So, what is the best game?

The Game Room
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We have a thread on some of the worst board games, So I figure we should have a thread on some of the best ones.

Some of my favorites:

Concordia: One of my favorite euros. I like that it has more player interaction than most euros without being conflict-driven and that it has no hidden information.

Suburbia: A drafting city-building game. You buy tiles from a central pool and add them to your city. There are various combinations of tiles which earn (or cost) you money or population.

Fidelitas: A card game. Everyone plays cards from their hand to a central tableau. The cards let you move the cards around in the tableau. Everyone has secret goals of certain combinations they want to set up in the tableau.

Gizmos: A nice engine building game. You collect marbles and then spend them to buy cards, which represent machines. As your machines get more complicated, you can collect more marbles and build bigger machines.

Kingdom Builder: Area control. You are placing little houses out on the board. When one player has all the houses out, the game ends. But there are variable ways to score points, which change every game and the person who builds the last house doesn’t necessarily win. There are also variable board set-ups, which give players different possible bonus powers.

Architects of the West Kingdom: A recent favorite. A worker placement game. I like the fact that there are very few artificial limits on the placement of your workers. The limit develops from the way that you make yourself a more vulnerable target the more you concentrate your pieces in one location.

Some other favorites: Actionworks, CV, Dice City, Fabled Fruit, Fields of Green, Gugong, Iki, Kemet, Millions of Dollars, Oh My Goods, Orleans, Panamax, Path of Light and Shadow, Rise of Tribes, Sagrada, Space Base, Stockpile, Yokohama, Zombicide

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I screwed up the title. It’s supposed to be “So, what is the best game?”

I’ve asked the mods to fix it.

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[Moderating]

Slight, unimportant typo in title corrected :slight_smile:

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You mentioned Zombicide already which I love. Very fun cooperative board game. I also love Flash Point: Fire Rescue, another cooperative game but your job is to help control a fire raging through a building while searching for missing people trapped in the fire and trying to rescue them all before the building collapses. Each round has the fire flare up and spread, while you run around trying to put out little blazes, remove hazardous materials before they detonate, and investigate where people might be.

There are different buildings with unique challenges and players take on different roles with strengths and weaknesses, like Zombicide or Pandemic. I really recommend it. A game is usually quick to set up and often doesn’t take more than an hour or two and can be played by a couple people or up to a half dozen.

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Sometimes I’m in the mood to play a co-op game. They’re good because players with different levels of gaming experience can play together. In addition to the ones you mentioned, I also like Castle Panic.

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Amazingly, I own over 100 board games, and yet your favorites and my collection only overlap on one, Sagrada (which we do like). But faves for us are Race for the Galaxy, Twilight Struggle, Agricola, Dominion, Takenoko, Power Grid, and 7 Wonders.

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I always liked Suspicion. It was TSR’s (the guys who published D&D) attempt to bump up the role-playing aspects of Clue. I just watched a rideo on Suspciomand ther were a few thing sings different bachnd. The flip ismeuencangtnan nynerweroiuyruyrte45678990-==5431216754S
sorry computer gone a bit whaked. will try to finish on another

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Any, at a set point, the game master who may of may not be bdcedcvgrhytom. When the lights go out, the killer can kill agan, as many as hw wasnt kn eeryipone kne me. He hugs me, and I grab him and pronoundecd the nurdered, ij33e hee

I need to go tp bed.

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I own Twilight Struggle, Agricola, Dominion, Power Grid, and 7 Wonders. But they’re not among my favorites.

Have you played Roll Player? I could best describe it as a more difficult version of Sagrada.

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I forgot to mentionTerraforming Mars.

I haven’t seen Roll Player, but I’ll take a look. Based on how we match so far, I don’t have high hopes. :smiley:

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I am a big Ticket to Ride fan. It seems to have a nice balance of simplicity/complexity, luck/strategy, game length, and pretty straightforward to pick up.

Agricola will never get old (because you couldn’t get through all the different profession/minor improvement combos if you played it till the sun cooled) but I understand it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. The tenth+ games you play are a lot better than the first

If we’re allowed card games in here, my family has had SO MUCH FUN over Munchkin, in its day (for the jokes, rather than the game mechanics admittedly)

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I’m not a huge fan of Munchkin. My experience has been that, like you said, a lot of the fun in the game comes from the jokes. And after you’ve heard the jokes for the third or fourth or fifth time, their humor wears pretty thin.

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The basic mechanic of dice drafting is similar to Sagrada. Each player has their own unique board, there’s a central pool of dice that get rolled, and then players draft dice in turn order to fill in their board.

In Sagrada, you’re building a stained glass window. In Roll Player, you’re creating a D&D character. You have six “stats” (Charisma, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Strength, Wisdom) and you’re going to place three dice in each one during the course of the game.

But your character sheet has a range for each stat and you want your total score in each stat to be within the right range. And the dice are different colors and you have a backstory card which gives you points for placing certain colors in certain locations. And each of the stats has a power, which you can use when you place a die in that area. And the dice are placed on numbered cards from lowest to highest and there are cards you can buy which give you bonuses but they’re sold in turn order based on which card you pick. And there’s an alignment card which you have to maneuver around on. And coins you have to earn and spend. And set collection of the cards.

So picking which die to draft in Roll Player means you have to juggle more different considerations than you do in Sagrada. And this is just the base game; the expansions add new levels of complexities.

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Is this thread related to Android games? If so, the Loop: Energy is the best IMO. It said to be an anti-stress game. If someone tends to play Android games, it’s worth trying. The concept of the game is to create the power supply to light the bulbs. Each level becomes harder than the previous level and you need to think carefully to complete each level. It’s been several days after starting the game. In the beginning, I was annoyed as I could not complete at least the first levels. But now I’m a bit familiar with it.

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My favorite board game is definitely Terraforming Mars. I’ve soloed it over 1000 times. It’s cards offer endless variations, and thus chances to maximize your play with analysis, yet individually are all very easy to understand and comprehend. None of the abstract “if you have 3 red dice and 2 wineskins, you may trade 4 buggityboos to increase your Pip Track by 1” stuff which doesn’t mean anything to me. Just stuff like “spend 6 M€ to increase your money production by 2.”

My second favorite solo board game is Agricola because as others have said the cards prevent it from getting old.

My favorite multiplayer game is another Rosenberg, A Feast for Odin. My favorite amount of player interaction would be somewhere in between Agricola and Feast for Odin since they both use the worker placement mechanic, but Agricola has few enough squares that you are stepping on each others toes too much whereas Feast for Odin has so many that it feels more like a solo game. But I still give it the nod because it is so freaking pretty. As a viking you can explore new islands, and their bright yet pastoral colors and small map size give it a dreamy, almost psychedelic quality.

My second favorite multiplayer game is Puerto Rico. It has just enough randomness to make it different each time. But it has little randomness and the right choice to make is obvious most of the time, so you can plan up to 8 turns ahead of time if you know your opponents.

Also, for some reason, the culture of both games is unlike that of Terraforming Mars and a lot of other board games, where there always has to be one person who points out the player who is supposedly “ahead” and tells people they should direct their attacks toward that player. Then, if they can convince people on the margins that you need to be taken down even if they’re wrong or lying, the game stops being a test of your playing ability but a test of your raw charisma, and there are enough of those in everyday life that I’d rather not have those in a board game. I have yet to see someone in Feast for Odin or Puerto Rico say something like “you shouldn’t take the Prospector because then Joe will take the trader and win!” I don’t mind if people figure that out on their own and attack me because I am the clear winner, I just hate it when people try to convince everyone to gang up on me.

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I know it’s a classic but I’ll admit I’ve never played Puerto Rico. And while I’d like to try it, I don’t think it’s a game I would love.

From what I’ve heard of it, it’s a game that embraces the idea of optimal strategy. So much so, that I’ve heard of arguments about seating order around the table. It sounds like one of those games where the “fun” of the game is learning the optimal strategy and once you’ve learned it, all you do is follow it. An experienced player is supposed to know what he is going to do throughout the game before it even begins.

Other games which give me this same impression are Root and Terra Mystica - and I’m not crazy about either one of those.

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The games I have most enjoyed recently include Concordia: Salsa (an expansion to the original that improves it further - not so much the addition of salt, a commodity that can take the place of any other as needed, but because of additional tiles that give you more power to do things.

I’m also a big fan of Twilight Struggle. Unfortunately I rarely have the necessary 3-4 spare hours to play either of these at the moment.

For shorter, abstract, strategy games I like Onitama, Hive, and Santorini.

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I really like Brass – right now I think I prefer the Lancashire map.
I like Terraforming Mars – but I think the expansions may dilute the deck too much. Hellas/Elysium is fine, and Prelude speeds up the game.
I like a LOT of games and have a hard time ranking them.

Brian

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I’ve never played Root, and Terra Mystica is technically not like that because in the variant I’ve played, the turn order varies from turn to turn. Plus the optimal strategy varies by race and game since you have different goals. It is non-random enough though that I can see how arguments would start about how a player has an advantage due to a race being imbalanced.

I didn’t like it myself due to the players that liked to play it with me being very slow. The slowness is compounded since in Terra Mystica, once you’ve finished your turn the opponents still have the option to do things, so if you’re done then they can AP to their hearts content by themselves for quite awhile. Even worse is that if you finish early you usually aren’t doing so hot, so you’re hanging around doing nothing for the privilege of probably losing.

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Given we all may be housebound, it might be worth mentioning board game apps… Which ones do you think are good?

Twilight Struggle: mediocre opponent. I only recommended it for learning the game.
Race for the Galaxy: excellent app. It has one slight glitch that shows up maybe every 40 games or so, and it’s not that big a glitch. I will add that the app is smart enough to sometimes gamble on a leeeching strategy, which is pretty sophisticated.
Puerto Rico: this will put up a decent fight, and is worth owning.
Potion explosion: I don’t actually own the physical game, but my wife and I use it a lot as a pass and play.
Onirim: this is just a really elaborate game of solitaire, with actual decision making, but it’s certainly a good distraction.
Onitama: The app is a poor player.

Two that I own, but haven’t played yet and welcome questions on:
Tokaido: to be honest this doesn’t seem much of a game, I just played it for the first time last night. I’ll give it a little more time. It was free on the App Store for some reason as of a couple of days ago.
Le Havre: I haven’t figured out the rules to this yet, and I think I’ve owned the app for two years. Probably a good time to take a shot at it.: