The Thread Where We Are Board Game Geeks

that it never snows set-up is totally nuts

totally nuts

Can anyone suggest a good word/vocabulary game that isn't Scrabble?

How does one shuffle that cat into the deck when you buy it?

Bananagrams is a pretty fun, quick word game that appeals to a lot of Scrabble people.

oh man that Tom Wham link (upthread from October). Search for the Emperor's Treasure and King of the Tabletop are probably my two favorite board games ever. I have the Dragon Games box set and I stupidly left my original copy of Emperor's Treasure with a friend when I moved ages ago. I miss that color version of the map so much, the box set version is so dead. Been trying to find a copy of Dragon #51 online with the map intact but no luck.

Ascension is great fun on iPad, but a lousy real-life card game - too much futzing around and shuffling.

oh cool, didn't realize there was an app version, might be a good way to get introduced to it

is it more shuffling than Dominion or about the same?

Yeah, It Never Snows was utterly insane. Not just in scope but in density. This is the best close-up I have of one of the battles, but it got a lot crazier than this.

http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1793807_md.jpg

Moodles: I gave you a brief answer upthread about Ascension, but it plays very similar to Dominion. Same amount of shuffling.

cool, thx

Having played both Dominion as an app and irl, I actually prefer irl despite all the shuffling. It's just easier to follow the mechanics when card effects don't all happen automatically.

I prefer in-person to online too cause it's more fun hanging out with people and I like holding real cards (very old man of me), but the amount of shuffling in Dominion and Ascension sucks. Online games take about a third as much time, maybe even less when you factor setup.

anyone fuck with el grande, played it tonight and it was fun

That's the game with the huge castle that you drop pieces into like a piggy bank, right? I remember that being fun, played it once many years ago. It'd do better with a name like "El Piggy Bank"

Bought Catan sight unseen, having never played it or seen it played, to play with my family (none of whom, I'm sure, have played it, either) over holidays. Over/under on how disastrous that's gonna be?

not disastrous at all. very easy to pick up + learn for beginners, broad appeal

Aye, it's a great idea. That or Carcassonne are super easy fun for all the family.

Cool. I hoped as much, based on what I'd heard & read ITT.

your family will have wood for sheep iirc

You're assuming they don't already.

I was going back and forth between Catan and Arkham Horror, but the latter seemed a little too "deep end" for super casual participants.

arkham horror is kinda a really bad game but a fun experience - it is designed to be obtuse + confusing + byzantine as a kinda ludic reflection of the genre. it's like a non-game for gamers. catan is a game for non-gamers. i think you made the right choice.

carcassonne is so placid and peaceful. even the hunters and gatherers version is relatively chill.

love karx

anyone fuck with el grande, played it tonight and it was fun

― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, December 18, 2013 11:11 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's the game with the huge castle that you drop pieces into like a piggy bank, right? I remember that being fun, played it once many years ago. It'd do better with a name like "El Piggy Bank"

― Vinnie, Thursday, December 19, 2013 12:50 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No - it's an area control game on a map of medieval Spain... you're trying to maintain control of territory while bidding each turn on a supply of special action cards (IIRC). I've played it once or twice and remember it being enjoyable.

Every holiday I get to try a smattering of games that my family's been exposed to over the year, plus some more with the local gamer group (super nice people). Today's experiences:

Mystery of the Abbey: Clue/Guess Who-esque deduction game, with a Name of the Rose knockoff plotline. Some cool ideas in play, but it was really hard to get a feel for how you should play, or how the questions you can ask other people about their hands can really help you. Also just kind of sluggish since you get very few movements and the board has needless filler squares just to annoy you. Meh.

Vegas: Very fun and pacey little dice game, with not-uninteresting decisions for you to make. Great light starter/finisher type game, IMO - not too brain intensive and you always have something to do, but you don't feel like it's just total luck.

Chinatown: Real estate thing in John Lindsay's New York... you collect pieces of property as well as businesses you can open on them, goal is to build sets of the same business next to each other. The cool thing is that there's an open wheel-and-deal round after you draw your cards for the turn, and you can make any kind of cockamamie trade you want ("I'll trade you space 45 for a seafood restaurant, *IF* you promise that the next time you draw a camera store, you give it to me"). I worry a bit about the theme, and the trading gets out of whack if you get too far behind everybody (so that you can offer them a game-winning piece and all they can offer you is something kind of vaguely helpful). But the trading dynamic makes it pretty social, that's cool. This is the second time I've played - pretty sure I did way better last time and therefore didn't get bugged about the above.

you do drop pieces into a castle but its not huge.. you might be thinking of wallenstein vinnie

anyone play jaipur?

I may have been confusing El Grande with Wallenstein and/or my dreams.

Got Castles of Burgundy for Xmas after my friend recommended it - anyone ever play that one?

mordy is incorrect re: arkham being a bad game but he is correct that it is not even remotely "casual"

i always find it weird that people find arkham horror confusing but maybe my perspective is skewed since i grew up playing warhammer 40k and many very grindy paper-and-pencil RPGs

warhammer is more of a lifestyle game imo; maybe Arkham scales up nicely the more you play it but between the set up time, the rule book consulting etc I never played it often enough to have a real strategic grasp on the mechanics of gameplay

I know El Grande OK... it's good! I think we always were not fully rule-literate and would do stuff like banish other people's caballeros to Portugal.

Castles of Burgundy is great!

Christmas board games played this year: Settlers of Catan (for the first time ever! It was great fun) and King of Tokyo (also first time, also fairly fun, though I didn't feel like the cards really added too much to the game).

At Sean's recommendation I bought Power Grid for my brothers and we played it a tonne on 25 and 26th. The rules are tricky, there's a lot of shifting around of player order and exclusion of regions on the board and thing, plus a lot of math at the end. It was great, we played five games, and it got intense. Not nearly as intense as the two hours of mahjongg I played today in stony silence tho

I've never played a board game (other than Monopoly, Scrabble etc) but I'm intrigued. Is Carcassonne the best one to try out?

Settlers of Catan, IMO. Even as you're figuring out the strategy of the game itself, the trading with/backstabbing your friends is fun.

I think Carcassonne is a good choice too. Only needs 2 players, the rules are brief and pretty easy to absorb so you can start up quickly, but there's a lot of depth to the gameplay.

Ticket to Ride is entry level.

yeah, Ticket to Ride is def. a good one, get the US version

King of Tokyo is a really fun quick game that pretty much everyone seems to enjoy.

Settlers is a popular entry game, but I'd also recommend Carcassonne over it. Less downtime, less complexity, less time per game, but about the same amount of strategy. Ticket to Ride is quite fun but more complex - I've had friends get thrown by that game.

Really? Age range on it goes down to 8!

NB: I may have dumb friends

Haha. None of my friends are into this stuff, but I could see it becoming a good pastime for weekend nights when we don't want to spend any money on going out. I think what's important is that it appeals to everyone as well as being accessible.

To expound on my "dumb" friends, I think the thing those friends sometimes don't like about Ticket or Settlers is that the complexity of the rules and actions is overwhelming for them. Sometimes they start getting antsy even as I explain the rules. I mean, fair enough, some people just aren't into those kinds of games, and as far as board games go they're not that complicated. But then, the same friends will enjoy stuff like Carcassonne because there's less rules information to explain and remember, even though the number of tricky decisions might be about the same. You can play Carcassonne with almost no thought (of course, you probably won't win), whereas with Ticket and Settlers there's more knowledge you need to know about legal moves and possible actions. I've found Carcassonne to be more universally appealing.

It's also very placid and has lovely imagery on the tiles.

xpost

Vinnie's exactly right, it has less to do with the age of the people playing and more to do with how comfortable they are with internalizing a set of rules that can be a bit more finicky than an old school board game.

Even with Carcassonne, the rules are pretty easy but it has a scoring system that can cause some confusion at first, and if you don't internalize that scoring system you will lose.

Yeah, the farm scoring alone makes it so most newbies get creamed.

My point being that I would rather play a game with beginners where there is chance they would grasp the concept/mechanics/tactics early on instead of mindlessly playing to just play. TTR always seems to work well for that. I played it with my parents and they are not the brightest bulbs, but did well and enjoyed it.

apples to apples is the easiest game for people who arent good at games

I much prefer Dixit and Wits and Wagers to Apples to Apples but party games are another animal altogether.