Yep, I try to secure an orange monopoly with trades where I can and, if not, the reds are my second choice, then maybe the purples, and I’ll gladly give up yellows, greens, or blues to complete those trades (and most people are not savvy enough that they’ll even give me extra cash in hand for those, and then I can develop on those properties while they’re cash starved and can’t on theirs). And I time those times based on board position, of course. That’s not even getting into intermediate strategy, even, but the vast majority of Monopoly players don’t even get that far.
(ETA: Free Parking is not the most landed on square. It’s Jail, followed by Illinois Ave, Go, B&O Railroad, and then Free Parking. But there are “Go to” cards involved for all those.)
I’m pretty sure Free Parking is landed on more often than Jail (not to be confused with Go to Jail, which is not landed on terribly often). I wasn’t counting the spaces that had cards directing you there, I was talking purely about how often the space was landed on.
You can make the argument that Candyland and Chutes and Ladders aren’t actually games. They are activities that have the trappings of games that teach kids how to play games. There is no agency or player decisions (except the shortcut in Candyland that you would never not take), just random movement. And that’s good. Kids need “games” like that.
I have a copy of this and have played it a couple of times - not enough for me to make a fair judgement. But I think it’s main issue is too much time working out game mechanics, not enough time playing the game. So, like Risk, maybe a computer version would be better?
Well played.
Boardgamegeek.com is a fantastic resource. But Tic Tac Toe is not the worst game, by a long way - mainly because you only ever waste five minutes playing it. Also, while most adults can very quickly learn perfect strategy, it does at least have a strategy.
As for me, I’m genuinely struggling to think of a game I hate so much that if it comes to the table, I’ll get up and do something else rather than play it. I’m not a big fan of Tsuro, which it seems to me doesn’t have much strategy or skill to it (but maybe I’m just not patient enough to sit there and work out how the board will look in three moves’ time). It does let you create penis shapes though, so it has that going for it.
Not true. Candyland has two demographics: very young children, and the poor hapless adults stuck playing Candyland with them. I was until recently part of the latter demographic.
This, however, is exactly right. Candyland is a terrible game, but it’s a great tutorial for how to play games. We added a tiny bit of choice to the game (draw two cards, choose which one to play), which even then wasn’t a meaningful choice, because one card was always objectively the right choice. But that variation teaches the idea that in a game, you look at your options and at your position before you complete your turn.
I will say this in favor of Life: The plastic pieces that you stuck on the board to make the path three-dimensional were cool.
Of the pure-luck kiddie “games”, I’d say that Candyland is the least bad of the lot, because at least it’s bounded. With Chutes and Ladders (AKA Snakes and Ladders), there’s the risk of having to start over and play the entire game again, just when you’d almost finished. Worse even than Chutes and Ladders, though, is War. That just goes on forever.
The worst game is Harpoon. There are 10 people on the planet who actually know how to play, and none of them possess the communication skills to explain it to anyone else.
Tsuro has plenty of strategy to it. There is an element of chance, sure, but that’s true of any game I can think of (if for no other reason than you can’t know for certain what your opponent will do). The most important skill is (obviously) being able to figure out where you will end up with the tiles you place and not inadvertently killing yourself. but also keeping track of the other players and getting in their way, and/or staying away from them to avoid collisions. The best part of the game for me is when you realize that you are going to lose no matter what you do, but one loss involves a collision so at least you can take someone down with you, which can be a victory of sorts.
I can understand not everyone loving the game; it can be fun but it’s not a great game (it’s pretty simple) and it’s definitely not among my favorites. But it’s a fast game to play and I rarely turn it down if others want to play. One thing I find interesting is that you know that you can’t last forever, eventually you will end up going off the edge, but your goal is just to survive longer than the other players. There’s a neat little nod to mortality in that.
Apparently Tom Clancy used the Harpoon board game as a source when writing Hunt of Red October and credited it in an author’s note for Red Storm Rising. So I’m guessing he’s one of your ten.
Texas hold’em poker has to be the lamest card game I’ve ever seen. There’s no strategy whatsoever other than deciding whether to bet or fold. And people actually watch that shit on TV.
I played Star Wars monopoly and quite liked it. Seemed to have cut out a lot of the bad parts of the regular game and was over in a reasonable amount of time.
