board games!

[alex]

That game is too stressful for me.

[kyle]

Played a pretty intense 5 player game of Settler of Catan: Cities and Knights on Friday night.

Also, I picked up Carcassone, with 6 expansions, and Last Night on Earth at the local stores "Scratch & Dent" section for just $60. Pretty excited for Winter!

[clare]

Have I asked this before?

http://www.cheapass.com/

anyone else played these? I used to play them with my now-dead friend whenever we saw each other, but haven't since then. I seem to remember that Witch Hunt was good as was Kill Dr Lucky, but beyond that, it's vague. Also I don't have any friends who are into board games...but hey, I could play it online...!

http://www.cheapass.com/freegames/kdl

[Thermofusion]

I should specify that I'm not looking for 2-player games specifically, because I (and my usual gaming partner) have quite a few of those (including Lost Cities, thanks to your recommendation, and a couple of other Kosmos two-player games). I am looking for games that I would be able to play with a few other people, who easily get overwhelmed with rules, but that also work for two players, because that's the constellation which realistically speaking will get most play.

You did indeed suggest Samurai before - somehow I was under the impression that would be more complicated! Sounds like a good game for my purposes, then. Torres and Pueblo might be worth a shot as well. Thanks!

edit: Samurai has been ordered! Part of the reason I didn't already have it was that it wasn't available at my local game shop, nor at amazon.de, which is where I'd usually mailorder stuff like that. Just realised that I can actually get free shipping from amazon.co.uk, though, so that's where I ordered it from on!

Yay on ordering Samurai! You'll love that game. It's so simple but the decisions make your brain hurt in an awesome way.

I thought of some more that are fine with two but scale well to 3 or 4:

Through the Desert/Durch die Wüste (plastic camels! surefire crowd pleaser)
TransAmerica (sort of a really, really, REALLY simplified version of Ticket to Ride. Fun though!)
Starship Catan (two-player cardgame in the Kosmos series...very thin connection to Settlers)
Clash of the Gladiators (so simple it's actually pretty stupid, but I like it)
Can't Stop (wonderful push-your-luck dice game, everyone should have this)
Lost Cities: The Board Game (you said you have Keltis, right? this is basically Keltis with a diff. coat of paint)
Stone Age/Stenen Tijdperk (great with two)
Um Reifenbreite (this may be out of print...'80s German bike racing game that lets you cheat by doping)

I will think of more! You start them out with simple stuff, and before long they'll wanna bust out Die Macher and the other hardcore grandaddy games.

edited to add Im Schutze der Burg

[alex]

Thanks, Thermo, very cool! I don't have Keltis, actually, only the Lost Cities card game (no wait, I don't - but my boyfriend does). It sounds like it makes no difference whatsoever if I get Keltis or Lost Cities: The Board Game if I wanted to get a multi-player version though?
Starship Catan I already have and like!

[Thermofusion]

The only difference is Keltis has an expansion that fundamentally alters the game in a neat way, and because of the way it works it's only compatible with Keltis and can't be used with Lost Cities: The Board Game. Other than that it's just a matter of which art style/slapped-on theme you like better!

And on that note, the way Knizia's games are rethemed for American audiences from the original German editions is endlessly bizarre. A card game about with a theme of tribes arguing over Scottish boundary stones (Schotten Totten) becomes a card game about battle formations in ancient warfare (Battle Line). A tile-laying game about positioning shop stalls in a marketplace (Auf Heller und Pfennig) becomes a game about trolls and dragons (Kingdoms), etc. The rules and mechanics stay mostly the same, but they paste on a completely different theme.

[alex]

Oh. It turns out I accidentally ordered Samurai - The Card Game instead of the original game.

[Thermofusion]

Shit I didn't even know there was a Samurai card game. I see it's by the same designer and publisher, let me know how it is!

[alex]

Yeah, I had no idea either - which is why it didn't occur to me to make sure I was indeed ordering the original game.

A bit of a bummer, but I guess I'll stick with what I have now. I'll report back once I've played once or twice.

[Nick Ink]

For some time now, Ellie and I have been racing these little toys around an old Totopoly board. They're called GoGos, and they're pretty cool little guys - I think I've mentioned them before here.



First GoGo home gets 10 points, second 7, then 4, 2 and 1 for the places. The crucial stage of the race is that far bend before the home straight - if a GoGo gets pushed wide on that stage, it can be very difficult to make up the ground.:



We even have league tables. I think we've played about 30 races now. It's building to a climax with promotion and relegation issues about to be decided, possibly even this weekend. 



Many, many years ago, an 8 year-old Nick Ink played much the same game with his brother. But then, instead of GoGos, we used these little cyclist figures that we'd collected on holidays in France.

[edison]

This all looks awesome! I wish I was 8 years old again now!

[kyle]

So cool oh man

[davy]

I wanna play!

[Dick]

Making up your own games is the best thing.

Didn't Jack Kerouac write somewhere about the absurdly complex baseball game he invented?  Sounded sort of like a pencil and paper version of football manager / that type of game?

[Nick Ink]

Making up your own games is the best thing.

Didn't Jack Kerouac write somewhere about the absurdly complex baseball game he invented?  Sounded sort of like a pencil and paper version of football manager / that type of game?

Well, so he did!

[coldforge]

My dad did the exact same. Drew up a couple big posterboards, lots of dice rolls, rosters. He did football and baseball. Maybe others too.

[C of heartbreak]

I really love those cyclist figurines, Nick.

When I was 7 I invented my own sport (forget what it was called), along with a fantasy league, including team names and logos and everything. I never got quite as far as Mr. Kerouac, though.

[Dick]

I made up a pretty complex squad-level counter-insurgency war game to play with my plastic army men when I was around 7.  I played it until I was about 10 or 11.  I remember almost nothing of the rules, but I wrote them down when I was 9 or so and they came out to 15 notebook pages or more.  I later adapted the rules (incompletely) to medieval warfare when I got into those medieval legos.  In the end, Hero Quest completely supplanted my system, though even then I think my love of Hero Quest was inspired more by object fetishism than by love of the game.  Not too much later I grew out of the whole thing.

[RavingLunatic]

That's awesome. How great would it be if you found that notebook?

Also HERO QUEST. I used to play that game with my little brothers, and I totally agree with you that the awesome mythological look of the game, including the box art, was the main reason we loved it so much.

[coldforge]

I LOVED HeroQuest, and in the years I owned it never actually played a single game. There was never anyone to play it with me and I never fully understood all the rules. But I loved playing with all the skeletons.

[RavingLunatic]

Ha, that's great. I probably went years without playing it at one point but still loved the idea of having that the whole setup too.

And how much of a rip-off of Lord of the Rings were the heroes in Hero Quest? A "barbarian" (Aragorn), a dwarf, an elf, and a wizard. The only thing missing is a Hobbit.

[Thermofusion]

Shit, Dick, I wanna play your proto-Advanced Squad Leader military tactics game dogg

Back in high school I was always thinking up ideas for games. Only a handful of them were developed enough to be committed to written rulesets, and of those, only one caught on. It ended up being one of our game group's favorite games.

It was a simple bluffing and bidding game for 3-8 players with a theme of space warfare, unimaginatively called Space Torpedoes. Each player had a "bank" of 20 torpedoes, valued 1-20 (20 highest), and a d20. The game was played in 20 rounds. Each round, all players would select a torpedo, cross that torpedo off their torpedo cards, and then simultaneously all players would reveal ("bid") which torpedo they were launching by placing a d20 in the middle of the table with the number of the torpedo you'd selected facing up. Whichever torpedo was the highest in value would win the round, and whoever won the most rounds won the game. You could only use each torpedo once.

But it wasn't quite that simple. For starters, all torpedoes of the same value would cancel each other out, leaving the next highest torpedo the victor. So if five people at the table launches their 20s, and a couple people launch their 19s because they think everyone's gonna play 20, then the player crafty enough to launch an 18 or even a 1 or 2 would win the round because all of the 20s and 19s tied each other and cancelled out.

That was just the beginning though -- as the game was played in 20 rounds, there was a corresponding facedown pile of 20 cards. Before each round, the topmost card would be flipped over. Whoever won the round would win the card (and whoever won the most cards at the end won the game) Ten of the cards were called "Normal Space", i.e. all combat is resolved under the normal circumstances of 1 lowest, 20 highest, ties cancel out.

But the other ten cards, shuffled into the deck, were "Special Space" cards that altered combat. For example, the "Negative Space" card reversed the power of all torpedoes, so that 1 was the highest and 20 was the lowest. Ties still canceled out. Another was the "Southpaw Space," which would add your torpedo's value with the value of the torpedo launched by the player to your left to determine your actual combat value. In "Random Space," instead of choosing on the d20 which torpedo you were launch, you actually had to roll it, and the number it came to rest on would be your torpedo value. If you'd already launched and crossed off your "12" in a previous round, and you were unlucky enough to roll a 12, not only did your torpedo not count but you had to cough up a card you'd won in a previous round (on occasions where the Random Space card showed up in the last round this was always hilarious, because every player only had one torpedo left). Each of the cards and their special conditions fundamentally altered your approach to the round, sometimes in pretty funny ways. Etc. Etc. Etc.

It was pretty silly and random, but we had a good time with it. "Strategy" came from bluffing your other players w/r/t the simultaneous reveal of torpedoes, keeping mental track of which torpedoes had already been launched by which players, and managing your own torpedo bank. Game was exponentially more fun with more players.

[RavingLunatic]

Dude, that sounds like a rad game, and pretty damn sophisticated to have come up with on your own. I feel like you had to have had a pretty good understanding of board games in general to have been able to come up with something like that, sort of the same way you have to have a pretty good understanding of novels in order to write one or know a fair bit about song structure to write a song. I definitely don't have that kind of knowledge about any of the above subjects to be able to do that kind of real creative work in them.

[Thermofusion]

Maybe! I've played an embarrassing number of board games in my life. But maybe after playing lots of different games, you start to realize that most of them are rearrangements of any of about a dozen or so gameplay mechanics. There are a lot of different ways to combine those mechanics, though, and those combinations kind of dictate the tone of the game. Like, if you marry Simultaneous Action Selection to a bidding mechanic, you'll inevitably have a game with a juicy mix of bluffing and second-guessing your opponents (and second-or triple-guessing your own choices).

[Good Intentions]

'Southpaw Space' is the name of my new indie band.