The Thread Where We Are Board Game Geeks

I found Troyes fun with two, but my tastes may be different than yours. (I do love "trading/resource-developing games" like Agricola.) Merchants and Marauders can be a tad complicated but is also a very fun two-player "theme" game, if you play it in the race mode.

Some favourite card-based ones for two:
+ Dominion
simpler:
+ Lost Cities
+ Coloretto
+ Bohnanza

Thanks for the recs! I heard Agricola was good in two-player mode too? I do like the trading-developing stuff as well.

I like Labyrinth for 2 players but it's nothing like Carcassonne

Also there is an expansion coming momentarily! It will include contractors, ISIS, Syria, etc.

I mean Hive is probably the best new two player game of the last 15 years so you're setting your bar pretty high there.

It's really great, eh? We bought it by chance. And I've been playing online at BGA when I can't sleep. I've lost every single game.

Hive is great. v. chess-like. but u know what's even more chess-like? chess. i've been playing a lot of it recently.

I can't seem to get good enough at chess to relax and enjoy it. My partner's lousy too. I guess it could be worth brushing up? Also I demand a good set. It's something about feeling the ridges on the knight, the baize under the pieces, the weight of the King tipping over when I inevitably resign.

I can't seem to get good enough at chess to relax and enjoy it. My partner's lousy too. I guess it could be worth brushing up? Also I demand a good set. It's something about feeling the ridges on the knight, the baize under the pieces, the weight of the King tipping over when I inevitably resign.

i got a cheap board for in person but i've mostly been playing online. idk why bc i've always been kinda bad at it but lately it has taken over most of my gaming. i want to get better. atm my very humble aspiration is to reach ~1200 rating.

For 2p Agricola look up online suggestions for how to hack it for optimal fun. But it's basically the best game ever, so recommended!

Just had an amazing time playing Bohnanza with the in-laws, so a reminder that it's good entry-level, surprisingly sophisticated, fun. Works well with as few as two players, up to seven.

Played Castles of Mad King Ludwig and Galaxy Truckers recently, both a lot of fun with a similar tile construction element.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/25/board-games-back-tabletop-gaming-boom-pandemic-flash-point

For those seeking reviews with a dose of British humour (leaning towards party games with a peppering of Splotter Spellen-type heavies), I'd recommend Shut Up and Sit Down.

has anyone on here played the Legacy versions of any games like Pandemic or Risk? Wondering if this is actually fun or just a goofy trend.

Goofy trend, but Pandemic Legacy has a lot of fans who think its the best boardgame ever for those with regular groups. Rob Daviau's third legacy game, Seafall, has had rather mixed reviews. Having a solid base game makes the difference.

I'm personally kind of over cooperative boardgames in general, what ever happened to good old competition?

risk legacy was a fun thing to try once, its hard to separate the novelty of playing an old game in a new way from how enjoyable the game itself is. no real desire to try pandemic legacy but then ive always disliked pandemic

got Betrayal at House on the Hill today! Wooo!

Ermm, I'm not terribly experienced at games. Only really played Carcassonne + expansion sets but I'm looking forward to this.

the fuck is this

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/who-soiled-the-toilet-is-your-next-party-game-about-pooping-on-the-floor/

is anyone interested in playing some board games on VASSAL? in particular i'd really like to play the COIN games but they require 4 ppl and it's hard to get enough ppl together irl. i was thinking of trying to get a group together and go through them in order starting with Andean Abyss: Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Columbia. for ppl who aren't familiar with this series they are 4-player asymmetrical games. in this one players take the roles of the "Government (Govt) or 1 of 3 Insurgent Factions—the Marxist FARC, the right-wing AUC 'paramilitaries', or the narco-trafficking Cartels."

the rules for the game are here:
http://www.gmtgames.com/andeanabyss/AARules-1c.pdf

there's a youtube learn to play from the publisher here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgS8pF0GmSw

i love those games but only enjoy playing irl -- however, i would totally recommend to someone who already enjoys playing games online if it sounds appealing. they are top notch games imo.
a distant plain is probably my favorite game-wise, but andean abyss is close to my <3 for personal reasons

aren't those real world games kinda depressing?

i mean i personally find them depressing

what do u feel about military games about old but real wars? like civil war games?

civil war games still depressing, renaissance or medieval stuff not so much. otoh i'm okay w slaughtering 1000s of goblins in my d&d campaign and my favorite boardgame is eldritch horror so i'm not sure what my objection is.

i think it's fair to find occult horror or fantasy genre violence to be more palatable than simulations of actual wars where real humans killed other real humans - i was just curious if your objection was to like bleeding edge contemporary conflicts (essentially all counter-insurgency style games i guess) or to any kind of historical violence. what are your thoughts on twilight struggle which is about the cold war but more-or-less abstracts all the violence such that you're adding and removing influence points, not manipulating actual troops/regiments/armies.

I can see the impulse to find it depressing, but there's the reality that people have actually lived through/are living through/trying to negotiate life in these brutal conflicts and understanding the complexities of the conflicts is educational. Playing to "win" misses the point. The game designers understand this and clearly aren't out to glorify bloodshed or violence.

yeah something that interests me about those games is the balance they strike in giving the players the option to pursue both violent and nonviolent strategies.

mordy have you ever played a board game about israel and how did that feel?

something about that screenshot reminds me of a video game i was obsessed with about 20 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict:_Middle_East_Political_Simulator

apologies if that question is too blunt

only once or twice but i love board games about israel. there's a whole genre of them that i like to browse sometimes. there are like 5-7 games about the yom kippur war (that are discussed here: http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/10/07/the-guns-of-october/). my friend has this game and he says it's tremendous - i'd really like to try it: http://www.preteristarchive.com/Books/1976_avalon-hill_siege-of-jerusalem.html - tho that's about ancient israel, not the modern state.

idk i guess i feel like what la lechera says is true for me too - i see a lot of these games as ways of trying to understand conflicts in strategic terms and produce insights that i wouldn't necessarily get from texts alone. i don't totally dismiss the competitive aspects but i obviously you can't rate a game by whether you won it or not. instead i'm interested in how the mechanics abstract the content in interesting ways, what kind of emergent strategies are set out etc.

the guy who made "liberty or death" the COIN game was being interviewed on a podcast recently (bruce geryk's) and he said that he doesn't think games like these can get conflicts wrong because they're not accurate simulations but more like artwork - they're the way that a particular person sees a particular set of events. one reason i'm very interested in the COIN games in particular are because they do simulate aspects of these conflicts that are not simply military figures on hex tiles. the 4-player aspect of revolving alliances opens up new ways of thinking too - "liberty and death" take a conflict (the revolutionary war) that is generally confined in games to 2 players and brings the indigenous people and the french in as well. there's a new COIN game in the works based on Gandhi and supposedly his faction is going to be entirely pacifistic (which is a new thing to the series) so that should be very interesting as well.

wow!! would play gandhi

i definitely understand squeamishness btw even tho it wouldn't really occur to me. i'd even be interested in playing that holocaust game they made not long ago (even if i think the holocaust resists being abstracted like that and it does the history a disservice in the attempt) but i'd still be interested in trying it! idk i don't really get offended by things at least not when it comes to abstract art/ideas/literature.

it's this one:
http://www.gmtgames.com/p-630-gandhi-the-decolonization-of-british-india-19171947.aspx

on two completely different notes

excited to see one of my favorite games from childhood (early 80s) is still in production

http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/

definitely considering picking up a copy

i got the lovecraft pandemic game for christmas and i'm finally going to play it this weekend w00t

i've been playing dead of winter lately and it's fun. the first game we played there was no betrayer but i was the only winner bc the other 3 players didn't fulfill their personal objectives before the colony completed the primary objective. that was kinda lol. i'm really hoping i get to be the betrayer sometime soon it seems like a lot of fun.

yeah i played that awhile back when i was visiting a friend, i am pretty over the zombie genre but i really loved dead of winter

as an eldritch fan i really liked the crossroads cards

https://s4.scoopwhoop.com/anj/sgfsf/281429724.jpg

Basically I'm with Mordy and Lech. Games on historical conflicts (really, any game attempting to abstract a real-world topic from history to science) in game terms are also a kind of dense data compression. You unpack the insights of the designer through understanding the rules, components and how they interact through play.

RL rocket scientist Phil Eklund is a cult figure among some board gamers for designing games from turn-of-century US-Mexico border business/conflict (Pax Porfiriana) to solar system colonization (High Frontier) to Meso/Cenozoic evolution (Bios: Megafauna) to Paleolithic cultural evolution (Neanderthal). His games used to have reference lists longer than the rules, and be about as dry in play, but he's gotten considerably better about streamlining things after retiring a few years back. I'm trying to unpack his Bios: Genesis (assembly of life from competing chemistries) now.

If you would like to read about Volko Ruhnke, designer of many of these COIN games, this is a good starting point

The fifth man in the room, a CIA national security analyst named Volko Ruhnke, called us here. The palpable discomfort among us brings him joy. It means he has done his job.
<3

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/in-the-world-of-role-playing-war-games-volko-ruhnke-has-become-a-hero/2014/01/10/a56ac8d6-48be-11e3-bf0c-cebf37c6f484_story.html?utm_term=.81ad894e5411

Puts our misgivings about casualties of war in perspective:

We’re hours into our war and no longer strangers. Jeff Gringer, known to us as the Taliban, stands and thrusts a hooked finger in my direction while declaring he’s going to “pop those Coalition troops in Helmand.” The Taliban is using a car bomb to ambush my men. I rock back in my chair, resigned to my fate.

Robert Leonhard, pulling the strings for the Warlords, is in real life a national security analyst at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and a retired Army lieutenant colonel. He has been sitting in mostly quiet concentration but finally speaks up: “I hate to hear you say that, Jeff. My oldest is in Helmand province.” He pauses, moving his glasses from his nose to the top of his graying high-and-tight. “I think. He can’t tell me exactly where he is.”

I think this ends up unappealing in both directions, for me. Like, a) palpable discomfort isn't a state in which I'd ideally be spending my limited leisure time, but also b) the people who were actually having to make the decisions you're playing a simulation of were no doubt feeling something way beyond palpable discomfort, and to sit around a dinner table drinking wine and telling yourself you're increasing your understanding of what they went through feels naive at best, and maybe disrespectful?

this coffee shop i go to has copies of the korean board game 'INTIFADA: FREE PALESTINE' and always i don't know what to make of it

https://tumblbug.com/intifada

https://tumblbug-psi.imgix.net/eb663c81ddd2d3fd2824f755e800244404371d1a/0f5006aa45d951881877d36570448640bd59acc2/7976c04a194f1b20e6501cc6d571cc1c2ccf8978/ad4f2a9ed6d8524ea683a6173245f4fa914ce2b8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&w=620&auto=format%2Ccompress&lossless=true&ch=save-data&s=54b4dd301c9117201e14be8d2c54432b

i would be interested in playing the above but my schedule is weird enough without trying to arrange transpacific electronic gaming

sorry, by 'the above' i mean the VASSAL stuff. i would also play intifada, though my korean is in no way, shape, form up to it

i mean it's just kind of baffling that it exists

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ci3-WaGUgAA0dKx.jpg

to sit around a dinner table drinking wine and telling yourself you're increasing your understanding of what they went through feels naive at best, and maybe disrespectful?

fwiw i don't think playing these games gives you any insight into what it's like to be a soldier on the battlefield. i think it gives some insight into the strategic considerations that led to that soldier being there. these aren't about simulating the chaos and fear of battle.

played Dead of Winter again last night. again no Betrayer and this time everyone fulfilled their win conditions. somehow it's less satisfying to win when everyone else wins too.

in the middle of a COIN game (Falling Sky). playing as the Arverni. it's... okay. the mechanics still take some getting used to and it's not always clear what moves would best move me towards my win condition. especially since my win condition depends on removing legions from the board, which means i'm somewhat reliant on Rome spreading thin so i can pick them off - i'm kinda waiting around and marshaling my forces. it's also not my ideal theme - tho hopefully after this i'll understand the system well enough that i can jump into, eg, andean abyss, without much trouble.

also terra mystica port to ios news

Ordered Tokaido from amazon this weekend. Hoping it gets my family excited about gaming again.