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 Post subject: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-26 10:09am 

Because board games are gaming too, and I am sticking to that.

This is a thread to talk about different board games. Favorites, ones you like, looking for suggestions on new ones, gifts, and so on. I'm mostly thinking of games along the lines of Carcassonne, Agricola, and Space Hulk, but I guess if you really, really wanted to talk about Monopoly, go ahead.

I'll start by talking about a game I just played recently, Talisman, and no I didn't know about any of that background stuff until I looked it up for a link just now. The basic idea behind the game is that your character (and you get cards for a playable character with different abilities and stats) needs to be the first to get to the Crown of Command, and then be the last one standing so you can keep it. But first, you have to build up your stats and get useful items and followers so that you can reach the crown. Once the first person gets there, it becomes a race among all the others to get to the crown and kill whoever's there (and then take the crown).

It's one of those games that sounds very complicated when it's explained, with the cards of varying effects and dice rolls and such, but is pretty easy to pick up. It can be a long game, though (the one I played lasted over three hours) so make sure you have a good chunk of time set aside, like a whole lazy afternoon, if you want to play it.


So, any questions, or any other games people want to share?

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-26 02:50pm 

My favorite board game is Chaos in the Old World and I am very sad because people never want to play it.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-26 04:36pm 

I played a round of Chaos in the Old World. A lot of fun, but brutally quick. I was Slaanesh, but by the time I figured out how to play the game was over!

I've actually been really digging into board games lately. I picked up Twilight Imperium awhile back, and since then grabbed the Battlestar Galactica game and Horus Heresy. All excellent, though FFG is sometimes a little hit-and-miss on the components. My HH game was short one 4-prong base, so now I have a 3-prong Chaos Titan, and the board itself is very, very warped and won't sit flat.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-26 05:20pm 

Don't mind if I do.

A lot of the problems with Monopoly are actually created by the house rules. The most common rule that does this is the "Free Parking pot" rule. If you've never played with it, it goes like this: fines, fees, and taxes that usually go to the bank are instead put into the center of the board. If a player lands on Free Parking, he or she gets all the cash. Some house rules go even further and stock the pot with $100 or even $500, plus whatever cash goes in.

Why is this bad? Because the objective in Monopoly is for one player to bankrupt all the others. The more money in the system, the longer this takes. Ideally, in Monopoly, you want to take money out of the system whenever you can.

Another very common house rule is "no auctions". In the official rules, if a player lands on an unowned property and doesn't buy it, the property goes up for auction and all players can bid on it. I have no idea why people don't play with this rule. It shortens the game substantially, it lets players with bad luck with the dice buy property, opens up new strategies for buying property, and the auctions themselves can be tense and fun.

Related to this is "unlimited houses". The stock game set comes with 32 houses and 16 hotels. Since you can't build a hotel without first building four houses, and you must build houses evenly across all properties in a group, it's very easy to run out of houses. Most house rules allow unlimited houses, but the game rules specify that if all 32 houses are in use, then no more can be built. Critically, if you don't have four houses on a property and there are no more in the bank, you can't build a hotel even if you have enough money to build straight to a hotel.

For example, imagine you own Baltic and Mediterranean avenues (the dark purple properties closest to "Go"). You have three houses on each. Houses are only $25 each, and you have $100 on hand--enough to buy the last two houses and then build hotels on both properties. So you hand the bank that $100 and ask for two hotels. The last two houses are "virtually" built--nobody bothers to place the houses, just to sweep them off the board. However, if the bank is out of houses, under the official rules, you can't build new ones, virtually or otherwise. Limited houses opens up new strategies for players. If I have opponents with monopolies on dangerous color groups, like orange or red, I might try to limit the housing supply by stopping at four houses on my own monopolies. The light blue group is great for this, since houses are cheap and you can lock up twelve houses (1/3 of the game's entire supply) on them. It also opens potential bidding wars over the last house, and prevents incredibly boring endgames where two or three rich players all have lots of hotels and just run around the board paying rent to each other.

Another oft-ignored official rule is "no loans between players", and a related rule "no rent amnesty". Rent amnesty lengthens the game. Loans usually lengthen the game, except maybe loans so a player can buy or develop property, but if you're playing with auctions, there shouldn't be any need to make a loan to buy property. I actually think property development loans could shorten the game if handled well, but I do wonder why a player would spend his own money to help make an opponent stronger.

That's not to say that all house rules are bad. It's just that since Monopoly works better with less money in the system, and people don't tend to make house rules that take money out. People make house rules that put money in, because when you're playing, it's fun to get more money and sucks to lose it. If you go the other way, there can be more moments of frustration, but the game itself is more enjoyable. Metatwaddle and I made a house rule where a player who hits income tax must pay 10% of his or her assets or $200, whichever is more. The result was a deflationary game where both of us were very tight on cash, paying and receiving the base rent on undeveloped properties mattered, and missing or losing your Go money was a disaster all the way to the endgame. The games also only lasted 90 minutes, which is still fairly long for a board game, but nowhere near the 3+ hours for which Monopoly is notorious.

Another house rule I'm considering is giving the banker the power to veto shenanigans like selling all your properties to another player for a dollar, or offering an absurd amount of money for a property to get around the "no loans" rule. Obviously, in this case, you'd need a neutral banker, but I find games tend to work better with a neutral banker anyhow, especially games with more than three players, since the banker isn't distracted by managing his own assets.

What I still don't know how to fix is the endgame, where one player has an insurmountable lead and everyone else is just waiting to hit a hotel and go bankrupt, or there are a few players who are roughly equal in strength, there are no more deals to be made, and the winner will be determined by who has an unlucky streak of die rolls first. It might be that you have to change the winning conditions to do this, but I'm not sure how yet.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-26 06:25pm 

So first I just need to mention some golden oldies like Advanced Civilization, Brittania, illuminati and Diplomacy.
Should also mention some solid quality like Puerto Rico, Ticket to Ride, Race for the Galaxy and Dominion.

Regarding Monopoly, I just don't get that game's popularity. Its slow build up, little to no strategy, then just an awful lot of bullying during the middle that lasts forever. Then in the end game its always one who loses in mid game and has to wait hours and hours for the next to get kicked out.
It doesn't even scale well with 5 or 6 players, instead its rather the opposite. Since the resources stay the same its just even worse case of blind luck gives the winner in 2h then you gotta play for another 10h to actually win.
I agree on the counter productivity of the house rules above. But for us as teenagers way back when the only way to make that game playable beyond the first 80 or so games was to make it into Mobopoly. With mobsters, shootouts, extorsion and burning down each other's properties.

Way back then we played at least 3-4 games a week and had little to no cash so we invented our own games a lot. Now some 20 years later at least 3 of those games are still regulars in my crowd. Not only among the old timers either but for others as well.

Nowadays with a steady income etc we get to play rarely so I buy lots of games but if they don't get into top 10 I just give them away knowing they will never be played by us again. So by now I've probably given away just as many games as I own.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-26 06:39pm 

I absolutely love Axis&Allies.... except it takes far too long and is far to complicated
It is significantly awesome though, and models strategy reasonably well for a board-game.
Finding a set is hard (my mate owns it, I don't) and finding players is harder... when a game takes 13 hours for three people, something is either very wrong or very right

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-26 07:24pm 

The strategy is all in the deal-making (and knowing what properties' relative worths are). Including auctions reduces the role luck plays in acquiring good properties, though there's still a significant advantage in going first. One way to counter that is to conduct a blind, single-round auction to determine who goes first. If you really want to go first, you'd better be prepared to pay for it.

I've heard of a variant where you take two Monopoly boards and overlap them at the Free Parking square, forming a figure-8 circuit (it's helpful to use a different theme set, like one US board and one UK board, or else it can get confusing when trying to determine who actually owns what property). This makes it impossible for one player to gain a commanding advantage early (you'll run out of money well before you buy into every good color group), and, by all accounts, actually makes the game go faster. I've never tested it, though.

I don't think a game using sensible rules should last more than two hours, unless you get a situation where two strong players just end up passing cash back and forth (deflationary rules tend to short-circuit these situations, but they're still boring). I agree that the endgame is the weakest part; once there are no deals to be made, the game gets boring.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-26 08:17pm 

Battlestar Galactica is a good one, especially if you can get a good metagame going ("You're a Cylon!" "No, you're a Cylon and just accusing me so we don't suspect you!") or if you get enough excitement and action without going overboard into complete rapid annihilation. The shortest game I ever played was six turns. Not six times around the board, but six turns, period. The guy who was playing Helo didn't even get to make a move because it didn't get back around to him. Every crisis card was another Cylon attack.

Dominion's also a good one. I like getting those long +1 action strings even if it's not the most optimal way to win. It's kinda like Agricola where I can get into this mood where I don't care if I win or lose so long as I can pull off stuff. If my farm turns out really well, I'm happy even if someone else gets more victory points. Just wish we could get more people to play it longer so we can introduce the cards instead of sticking with the simplified family version - the cards make it more difficult to explain but easier to actually do stuff so I can get my awesome farm instead of something generic.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-26 08:48pm 

That's one of the hardest things about these games. I have the BSG and TI expansions, plus all their cool-looking variant rules, but never get the opportunity to play them simply because trying to get 4 other people to sit still for a few hours and play the basic game is hard enough.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-26 10:53pm 

I am a big Axis and Allies fan and recently managed to scrape together several coworkers for the latest uber version: Global 1940, which is the the new Europe 1940 and Pacific 1940 boxes stuck together. The board is, as you might guess, huge, and there are several new units depending on which version you last played (tactical bombers, mechanized infantry and cruisers). Our first game took a looong time (14-16 hours with food breaks), but our second went much faster (~11) thanks to everyone being more experienced and making a serious effort to speed things along (pre-buying units and planning out actions ahead of time). Each game ended in concession, though I have never seen an A&A game go all the way to the formal victory conditions. I am sure "normal" people still view this as an obscene time commitment, but fortunately we are not them. If you are willing to blow a whole Saturday on redoing WWII, it is worth a look. A lot of shortcomings from earlier versions have been corrected. Technically Global has 9 playable countries, but since two of them (France and China) get curbstomped in short order, the game can really only support 7 players.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-27 12:03am 

My personal favorite for Board Games is RISK. Classic RISK, and Lord of the Rings RISK. I was first introduced to RISK by a friend when I was in elementary school. The game was quite enjoyable and it was a clear social experience at the same time. I next encountered RISK on the computer back in the DOS days and I played it from time to time. This sparked my interest and I eventually got the game as a present for Christmas. I've enjoyed many a RISK tournament. Then I encountered the Microprose RISK II game. My god, this PC version of RISK is incredible. So many variations and the ability to add and remove territory. Same Time RISK just rocks. Eventually I encountered LOTR RISK and was captivated. Similar, different, unique.

I am also a fan of a much older board game. Parcheesi. I remember one game fondly. We were on a truncated board (one of the travel multi game boards). Four of us playing late at night. That game went on and on for more than an hour without any progress. The board was so small that we kept jumping each other. Eventually I decided to play dirty and formed a blockade and won the game.

I like RISK and Parcheesi. I can probably get back into Monopoly. I've enjoyed "The Farm Game" as well. What games would anyone recommend I give a try?

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-27 12:47am 

Ghosts (Milton Bradley made this once).

One of the simplest board games I've seen - short of perhaps tic-tac-toe and the like - also provided me and several of my friends with hours upon hours of gameplay. The basic idea is that you have 4 good ghosts and 4 bad ghosts but - stratego-like - only you the player knows their identities. Played on a 6x6 board, moving one square orthogonally each turn, the goal is to either get a good ghost to the exit, OR kill all your opponents good ghosts, OR get your opponent to kill off all of your bad ghosts.

What ensues is a bunch of guessing, tactics, ploys, gambits, and trying desperately to read your opponent. I've won huge sequences of games at a time (more than, say, 20 in a row) against certain people because after a while I just *know* what they're going to do, how they think, and how to psych them out. You'd think it would quickly devolve into rock-paper-scissors logic, but it ends up not working out like that. Instead you end up playing the person just as much as the game, and the exit squares keep it all legit just as surely as the chips keep it that way in poker.

Sadly, I've never been able to find an actual copy of the game since I saw it at a relative's house, but its fairly easy to use cut-up index cards to put together the pieces and make a makeshift set. Definitely worth looking into the rules if you've got someone to try it out with. THere's a good chance that it's one of those games where optimal play is not always the winning strategy.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-27 12:49am 

Battlestar Galactica is great, because it also shows you which one of your friends is way too good at lying to ever be trusted. My group of friends has an injoke now that always ends in 'yeah, but everyone knows Pat's the Cylon'. It's really a wonderful game.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-27 01:29am 

Ugh, QFT. I've put myself on the receiving end of this, partly through sheer awful luck (I have only not been the Cylon a single time. Every other time I've drawn the sole Cylon card, or both Cylon cards, depending on number of players). And I'm usually pretty good at it, so I catch a lot of flak now.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-27 02:06am 

http://boardgamegeek.com/

I think I've played around around half of the Top 100 boardgames in that site, so if any of you have questions about a particular boardgame, chances are I've played it and I can give recommendations on whether or not a boardgame is good for you.

Lemme also make a couple of comments on the games mentioned here:

1) Chaos in the Old World is probably the best-designed FFG in the market today. It does end a little fast, but it's not clunky at all and with experienced players it's pretty balanced. There is a new expansion pack coming out adding a fifth player - who plays the Skaven.

2) BSG is also extremely well designed, and the "You're a Cylon!" thing actually sits well with me as it's very thematic. I would avoid the first expansion though - the Pegasus expansion is very "gamey". Haven't tried the second expansion yet.

3) Risk is a fine classic, but the best version is really Risk 2210, which is a much improved variant. Godstorm held promise, but it kinda fell flat.

4) Dominion is an excellent game that started a whole trend of deck-building games. It can get a little weird and the theme is tacked-on, but if you like card combos this is a game you can play with your non-geek friends and family. Of all the deck-building games that have come out aside from Dominions, Thunderstone with the Wrath of the Elements expansion is possibly the best. It's like Dominions, but you're playing adventurers raiding a dungeon.

5) FFG has put reprints of Talisman with expansions and nicer pieces, and it's very good for what it does. It doesn't change how Talisman is the forbidden love child of Monopoly and D&D, but the expansions and much nicer pieces all make the FFG Talisman a very good buy for casual gaming.

6) People who liked playing Sid Meier's Pirates! may want to check out Merchants & Marauders. It seems heavy at first, but it's actually a simple and fun pirating game. Downtime is kinda long though.

7) Finally, my favorite game at the moment is Navegador. It's a Euro, but for once the theme isn't totally "tacked on" like most Euros. And it has a rondel mechanic that I really, really like - which is also featured in another great game called Imperial (where you play bankers investing in countries, and making those countries go to war with each other for fun and profit. Winner is the banker with the most money - not the one most loyal to any particular country! :p).

Finally, the major problem with Monopoly is the seemingly random way the properties can become available for sale. If you really like the negotiations part though, try playing Chinatown. It's basically Monpoly without having to roll dice or taking money away from each other side from being part of a deal.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-27 02:13am 

This is why I have trouble getting people to play the game with me. You have to play it a couple times as different Gods before you really understand how they all mesh together and can start forming more complicated plans.



There are a lot of games out there that are Risk-esque without relying entirely on die rolls and good starting draws. My personal choice is History of the World, although it's out-of-print and in-demand, so unless you can find someone who already owns it you probably won't get to try it.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-27 08:36am 

Speaking of Monopoly, you know what I think the world needs? A Monopoly-variant or Monopoly-esque game where the objective is to make as much money as you can in subprime loans, credit default swaps, and outright fraud before the market crashes. The winning conditions would be surviving the crash long enough to get bailed out.

Unfortunately, I'm clueless about game design and have no idea how to implement rules like this.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-27 08:44am 

Want to play a boardgame where you're a greedy corporate executive blowing up companies and getting out before the blame can be put on you? It already exists!

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5595 ... corporated

Haven't played this one yet, but I've seen it played. It's... pretty evil.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-27 05:17pm 

I've just gotten back from the local games con (conpulsion) and I've spent most of the afternoon playing various games.

I played few games of Small world which seems to be very popular this year (I saw three games going on at once).

I also played Cash'N'Guns a simple and very fun game, sort of resevour dogs the game. As soon as you open the box and get your hands on the foam rubber guns you know how to play it just point the guns at other players and make shooting noises. You dont know who your friends until they've had a chance to hold a gun to your head.

Robo rally was also quite fun, its funny to see how many great plans fail because people forget their left from their right.

May faviourite games of the weekend were small simple games, one called Quoridor where you have to get your piece from one side of the board to another while putting up walls to block your openents, its very easy to learn but to becomes a fiendish battle of wits and the 4 player version is very different from the 2 player. The other game (which I have fogetten the name of) involved trying to move stones around a 4x4 board and getting then in lines or squares. Again a very simple game but hugely complicated when you get into it, the only problem I had was that it was very unforgiving, you generally dont win it you loose it by making a single bad move.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-27 11:41pm 

Small World is a good game. The mini-expansions add a lot, as well. I haven't gotten to try the latest one yet, despite buying it.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-27 11:48pm 

My family was introduced to Settlers of Catan when we visited Germany a few years ago. Since then we've had fun playing and introducing it to others. It's easy enough to pick up on. (though I can't count the number of times someone got stuck with "you can't place the village there, it's one space away from another)

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-28 01:02am 

The thing about Catan is the 5-6 player expansion really destroys the balance of an originally 4-player game.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-28 02:27am 

Small Worlds with base set only becomes repetitive after a while. Small World with all the expansions however, is hugely fun.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-28 03:41am 

@RedImperator
Just for clarification in my youth I've played at least some hundred Monopoly games, then I had a friend who did the chamionship circuit (in europe) and he needed good opponents so I played some with him. Did play a short while when it popped up as online multiplayer because of some friends who wanted to.
But from the perspective of all the really good games that have come out in the last decade it just boggles me that Monopoly still is a big seller. If it had been a new release in todays market it wouldn't even make a ripple.
While I understand what you are saying, that is not strategy for me; maybe a compromise would be to call it tactics. For me that stuff is more rote memorization. There is almost nil decision making. Just lots of improbabilities and contingencies. As for the trading, the more pro you go the less trading there is, look at the different championships, the only time there are lots of trades is if there are newbies. Otherwise its almost exclusively between #2 and #3.
I disagree from memory, but it was like 10 years since my last non-internet game so I could be wrong. IIRC there is never any incentive not to buy property, this due to the mortgages. The only time I've seen an auction in the championships was against newbies where the champ wanted someone to spend too much at the start, which was a gamble that worked.
While I like it, not even the world championships do that.
What we did to get a better starting spread would be to have the three first rounds with a d12. That greatly reduces the walking in someone elses footprints - Im shit out of luck - scenarios. It would also remove the double-double glory start.
Tried it, didn't work. This just makes the game longer not more fair. However it does increase the number of auctions so if you like those you should try it. What happens is that you run out of money before you get sets of properties, so the build is much slower, then its harder to get full sets even if you have the money.
On the computer or at some autistic championships I'd agree but among friends in real life, how do you get it below two hours?
Our games would drag a lot, especially with kingmaker stuff where those who couldn't possibly win would prop up #2 or #3 to make sure #1 wouldn't get away with an easy victory.

Dito.

But I don't trust boardgamegeek by the way and are sceptical of those who do. The most glaring thing would be that Sid Meier's Civilization (boardgame) had 9s and 10s for four-five weeks from people who claimed to have played it. That game was sooo broken you had to invent new game pieces, a new turn order plus modify the techs to get it to semi-work.

If a site should be mentioned it should be http://www.brettspielwelt.de where you can play top quality games online for free.

Love brittania lite. But how come it was popular this year, is there a new expansion I've missed?
Really good easy going game. Really fun at conventions when everyone is too tired to play something big.
Really like the new edition pieces and boards.

So many couples got mad at eachother over settlers that we've had to ditch it in our circle. Nowadays I only play it in tournaments. This since half the game as you say is cutting someone off so they are stuck in shithole creek.

 Post subject: Re: The Big Thread of Board Games

Posted: 2011-03-28 04:06am 

I'm not aware of a new expansion and I was just playing the vanilla version. I dont know why it was so familiar maybe just becasue there were several copies around and people just saw them getting played?