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#467589 Wed 27/10/10 16:16 UTC
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Nivek Offline OP
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I love board games so while I took some time off, I went on a board game buying spree, adding another half dozen or so to my collection. I then roped my daughter(18) and her boyfriend when he was in town to play with me. My daughter is hooked. When I suggest learning a new game, she groans but pulls herself to the table. After every new game though she has declared that she liked the game. So getting her to learn the last couple haven't been too bad. I always enjoy hearing about new games, especially ones that I can get reviews from people I know, so I'll do the same.

The best part about all of these games is that I could basically explain the rules in a few minutes and we could get started. My daughter doesn't mind learning, but after 5 minutes, her eyes have rolled up into her head and I know it's hopeless. What I loved about every one of these games is that the rules are easy to learn, but they all had a good amount of strategy to them so that on each play you had to make decisions. The other factor was that you could play the game in less than an hour or at least close to it. One of our all time family favorites is a game called Rail Baron, but a six player game is going to take 5+ hours. These are all quick.

Another thing I think that is really good with all of these games is that you don't know for sure who is winning until the very end. You may have an idea, but until all the points are added up, you aren't certain, which helps to keep everyone involved. I'm sure many of you have had your share of Monopoly and Risk games where it was over long before it actually ended. You just had to endure the agony of being wiped out. These games aren't like that.

I started off searching the web for game reviews, lists, awards ... And came across a site I really like Boardgameratings.com. Anyways, the first game we pulled out was Carcassonne which turns out I had in the basement for a few years, but we'd never gotten around to playing it. (Unfortunately, I have to admit that I have a lot of games in the bought but never played category). So we broke this one out and her and her boyfriend immediately enjoyed it. It was simple, fun and we played it a bunch of times. We've even gotten my wife to play and she rarely plays games. It didn't hurt her interest when my daughter won the first game. We've played it a few times now and the strategy starts becoming clearer. Not that the exact strategy is obvious, but that there are a lot of strategies that weren't immediately obvious the first time we played it.

The next game we broke out was Ticket To Ride. I think some people here mentioned it. It was an instant hit. I'm now a big fan of DaysofWonder.com and their games and have put a bunch of them on my Christmas wish list. I also bought the online version of this and my daughter and I both play it solo all the time. If anyone plays online, I'd love to play with ya smile Anyways, simple game, get cards, buy tracks, complete destinations. But again there is a lot of strategy to it. There is a lot to be said for bright colorful maps and components and DaysofWonder games do this extremely well. As soon as we opened the box, I knew I had them hooked. For the most part we worry about completing our own tickets and don't mess with others, but with different people (like my dad) this could easily be a very cutthroat game as you block others from certain cities.

The next game my daughter and I tried was Dominion. This is a card game with a lot of sets of cards (maybe 30 or so). You actually only use 10 per game. It took us a full game to really see some of the strategies and understand completely the mechanics. So after playing it, I was very surprised that she wanted to play it again. As a matter of fact, I would have bet heavily that of all the games we tried, this would be her least favorite, but I was quite wrong. Again, I think the simplicity of the play once we understood it along with the strategy kept her interest. It's a very difficult game to describe so I won't even really try, but it will play quite differently every time because of the possible randomness of the decks you use. I also think it would be a much better game with at least 3 people. I think a 4 or 5 person game of this would be a lot of fun.

We next moved on to Lost Cities: The Board game. I've never played the card game, but I've heard it's a classic. This was a lot of fun also. You move your little researchers along a board by playing cards one at a time. The catch is that the card you play has to be higher than the last one you played. Often you don't want to play or can't play and have to discard, there is nothing worse than knowing what you throw away will help your opponent. It's funny to watch my daughter agonizing over this 2 cards into the hand. I can only imagine the torment with 3 or 4 players. Again, simple game where we didn't know until the end who won. The second time, I was certain she had and I beat her by a couple of points to my surprise. This is one that younger kids can play, although some of the strategy will be over their heads. My only complaint wit this one and it's the same complaint I have with Settles of Catan. If you only have 4 player colors, why do you make them really close. (The orange and red in Settlers are almost indistinguishable in poor light). In this game, I have a hard time figuring out which track is brown or red.

Her boyfriend was back in town and we broke out Alhambra. I bought the big box version which has 5 expansions, but we only played the original one once so far. It's a tile laying game as you make your estate. Each estate is made up various things, gardens, ... Well the scoring is based on who has the most of each type of thing. So with 3 or more people, you have to decide if you try and build more of one thing to maintain your lead or do you try and build something else to catch up to an opponent to steal some of their points. Scoring happens three times during the game and the first two are somewhat random so that helps keep a lot of the surprise in the game. Anyways, we had a great time and they both want to try again. After playing it once, like a lot of these games, we see a lot more potential strategies. This is one we'll definitely play a lot more and we'll probably try a new expansion each time to see how they work.

The last game we tried was one my daughter was reluctant to play. It's another DaysofWonder game called Small World. It's a war/combat game which she isn't terribly fond of. But being the good trooper that she is, she gave it a try. What she immediately found was that the actual combat was very simple and that again it was a strategy game far more than a war game. She loved that each player got a big glossy card explaining what every race and ability could do so she didn't have to ask me or refer to the rulebook. It made the play faster. I won this game, but she made a huge comeback at the end and almost caught me. As soon as we finished, she was talking about things she could have done differently to win and how she wanted to play again. This is another game with all kinds of add-ons that we can buy. It's going to be easy for people to buy me Christmas and birthday presents smile

One thing I loved about all of these games is that with the possible exception of Dominion, the rules book was well illustrated and very simple to follow with good examples. Dominion wasn't bad, but it was thicker and some of the play isn't always obvious, so it made us refer back to the booklet often. Most of other games, we read them once, setup the game and never looked back. Nothing like a 4 page rulebook filled with pictures to get you going quickly.

I love card games and other games that involve skill and I'm not a huge fan of games with a lot of dice rolling and luck. So these new games are perfect. They have enough luck and randomness to make it so that you have to alter your plans and strategies as the game goes on, but not enough that someone who is just plain lucky can win repeatedly. It's nice to get off the computer and turn off the tv and spend time with family. If anyone is struggling with that, I'd highly recommend all of these games. Some of the best money I've spent. I can't wait for Christmas when family comes to town and we can play these with more people. I think the toughest problem will be figuring out which game to play next. Something tells me we'll have 2 or 3 tables going all the time. Well at least when my sister and nieces aren't shopping themselves to death.

There are lots of places to buy games online, and I looked at probably 20+ websites pricing them since I was buying a couple hundred dollars worth at once and I found the cheapest was a site called dragontalongames.com (At least in the US and with a $125 order they had free shipping).

If anyone else has any games they've discovered, let me know about them, I love to hear. My Christmas wish-list includes the following, let me know if I'd be making a mistake with any of them: (Mystery Express, Puerto Rico, Finca, Zooloretto, Elfenland, along with any Carcassonne, Ticket To Ride and Small World expansions)

And if you play Ticket To Ride online, let's get together.

Last edited by Nivek; Wed 27/10/10 17:15 UTC.
Nivek #467594 Wed 27/10/10 16:51 UTC
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I was going to mention Puerto Rico until I saw it was already on your Christmas list. I can definitely recommend it. I'd give it four out of four stars, you will like it.

Nivek #467595 Wed 27/10/10 16:58 UTC
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Some others I'd recommend...

First, the site boardgamegeek.com. There's noplace else like it for games. And, as of recently, including RPGs, though that area of the community is still somewhat underdeveloped.

No Thanks is an incredibly simple, increadibly fast card game. You start the game with 11 chips and a shuffled deck of cards numbered 3 to 35 with 9 cards dealt out of play at random. Each card is flipped in turn and either taken by the current player or passed at the cost of 1 chip placed on the card. The next player then has the same choise, but gets any chips on the card if he or she takes it. Cards give points, and you don't want points. Retained chips are negative points, and that's a good thing. Runs of cards (19-20-21, for example) are only as many points as the LOWEST number in the run. Play until the deck is exhausted. Whoever has the least points wins. Play takes only 5-15 minutes!

Thunderstone is Dominion with a dungeon crawl mechanic added. Village cards represent equipment you can buy and heroes you can recruit, and like in Dominion you use only a small subset. Likewise, there are several different decks of monsters and you use only 3 of those each game. Heroes can be developed with coin or with experience from killing monsters, but like in Dominion, the victory point cards (in this case, mostly killed monsters) don't usually do much when drawn from your deck, so you have to manage the deckbuilding a lot.

Back to the Future The Card Game is just what it sounds like. Cards are laid out with an initial timeline (events all familiar from the movie trilogy) and everyone is given a secret character and goal, which will contain items on the timeline you want to change. Then, using your hand of cards, you flip over the changable "lynchpin" points in the timeline to get the changes you want. Once you have time as you like it, you have to rush to when Doc Brown first visualized the Flux Capacitor and eliminate time travel so your timeline is the final one. Despite this being a re-skinning of an earlier game (Chrononauts), the feel of the movies is strong and play is great fun.

Forbidden Island is a cooperative game, with the players working together to rescue lost treasures before the island sinks under them. The game is amazingly well produced for its price point, with attractive cards and a durable metal game box. Players have unique roles and abilities, and tension builds thru the game by the sinking becoming faster and faster as time progresses. But victory is fairly likely, as the game is designed to be forgiving. If you want a harder coop game...

Pandemic is by the same designer and is similar in structure. Unique roles for each player, moving around the board collecting cards to match goals... But here, you're CDC doctors, researchers, and field staff trying to out-race several about-to-break-out diseases. Play is tight and victory is far from certain. An expansion set adds extra roles, optional extra complexity, really cool petri dishes to store the game pieces in between games, and rules for a "bioterrorist" player who's working the other side!

Two fantasy themed Cooperatives are also good fun...

Defenders of the Realm is in many ways a fantasy Pandemic, with 4 invading armies (undead, orcs, demons, and dragon-men) marching from the fringes of the board toward the capital city in the middle. Heroes quest to gather the experience and treasure they need to defeat the four generals before it's too late.

Castle Ravenloft is the classic D&D module turned into a GM-less coop board game. 4E mechanics are simplified into board game rules quite cleanly and reasonably straightforward rules guide how monsters attack the heroes as they search for the scenario's goals. The designers (who are also 4E's main designers) set out to do a "game we play when no one has time to design a D&D game" and pretty much hit their target.

One note... I'd avoid Mystery Express. It's not as good as it promised to be thanks to several flawed mechanics (especially the one for determining the time of the murder), a rare miss for DoW. But if you can find the older Mystery in the Abbey, it's worth picking up and similar in nature (Clue-on-steroids). I'll agree with Don about Puerto Rico as well, even if I enjoy its more recent derrivative (because it started life as a proposal for a card game version of PR) Race For the Galaxy. Both share a similar base mechanic, in which there is a choice of which phase to play next, and the player who makes the choice gets an enhanced version of the phase while everyone else gets the normal one. But be warned... both PR and Race are relatively heavy games, strongly rewarding smart play. More casual players will find themselves utterly swamped by stronger strategies.


Last edited by The Ghoul; Wed 27/10/10 17:12 UTC. Reason: added bolding and some additional commentary
The Ghoul #467599 Wed 27/10/10 17:13 UTC
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Nivek Offline OP
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Thanks G. I knew you'd reply.

I looked at Mystery of the Abbey along with Mystery Express. What makes it better in your eyes?

Also have you heard much about Shadows over Camelot and Pirate's Cove both also from DoW?

I saw a lot of good reviews on Pandemic. I'm not sure how much the family would go for cooperative games. We have played Knizia's Lord of the Rings, and enjoyed it, but I think in general, the family prefers non-cooperative games. I also find that that if the player's experience gap is big, the one who knows the most drives everyone else a lot.

Thunderstone and No Thanks sound really good, I'll add them to the list and check out the others.

And yeah I know about boarrdgamegeek.com. I actually don't like the site. I always feel like they tried to squish way too much into too small of a space. It's good for getting lists, but half the time, I can't even find a review.

Last edited by Nivek; Wed 27/10/10 17:17 UTC.
Nivek #467603 Wed 27/10/10 17:24 UTC
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Ticket To Ride is truly deserving of the "classic" label. Imho it's already well on its way to supplanting undeserving classics, such as Monopoly.

One thing I'll say is that we very quickly identified the flaw in the game, which I verified online. Players starting with Routes on the West Coast generally win. They're at an advantage.

If you own Ticket To Ride, the best present you can get yourself this Christmas is the USA 1910 Expansion Pack. This fixes the game, so succinctly in fact that I'm surprised it hasn't been integrated into the core game. (Then again, why bother if everyone buys the expansion!)

I enjoyed the Lost Cities: The Board Game, it captures most of the energy of the card game but still isn't as quick. The card game's about 20 mins long (unless my girlfriend's playing, then one turn is 20 mins long lol ).

I'm personally a fan of Dominion but I've had a hard time convincing everyone else around here. The problem is you go through phases with this game. At first it seems shallow, flawed by an obvious strategy. Then it seems deep. Then it seems like a solo game. Until finally you realise it can be all.

I never got my players passed the first phase. sad It's never taxing though, as the strategies vary depending on the set of cards used. It's basically a CCG in a box though. It has tons of expansions, but sadly I can't comment on them.

Elfenland. :s It's OK, it inspired many other board games and has to be played so you can say to have, but isn't itself a very flexible game tbh.

If you have 3 players, I can recommend Atlas Games' Corruption. It got critically mauled because it didn't successfully embody the era it was trying to represent, the 1930s, the mafia, government corruption, et al. I'd agree with that but imho it doesn't represent any one era. It's a game about out bidding, out bluffing and screwing over the other people around the table. It's an aggressive game, there's no two ways about it. Many hardcore gamers don't like that, but non-gamers generally expect it in a card game.

Rio Grande Games' Dracula is a game I rate highly for entertainment, but highly for concentration too. It's a hybrid bluffing and memory game, and it is taxing (especially after your third glass of Scotch). Being only 2 players adds to the intensity, and I think it captures the rivalry between Dracula and Van Helsing rather nicely. I enjoy this game more than the others, though it is more demanding too so it's not one I'm always going in the mood for, ironically.

nem #467604 Wed 27/10/10 17:28 UTC
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Thanks Neil. Maybe I'll have to scratch Elfenland from my list. I've found with my family the games that let you screw over someone else get ugly fast and people won't replay them. best to avoid.

I agree about Monopoly. I play the games I mentioned above and I can't imagine someone going out and buying Monopoly anymore. Of course I say the same about McDonalds food and they make billions annually so what do I know.

We noticed also in Ticket to Ride that you need the cross country routes to win. Is it still the case in 5 player games? I can see you easily getting stuck with a cross country ticket with that many and if you do, you're doomed. Playing online I love all the versions. I heard the Marklin on is an especially good version. Hopefully it will come online soon.

I can see what you say about Dominion. Some strategies of getting silver then gold then provinces as fast as possible seem unbeatable, but I think with more people stealing, cursing, knocking cards from your hand and it probably changes. I think it's the kind of game you have to get people to play 5 or 6 times and then it will become a favorite. Which is why it surprised me that my daughter liked it so much.

Last edited by Nivek; Wed 27/10/10 17:31 UTC.
Nivek #467607 Wed 27/10/10 17:39 UTC
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Both Mystery of the Abbey and Mystery Express are Clue-like games thinly changed from source material (Name of the Rose or Murder on the Orient Express) with more creative and complex mechanics for how you get access to new cards and other player's cards. In Abbey, those mechanics work (especially clever is a confessional, which functions as a "take a card, leave a card" repository). In Express, many of them don't, either thematically (how is it that new passengers, getting on the train hours later in a different country somehow know new facts about the murder?) or practically (one player gets a deck of clock-faces and flips the cards over one-by-one as fast as he or she cares to and everyone watches to try to spot which card is missing). It's just a little bit off in several ways.

Shadows over Camelot is a wonderful sort of Coop game with a twist... one player might be a traitor! (I call that sort of game "semi-coop".) Players quest against several threats to the kingdom, trying to keep them under control so the net balance is toward the light. But a deck of loyalty cards was shuffled initially and dealt out in secret, and one player might have gotten the card saying they're on the other side. Knights have interesting unique powers and the mini-games for the threats are just diverse enough to be interesting. But the Traitor role is somewhat under-developed, and it's often hard to tell clever Treason from simple poor understanding of the game. Battlestar Galactica is a more complex take on the same idea, with an added twist that you might only find out you're a cylon mid-game!

Pirate's Cove is a great game, and I was very glad to see it reprinted. Treasures are dealt out to each of several islands and each player decides where to go in secret. Go to an island solo and you get the treasure (as well as the mechanical effect of that island). If multiple pirates go to the same island, they fight it out. Players can develop their ship in several ways (better cannons, sails, crew, etc.) and there's a lot of bluffing and second-guessing about where to go. It's quite fun trying to read the table and find the "free" loot.

Let me add another light game recommendation or two...

Incan Gold is a "press your luck" game. Players are treasure hunters investigating an incan pyramid. Each turn, they can either go forward and hope to find more treasure or back out and bank what they have. If the next card is a treasure card, everyone still delving gets a share. But if it's a hazard card and matches an earlier hazard card, everyone still in the pyramid loses any treasure from this round. So it's all about gathering what you can but deciding when you have enough. A similar game, differently themed, is Cloud 9, which is about deciding when the baloon's pilot is at his limit and abandoning ship as high up before the crash as you can get.

Ca$h and Gun$ is a game of untrustworthy crooks. While dividing the loot post-crime, they turn on one another. Players point foam-rubber pistols at one another and bluff about if their gun is loaded or not. Read the bluff right (or be fortunate enough that no one aimed at you) and you'll get a share of the loot rather than a bullet. This is an especially good game for the larger end of its player range (5 or 6) and using the special powers of its intermediate rules set. But the most advanced option, adding a police snitch, really doesn't work. Fortunately, it's an option, so just don't do it.

The Ghoul #467608 Wed 27/10/10 17:54 UTC
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Do you get to play games every week? I'm so jealous!

Nivek #467609 Wed 27/10/10 17:57 UTC
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I'm a regular at my local stores' Game Night (wednesdays... D&D encounters and perhaps a short board game or two on either side of it, and the store is glad to loan out new arrivals and occasionally previews for play) and we're coming up on Thanksgiving Week, when I get with several friends (including Dazzler, Lucinda, and ShadowSpawn from RPGames) for a week that includes lots of games. I typically bring two 50-gallon tubs filled with my preferred options.

The Ghoul #467610 Wed 27/10/10 18:06 UTC
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Sounds like fun. I'll have to settle for convincing the family to play. I knew I should have had a dozen kids wink

Nivek #467628 Wed 27/10/10 19:57 UTC
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Originally Posted by Nivek
Thanks Neil. Maybe I'll have to scratch Elfenland from my list. I've found with my family the games that let you screw over someone else get ugly fast and people won't replay them. best to avoid.


It is inevitable you'll screw over another player in Elfenland, rather more so than in Ticket To Ride, frex. But it's purely coincidental, unlike Corruption. That was the card game I said was aggressive. I prefer to think of it as combative. weg I enjoy those sort of games, but I can take them in good humour. Playing with family, however, that is a different kettle of fish. lol

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AHHH! Tabletop gaming has been all my ftf gaming for the past 6 years or so and I've been gaming about once every 2-3 weeks for all that time...much to offer, but totally doing massive overtime at work...will get back with a list and input on games mentioned here so far very soon...

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Since you brought up board games, I have been looking, literally for decades, for an old TSR game called Divine Right . Had a blast playing that in college, but haven't seen it in years and years.

Barry Mulvihill #467683 Thu 28/10/10 03:41 UTC
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Not really a two-player game but a good beer & pretzels game for a group from the old days was Avalon Hill's Acquire. It used to be a favorite pick up game back at Detroit Gaming Center in the eighties, because it didn't take hours to set up or play.

Alas, I know for certain that the rules for Nuclear Risk which combined the board game Risk and the card game Nuclear War we developed back then no longer exist or at least are not in my possession. If I look around I might actually have a copy of the rules for Magical Risk which as a fantasy version of Nuclear Risk. It changed the complexion of the game because with charms and fireballs out there you can't safely put 100 men in one country.

Don #467706 Thu 28/10/10 11:49 UTC
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Nivek - Incan Gold is worth getting - small game, easy play but fun. Another few games that are favourites with our group are 'Oasis', 'Ra' and 'Thern and Taxis' - all very replayable!

Gypsy #467722 Thu 28/10/10 13:26 UTC
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Commenting on two of Gypsy's suggestions...

Thurn and Taxis is a wonderful example of a weak theme that doesn't managed to hamper a great underlying game. The theme is developing competing postal services across pre-industrial Germany, which is far from gripping. But the game is a very clever mix of race mechanics (you get more points for completing things first), hand-building (like in Ticket to Ride you can draw new cards from several face up cards) and area control (you want to dominate districts of the board). It's got a lot of TtR's feel to it, but with a bit more depth to the play.

Ra (and it's cousins Razzia and Priests of Ra) is a classic Knizia design. Tiles are drawn out and placed on the board until an auction is triggered, then they are bid for. Also included in the bid is the winning bid piece from the previous auction, which makes for some VERY interesting strategy to trade up or down for future rounds. A very Knizia-esque scoring system occurs at the end of each round, with each type of tile having different ways to determine its worth. Razzia is essentially the same game re-skinned as criminals bartering for ill-gotten gains, while Priests is a recent re-working using the same auction rules but new tiles and scoring to create a distinct feel.

I'll also say a bit about two other games in the dice game family... Both are distinct flavors of "Yahtzee on steroids".

To Court the King is a game of progressive "Yahtzee". To win, you must get 7 of a kind, but since you roll only 3 dice, you have to go thru collecting lesser sets, claiming the associated minor noble card and their associated power. These powers add more dice to your roll, letting you slowly climb the pyramid of powers until you have enough dice to claim the Queen and King. Great fun, and some interesting powers to let you modify rolls, add dice already set to a given number, or otherwise manipulate things to create the combos you need.

Roll Through the Ages is, oddly enough, a Civilization building dice game. The dice are custom, with icons representing food, workers, coins, trade goods, and disasters. You roll and keep combos, ala Yahtzee, then record what you get with pegs on a control board (ala Cribbage) and score sheet. Be the first to build Wonders, learn the best technologies, and avoid starvation and disaster and you'll create the great Bronze Age civilization. The pieces are of astonishing quality (heavy wooden control boards, custom wood dice). And there's a "Late Bronze Age" expansion available for free download that adds a few more rounds to the end of the game and extra cultural powers to consider buying.

The Ghoul #467724 Thu 28/10/10 13:23 UTC
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Glad I started this. I love hearing about these games smile

Has anyone messed with Ticket to Ride Dice expansion or the card game?

Since nobody said so, none of you play the online version of Ticket To Ride?

Nivek #467731 Thu 28/10/10 13:39 UTC
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So Ghoul of all the games you've mentioned, which would you rank highest as a two person game? The reality is if I'm going to play a lot of games, it's going to be primarily my youngest and I.

Nivek #467754 Thu 28/10/10 14:27 UTC
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I carry To Court the King and No Thanks with me whenever I'm expecting gaming to happen, but both are really 3+ player games.

Two player games are actually a distinct subset, as their requirements are different.

Most coops work at 2 players, but semi-coops (the traitor games like Shadows over Camalot and Battlestar Galactica much less so, because of how over-powered the traitor gets if there's only one other player. Of course, the problem that the skilled player dominates all play is at its worst with 2 players.

Dominion and Thunderstone are FAR more strategic games at 2 players than at 3 or more, because there isn't as much chance for multiple strategies to develop and for luck to balance them out. Simple, direct play of your own position dominates over interactive strategies (like the Witch and the Militia in Dominion). If you like the feel, they're still good games, but they get VERY different with more players (albeit, in the negative, they also add a lot more downtime that is absent in the two-player version).

The original Lost City is great for two. It's similar to the board game (which is actually a distinct game called Keltis that was re-skinned as Lost City for its English Language release) but has an very clever discard mechanic that lets discards be potentially picked up for later use ala many Rummy games.

There's a distinct Carcassonne for two players, actually designed by Knizia rather than the usual Carcassonne folk. That's Carcassonne: The Castle. It has the Carcassonne feel with better balance for head-to-head play. It involves building one city rather than several, with efforts to create and block coherent neighborhoods within the city.


The Ghoul #467762 Thu 28/10/10 15:45 UTC
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I still like Lunch Money (which isn’t strictly a board game i know!) and the aforementioned Nuclear War (which is a great game to play with about 10 friends when all of them are slightly drunk smile )

Muddy #467778 Thu 28/10/10 19:25 UTC
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I'll have to do this in stages...

Barry, a company put out a 25th Anniversary edition of DIVINE RIGHT which included ALL the material including expansion cards and stuff that only appeared in THE DRAGON Magazine, and it included a CD with printable versions of every card and 3 different rulesets - Beginnier, Intermediate and Advanced - look for it on ebay or BGG - I gots mine.




#467789 Thu 28/10/10 22:22 UTC
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Family Business and Guillotine are two older card games that are great fun but as they are take-out games both tend to work better the more players you start with.

Family Business and later Guillotine made regular appearances at a lot of AmberCons during downtime. In fact it got so where I looked forward more to the downtime than the actual tournaments.

Don #467866 Fri 29/10/10 11:37 UTC
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Guillotine is a great game but often out of print - I tried for 2 years before I found one due to a repeat print run! smile

I love ticket to ride.

I have the online version but use it as a single player v the computer game which I play several times a week! grin

I also have in the Ticket to Ride collection:

Europe - bit repetitive with routes but improved with depots and warehouses expansion

USA - with the 1910 route expansion - and this is the one played more often with 4 or 5 players.

Scandinavia - 2 or 3 player game - which is an absolute favourite as a 2 player game for me & hubby - we play at least once a week, sometimes 2 to 3 times a day if off work! grin

Marklin - German board - different mechanic here with passengers - good game for 3-5 players but takes a bit more setting up as cities have small stacks of point counters on them which passengers collect later. Good for a change.




Gypsy #467867 Fri 29/10/10 11:42 UTC
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Ticket to Ride is great until certain evil players block my route goals smile


Muddy #467869 Fri 29/10/10 11:53 UTC
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Wouldn't know what you mean.. <whistles>

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