behind the couch and we found it six days later. the apartment, which i had been treating as a managed-community liability since the day we signed the lease, turned out to be capable of holding people.
the part i didn’t anticipate: people came back.
not formally, not with a calendar invitation — more in the way that a room that has demonstrated it can hold a night starts receiving return traffic without much discussion. julian’s college friend and his girlfriend showed up two saturdays ago and stayed until midnight. my friend meredith sat on the couch with me on a wednesday and we split a bottle of wine and watched something neither of us chose. julian’s parents visited in march and required the specific version of us that can navigate four hours without anyone opening the wrong drawer. the apartment has been tested in configurations i didn’t plan for, and it has, against my initial assessment, passed each of them.
what the repeated hosting has revealed is that the original four games have load limits. not in quality — they hold up — but in range. throw throw burrito at two in the morning with four people who know each other well is not the same activity as throw throw burrito at seven o’clock with people you’re still calibrating. the magnetic tiles that work as a late-night excavation tool don’t work the same way when someone’s in-laws are in the room. you start to see the gaps.
what follows is the expansion pack — not a supplement to the february catalog but a second layer of it, organized not by game but by occasion. every version of this apartment that people have turned out to need.
- block block burrito — the foam intrusion expansion
the original throw throw burrito is a card game that occasionally becomes a foam projectile situation, and this expansion adds the thing that gives the chaos structure: shields. inflatable panels, the same dense foam as the burritos, that players can use to defend themselves from incoming carbs. julian described this as “adding stakes,” which is a sentence i have chosen to live with.
what it actually does, structurally, is transform the game from a simple act of domestic mayhem into something with a defensive dimension — you can now actively protect yourself, which means someone is now strategizing about how to throw a burrito, which is not a thought pattern i anticipated becoming familiar with. the shields are solid for what they are — they don’t collapse mid-game the way you’d expect inflatable pool accessories to — and the whole setup packs back into the box without much ceremony. as an object when the game isn’t in play, they are mildly absurd. as an object in play, they are the specific kind of absurd that makes a room feel genuinely alive rather than just occupied.
shop: block block burrito expansion →
- throw throw avocado — the millennial projectile
same basic mechanical premise as the burrito — you play a card game and at intervals someone gets hit with a foam object — except the foam object is now an avocado, which is a choice i find both predictable and correct. the avocado has a slightly different weight distribution than the burrito, which sounds like a meaningless distinction until you’ve thrown both and noticed that the burrito curves and the avocado commits more fully to its trajectory. julian noticed this before i did. i found it offensive.
what throw throw avocado adds to the catalog is a compatible parallel game — you can run it alongside the burrito version for larger groups, or use it alone when the burrito has been retired for the evening. the combined mode, which the instruction card calls “extreme,” means everyone has multiple foam objects available simultaneously, which is an environment i would have considered unreasonable as recently as january. and yet. the room is apparently this kind of room now, and the avocado has earned its placement on the shelf.
- ransom notes nsfw expansion — the basement tapes
the original ransom notes is a magnetic word-tile situation we use in the polite hours, when everyone is functioning and the wine is still in a moderate range. this expansion is what happens after that — when the performance of civility has relaxed into something more honest and the vocabulary can expand accordingly. it’s crude in a way that feels calibrated rather than gratuitous, if that distinction makes sense, which it does after midnight.
i keep this one in a separate drawer. not hidden — there’s no mystery about its existence — but categorized, the way you’d organize a kitchen by use frequency and audience. julian refers to it as “the drawer,” and at this point the whole apartment understands what that means. the expansion adds tiles in a register that’s significantly rawer than the base set, and the result is that the same game that produced a completely civil evening two saturdays ago is capable of becoming something else entirely when the right people are still at the table at midnight. both versions are the game. the drawer is just the sort.
shop: ransom notes nsfw expansion →
- ransom notes couples edition — the marital post-mortem
this edition is designed for two players, which means it’s also designed for the specific friction of being two people who share a lease and have developed opinions about each other’s organizational systems. the prompts are calibrated for the couple configuration — things like “describe how the other person makes decisions using only the tiles available” — and the magnetic constraint means you can’t just say what you think. you have to build it from whatever vocabulary the tray gives you, which is both the limitation and the point.
we use this on evenings when we’re both too tired for an actual conversation but not tired enough to be finished with each other. it’s a structured format for the kind of acknowledgment that doesn’t require energy — you point at tiles, the tiles do the arguing, and occasionally something true gets constructed that neither of you would have found through direct speech. julian is better at this than i expected, which either says something about his facility with language or about how much he’s been accumulating that hasn’t been said out loud. i’ve elected not to investigate which.
shop: ransom notes couples edition →
- ransom notes family edition — the sanitized magnetic debris
julian’s parents visited in march. this is the version of ransom notes that exists for that occasion — the same magnetic constraint, the same formal challenge of building meaning from available debris, but with a vocabulary that has been audited for things a person would regret constructing in front of a mother-in-law. the tiles are still sharp enough to be interesting. they’re just sharp in a different direction.
what the family edition reveals is that the actual game is the constraint, not the content — limiting yourself to available tiles and having to construct something coherent from them is an interesting problem regardless of what those tiles say. the restricted vocabulary produces different sentences but the same kind of satisfaction. it’s the one i leave out on the coffee table by default now, which is a sentence that tells you something about what the last three months have done to my risk assessment in this apartment.
shop: ransom notes family edition →
- poetry for neanderthals expansion — the primitive extension
the original poetry for neanderthals — you describe concepts using only one-syllable words while your teammate holds an inflatable club — has been in regular rotation since february, long enough that julian and i have developed what i can only call skill at speaking like children. this expansion adds more prompt cards, which is the only thing the base game was actually running out of. it’s not a mechanical change. it’s vocabulary for the vocabulary-reduction exercise, which is a sentence i have apparently become someone who writes.
the prompts in this expansion tend toward the abstract and relational — harder concepts to reduce to one-syllable units, longer rounds, more moments where someone stands there holding the foam club waiting for an answer that requires restructuring the entire sentence from scratch. julian, who is good at the original, finds this version genuinely challenging, which is not nothing. the game that was supposed to be a soft corrective for my decade of meeting-room jargon has, at some point, become something we’re both taking seriously. i feel like that’s either a good sign or evidence that this apartment has successfully reduced both of us to our most essential components. probably both.
shop: poetry for neanderthals expansion →
the room passed, again.
that’s the thing i didn’t have a framework for before the housewarming — the distinction between a space that works once, under controlled conditions, and a space that works repeatedly, under whatever configuration arrives. we’ve had the late-night crowd and the early-evening crowd and the just-us crowd and the in-laws crowd, and the room has held all of them, and the games have sorted themselves by occasion the way a good catalog does: the shields come out when there’s enough physical space and everyone’s past caring about the furniture, the couples edition comes out when it’s just us and we’ve run out of things to watch, the family edition lives on the table where the in-laws can see it.
julian still calls every occasion “basically another housewarming,” which i initially found irritating and have come to understand is actually a reasonable description. the apartment doesn’t have a fixed temperature to warm to — it just runs, and the games keep getting used, and the drawer stays organized, and the shields go back in the box.
the expansion pack, it turns out, is not a supplement. it’s just what it looks like when the room actually works.
products:
- block block burrito expansion
- throw throw avocado
- ransom notes nsfw expansion
- ransom notes couples edition
- ransom notes family edition
- poetry for neanderthals expansion
price: $14.99–$29.99
why buy: because the original four were a kit, and this is what you buy when you’ve used the kit enough to know what’s missing
(affiliate links above — i make a small commission if you buy, which funds the ongoing effort to make this apartment feel like somewhere a person chose to live)
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