Chatting with a fellow GOGer we both expressed our love for board games and it made me want to start this thread.

A place to share and discuss board games.

Old-time favorite:

Solar Quest - This is like monopoly but in SPACE, and honestly a much better constructed game (I don't really like monopoly, whereas I like Solar Quest.) You travel around the solar system purchasing Planets, Moons, Space Docks, and Research Labs and effectively trying to rule the Solar System and make everyone else go bankrupt. Each moon/planet has facts about it on the property card. You expend fuel if you leave from a property with gravity, and must remained refueled so you don't get stranded in space. You purchase fuel stations and can put them on your properties and people have to buy fuel from you on occassion, on top of paying rent, or you fill up for free on your own properties with fuel stations. Earth is the neutral starting place. Some planets aren't purchaseable but their moons are. There are Space Stations that give you boons if you land on them. Mars and its two planets, Phobos and Deimos, are the wallet-killers if someone owns that monopoly. There are cards to draw if you roll doubles that do varying things. It contains Pluto and its moon Charon.

New favorite:

We've been playing a lot of Carcassonne (with numerous expansions) the past couple years. This game makes you actually create the board with tiles as you play. You draw 1 tile on your turn and they consist of a variety of 1 or all of a piece of: farm, city, or road and some tiles even have a Cloister on them. You build these structures by adding a tile each turn and accumulate points based on how your structure is built (there's a rules system for how to place tiles, it's pretty easy.) There's a lot of details and intricacies to playing (we never play with bridges, 2 inns on the same road gets you more points, and other things) and you never create the same board twice since the tiles are drawn randomly every time. Its replay value is very very high. It's competitive but cooperative as well, and as with all games you're playing with people you know, the severity with which you treat your fellow players can vary greatly. You can try to overtake other people's structures and farms, or respect their space and not work towards doing that. The rules actually encourage cooperative friendly play to an extent. Show your tile to the other players and discuss the options of where to place. Tell someone "hey you don't want to place that there because you didn't see it will make this happen, and you don't want that." Even if it would have benefited you had they done it.

Different:

Perquacky - an old, quick-mind vocabulary game that I just love if playing with the right people. You roll out a bunch of 6-sided die with letters on and form them to spell words as fast as possible as time clicks down and score yourself based on how many words you were able to spell how fast.

What are some of yours? Tell us about them if they aren't necessarily common knowledge games.

The COIN series is really enjoyable. There are 4 games (I think,) that cover different wars and conflicts around the globe. They do an excellent job at simulating real warfare. For example, one of them Cuba Libre, that covers Castro's guerrilla war against the government in the late 1950's, You have to recruit troops, gain control of cities and resources, but be careful about how much you attack the Cuban government player, because if their need level reaches a certain point, they begin receiving US aid.

They're very well designed and fun, although complex, games.

Kogworks a.k.a. Mecanix

It's an abstract strategy game. Each piece is a kog (gear). The whole point is to spin the golden gear at the top. You only ever spin your bottom gear. You outsmart your opponent so that you can form a working chain of gears to be the first one to spin the golden kog.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/32466/kogworks

I also really like Ta Yu
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/117/ta-yu

And of course Go / Pente / Go Moku
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/188/go

Oooh good thread!

I'm a huge fan of "Ameritrash" board games with lots of bits, rules and strong atmosphere. Ones where it doesn't matter if we win or lose, min / max the perfect strategy and destroy opponents so much as we sort of get together and tell a story.

A few of my favs:

War of the Ring - LOVE this game. It's huge in scope, it distills critical actions while still accounting for them and has a wonderful asymmetrical feel. The game has a bit of randomness in that the cards you draw will affect your strategy; however a good part of the game IS learning and adapting on the fly. The scope is enormous and all the little things you have to do (breaking the fellowship apart at the right time and for the right reasons, advancing nations to war, using your dice) really have a large impact on play.

Arkham Horror - Some strategy to this one, but really it's about collecting all sorts of neat gear, engaging in collective story telling and trudging around Arkham and its outskirts before you are inevitably driven insane or horribly overwhelmed. I love the mechanic of "Encounter Cards" - its fun to wander from location to location and get these little story bits. The high quality of the pieces and board really add to the idea that you're actually exploring a concrete place in a realistic manner. Translates the "abstract" nature of a boardgame into very much feeling like your group is really doing all these things. It plays like a mini tabletop RPG where the DM is provided for you.

A Few Acres of Snow - This is a genre I don't have much experience in, but that became popular about 4-5 years ago or so - the "deck building" game. Players bid for cards in an effort to build decks on the fly and use that deck to beat their opponent. Bidding for the right cards and streamlining your deck by getting rid of the useless stuff are key. This game is heavily steeped in historical lore. You play either France or England toward the end of their respective heydays of vying for control in North America in pre-Revolutionary times. You're deep in the wilderness of NE Canada - New England - New York. The mechanics for settling cities and using their resources to fuel additional expansion and armies are a lot of fun. At the heart they're just icon matching but in game it feels like you're really using these objects to advance in a logical way. This is the least "random" of the games I mentioned. Have a plan, exploit weaknesses and be cutthroat because if you don't, a seasoned player will DESTROY you. But you'll probably still have a lot of fun anyway ;)

It's funny you made this thread now drealmer7 because I've been hankering for a new game. I actually have 3 in mind and if you and / or others don't think it would be too much of a derail I'd love to ask for advice here!

All I know is that I hate, HATE, monopoly.

If I had the right time/money/patience combination, then I would love to get into 40k or Battletech, but I don't think that is the kind of boardgames you're talking about. The only cool board game I've played is the Mad magazine one. Truth be told, I don't think I have any idea about what boardgames have to offer. Perhaps I'll get a better idea once I eventually get round to playing that Settlers of Katakataka one.

I like many board games. Carcassone is a good one and so is Catan.

One I like a lot is Dominion. It is a card game but you have to build your deck while you are playing and your decisions will highly depend on what the other players do and what cards are in play. Also there are 10 piles of cards that may be different from one game to another and that gives you a lot of possibilities so every game is different.

Elder Sign: A dice game that's essentially a faster version of Arkham Horror. I like to think of it as a luck manipulation game- everything comes down to dice rolls, but if you make good use of the resources available to you, the odds are generally in the players' favour. Of course, bad stuff happens more or less constantly, and if the random number gods want you dead, it can get very messy.

The Resistance: A very simple game of betrayal and deceit. Players are randomly assigned to either the loyalist or spy teams- spies are outnumbered, but know who the spies are. Loyalists can't be sure of anyone's affiliation except their own. The idea is to assemble teams to go on missions (which just consist of secretly voting whether they succeed or fail), where loyalists want to make sure there are no spies, and spies want to fail the missions without being caught.

I quite liked Talisman and Warhammer 40,000.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/18794/supergang

and

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/20/full-metal-planete

were the best.

Stuff like Junta, Fury of Dracula, or the Cry Havoc series were pretty nice too.

Hard to beat Parcheesi, but I was a Talisman fan as well.

Also, boggle.

Survive : Escape From Atlantis was a great game when I was a kid, and it's still a great game today. Feeding the people of your rivals to sharks and sea monsters as you race against the clock of an impending volcanic eruption..if that doesn't sound awesome, you're probably broken in some way. :)

Duel of Ages II is also fantastic, albeit quite expensive if you go for the Master Set. You can play it as a skirmish game, or add objectives, bases and adventure keys. Plus, you can have Napoleon riding a dragon, dodging incoming fire as Genghis Khan blasts away at him with a laser rifle.

1.) Carcassone

2.) Scotland Yard (preferably as Mister X)

3.) Labyrinth

Oooh, Scotland Yard is a blast. Such fun making the perfect getaway.

The Amazing Labyrinth (only known as Labyrinth these days)
AKA 'Das verrückte Labyrinth', which is a German play on words. Still a favorite of mine ever since my childhood. Very simple but always fun. Try to claim your treasures one at a time, while the maze keeps constantly moving, cutting off old and opening new paths. It can become quite unpredictable with all four players.

Can't Stop
One of the very few that are unlikely to ever fall out of favor with me. Hell, that game is about as old as me, yet I hadn't played it until about a decade or so ago. Anyway, it's very much a make-your-own-luck kind of game or like most of us who know it call it "the gambling board game" since one can risk to keep going or lose all progress unless one stops. Best played while egging on the current player to keep rolling. ;) Very casual, very quick (most of the time), and always a blast.

Forget the crappy American version with the silly traffic cones. It's up and away onto the top of the Himalayas! Sadly, the good (old/German) version has been out of print for a number of years now. Luckily, I was able to snag a copy of the slightly "newer" version back in 2006 - see attached picture - before it was discontinued. The current German version's board (not to mention that fugly box) looks like absolute pants; at least all the playing pieces are still pretty much the same.

Settlers of Catan (aka Catan)
If you don't know this one you can go right ahead and revoke your board gamer card. It's only pretty much one of the best known board games of recent times. Some may not be fond of it, but I say screw them! I will always have wood for sheep. ;) I tried the expansions, but as with pretty much any board game they tend to overcomplicate things as usual. The base game is fine as is and still regarded as a modern classic simply because it's just so well designed. Coming up on its twentieth anniversary, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't around for at least another two decades.

I never could be bothered to care much for the expanded Catan franchise. *shrug*

[url=http://www.spacecowboys.fr/splendor/language:eng]Splendor[/url]
Very much my favorite of the newer bunch. Got to have that gem empire of mine expanding. ;) It's a relatively simple game of mining gems and expertly using it to acquire new mines, trade routes, artisans, shops... to gain the ultimate prestige and attract the attention of the nobility. Those (weighted) gem chips are definitely some of the best quality game pieces I've come across in quite a while. Not to mention the loverly artwork. Oh, yes, and the game is quite fun.

Hanabi
Also fairly new. Build the best fireworks ever seen with your fellow players... while not being able to look at your own hand. I've yet to come across a game where there wasn't some mild form of cheating involved as in goofy facial gestures. A perfect game is almost impossible to make.


If you hadn't noticed the trend by now, I prefer my board games typically to be of the middling or lighter variety. I never understood the draw of those 3-4 hour long (or longer) games that require a brain work out. Yeah, I rather have fun than stress over some silly game.