board games!

[alex]

Because we never had a dedicated thread, as far as I recall, and I'm curious what, if anything, you guys are playing.

I've been playing a little less board games in general since moving away from my regular Settlers of Catan/Malefiz/Risk buddies, but I think that is about to change. I just got Ticket to Ride Europe (a slightly more complex version of the original Ticket to Ride, which me and my friend mmmaria played somewhat excessively when she still lived a one-hour bus ride away from me) and San Juan (card game version of Puerto Rico, and thus, strictly speaking, not a board game at all) for my birthday, both of which I've played once or twice since then, and both of which are proving awesome so far.

What else is good?

[silentsigh89]

I love ticket to ride!

And Trivial Pursuit!

As far as card games go, there is one called Dutch Blitz that is apparently available internationally that is quick to teach to people and surprisingly fun and competitive-- sort of a speed, stacking game. I have to go for now, but I'm excited about this thread! I tend to know more about quick, large group games than about the more serious and strategy oriented ones, but I enjoy all of them.

[alex]

I was thinking that description sounds a lot like Ligretto, and it turns out that it's indeed an alternate name for the same game. I like it, too! I haven't played it in years (the fact that one of my most reliable game buddies in Vienna has a paralysed left hand makes it a little less likely to be played), but it's actually sitting here in the shelf in front of me and begging to be played again at some point. A friend of mine has a somewhat similar, but slightly less hectic game that I forgot the name of, but which is also fun. Plus of course there's always Uno for fun, quick, large group games.

[auto-da-fey]

As far as card games go, there is one called Dutch Blitz that is apparently available internationally that is quick to teach to people and surprisingly fun and competitive

Beth tried to teach me this last weekend, but I instead chose to have a rather heated conversation with my onetime partner over her editing suggestions for my first two chapters. It looked fun, though (but I made the right call--I have to admit, the edits were spot-on--whatever else she may be, she's pretty much a genius when it comes to such matters, literally).

I dig Scattergories.

[dumbfish]

Is that the one where you think of words that begin with a given letter? Humiliated by that game once. Had to think of fish that began with the letter "s" and just blanked.
Have I mentioned that I study fish for a goddamn living? Snapper, sailfish, sleepers, Stegastes planifrons, shiners, striped minnow, stingray, skate, sculpin (my dissertation topic!), seahorse, sea robin, sea anything... But at that moment, nothing. Ugh.

[auto-da-fey]

that happens to me all the time. you could roll a J, have the category "lesbian-vampire filmmaker," and I'd run out the clock thinking to myself "uhhhhh . . . did James Whale make Dracula's Daughter? uhhhh . . . ."

[Thermofusion]

My games group down here isn't as up to speed on new stuff as I'd like, but we still have our favorites. We're all big Reiner Knizia fetishists, so we play a lot of his beautifully abstract games: Ra is a perennial favorite...built around probably my favorite auction mechanic in all of deustchespiele...a genre with an admitted fuck-ton of auction games. We also play his Samurai a lot (beautiful hexagonal representation of Japan for the game board, fun little idol pieces and an agreeably mathematic central mechanic) and, of course, Lost Cities and Battle Line are two of my favorite two-player German-style card games.

Other stuff, we're burned out on Puerto Rico, slightly less so with San Juan, almost burned out on Caylus, but it's a recent classic and still worth playing. Power Grid (known as Funkenschlag in its original EuroRails-style incarnation) gets regular play. We of course play a lot of pedestrian stuff like Settlers and Carcassonne.

Right now we're got a massive game of Diplomacy in its ninth turn and we've been playing History of the World (my all-time fave Risk variant) a lot, too. I guess we're in a world domination kinda mood lately.

Also, Ricochet Robot(s) got dusted off last week and we had a blast with that--still prefer it to its clunkier but also enjoyable brainfuck robot puzzler cousin, Robo-Rally.

Will think of more!

[mountmccabe]

I rather like Acquire.  It is a 60s 3M bookshelf game.  It is a stock/merger/acquisitions type game.  It is fun, though.  It can take a little while to play but we have made up modifications - cutting down the number of tiles you have in your hand to play - to speed things up, if desired.

I learned this game from my brother in law.  He has probably 20 60s 3M bookshelf games and that's just the start of his collection.  He was the one that has Khet, the game with lasers and mirrors where you shoot your opponent's pieces to get rid of them, that I posted this picture of before

[Thermofusion]

Acquire is my favorite abstract business game, easily. The Avalon Hill version is beautifully made, too. Certain editions of the 3M version are a rarity and fetch high prices online.

Khet looks awesome.

[mountmccabe]

I found my copy - I think it's the '68 reissue - at a Goodwill for $2!  I was thrilled.

[plainenglish]

i love games -- love 'em!! Beth, thank you for inviting Chris to play drunken Trivial Pursuit, he said he had a blast.

I'm sort of obsessed by packaging -- I love games that fold up into boxes or slide together or something. I have no clue how to play cribbage but had to get  this set just because it all folds together. You can see on the same page a game called Shut the Box -- Chris made beautiful sets of that game for Christmas presents. We have a gorgeous Mah Johng cabinet with all the pieces in little drawers -- it belonged to Chris' great grandmother -- does anyone know how to actually play mah johng? i've looked it up but keep getting some irritating thing like "there are many variations of mah johng, you can play it any way you like." yeah, bite me, I just want you to tell me how.

There's a great game called Hive -- very fast, very maddening, especially when one's husband is a million times better than one and always wins. I guess my favorite thing about this game is that Chris made me a beautiful set one year for Christmas -- he designed it to fit into an antique half-circle walnut box.

Another cool little game -- Cosmic Wimpout -- just five groovy dice, you keep score. It's a stoner game, so i suppose you keep score until you get hungry, then you walk down to the Cumby for pints of Cherry Garcia ice cream.

So I guess that's my thing -- strategy games with cool pieces that pack away in some way. Any suggestions?

[clare]

Cheapass is good. I also bought an amazing 80s board game called Mandala which is fiddly as all hell to play, but fun in the end. I bought the bloke Zooloretto in 2007, and it really is fun for all the family.

plainenglish - 'cosmic wimpout' sounds like a drinking game I know called Zilch, which is basically 'yahtzee' only more fun. 5 dice, you roll, and based on the score of your roll you roll again.

[Thermofusion]

Yeah those Cheapass games can be fun. My favorite, Safari Jack, is long out of print--was basically a tile-laying game where you ran around poaching imaginary endangered species. I still have my Brawl decks gathering dust somewhere. That was a fun little game--basically a real-time card-shedding game that roughly emulated a fighting video game. Each bout lasted about a minute-minute thirty and each deck was a character with various strengths and weakness (some had better defense, more blocks, etc....others had stronger offense).

Alex, another game I thought of and wanted to put in a good word for was The Traders of Genoa, a Rüdiger Dorn (who would go on to design the excellent Goa) negotiations game taking place in the port of Genoa during the Renaissance...each turn, you negotiate with your opponents to get them to help you fulfill various orders and contracts, which you accomplish by paying them to visit various warehouses and buildings in the town square. Really deep game that kind of takes the negotiation aspects of Settlers to another level. We pulled it out recently and had a grand old time.

[The_Tourist]

i played the "hello kitty bff" board game the other night. it's much more complicated than it sounds.

[plainenglish]

Oh, damn, Cheapass Games is flippin' GENIUS! I can't tell you how many millions of pawns and dice and chips we have -- see, there's a big bag of them right over there, in the games basket. I'm perfectly proud to use those and just buy the game part -- genius.

[Thermofusion]

I do like their business model, although they've subsequently strayed from it by producing a "deluxe" edition of (the excellent) Kill Doctor Lucky. Also James Ernest is an eccentric, eccentric man. My favorite out-there design of his is Bitin' Off Hedz, which is a long out-of-print dicefest race game where everyone is a dinosaur trying to be the first to fling themselves into a volcano while biting all the other dinosaurs' heads off.

[clare]

My ex took all the Cheapass, but there was a good one called Witch Trial. Devil Bunny Needs a Ham is also good. Before I Kill You Mr Bond was another fave. Can't remember if I ever played Bitin' Off Hedz, but it's ringing a bell, as is Give Me the Brain. The friend who introduced me to Cheapass made a game set in the East End markets of Adelaide, which was legendary. I haven't played much in the way of games since he died.

[alex]

Yes, starting this thread was definitely a good idea!

We also play his Samurai a lot (beautiful hexagonal representation of Japan for the game board, fun little idol pieces and an agreeably mathematic central mechanic)

I'm now banking on Doctor Bob going out to buy this immediately, and then I can make another trip to Dublin and play it.

I just opened too many tabs at once exploring people's tips and looking up games, but I'm already sure this is going to cause some modifications in my wishlist. (Though I need to figure out first whether I can actually get people to play the games I have now before I make much new purchases. But at least for a couple of 2-player games, I am optimistic.)

I have a hunch that Thermo is going to be the one most likely to field this one, but: Does anyone have any experience with Le Havre? I've never played it, but am a bit curious. I know that it's made by the same people who made Agricola (which I played only once and really liked, though, man, that's a fucking stressful game), and that that shows in terms of game play mechanics, but the goal here is to build ships instead. Somehow I get the impression that it's simultaneously even denser, yet a not quite as tense, as Agricola. It sounds intriguing, but also a little scary.

(Caylus has been on my wishlist for some time, too.)

[Thermofusion]

We also play his Samurai a lot (beautiful hexagonal representation of Japan for the game board, fun little idol pieces and an agreeably mathematic central mechanic)

I'm now banking on Doctor Bob going out to buy this immediately, and then I can make another trip to Dublin and play it.

I just opened too many tabs at once exploring people's tips and looking up games, but I'm already sure this is going to cause some modifications in my wishlist. (Though I need to figure out first whether I can actually get people to play the games I have now before I make much new purchases. But at least for a couple of 2-player games, I am optimistic.)

I tend to buy more two-player games, also, just for the flexibility of not needing a whole group of people to play them properly. Some of my favorite games are light games that work best with at least 4+ (Adel Verpflichtet, Ra, Um Reifenbreite, Formula De, Pit, Citadels, Can't Stop) but outside of my games group it's rare that I have that many people gathered in my apartment to play card and board games.

Anyway, here are some of my favorite two-player games, since that seems more like what you're looking for:




Carcassonne: The Castle This is Knizia's two-player variant of Carcassonne, and while some of the same basic mechanics are similar (it's still a tile-laying "completion-and-score" game) some of my more hardcore gaming buddies enjoy it better than the original. I'm not sure if I'm in the same camp, but I would agree this game is more elegant and a little less luck-based than the original (which has possibly suffered from its ceaseless glut of expansions). Only for two players, takes maybe a half hour to play.





Battle Line This is another Knizia two-player game, and for my money the most intense, stomach-churning decision making card game he's put out. It's actually a rethemed version of Schotten-Totten with an Ancient theme tacked on. The object is to capture either five total "flags" or three consecutive flags, which you accomplish by trying to play the best "formation" (in this case, roughly corresponding to modified three-card poker hands--a "Wedge" is a straight flush, a "Phalanx" three of a kind, a "Battalion Order" a flush, etc.) in a special six-suit deck. The decision making is really stomach churning, on a level that Lost Cities can't really come close to matching. Not sure about the print status of this one, as my copy is nine years old and the American publisher (GMT) has been in and out of financial troubles for at least the past five or six years.




Speaking of Lost Cities, I'm sure this one has been ubiquitous in Germany, Austria and elsewhere for some time, but we still love the artwork and the basic mechanic (even if I've gotten spoiled by online versions performing the math for me).





Blue Moon Another good strategic Knizia two-player card game with BEAUTIFUL artwork






Zeus en Hera This game has a great bluffing aspect to it. Each player arranges rows of facedown attack cards to try to destroy the other player's rows.





Flagship: Coyote Stands and Flagship: Prometheus Unchained are two halves of a Magic: The Gathering style space card game which can be played independently. Each set contains two complete decks, which each represent a unique warring faction. The gameplay mechanics are pretty much lifted directly from M:TG but because it's not a collectible card game or have a ton of expansions, the decks are very well balanced and you don't run into the problem with M:TG with some cards being grossly overpowered and that sort of thing. Another GMT game, I think this one is technically out of print but I literally see it everywhere, as it was somewhat underrated and didn't sell very well in relation to its ambitious print run.





Kingdoms An American re-tooling of Auf Heller und Pfennig with a knights/trolls/magic fantasy theme, which is a great little Knizia game with a central add/subtract mechanic: you're trying to arrange rows and columns of various positive and negative-valued tiles, screwing your opponent over with the negative ones and trying to rack up your points with the positive ones. For a game that only takes 15-20 minutes to play, the strategy is pretty fucking deep.




A link for Samurai -- yes, make Dr. Bob buy this one because it is excellent...also would encourage everyone else to give it a shot...works well for 2 and 3 players especially.

I have a hunch that Thermo is going to be the one most likely to field this one, but: Does anyone have any experience with Le Havre? I've never played it, but am a bit curious. I know that it's made by the same people who made Agricola (which I played only once and really liked, though, man, that's a fucking stressful game), and that that shows in terms of game play mechanics, but the goal here is to build ships instead. Somehow I get the impression that it's simultaneously even denser, yet a not quite as tense, as Agricola. It sounds intriguing, but also a little scary.

(Caylus has been on my wishlist for some time, too.)

I haven't played Le Havre yet! The US edition has been out for seven or eight months but, as I've said, my games group is slow to getting around to new stuff. My old group in Charlotte enjoys it more than Agricola (which I thoroughly enjoy)

Caylus is essential--one of those benchmark games like Puerto Rico, but it plays best and most balanced with 3-4

I'm already thinking of some great 4+ player games I've somehow missed, may post about those later.

[dumbfish]

Man, my friends and I play poker every week, but this thread has me thinking we need to broaden our horizons. Particularly interested in strategy games with a bluffing aspect, since that clearly appeals to that crowd. Similarity to Margic: the Gathering to be avoided, please.

Love love Scrabble, but gf is the person who takes 15 mins/turn (it's endearing in most contexts), so that doesn't come out much.

[mountmccabe]

Carcassonne: The Castle This is Knizia's two-player variant of Carcassonne, and while some of the same basic mechanics are similar (it's still a tile-laying "completion-and-score" game) some of my more hardcore gaming buddies enjoy it better than the original. I'm not sure if I'm in the same camp, but I would agree this game is more elegant and a little less luck-based than the original (which has possibly suffered from its ceaseless glut of expansions). Only for two players, takes maybe a half hour to play.

My sister and brother in law have brought up Carscassone the last few times they have come North.  It is easy to play but fun.  They have the original version with the river expansion. 

And when I say it is easy to play I am serious: the first time my sister played with her three year old daughter they tied.  I am sure my sister wasn't playing all cutthroat and my niece was playing it as a matching game (this piece goes there!) but still.

[YojimboMonkey]

My 9-year-old always wins at Carcassonne.  Fun game though.  We also have Settlers of Catan but it gets a little frustrating because I have to remind the 9-year-old what he's supposed to do every damn turn.  He's been getting better though.

We have a game called Labyrinth by Ravensburger that is pretty fun, anybody ever played that one?  A lot more simple than some of these others but simple in a very clever fun way.  Certain parts of the game board are fixed and the rest is made up of squares that slide between the fixed parts.  Each square has a portion of a maze on it, either a straight hall, a t-intersection or a bend, and you try to reach goals on the board by sliding an extra piece into the maze and altering it.

[mountmccabe]

My brother in law has that one!  I have not played it, though.

One game he brought to play once was Sucking Vacuum, using the Alien Incursion Expansion Pack.

The basic game involves a customizable board that represents a space station.  You control the astronauts - one of them is a chimp! - and you race to the escape pod, picking up the things to make it work/allow you to survive along the way.  And, as time goes on it gets harder to move around and pods get inaccessible as the oxygen depletes.

The Alien Incursion Expansion Pack posits that some Aliens have caused the breach and/or arrived coincidentally at the same time (I forget!) and they're trying to capture you for study.  This is supposed to make the game a little more exciting, what with the antagonists.

It's a little slow anyway, but ridiculous enough to be fun enough to play every once in a while.

[alex]

My 9-year-old always wins at Carcassonne.  Fun game though.  We also have Settlers of Catan but it gets a little frustrating because I have to remind the 9-year-old what he's supposed to do every damn turn.  He's been getting better though.

We have a game called Labyrinth by Ravensburger that is pretty fun, anybody ever played that one?  A lot more simple than some of these others but simple in a very clever fun way.  Certain parts of the game board are fixed and the rest is made up of squares that slide between the fixed parts.  Each square has a portion of a maze on it, either a straight hall, a t-intersection or a bend, and you try to reach goals on the board by sliding an extra piece into the maze and altering it.

Is this the aMAZEing Labyrinth (Verrücktes Labyrinth) or Master Labyrinth (Layrinth der Meister)? The former was all the rage in my primary school days, and then a little later (though still during primary school, I am sure), I played the latter quite a bit with my older brother. They're quite similar in terms of basic approach, the main difference being far more interaction/competition between the players in Master Labyrinth, as everyone is trying to get the same pieces.

Anyway, what I'm saying is, those were fun, but I haven't played them in a long time.

Have you seen this game, Jim? Don't know what the game itself is like at all, but the theme seems like it'd appeal to you, at the very least. Even comes with beer coasters!

dumbfish, I'm sure Thermofusion will be along shortly with much more elaborate recommendations, but it sounds like either of the card games I've been playing at the boy's place recently (those being Citadels and Ruse & Bruise) might fit the bill. Maybe not bluffing games, per se, but certainly games where you don't want your players to know what you have in your cards at the moment. Citadels is probably the more sophisticated game, but Ruse & Bruise plays better for 2 players (not sure if that's an issue for you).

Finally, thanks for that fantastic post, Thermofusion! My wishlist has been amended accordingly. I'm particularly intrigued by Lost Cities (don't know anyone who has that, by the way, but none of my friends have more than maybe 2 games) and Samurai. That Carcassonne version looks neat too, though I'm not particularly convinced of the general need for a 2-player version of that game; the original always seemed perfectly playable for 2 players for me.

edited for URLs

[Thermofusion]

don't have the time to do a full-blown post right now but I second the recommendation of Citadels