The Big Thread of Board Games

[Zinegata]

http://boardgamegeek.com/

I think I've played around around half of the Top 100 boardgames in that site, so if any of you have questions about a particular boardgame, chances are I've played it and I can give recommendations on whether or not a boardgame is good for you.

Dito.

But I don't trust boardgamegeek by the way and are sceptical of those who do. The most glaring thing would be that Sid Meier's Civilization (boardgame) had 9s and 10s for four-five weeks from people who claimed to have played it. That game was sooo broken you had to invent new game pieces, a new turn order plus modify the techs to get it to semi-work.

BGG's ranking system does have a lot of faults, but it does at least give a list of games that are heavily played in the boardgame scene outside of the traditionals (i.e. Monopoly)

Love brittania lite. But how come it was popular this year, is there a new expansion I've missed?

Not sure (I don't follow Small World closely, as its expansions are really tiny), but my gaming group got a bunch of expansions this year. I think the last big one was Necromancer's Isle.

So many couples got mad at eachother over settlers that we've had to ditch it in our circle. Nowadays I only play it in tournaments. This since half the game as you say is cutting someone off so they are stuck in shithole creek.

Euros generally have pretty subtle "screw you!" mechanics, but they are still just as devastating.

[Exonerate]

Battlestar Galactica is a good one, especially if you can get a good metagame going ("You're a Cylon!" "No, you're a Cylon and just accusing me so we don't suspect you!") or if you get enough excitement and action without going overboard into complete rapid annihilation.

Oh, definitely. I forgot who it was on the board (Nephtys?) who mentioned the game in a post, and after checking it and some reviews out, I ended up getting it. The game has a great way of bringing out personality traits into the open, from the maniacal evil overlord who always draws accusations to the indecisive paranoid who never knows who to trust. Another point is that games build a lot of tension and often come down to the wire - just when you think you've won/lost, one event turns the table.

There was one game where I willingly went into and stayed in the Brig because I perceived an advantage in it, then we became convinced another player was the Cylon, so we tossed him in too. Immediately afterwards, the true Cylon revealed himself, and with his reveal ability, tossed the last remaining non-Cylon into the Brig. Oops.

[Zinegata]

Heh. In my last BSG game I and the most competent player on the board got fed up with the rest of the crew so we threw everyone save the two of us into the brig.

We basically went, "Okay, you've done the optimal move for the humans every step of the way. I've done the optimal move for the humans every step of the way. We both know we're human. Everyone else is either a Cylon or an incompetent. We don't have time to seperate between the two and incompetence is dangerous anyway. THROW EVERYONE IN THE BRIG"

Hilariously, we survived with just the 2 of us pilotting the ship even as the Cylons finally revealed themselves. We didn't even bother freeing the rest of the crew!

[Spoonist]

BGG's ranking system does have a lot of faults, but it does at least give a list of games that are heavily played in the boardgame scene outside of the traditionals (i.e. Monopoly)

Completely agreed. What I like is all the added tidbits and the chats on topic.

Euros generally have pretty subtle "screw you!" mechanics, but they are still just as devastating.

Had a funny talk with a friend over Carcassonne when that was new. He said it was nice with a game where everyone was friends. While I said that it was nice with an easy game where you could get non-gamers to like while still having a cut throut competition angle. Took me a while to show him the error of his ways and how fierce it can be.

[Coalition]

One game I enjoy is Shadows over Camelot. It is the players vs the game, and just when you think things are going well, you get a black card (evil stuff) that tells you to draw the next three black and play all three of them at once. We were going to win, then that thing hit and we lost a lot (all knights lose 1 pt of health, then all knights recalled to Camelot, another card placed the last card on a quest with another card out that said all knights not the next lost quest lose 1 pt of life).

To give an idea, knights have their life represented by a d6. You start with 4 pts of life. The above sequence cost everyone 2 pts of life (killing 2 of us immediately), and the last knight only had 1 pt left.

Since it is players vs the game, you can have people join the game in progress. Best if ~3-4 players, so their special abilities can help each other. Get enough players, and one can be a traitor, whose job is to help the game win.


Arkham Horror is another fun one.

[wautd]

I love boardgames, but it's hard to find enough people to play with (eg, i bought battlestar Galactica 2 years ago and never had the chance to play it - except for one time but we didn't get far because of low intrest of some of my friends, and that it's hard to learn when drunk of your ass and half of the people don't speak english too well).

Should also mention some solid quality like Puerto Rico, Ticket to Ride

Coincidentally, 2 weeks ago I went to check out a club for board gaming with a friend and these were the two games we played. Both were excellent but I especially liked Ticket to Ride. Very easy to learn, yet it offers you with a lot of choices and risks to make.

[Spoonist]

How could any boardgame topic be complete without a reference to the one prussian oppression of games with any quality?
http://www.spiel-des-jahres.com/cms/fro ... ?idcat=141

[Lord Relvenous]

Anyone else played Ascension? It's a deck building game (like Dominion), but it includes enemies as well as cards that go into your hand. Enemies that are defeated give you a set number of victory points into your pile. Cards that you buy have in-game effects, and then are worth a certain amount of victory points (everything but the starting deck has value). Also, instead of all the cards being laid out, they are put in a stack from which 6 cards are always showing. It's a great game with a lot of different strategies possible, and we can always get the 4 people maximum on it.

A lot of my favorite games have already been mentioned, but there are two more that I really like. Betrayal at the House on the Hill is a fun horror game where you take the role of an explorer moving through a haunted house. Weird events and omens manifest as you explore. After a certain amount of omens (it depends on dice), the Haunt is revealed and the game switches from exploration to survival. Due to the system determining Haunts, there are over 50 situations. Combine that with the fact that the house is built as you explore it and the game is never the same thing twice. A really fun game, and I would definitely recommend it, especially for its relatively low price ($35-$40).

Another really fun game is Lords of Vegas. You're a casino boss participating in the first boom of Vegas. You have to develop land and manage casinos, trying to score the most points. However, who controls plots of land is random, meaning the other players can get that plot of land you really want. The game really captures the chaotic and cut throat nature of Vegas, and is a lot of fun, even if you don't like Vegas.

Besides that, Forbidden Island is a great gift ($16 and a really fun co-op game), Atlantis is a cutthroat blast, and Stone Age is a fun resource management game.

[Faqa]

No Game Of Thrones references yet? I am SHOCKED and appalled.

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6472 ... of-thrones

As you might imagine, it's the various noble families from the fantasy series A Song Of Ice And Fire competing to Rule The Land(i.e, acquire six supply centers castles).

Basically, it's Diplomacy on steroids in many ways - you place orders on a board(move, attack, raid, defend, support) and then resolve each order one at a time in turn. The kicker? Most orders can be resolved in quite a few different ways. You never, after all, specified WHICH WAY you were going to attack. Or who your army was planning to support. This is the primary change from Diplomacy, and it makes the game far more dynamic, since you'll never know what an order does until it's resolved. Also notorious for insane mobility - control the seas right and you can literally attack across the board. The combat dynamic is partially deterministic, but includes a poker element through playing 'hero' cards to add strength to your army(you basically know what cards the opponent can play, but not what he will choose to).

A LOT of tension, a lot of backstabbing and a lot of fun. You do lose some of Diplomacy's, well, diplomacy, since it is not NECESSARY to juggle allies in order to do anything, but it is still helpful.

Of course the magnum opus of board gaming is and will always be Twilight Imperium.

[Mayabird]

Does anyone know of some good collaborative/non-competitive board games? The only name I can think of is Pandemic, where four plagues are burning across Earth and the players have to work together to make vaccines and stop the outbreaks before we go extinct. Not that competitive games aren't fun but I like to see different game mechanics.

[Alyeska]

After seeing so many positive reviews on BSG, I will be giving that game a look. What I read on it, that game looks interesting.

[Faqa]

Does anyone know of some good collaborative/non-competitive board games? The only name I can think of is Pandemic, where four plagues are burning across Earth and the players have to work together to make vaccines and stop the outbreaks before we go extinct. Not that competitive games aren't fun but I like to see different game mechanics.

The thread has mentioned Arkham Horror, which is a lot of fun and fully cooperative. Also, you might get to kill C'thulu in it.

After seeing so many positive reviews on BSG, I will be giving that game a look.

Free tip: ALWAYS check Roslin for Cylon-hood. She is literally the most painful hidden Cylon in the game. Also, play it with people who have a VERY good understanding that "It's just a game", because you will literally be required to lie to people to their face.

[Gerald Tarrant]

Does anyone know of some good collaborative/non-competitive board games? The only name I can think of is Pandemic, where four plagues are burning across Earth and the players have to work together to make vaccines and stop the outbreaks before we go extinct. Not that competitive games aren't fun but I like to see different game mechanics.

You might also try Forbidden Island. Your group needs to retrieve an artifact from somewhere on the island and then Get to the Choppa, before the island sinks. As the waves rise areas start to flood and make routes impassable, and your group needs to spend actions shoring up tiles before escape routes get cut off. Done by the same guy who did Pandemic, a little more approachable for younger players than Pandemic though. I also had fun with Betrayal at House on the Hill but that does have someone taking on the role of villain du jour. Your group is busy exploring a mansion, every room you explore is a grabbed from a pile of un-revealed tiles, also depending on who triggers the villain and where they trigger it; the big bad is different so each run-through has a different feel. It feels a bit like a cooperative DungeonQuest which has a similar exploration mechanic.

A couple of days ago I got introduced to Merchants and Marauders. You're a captain sailing around the Caribbean, your goal is to get 10 victory points, you can collect 1 for every 10 gold you bank (up to 5), and the others come from sinking your competitors' ships, plundering valuable merchant ships, fulfilling missions, or making great deals. It feels like a board game version of the old BBS game Trade Wars. If you die, you get a new captain, a new ship, you get new starting capital, and lose all your unbanked gold, which is much more forgiving than most other player elimination type games. At the end of a complete round cards can add npc warships, or pirates, and if you find yourself on the wrong side of the law you might end up tangling with frigates from the great powers. Game mechanics are a bit like Arkham horror, every character has a set of stats, and when making checks (like to see if your naval volleys are successful, or if you flee) you roll dice equal to the appropriate stat and check for successes (skulls and crossbones in this game, 5's and 6's in Arkham Horror). The game slows down with more than 4 as you're more likely to start killing player ships, meaning more people need to "reset".

[Mayabird]

Ooh, yes, Betrayal at House on the Hill was a good one, but I didn't think of it initially because of the one person who turns against the others.

And now a shoutout for Red Dragon Inn, the game after the game, when all the adventurers go to the tavern and start drinking until hilarity ensues. It's a fast and funny game ("No, Pooky! Don't drink that!"), though better with the four extra characters and the new boozes in the expansion.

[fnord]

Mayabird, I've found Pandemic combined with On The Brink to really change things up nicely. Even in a basic, no-challenge game, the extra roles (we now ONLY use the revised OpEx in basic games, as he's better than the original) and special cards really keep it interesting - more than one game, we've had city cards run out with the final cure in hand and to be played by the next player. We've also had some skin-of-teeth wins enabled by Commercial Travel Ban.

We've only tried one game combining the mutant and virulent strain challenges - the immediate cause of us losing that game was the Virulent Strain (black, I think for this game) breakouts counted double, we were on 4/8, and two chained black cities outbroke, to screams of "DEAR $DEITY, WHY?" around the table. I got some weird looks when $DEITY = "SAINT BOB".

Have played a few bioterrorist challenge games, usually at another mate's place, who was kind enough to supply a black fedora for the BT player to wear. It's become a standing in-joke among our group that if a research station's toilets run backwards, it's doomed.

I haven't seen the Ticket To Ride series mentioned, nor my first ever eurogame, Power Grid (played the Russia map on Friday night - blimey didn't Midget Fusion go for a packet - and, to my annoyance, no one really grokked the "Post-Soviet Russia" jokes - I need to get the Russia/Japan and Brazil/Iberia boards).

[Jade Falcon]

Anyone else here played War on Terror?

http://www.waronterrortheboardgame.com/

Lets just say it was....controversial when released, but if you've got a good group of guys with warped/twisted/sick (delete or add as appropriate) this game is fun. It doesn't take itself too seriously. I mean, what game with a supplied Black balaclava with the word EVIL across the front is?

I picked up a few golden oldies off of Ebay some time back..

Supremacy, that was a complex one where there's no real winners, I hear there was a myriad of expansions that really made things complicated but I've never seen them. This game can cost a fortune on Ebay, though if you shop around its still available.

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/27/supremacy

Another one that came out about the same time as Axis and Allies was Fortress America, this pretty much seems to be the board game of World in Conflict, or more correctly the other way around.

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/99/fortress-america

Would Car Wars 1st through third edition count, I had countless hours of fun with them, integrating the background material from the AADA Road Atlases and making a game that was more RPG than just pure board game. The latest version was a drastically different animal altogether

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2795/car-wars

[wautd]

Anyone else here played War on Terror?

http://www.waronterrortheboardgame.com/

No, but I'd like to give it a try. I like its sense of humor.

Heh, even the IT crowd played it

[irishmick79]

I have quite a few military themed board games, all of which I have thoroughly enjoyed at points.

Patton's Best, a solitare tank simulation where you follow the trials and tribulations of a Sherman crew through WWII.

Across the Reich, an operational level sim of the west front from Normandy to the end

Across Five Aprils, a simple, quick and dirty sim of five civil war battles, 1st Bull Run, Gettysburg, Shiloh, Perryville, and Bentonville.

Across the Rhappahannock a brigade level sim of the Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville campaigns (the board is HUGE).

Stonewall Jackson's Way a brigade/divisional level sim of the 2nd Bull Run campaign. Really elegant system here. Each hex is about a mile across and each strength point represents about 400-500 men. I also have Stonewall in the Valley, which is a companion to the 2nd Bull Run campaign. This one sims the entire 1862 Shenendoah campaign. The map uses the 8 foot long map that Stonewall originally used during the campaign as a major source.

The Civil War, published by Victory Games. This one is awesome. A pure strategic level sim - each hex is about 25 miles from side to side and each strength point is about 5000 men. Fluid system for naval rules and for initiative.

B-17, Queen of the Skies, a solitare sim of a B-17 mission. You can create a crew and track a bomber through the course of its career.

[Zinegata]

Labyrinth is really the premiere "War on Terror" boardgame nowadays.

[fnord]

Also, continuing in the Ticket to Ride vein, I can now heartily recommend the Europa 1912 mod.

[Gerald Tarrant]

I thought I'd mention the 18xx series of games. It's a stock market theme based around railroads. There's lots of variants of the same basic game (Some are set in Europe, some in the N. East US, etc, as well as lots of minor variations on the core game mechanic). The game is split into two phases, a stock phase and some number of operating rounds. During the stock rounds you use your personal funds to buy stock, or fund new companies, or sell other companies' stock (some variants will have the stock price go down on every sale). During the operating rounds whoever controls the most stock in a given company will run that company, and have complete control over its funds. You use those funds to build rail lines and buy rolling stock. As more and more trains are bought the new trains can reach further, but they start to cost more, and once a certain amount of trains have been bought the low level trains become obsolete and "rust", meaning the company will have trouble making a profit. It's a fun balance of squeezing the most you can out of your company and leaving yourself a cushion for hard times. Plus the stock rounds can be interesting when you find your companies bought out from underneath you.

Poseidon is a much simplified version of the 18xx series, it's also shorter due to a defined set of rounds (the basic 18xx games usually go until the bank is exhausted-meaning that low profit games can drag on and on). Also Poseidon is a little more forgiving, it's easier to inject capital, and "train" obsolescence isn't as bad as most variants of 18xx.

I thought I'd also mention Imperial and Imperial 2030 (which is slightly more balanced than the original). Another stock game, only in this game you're in control of various countries, whoever has the most invested in a country gets to run that country, you get to buy and build armies and navies and increase the value of your country bonds by improving the tax base of the countries you control. Similar to 18xx series in that you have separate personal and company treasuries, and you can find control passing back and forth depending on what happens during the stock rounds.

[JonB]

After seeing so many positive reviews on BSG, I will be giving that game a look.

Free tip: ALWAYS check Roslin for Cylon-hood. She is literally the most painful hidden Cylon in the game. Also, play it with people who have a VERY good understanding that "It's just a game", because you will literally be required to lie to people to their face.

BSG is a wonderful game. Played one where I was Adama, and a Cylon from the get-go. Did my utmost to keep the fleet intact like a good squishy, but frakked the Fleet on the Jumps, always leading the Fleet to dead worlds. They didn't make it to Kobol and I managed to get Zarek thrown into the Brig after accusing him of stacking the Jump deck after he did a scouting mission. Fun times!

As for my reccomendation - Twilight Imperium. Nice game with a semi-random map, and with the expansion, plenty of replayability. Haven't taken a crack at it for a while though.

[Mayabird]

Also, continuing in the Ticket to Ride vein, I can now heartily recommend the Europa 1912 mod.

Maybe I'm insane, but I seem to remember some sort of Ticket to Ride expansion/mod/whatever or maybe something similar that was set on Mars, or maybe it was some sort of similar game, but a search couldn't find anything. Is it a real thing or was I hallucinating at the game store one day?

[DPDarkPrimus]

You're thinking of Martian Rails, which is a Mars-themed spin-off of the Empire Builder game by Mayfair Games.

Empire Builder, and related ____ Rails titles have the fun mechanic of drawing out your railroad line using crayons on the (washable) board. I certainly had fun with it, though I never actually won.

[wautd]

Tried a game of Kingsburg yesterday and it was good fun. Easy to learn yet plenty of decisions to make to keep it interesting (which resources to take, what buildings to build, should I try harassing that other player, etc..). I also learned the hard way twice not to underestimate defences. Rolling anything but a 1 cost me the game at the final round (should have bought more soldiers instead of a building dammit).