Board games to buy

[RobbyPants]

Dominion - the most well known deckbuilder, responsible for establishing the genre. On the downside, it has far more than it's share of fans who are both loathsome and delusional, so I recommend playing any other deckbuilder instead.

What do you mean about Dominion having a bunch of fans who are loathsome and delusional? I've never played this game with people I didn't already know before hand.

[fbmf]

So I'm trying to find a game that two people who are both into money (one's a banker, the other's a CPA) would enjoy*. I didn't see anything geared toward that on the list... Did I miss something? Are there other suggestions?



*Not Monopoly.

Careers?

Game On,
fbmf

[Blasted]

Ticket to Ride?
Puerto Rico's a game I love, but it's a little dry. Very good logistics game.

[Prak]

The winter gift giving occasions are upon us again, and I need suggestions from people on what to get my parents. I had non-game thoughts, but it occurred to me they'd never use them, and I remembered that the Apples to Apples set I bought them last year was the best gift I'd ever given them because they fucking use it. Also it allowed me to be cheap, spending half as much per parent as my usual budget.

So, here's the specs-

• 4 players (so they can play with the other couple they have dinner and coffee wit)
• quick set up & simple play
• will not offend two Conservative Roman Catholic deacons and their wives (Apples to Apples=win with them, they would not like Cards Against Humanity, however...)
• preferably south of $40 (I'm a broke fuck, so I budget $20/family member, which is coincidentally the exact amount of cash I have... if I can undershoot this, that'd be nice)

Suggestions? I'm considering Trivial Pursuit

[Maj]

Wits and Wagers

BTW: Thank you, peeps, for the game suggestions!

[Josh_Kablack]

The winter gift giving occasions are upon us again, and I need suggestions from people on what to get my parents. I had non-game thoughts, but it occurred to me they'd never use them, and I remembered that the Apples to Apples set I bought them last year was the best gift I'd ever given them because they fucking use it. Also it allowed me to be cheap, spending half as much per parent as my usual budget.

So, here's the specs-

• 4 players (so they can play with the other couple they have dinner and coffee wit)
• quick set up & simple play
• will not offend two Conservative Roman Catholic deacons and their wives (Apples to Apples=win with them, they would not like Cards Against Humanity, however...)
• preferably south of $40 (I'm a broke fuck, so I budget $20/family member, which is coincidentally the exact amount of cash I have... if I can undershoot this, that'd be nice)

Suggestions? I'm considering Trivial Pursuit

While I'm with Maj in that Wits and Wagers is a superior option to Trivial Pursuit, Dixit is my go to suggestion here. It's remarkably easy to teach, fun to play, not terribly cut throat, and only offensive if you play with people who like to give offensive clues.
On the downside it doesn't work well with less than 4 players and it's towards the higher end of your "under $40" budget.

As plan-B Hanabi is a lot cheaper, can play as few as 2 and I personally have had great success playing it with non-gamers. The main drawbacks are A> non-gamers may not be as open to the notion of co-op games where you play competing against your prior scores instead of against an opponent at the table B> the theme is only kinda pasted on..

[JonSetanta]

Yesterday after a Magic tournament I heard someone shouting about some card game called "Love Letters".
I came over to investigate.

It's a multiplayer game. All cards are characters vying for the affection of a princess or something like that.
You get tiny heart tokens for every affection you win.
Cards are sometimes played like Yugioh traps face down.

I asked how to play. Everyone ignored me due to rampant autism or similar, but one guy simply said "It's pretty easy." and that was all I was told.

[Morat]

Yesterday after a Magic tournament I heard someone shouting about some card game called "Love Letters".
I came over to investigate.

It's a multiplayer game. All cards are characters vying for the affection of a princess or something like that.
You get tiny heart tokens for every affection you win.
Cards are sometimes played like Yugioh traps face down.

I asked how to play. Everyone ignored me due to rampant autism or similar, but one guy simply said "It's pretty easy." and that was all I was told.

The theme is that all the players are suitors of a princess, but she's not taking visitors, so you have to get your love letters into the hands of various people who can take them to the princess. All the cards (all 16 of them, this game is really small) represent those people, so there are guards, the king, the prince, various nobles, etc. They have different values and do things when you discard them. You start each round with a card, you then draw one and discard one. Some of the cards knock people out of the round. The round ends if only one player hasn't been KOed (who scores a point), otherwise everyone left reveals their card and the highest gets the point. First person to a certain number of points wins by getting enough love letters to the princess.

It's been well-received, but I haven't played it yet.

Prak: What about, say, Pandemic? Or is co-op not what they're looking for? Ticket to Ride (I'd go with Europe) is a reliably fun game. Carcassonne is another solid performer.

If there were another couple I'd totally go with Bang! or Resistance: Avalon, but eh. Race for the Galaxy is really fun, but the all-symbol cards (to save on translation) may as well be Linear A until you've played for a bit.

[Prak]

Pandemic has always seemed a bit more complex than they'd be into. Co-op would maybe throw them for a moment, but would not necessarily be a deal breaker--in fact I think they'd like it.

[Doom]

Prak, I'd go with Ticket to Ride for the folks...very fun, very simple game, you'll have them playing within minutes of opening the box.

One game nobody's mentioned is the Mage Knight board game. It's freakish complex, but really, really, good. Doesn't have all that much to do with Mage Knight, not that that's much of a loss.

[...You Lost Me]

Ticket to Ride is ~$50, isn't it?

[Josh_Kablack]

There' a Ticket to Ride for $37.69 with Free Shipping on Amazon Now...but it's currently out of stock until after X-mas, and all the other options are over $40 when shipping is included, so it's probably out for Prak

It's also not a game I can endorse any more, although for a while it supplanted Settlers as my Gateway Game to introduce people who had only played mass-market games to the sort of niche hobby game I call "gamer games". As I said above Dixit and Hanabi are my current go to games in that niche, having supplanted Ticket to Ride. Other cheap honorable mentions include No Thanks, Get Bit and Love Letter.

And while this is unsuitable for a gift, the freeware game of"Writey-Drawey" is hilarious and totally worth playing with folks who love Apples to Apples. Although if you're like me, you'll have to be careful to self-censor if playing with religious types; and I personally find that a stack of index cards works better than a single folded paper (just be sure the first player numbers each card in the stack to preserve the order).

[Prak]

Well, the local B&N does not have Wits and Wagers Family Edition (which would be $12 after coupon and membership), and it would cost me literally a gallon of gas just to drive to the one which does, so that didn't happen.

The local Target did not have Dixit (which would have been $18 by online prices), and I wasn't about to go searching multiple Targets, though I was tempted, because I think my parents would enjoy Dixit.

So I wound up looking at convincing someone else to drive me 15 miles and back for W&W, Party Trivial Pursuit ($12 at various places) or Scattergories. Wound up picking up Scattergories for $12 at Walmart, which I think they'll enjoy. I looked at No Thanks and Love Letter, but no local stores have them even on their websites (and the FLGS is a bit of a trek in a 14 miles to the gallon crown vic).

I've also come to the conclusion that no one should ever go into a store and buy Yahtzee. It just shouldn't happen because you will not get out for less than ~$7 best case scenario, and literally all you need are a dice cup ($2 or less, depends on how fancy you want to get), five d6s and scoring sheets. You can literally play yahtzee for the cost of five dice and asking a fast food place for a water cup.

So given that, I'm going to put together a dice (and maybe card) game kit for my parents as well. This literally entails just buying a cheap but nice cup for shaking dice and containing the kit, xd6s which could come from my personal dice (fitting since I think I stole all the board game dice in the house when I started playing D&D...), and printing up a booklet of rules for various games. For scoring sheets I'm going to probably use a mead composition style note pad which will easily fit into a dice cup and I can just draw out score sheets.

So I'm looking for suggestions of games for ~4 players which require no more than dice, a cup, and a pad of paper, or only those things and some cheap extras, like a deck of playing cards or a handful of poker chips. I'm going to look at Writey-Drawey too, and maybe toss that in.

[...You Lost Me]

Liar's Dice is a fun one. Maybe for young people?

[Prak]

Yeah, I was planning on including Liar's Dice. I'd include Kings Cup if they were, oh, about 30 years younger.

...damnit, now I want to play King's Cup (the gamer's drinking game)

Edit: in fact, even though it's not a board game, I recommend King's Cup to anyone who likes games with a relatively large number of rules that are designed to get at least one person incredibly drunk.

For those who don't know it:
Basically you need a large cup, drinks for all players, and a deck of playing cards--warning, do not use special playing cards for this, chances are they will be ruined, unless you drink with very considerate people. I recommend picking up a deck of cheapo cards when you buy your booze.

Shuffle the cards, and spread them around the cup/can of beer/whatever. Players take turns picking a card, each card signifies a minigame. The game ends when the last card is taken, or the King's Cup is drank. There are lots of variations, I'm going from Beerfestboots.com and my memory of the one time I played this.

Ace- Watefall: Each player begins drinking their drink. A player cannot stop drinking until the player before them in turn order stops (consider the person who drew the Ace to be the first player).
2- "You:" Pick a player to drink.
3- "Me:" Take a drink.
4- "Whores:" All female players drink.
5- "Bust a Jive:" Player makes up a dance move. The next player in turn order must copy and add on. The next must copy the previous two, and add their own. The first to fuck up drinks.
6- "Dicks:" All male players drink.
7- "Heaven:" All players must reach into the air. The last to do so drinks.
8- "Mate:" Player picks another person at the table to drink when they do. Particularly fun when you have a friend with a much lower alcohol tolerance than you.
9- "Bust a rhyme:" Player says a word, which the next player in turn order must say a word (Kite>fight>bite>mite>dynamite etc). The first to fuck up drinks.
10- "Categories:" Player picks a category, and the other players must state something which fits the category, anyone who cannot drinks. I particularly loved getting tens because I was playing with non-gamer frat types, and so "D&D Classes" got a good number of people drinking (but be fair and use a real thing. It's not fair to make shit up when you can probably come up with something obscure but plentiful).
Jack- "Never have I ever:" Each player raises 3-5 fingers. The player who picked the card says something they've never done, anyone who has lowers a finger. The first to lower all their fingers drinks (I say they should take a number of drinks equal to the fingers they raised, to balance things).
Queen- "Questions:" Player asks another a question, who then asks another player a question, and so on. The object is to not answer the question posed to you, as if you do anything other than pose another player a question, you "lose" and must drink. Ideally, you ask shocking/vulgar/provocative questions to throw others off or make them defensive.
King- Player who drew the king can make a rule. It can be anything (within reason), and must be followed until replaced by another king rule. Anyone who breaks the rule must drink. When you draw a King, pour some of your drink in the King's Cup. The fourth King ends the game, losing and being forced to chug the King's Cup.

The only problem with this game is that light weights get too drunk to play after only a couple rounds, but basically it's the Monopoly of drinking games, aka "see who you can screw over the most."

[deathdealingjawa]

My old ttrpg group has shifted to playing board games now since we often can't get a consistant group together for rpgs any more. My friends and I really enjoy playing Arkham Horror, right now though we want to take a break from it for a bit. We took a break from it by playing Smashup (+expansion) for something different and have really enjoyed it.
We were hoping to get back into a deep co-op board game again.
I saw a recommendation for HeroQuest but the only HeroQuest I found on Amazon was for $419.99, I would prefer not to invest that much in game.
Sentinels of the Multiverse sounds interesting, and I think my group might be able to get behind it since we enjoyed playing a M&M campaign a few years back.
Does anyone have any recommendations for deep co-op games?

[fectin]

Love letters:
http://www.alderac.com/tempest/files/20 ... _Final.pdf

It's around $10, and comes in a snazzy bag. Apparently, this is what AEG is doing now.

I've heard it's not very good with 2 players, and great with at least three. I won a copy two months ago, but haven't tried playing yet because of that.

[Josh_Kablack]

So late Xmas shopping revealed that Once Upon a Time has a new edition, expansions and a "strategy guide" out.

I haven't played with any of those yet, but the prior edition was a blast deserving a wholehearted endorsement here on the boardgame recommendation thread -- It's one of James Wallis's many attempts at eliminating Mister Cavern from collaborative storytelling games, and as such requires the right sort of group to play with. But with such a group, this is not merely an awesome game, but becomes a meme which spreads to the way you recount everyday anecdotes to friends and colleagues.

[Morat]

My old ttrpg group has shifted to playing board games now since we often can't get a consistant group together for rpgs any more. My friends and I really enjoy playing Arkham Horror, right now though we want to take a break from it for a bit. We took a break from it by playing Smashup (+expansion) for something different and have really enjoyed it.
We were hoping to get back into a deep co-op board game again.
I saw a recommendation for HeroQuest but the only HeroQuest I found on Amazon was for $419.99, I would prefer not to invest that much in game.
Sentinels of the Multiverse sounds interesting, and I think my group might be able to get behind it since we enjoyed playing a M&M campaign a few years back.
Does anyone have any recommendations for deep co-op games?

What do you mean by "deep"? And what size group?

[deathdealingjawa]

Morat: hmmm what do I mean by "Deep"? I think I meant that the game requires players to plan out their actions, and can be played multiple times without becoming stale. Arkham Horror, Pandemic I feel are great at this, Defenders of the Realm, Legend of Drizzt: A Dungeons and Dragons Board Game are good at this, just not as good as AH or Pandemic.
Number: Generally 3-5 players. Most often 3.

[Morat]

Morat: hmmm what do I mean by "Deep"? I think I meant that the game requires players to plan out their actions, and can be played multiple times without becoming stale. Arkham Horror, Pandemic I feel are great at this, Defenders of the Realm, Legend of Drizzt: A Dungeons and Dragons Board Game are good at this, just not as good as AH or Pandemic.
Number: Generally 3-5 players. Most often 3.

If you don't get 5 that often, I'd strongly recommend Ghost Stories. The theme is great, the game is absolutely gorgeous, and you really, really need to plan your actions...because that game is ruthless. The easy difficulty is easy enough if you're paying attention, but normal is fairly difficult and the two higher difficulties are just brutal.

I've found it's quite replayable, the board is a 3x3 grid of tiles (there aren't really alternative tiles but the different layouts change it up), the ghost distribution is pretty variable, there are four different players each with a choice of two powers, and the final bosses often require different tactics to kill.

Alas, it is 4 players maximum. There is a five player expansion (Black Secret), but the fifth plays the bad guys. If you do get the game and want a little more going on, I can highly recommend the other expansion (White Moon).

[fbmf]

Josh, why do you have a hate on for Ticket to Ride?

Game On,
fbmf

[Josh_Kablack]

I don't have a hate-on for it. I just think that there are better games for the same boardgame niche which can be had for cheaper.

But I wouldn't be a Denizen, if I couldn't game-hate on demand, so here goes:

[rant]Ticket to ride is a mediocre game paired with some very intelligent marketing from the Days of Wonder folks. It was their attempt to dethrone Monopoly as the mass-market boardgame, and it managed to come pretty close. It does this by pretending to be all things to all gamers. It's a train game; it's a "deep" hobby game (aka game store game). it's a mass market game (aka can buy at Target), it's a Euro-game with less direct conflict and a scoring track.

It took me dozens of plays of various maps and expansions of the course of a couple of years to realize that Ticket to Ride is merely pretending to be these sorts of games - so it's best summarized as Pretentious.

It's not a train game. But don't take my word for it, check the Wikipedia Entry.

In this sense, Power Grid is more of a "train game" than such train themed games as Ticket to Ride, Union Pacific, and TransAmerica.

It's not deep. You either hoard colors, refusing to play trainbows until after the deck cycles or grab the blocking routes asap and you do well.

It's barely mass-market, in that I'm pretty sure my mother still has never heard of it, and while it is available from Target, it's deeper in their website than Catan and Catan; Star Trek Edition.

And most rantworthily danming of all, it's utter, steaming, pretentiously pretentiosing pretentious crap as a Euro game.

It nails the lack of direct conflict pretty damn well, since the only interactions with other players are via blocking routes or hoarding colors. And the game is structured so that destination tickets are always hidden information and colors in hand are usually partially hidden. Thus there is rarely enough information to deduce other player's objectives, and next to no strategic basis for ever trying to deny them those objectives in place of pursuing your own. There might be an interesting game of bluff and tells and reading opponents if not for the fundamental flaw that the game calls a point system. Not only is this so fiddily that the typical game will have most players with moves scoring as low as 1 point while the game end totals are usually in the triple digits, but that mere fiddliness was not enough needless complexity for the sake of avoiding the very conflict that makes a game interesting. No sirree bob, Ticket To Ride avoids the low-burn "don't let John win" cockblocking of typical Euros like Settlers by making absofuckinglutely sure that it is impossible to deduce the currently leading player at any point in the game. Destinations are usually the biggest component of a player's endgame score, and they are kept secret until the endgame, and everyone has several all the time. And if you don't complete them, they count negative. So not only is there no way to know any other players' actual score at any point where you could make a choice based on that knowledge, but there's not even a usual approximation based on averages from that hidden information -- you can't assume that the player with more Destination tickets in hand has a higher hidden component of their score, because they are just as likely to have additional negative points as positive points.

But hey, it's easy to teach, and turns go quick so long as you play with folks who remember to say "done, go" after their turns and not the kind of "wait, whose turn is it again" players found in every gaming group Josh has ever gamed with.[/rant]

Izzat hateful enough for ya? Caz' If not, I can produce similar rants for games I truly dislike.

[Blasted]

ohhh yes please! Moar rants.

[codeGlaze]

New type of review thread?