If you have 4 players (no more/no less), Tichu is the bomb. It’s a complex little card game that is partner based. I’ve gotten my co-workers hooked that we play it at least twice a week at lunch.
I personally love the crayon rails games like** EuroRails, Empire Builder, and China Rails**. They’re all the same mechanic and there’s just a peacefulness to the competition.
I’ll second King of Tokyo (more chance fun than skill-in the same vein, Can’t Stop is another push your luck type game too). I’d also throw in Fortune and Glory to round out the ameritrash trio here.
Airlines Europe is by the same designer as Ticket to Ride and is a good next step into eurogames.
Modern Art is a fun auction game that takes a round to get the mechanics, but after that, it’s a good challenge and social enough too. (Avoid the card game version).
If you want something more along the lines of Love Letter, try **6 Nimmt **(aka Slide 5) and No Thanks!. They’re both simple card games that are a ton of fun.
On the opposite end, if you’re up to a challenge, give **Tzolk’in, Bora Bora, and Trajan. **
The Legend of Robin Hood is a neat little two player game. Takes about two hours to play, unless you’re in college and um…consuming intoxicants…during the game.
Dune is an awesome game, but you really need six players, and games run about 6 hours. My group had a certain traditional method of celebrating the “spice blow” phase that you probably would not want to share with your kid, because it also involved intoxicants.
If the kiddo gets into these games, you may try him with more advanced games like Squad Leader or Starfleet Battles…
How do you like Dominant Species? I’ve thought about picking it up.
I have a thread here somewhere where I asked for suggestions for board games. My wife and I play Dominion, Munchkin, and Star Fluxx regularly. She loves it. Mostly Dominion. We also picked up one of the many expansions which add even more replay value.
I liked Pandemic. She didn’t.
I want to try Power Grid and Seven Wonders.
I contributed to Tiny Epic Kingdoms kickstarter recently. It looks really fun.
I wouldn’t say its broken. I’d just say it isn’t very fun. For what its worth, my wife played it and kind of liked it. I’d play it again, but I’d much rather play Dominion. So would my wife, I assume.
A fun, relatively quick, and silly game to play is Munchkin, which works for all ages. It’s a card game which is kind of a mild satire of D&D where the end goal is killing monsters. Most of the fun is the amusing descriptions of your armor/weapons and in the backstabbing of your fellow players.
A list of like, 3 things to not do isn’t really what I’d consider ‘strategy’. And since there’s very little you can do to actually further one of those goals (“equip your party”) since all getting of equipment is completely random, all you can do is explore a bunch of rooms and hope. Similarly, there’s not actually that much you can do to control how much damage you do or don’t take except by not doing a couple of dumb things like trying to jump the pit if you suck at it. Yeah, I guess you can take steps to distribute items if randomness gives a bunch of to one person, but that’s pretty much it for “strategy”.
Dominion is one of my favorite all-time games and definitely my favorite card-driven game. Some of the complaints mentioned above are valid, though.
One way to mitigate that is to use an awesome app called Dominion Shuffle. You tell it what expansions you’re playing with (and can set other parameters if you want) and it will randomly pick a set of 10 cards to use. Streamlines the whole process and makes the game more about “who can figure out this particular set’s most optimum path to victory” more than about playing the same combos over and over.
We never get to that point, because each of us buys a province every time we can. The trouble is that the game is well-designed enough that buying a province is hard. But once your deck is capable of buying one, you can typically buy several before anyone else gets a chance. And that lead is hard to surmount.
Yes, I know. That is why I’m suggesting making the lower level score cards more valuable. The vanilla game has something like a province worth 6 points costs 8 coins (.75 pts/coin), duchies worth 3 costs 5 (.60 pts/coin) and estates worth 1 costs 2 (.50 pts/coin). By increasing their point values to match their costs, and letting the game end by depleting them, collecting them will be a viable tactic. As it stands, it’s always better to buy an action card than a lower-level score card.
Yes, that’s what I’ve been complaining about. Whoever manages to get deck that can buy provinces first, usually wins. The game has the potential for a lot more variety than “maximize buying power”. I like the deck building mechanic, but the game needs some tweaking to have more variety.
We’ll play with various house rules until we figure out some we like. I’ll certainly suggest that the “Thief be required to be in play” as a house rule. We’re almost at the point of requiring the Garden, since that lends itself to the “maximize number of buys” tactic instead of coins.
My point is that there’s no one path to win in Seven Wonders. There’s multiple ways to collect points and a player leading in one path can be beaten by someone collecting more along another. And there’s enough balance that one can’t usually win by taking one particular path.
Again, what? If you’re so far ahead that you have a deck capable of producing reliable province buys 3+ turns before anyone else can, you are WINNING. BIGTIME.
But this is absolutely false. If you can see that there are two provinces left in the pile, and you don’t have enough money to buy one, but you DO have enough for a duchy, you bloody well better not waste your buy on a action card that’s never even going to come up.
This is just mindblowing to me. It’s like saying “I like monopoly, but I think the game should be about more than getting money.”
I disagree with your assessment of the Garden, FYI.
No, it’s not. There’s only one way to win in Seven Wonders. Have more points than everyone else. There’s only one way to win in Dominion too. Have more points than everyone else. There’s only one way in either game to have more points than everyone else: Have more turns in which you score more points than the other players. (This should be obvious stuff). Yes, the “best” way to win Dominion is to buy more provinces than everyone else, but there’s a VAST number of ways to build a deck that does that. The fact that provinces are the ‘most efficient’ doesn’t change that at all. There’s the “Just buy the highest value coin you can get every turn” approach (works surprisingly well). There’s remodeling decks. There’s card churn decks. There’s attack decks. There’s countless synergy types here. 7 Wonders is basically ‘pick which color of points you want and go for it’.
Unrelated: Apples to Apples is fun, but it doesn’t have a lot of long term staying power. If it’s a game you plan to break out a few times a year, it’s awesome, if it’s something you want to play every week, it’s kinda garbage. Same goes for it’s Adult Oriented version, Cards Against Humanity. (Aside: As I visited their website, the following card set flashed across the screen: “What’s the next Superhero/Sidekick duo?” “Barack Obama” and “Shaft.” Priceless.)
Then how about Fluxx: The Board Game? It’s been called “Fluxx meets Martian Coasters.”
The quick version: it’s Fluxx, but without Keepers - instead, there’s a board consisting of nine square tiles, eight of which are divided into four squares; each Goal consists of occupying two particular spaces (22 of the 32 spaces have drawings of what are Keepers in normal Fluxx). Each player starts with three game pieces on the Start space (the one tile that’s not divided into smaller spaces), and a turn includes a number of Moves (yes, there’s a Move Number Rule - this is Fluxx, after all). Note that completing one Goal isn’t enough to win; when you complete a Goal, you take the Goal Card and put it in front of you (as if it was a played Keeper), and whoever gets to the current Goal Number first wins.
I feel qualified to speak on Dominant Species, having run a DS tournament the last three years at a large boardgame convention.
DS is a game about managed chaos. Each turn, the players will have between 3 and 6 actions to take. Certain scoring cards may give you more actions. The trick to this game is that ALL the action pawns are placed on a planning board THEN the actions are resolved on the game board. This can lead to spectacular turnabouts from turn to turn.
So, the best players are those who can look at the scoring cards available (which can give extra actions, extra victory points, or disasters that wipe out board positions), the game elements available, and how they may impact their board position in this and future turns. The game itself takes about 3-4 hours to play, with about 20 minutes of set-up and clean up time.
It’s definitely not a light game to play. But if you like to grind the mental gears and can anticipate then mitigate the unexpected, then this just might be the game for you.
I think it’s great. Apart from anything else it lends itself to a little role-playing fun, where you as (say) the birds get to make demeaning comments about the spiders, or whatever.
Both excellent, excellent games. We play PG almost every gaming session. You do have to have someone who has a firm grasp of the rules, as they’re somewhat weirdly expressed and laid out, and some vital things are only mentioned in tiny paragraphs at the end of a section.
In particular they use ‘phase’ and ‘step’ for different things in some places, and interchangeably in others. There’s probably a cleaned-up rule set on BGG, I haven’t looked.
If you have a large enough group (5 is bare minimum, and it really gets going with 7 or more), The Resistance The Resistance | Board Game | BoardGameGeek) is a really fun game. It’s a bluffing and social engineering game. Everyone is part of a Resistance cell, trying to overthrow the government - but some of us are traitors, who are going to sell us out to the government. Each turn, a leader picks members to go on a mission, everyone votes to approve it, then those on the mission secretly pick success/failure cards. Even one failure means the mission fails.
Palette is a really unique one. I notice the boardgamegeek link says it’s a “children’s game.” In reality, it’s among the hardest games I’ve ever played. The rules are simple - you pick a colored chip out of a bag and stare at it about a minute. Then you put it back, and pick out the same shade from an assortment of color wheels. It’s incredibly difficult to remember exact shades, especially when there’s 50 colors of blue to choose from, and it’s one of those games that’s engaging for all ages.
Gah–I’m glad that appeals to some people, but it’s hard for me to imagine a game I’d hate more, at least one that didn’t involve scalpels or hungry rodents.
My two contributions:
Seven Dragons isn’t a board game, but the OP mentions card games. It’s simple enough that my five-year-old can play it, and is pretty fun, unlike most games she can play (Candyland twitch twitch). The art is gorgeous, paintings by Larry Elmore I think, and it plays a bit like a cross between Dominos and Uno.
Boardgamewise, one of my favorites is Small World. You play one of a handful of fantasy races that battle for control of a map that’s too small for everyone to fit on. Over the course of about eight turns, you have to decide when to put your current civilization into decline and pick up a new civilization. Each race gets randomly assigned an adjective, and the combination of race and adjective leads to a lot of interesting permutations. It’s pretty fast-paced and silly, and you get to screw over other players without anyone getting annoyed because it’s impossible not to screw over other players. Good times.
Whoever manages to get deck that can buy provinces first, usually wins. The game has the potential for a lot more variety than “maximize buying power”. I like the deck building mechanic, but the game needs some tweaking to have more variety.