I’ve always liked board games. They are a combination of math (probability), art (looks), and writing (storylines). One of my goals someday is to have a room where the walls are covered with the boards, covers, and pieces of board games. I’m always picking them up at garage sales and such.
Do you all have any favorites?
Also to the non-Americans - are their any in your country that are unique that we might not find here in the US?
I guess mine are the classics like Monopoly and Sorry and then the party games like Pictionary.
I very rarely get to play board games, but there are a few I enjoy:
I like Monopoly in theory, but I’m not sure a game has ever turned out to actually be fun.
I used to love Trivial Pursuit, but the old questions are dated and the new questions are just too “lowbrow”. It would be so easy for other people to make replacement question cards, I wish I could find some good ones.
Pictionary is one of my favourites. Sometimes I play an online version (just drawing and guessing for points, the board game part is missing), although I’ve been avoiding it for some time now. It can be fun, I should drag myself back.
Similar to Pictionary is Cranium, which I’ve only played once or twice. Imagine the same sort of game, except instead of landing on a square and rolling a die to see which category you draw from, you’ll be rolling so see whether you need to draw normally, draw blind, make the word with plasticine, answer some kind of question or mime something.
Risk is awesome. I don’t get to play it in board game form, though, just on my computer.
I love board games. For Monopoly to be fun, you have to get people to play by the rules as written. Putting all the tax money under Free Parking, and not conducting the auctions makes the game go on forever, because it puts too much money into the game, and it keeps all the properties from getting sold
I love Clue, but my mother always wins. I have to play it somewhere where my mother isn’t.
Around the time Win95 came out, you could get all the great games for PC, but they have never been updated, and “compatibility mode” no longer works.
I used to use a virtual machine with 95 or 98 (I don’t remember which) just for Chip’s Challenge. Maybe it’s worth it for some of those games you’re talking about.
Give me a big table, a copy of Talisman with a couple of expansion boards, and four or five good friends, and I’m good for a looooooooong evening anytime.
Germany is to board games what Hollywood is to movies. A lot of the best ones get imported, but there are still hundreds made there every year that never get translated.
This is a lot less true than it used to be. There are quality board games coming out of France, Belgium, and Poland (to name 3) Even the US is getting better at making strategy games.
In fact the issue now is that there are so many that it is hard to find the best ones.
Recent games I like include Suburbia, Lewis & Clark, and Myrmes.
I like Concordia but need to play again to confirm my opinion.
Not sure that last one goes in the ‘boardgames’ category. Though I generally prefer RPGs to boardgames when we’re talking about “Tabletop games”. Though I also generally prefer other games to D&D even in that space.
Never understood the love of Monopoly. It’s a really unpleasant game, even played ‘as written’. Actually, the older I get, the less I like games with high degrees of randomness.
I think Germany has somewhat lost its huge edge in the boardgame market. I think they just call them “Euro Games” now, though the Wikipedia entry redirects to “German Style Board Games”
Technically not a board game, but my son and I have been playing a lot of Dominion lately (thanks in part to the thread Bricker linked to above). It’s a deck-building game: you start with a small hand of weak cards and gradually build it up to a winning deck by acquiring more cards. The repeated shuffle adds a good degree of randomness.
Use to play a ton of Scrabble with family and at ISC.RO, but haven’t for a few years and miss it like a dear friend that moved away. Words With Friends is not even close.
