Twilight Struggle is one of the highest ranking games in BGG history, and deservedly so. It held the overall #1 ranking for years and years after it was published, and is still one of the oldest games in the overall top hundred (newer games get lots of enthusiastic votes but tend to fall off over time).
There’s a bit of a learning curve, mainly because it’s very helpful to know when the various cards come into play. Lots of replayability and an excellent complexity:time investment ratio. I can’t recommend it enough. However, it’s definitely a “heavy” game rather than a casual one.
Look for the deluxe version. It has a few extra cards and a much nicer board.
Ever played Fluxx? Probably the real game closest to Calvinball, in spirit.
Basic rules are simple: draw one card, play one card. But playing cards changes the rules and goals, so no game is ever the same.
There are a ton of different versions and expansions, such as Star Fluxx, Zombie Fluxx, Batman Fluxx, Monty Python Fluxx, Jewish Fluxx (seriously!), etc., so there’s bound to be one with a theme that appeals to you.
More fun with more players (the more players the more chaotic it gets), but it will work for 2.
I would argue that it’s crippling flaw is the fact that entire game is basically random and that nothing you do really has any great influence on the progress of the game, because the rules could and usually do change before anything you did has much chance to influence the game state (unless what you did was “win”).
Call me a curmudgeon, but games like this make me feel like I might as well be playing War.
I am familiar with drafting in Magic which as I understand Dominion is very similar to but I suspect my girlfriend would prefer Flip City so thanks for the follow up suggestion.
Keep them coming, great ideas for us in this thread.
The only reason I disagree is because there are plenty of games which are unabashedly random. Fluxx doesn’t make pretensions of strategy. The only point of the game is to make silly rule combinations. That’s fine! I don’t take issue with that sort of game from time to time. For maybe ten minutes. But Fluxx is fully capable of going on and on and on and on. And on. And on some more.
Deck building isn’t quite the same.
In a deck building game, you start with a very small hand of cards and add (usually) one card to your discard pile every turn. As you reshuffle your deck over and over again, you try to build an “engine” that drives you to earn more points by only selecting cards that create useful synergies in your deck.
Dominion is the progenitor of the genre (and is a very good game) but, as often happens when you are super innovative in a design space, other games have since improved on the formula.
As Johnny Bravo said, it’s a somewhat different mechanic. In Magic drafting, the players start b building a deck and then they play the game with the decks they’ve just built. In a deck building game, building the deck is the game itself.
The players each start with a small and limited deck, usually with about ten cards. There’s also a common pool of cards for players to buy. The players shuffle their starting decks and deal themselves a hand, usually five cards. These cards give them some resources which they can use to buy cards from the common pool. The purchased cards and the cards from the hand are then put in discard pile and the players draw a new hand. Every time the draw deck is emptied, the discard deck is shuffled and becomes the draw deck.
So after five rounds, for example, you’ll now have a deck of fifteen cards; your ten starting card and the five cards you’ve purchased and added to your deck. So when you deal out your five card hand, it will be a mix of your weak starting card and the better cards you added in. At some point, you’ll want to start thinning your deck by removing the weaker cards from it. That way every time you draw a hand, you’ll get a higher percentage of strong cards. Ideally you want a very small deck of really powerful cards that you keep recycling through.
I’ve always said there’s no strategy to Fluxx. But there are tactics. You’re generally going to have choices on which cards you play from your hand on any given turn and some combinations will do better for you than others.
More importantly, deckbuilders are what’s now called “multiplayer solitaire” games. While you are nominally at the same table as the person whom you are playing with, you’re really just comparing scores at the end of the game. What you do during the game tends to not matter too much to what the other person is doing.
Star Realms breaks that mold a tiny bit, in that you are nominally attacking the other player’s fleet of ships, but somehow it still feels like you’re really just picking things from a market and trying to tune combos. The other player’s plays are largely irrelevant to everything.
Magic the Gathering, on the other hand, is a stupendously interactive game where you are constantly looking at what your opponent put onto the table, and you’re varying what you do, what you hold back, and what you aim for based on that.
There’s relatively little overlap, beyond that they both use cards as their primary component.
How many games of Fluxx actually last two hours? One in a thousand? While the game theoretically can go on forever, in the real world the average game lasts for around twenty minutes.
Nothing to add to the suggestions, but you can play Dominion online for free. You can play against strangers or against someone you know. It’s nice because then you don’t have to do any setup/breakdown.
It’s been a while since I played it, but I’d guess that it depends on how many players you add in. It’s like with Uno, in a game of 2-4 people, you’re probably going to keep playing the game. If you get 20 people in a ring, playing it, the odds that the game keeps bouncing back and forth between the same 5-7 people, exluding half of the ring, starts approaching one. I suspect with Fluxx that once you get 6+ players, the odds are pretty decent that you’ll get a 30-120 minute game, and that’s just a silly spread.
If you just want something to do with your hands, while talking, a game like Sushi GO is probably better. Everyone is involved, you can play randomly if you want, no one is eliminated, you can socialize, you know how long the game will take, and the game doesn’t take any longer with more people.
A slightly different recommendation: Quarto. Imagine a gorgeously-crafted Tic-Tac-Toe set, with three differences, in increasing order of interest:
The grid is 4x4, and you have to get 4 in a row to win.
The sixteen pieces are wooden, and each piece is light or dark, tall or short, square or round, solid or hollow. You have to get 4 of ANY of these traits to win (that is, if you can place a piece that results in a row of four solid pieces, you win).
You don’t choose which piece to play; rather, you end your turn by handing your opponent the piece they get to play.
It’s not a game that supports years of play, but it’s a wonderful mind-bender of a game.
This is also my core complaint with most Eurogames, which usually minimize player conflict to one degree or another.
I was about to explain why I like deckbuilding games anyway, but then remembered that I was about to describe something I’ve already described. So I’ll let the ghost of Johnny past tell it.
This claim gets trotted out often, and it’s mostly rubbish. You react to your opponent doing things. Your opponent may play attack cards that influence you directly. Sure, you CAN play Dominion without paying attention to what your opponent is doing, but it’s a losing tactic at any level of play where your opponent cares enough to watch you. What your opponent does doesn’t “directly influence” you in poker either, and no one accuses that of being “multiplayer solitaire”.
My gaming group is currently playing Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 and I’m really enjoying it. My suggestion is that anybody buying Pandemic should purchase the legacy version (Season 1 only). You can play “regular” Pandemic with the legacy board and then, when you get bored with it, play legacy rules.
