Protocols
Chapter: Season Three
Characters: Sir Forsythe - PC, Sir Reginald - PC
Charlie never seems to have any luck against traps. It’s a thing.
This weekend I am looking forward to an evening of board games and pizza with friends. If all goes to plan, we’ll probably break out more Lords of Waterdeep or possibly Gears of War. Either way, I’ll be happy to sit down and roll dice a bit.
COMMENTERS: I’m on a big board game kick as of late. Throw me some of your favorites.
Love it! Sgt Apone is my hero.
Boardgames: Betrayal at the House on the Hill is my favourite!
Smallworld, Discworld: Ankh-Morpork, 7 Wonders, Yggdrasil, Android
I’ve got a couple boardgames that I’ve been enjoying lately.
Fortune and Glory – a pulp-themed game, lots of globe-hopping, treasure hunting, and of course, Nazis.
Battlestar Galactica. It’s great fun.
A Game of Thrones (2e) – it’s like diplomacy, but a little deeper. Really enjoy it.
I’ve been playing a lot of Elder Sign lately. It’s like Arkham Horror, but bite-sized and can be played in an hour or so. They also have a one-player version available for iDevices and Android phones and tablets. It’s fun!
My friends and I have been enjoying Runebound – http://tinyurl.com/d4dso3p – and its expansions lately. Its Fantasy with a tiny bit of sort of Roleplay bits in there. It’s a lot of fun and can on occasion be mercilessly difficult!
That is pretty damn brutal. But I love it. I hear Tommy Lee Jones from “The Fugitive” in the Paladin’s voice. OKAY PEOPLE. I WANT A HARD TARGET SEARCH OF EVERY GAS STATION, RESIDENCE, WAREHOUSE, FARMHOUSE, HEN HOUSE, & DOG HOUSE.
Oh, good, I’m not the only one who read it in TLJ’s voice.
Either TLJ or the sergeant fom Aliens: “Check those corners. Check those corners!”
TALISMAN the everliving! Mostly because we’re too lame to buy more recent board games.
I still have my copy of second edition Talisman with all the supplements. I think my friends and I played that so many times, the cost/play ratio got under 10¢ per game.
I’ll second Waterdeep. It’s simple and fun.
Battlestar is great if you have a group that’s not afraid to yell at each other.
Catan is classic, if you’re bored with it try the Cities & Knights expansion.
Carcasonne is quick but still deep enough to be interesting.
Civilization: The Board Game takes a ton of time to setup and play, but it’s a blast and has tons of options.
I’ve heard Fiasco is a blast, but it’s more of a roleplaying game.
Here’s the list from the shelf behind me:
Citadels – Fun, fast, and makes you think in strange ways.
Patrician – Tower-building strategy. Sounds weird, I know, but awesome.
Innsmouth Escape – Zombie Hordes. That is all.
Talisman (mentioned before) – Good, can get formulaic.
Space Alert – Cooperative team survival. Comes with a tutorial. Wonderful.
Icehouse – No board, no turns, doesn’t need either.
Set – more of a card game than a board game, great at parties.
Tsuro – Path-building game that hurts the brain in all the right ways.
Cathedral – Go meets Tetris.
Dominion – Okay, so it’s a card game, but it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
I only hope your Waterdeep game includes the Inevitable Betrayal card.
My most played, at the moment:
7 Wonders Good mechanics, and scales well from 2-7, though best with 3+.
Race for The Galaxy – Complex, especially as you add expansions with multiple avenues and synergies between the cards.
Ascension: Good, simple deck builder that plays quickly, expansions do a lot to aid the replayability and variety of strategies.
Thunderstone (Advanced): Deck builder that is a mix of Dominion and Ascension.
Some great suggestions here, but I’ll throw down some favourites: Cosmic Encounter gets my vote for Best Game Ever (simple space battle, then throw in alien powers that let each player break the rules in some way). If you’re ever looking for a game that can turn best of friends into mortal enemies, look no further than Diplomacy. It’s like Risk minus the random crap and with a heaping helping of Inevitable Betrayal (pretty much the whole theme of the game). For a quick fix, another card game: Fluxx (each card played changes the rules of play).
My friends and I just finished playing through all the quests of HeroQuest board game. That was epic fun and we had a blast
My friends and I have been really into Super Dungeon Explore lately. It runs sort of like a fast and dirty table top game with one player running the Dungeon as a psudo DM called a Consul and the others (up to five) playing Heros. Its a lot of fun, plays pretty quick, has a lot of great tactics to consider and ends up being a fun challenge for both Heroes and Consul where either can come out on top.
I have been Pretty big on Catan and Zombies as of late.
And can’t forget the old staple, chess. Gotta love chess
I love his expression in the third panel.
Well, there is Smallworld of course. But everyone knows that one. Talisman is a lot of fun if you’ve got the time to invest. But it can go long.
One of the ones I picked up just recently that we really love is The Red Dragon Inn. Its more of a card game. Each player is an adventurer, drinking and gambling in a tavern, trying to be the last one left conscious and with coins in his or her pocket. If the players get “in character” and ham it up, it is a blast!
Boardgame recs: Ticket To Ride and Robo Rally.
Ooo….TtR is a good one – I like the Euro map for all of its complexity, but U.S. is a good intro to the game.
Another board game to add to the list: Tiki Mountain.
I just played Nuns on the Run last weekend and it was a blast.
Ticket to Ride (I prefer European best, but am enjoying the new East Asia board as well), Pandemic, and Tales of the Arabian Nights (FINALLY reprinted!) have been getting a lot of play here lately. For cards: Zombie Fluxx, or Guillotine!
Me and my friends play a lot of board games, but there is one that we always come back to: RoboRally. You each play a robot on a board, or series of boards with different obstacles on them. You then are dealt a maximum of 9 cards with which to program your robot. It sounds boring, but once you try it hilarity ensues what with you able to shoot your friends, push them off precipices and whatnot. Here is some info on it: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/18/roborally
Smallworld
Fortune and Glory
Arkham Horror
Citadels (Great combination of eurogame mechanics w/poker style social interaction)
Last Night on Earth (really great ameritrash zombie combat game)
Also I just played Qarriors (Think deck building game but with dice and a dice bag instead) and Frag (unreal tournament style death match FPS BOARDGAME). Quarriors is the better of the two but frag was cool as well for its cliche-ness.
Since you like Lords of Waterdeep (as do I!), I’d also recommend Agricola – another “worker placement” game. Fresco is a good one in the same vein, too.
I’ve been on a huge online Dominion kick lately – I’m up to level 8 on this site: http://dominion.isotropic.org/
Board/card games our group always comes back to:
Citadels (as discussed)
Dominion (as discussed)
Betrayal at House on the Hill (great fun Scooby Doo style investigation with lots of replayability)
Cutthroat Caverns (possibly the ultimate in back-stabbing dungeon crawling and a great fun three hours play)
Incan Gold (a very simple but great game of risk evaluation mixed with gauging how everyone else round the table will react)
Bloodbowl Manager (compete for fans in the highlight spots in the weekly sports roundup whilst building up your team)
Fury of Dracula (one player runs Dracula stalking invisibly acreoss Europe leaving a trail in their wake whilst everyone else plays hunters trying to corner him)
Twilight Imperium (a truly epic weekend-spanning game of galactic comquest, diplomacy and technological advancement)
I’m also loving Tigris and Euphrates and Ra on my iPad
Seconded on FURY OF DRACULA, though I prefer first edition because the mechanics are a little easier to embrace. That and some AXIS & ALLIES, which over the years comes in third in terms of amount of home brew rules available for it, coming in behind D&D and MONOPOLY…
Chaos in the Old World is a great PVP game, it has a great balance between the asymmetric gods and you can add the Horned Rat as a fifth player with the add-on.
It plays in a reasonable amount of time (~1-2 hours) and i haven’t had a game where one player dominated the game from the beginning until the end. The game always gives us tight fights for the lead up until the last round of play.
Fortune and Glory is an awesome game if you like pulp adventure (and I Wonders is good too.enjoy most of Flying Frogs games quite a bit).
Another Smallworld fan here. Nuns on the run is awesome, as is Thurn und Taxis. Robo Rallyinvolves a lot of strategy, but also lasers and deathtraps.
Space Beans is a great choice for a quicky, it takes only 30 minutes or so.
One game to stay away from: Starfarers of Catan. It takes ages to set up and is way too complicated to be really fun. The rest of the Catan games are so much better, especially the Cities and Knights version. Also: Carcassone
Kill Doctor Lucky is fun if you have at least four people. It’s a bit like Cluedo in reverse.
Advanced Squad Leader if you’ve got a lifetime to play.
Star Fleet Battles
Britannia and Maharaja
OK… I’m the Old School guy
Mage Knight is a great coop game with many different scenarios.
Pirates Cove for a quick swashbuckling good time.
Last Night On Earth: The Zombie Game is a simple but fun game with survivors trying different scenarios to beat the zombie players
Mansions of Madness is like Arkham Horror (Same HP universe) but with a GM instead of a board turn
Thunderstone is like Dominion (deck building game) but the goal is to kill monsters in a dungeon to get points.
I find anything Fantasy Flight Games makes is reliably good. Arkham Horror and Shadows Over Camelot stand out. If you’re willing to branch into card games as well, Space Hulk: Death Angel is good fun. Pandemic and Yggdrasil are great games that are hard to beat, but super triumphant when you do.
For a really cool random old game look for Scotland Yard. One guy plays a criminal running around London while everybody else plays inspectors chasing him.
It’s more of a card game but Infernal Contraption is a very fun crazy inventor game.
Tied between Settlers of Catan, ZOMBIES!!!, and (not sure if it fits as a boardgame but) Melee Wizard.
I am really enjoying 7 wonders and Dominion. Solid fun games!
Arkham Horror (or elder sign if you don’t have the time)
Talisman
Risk Legacy
The original, Avalon Hill (as in, not the Sid Meier) ‘Civilization’. That was an amazing game.
I also have a love-hate relationship with ‘Diplomacy’.
I grew up liking ‘Stellar Conquest’, but it can no-longer be enjoyed, now that computerized RTS’s exist.
High Frontier. It’s not rocket science; it’s just the next-best thing.
And THIS is why you put the Rogue up front…so he can find those pesky traps before others do, the hard way.
Sadly, I’ve never played fantasy board games. However, I HAVE played the classics…Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit, to name two.
Small crowd with something simple I’d go for Saboteur. With something for more interaction and tons more backstabbing, I’d say Mall of Horror. If you want a hack and slash heroes vs. monsters brawl, I’d consider Super Dungeon Explore but only if you enjoy painting miniatures (otherwise I’d pass, but a fun beat up the monsters and get the loot game). Another light wargame with plenty of dice rolling and beating up on each other would be Risk 2210 AD.
Race for the Galaxy has a steep learning curve. The mechanics are easy, it’s just processing all the symbols. Literally will take 1-2 games under everyone’s belt to ‘get it’, but by far that has been one of the more enjoyable strategy games I’ve been playing for a while.
Nuclear War!
I have fun Playing Small world and Cards Against Humanity.