Our current favorites are Gloomhaven, Fury of Dracula, and Chess. Honestly for the last month Gloomhaven is the 500 pound gorilla that has dominated our game time.
Worst is any roll the die and move your token around game.
The best game is roll the die and move your token around the Backgammon board! 
It was almost six decades ago that I played Stratego. It was fun.
Anyone else enjoy Acquire? (I don’t really recommend it though.)
Most games are more complicated than you realise at first. Once you learn some strategy, you’ll understand how good the game is.
This is an excellent example. If you use Left Hand of Dorkness’ tips, you’ll play Cluedo (UK spelling) much better (and finish quicker.)
Monopoly at first sight is a friendly family game.
But once you apply the rules (e.g. when anyone lands on an unowned property and doesn’t buy it, it MUST be auctioned) you see that it’s a HUGE advantage to be the first to get a set of properties.
(I played in a game once where a spouse sold properties to their spouse for $1. :smack:)
Also there’s a lot of luck in the game.
Finally you can get situations where all players are well-off and the game drags on a long time.
So my two best games are:
- chess (no luck, extremely skilfull)
- Pandemic (co-operative, always close)
Both of these finish in a reasonable time (you can use a clock for chess), which also makes me like them.
Worst: Roll and move games in general, Monopoly in particular, if only because it’s a mediocre game when played by the rules and a terrible one when played with any of the profusion of ‘house rules’ out there.
Best: Spirit Island. Cooperative, minimal randomness, minimal waiting for other people, monstrous replayability, configurable difficulty, and asymmetrical player choices. Takes Pandemic and throws it in the trash as far as I’m concerned.
IIRC, that’s also the origin of wrong answers: the original source(s) contained copyright traps.
I think the best games have you make decisions based on various factors. Lots of important choices are fun to make.
Best:
Carcassonne: The Castle - 2 player version of Carcassonne and much better in almost every way.
**Cartagena 2 **- Again, much better than the original. A lot of fun and some pretty great decsion making points.
Ra: The Dice Game** - Sounds like luck, right? Well, there is luck, but you have to **decide how to allocate your dice and it is a lot of fun. We do modify the rules a bit, though. The original is flawed.
**
Takenoko **- Just lots of fun and a great theme. Gardening and Panda managing.
Worst:
Risk - 'nuff said. It’s just not that fun.
Machi Koro - Totally broken, though I heard they fixed it in later updates. You need about half the cards to be able to win. Honestly, it’s terrible.
Dominion - I’ve only played with two players, but it was not fun at all. We played many times, but it was just a race for the best cards.
Mouse Trap - the actual game is terrible
Another vote for** Pandemic**. Losing has never been as fun as in that game.
Also kind of fond of Flash Point: Fire Rescue
Honorable mention should go to Betrayal at House on the Hill and Fury of Dracula (good luck finding a copy of Fury of Dracula for under $150 these days sadly).
Additional tip:
Hoard your information. Whenever possible, show a card you have already shown to someone before.
Also, if you ever get the chance, play the Harry Potter version of CLUE. It is not merely a reskinned version of CLUE. Maybe they added a bit too much (House points, I’m looking at you), but they kept enough to keep the core game the same, but added a lot of twists that really capture the feeling of the books and movies. I especially like the appearing and disappearing doorways and the way the secret passages open and close and change.
Makes me wonder if the secret agent version of CLUE I passed up on years ago was similarly delightful.
Yes, we love Pandemic.
Risk isn’t a terrible board game. It’s a pretty good computer game, that just had the misfortune to be invented before the computers that could run it. Find a computerized version somewhere that automates all of the tedious dice-rolling, and you’ll find that it’s much better.
My son got a game called ‘Dark, Darker, Darkest’, featuring apocalypse survivors getting around a zombie filled house (on fire).
So many rules! There is even a page entitled “…even more rules”. Also, so far, even at the easiest ‘Dark’ level, it seems to be impossible. Some aspects of play appear poorly thought out. I wonder if it was really play-tested.
I’ve suggested we modify the rules, maybe call it ‘Dim’, but I think my son has given up on it, and no one else in the family wants to play it.
I’m not a fan of deck-building games in general, but Dominion is a particular bugbear of mine.
The house points are pointless and just serve to arbitrarily eliminate players, but the having the secret passages shift is kind of brilliant, adding a degree of uncertainty to the game and preventing players from just bouncing back and forth between corner rooms. Clue is primarily a logic game with the die movement element adding a degree of randomness, but I’d like to see a version of a mystery/elimination that replaces die movement with some kind of action point/resource allocation to make it more skill based somewhat akin to a resource allocation game like Trajan.
Stranger
Steve Jackson’s O.G.R.E.
Best, hands down.
I like deck building games myself, and I love the tension Dominion has where the cards that award the game-winning points are the cards that hold you back when playing the game (I’m frequently too slow in converting from acquisition of resource-getting action cards to point-awarding territories).
I recently played Star Realms, a two player deck builder, with my son- enjoyed it a lot.
I like deck builder games, because I love Magic, except I hate investing a bunch of time building a deck, especially just to get stomped by someone who has better (or far better) cards. Not to mention organizing the whole mess. Deck building games grant parity and spontaneity that Magic lacks (unless you’re drafting- but then you still have to go through preliminary phases before you get to play).
Yes, great game! Wish they’d make an app for that!
That’s my second tip :). I think I phrased it pretty confusingly, though.
I really like Acquire. it’s by far my favorite pre-boutique era boardgame. It’s missing out on a lot of the depth of modern board games, but it was probably the first game that had some sort of real combination of both strategy and luck.
My favorite games are Puerto Rico and Castles of Mad King Ludwig. They’re both euro-style games that have a great deal of player interaction.
My least favorite game is probably Talisman, although that’s only if you play games by the rules. As every board gamer knows, the true worst game of all time is Monopoly played by lunatic house rules designed to draw the game out for hours.
Wow, good thing I managed to grab it at Barnes and Noble last year for 50 bucks.
My teenage love for Squad Leader reached its end at a specific point.
The rules are incremental – modules add new rules to cover new situations. Eventually there were rules for bicycle troops, and rules for splitting off a lone scout from a squad, so there were rules that allowed you to account for a single man on a bicycle (fighting World War II). There was a rule for a shell glancing off a tank’s front hull and stunning the driver temporarily, causing the tank to move randomly one space. There was a rule for cliff hexes – only a few existed in all the maps. There were rules for “overrunning” infantry with tanks. Those rules contemplated reducing a tank’s inherent overrun value if one or more machine guns or the cannon were jammed – even a gunless tank had a basic hull value for simply rolling over a squad of troops trying to squash people.
It was at that point we realized the rules simulated World War II elaborately enough that you could calculate the attack value of a tank falling off a cliff onto a man riding a bicycle.
The absurdity of that was funny at first, but as more and more rules were added it became our wargaming group’s symbol of all that was needlessly, trivially complex about wargames.
If it counts as a board game my favorite game is Magic.
I don’t play enough board games to have a worst.