With Gen Con this weekend, I have Board Games on the mind. What games are you playing right now?
Lately, Mars: Red Planet and The Stars Are Right.
I’m keeping Glorantha - The Gods War for my friend who didn’t his wife to see the massive game he spent close to a thousand dollars on.
Games I played in July: Q.E., Tiny Epic Mechs, Gizmos, Century: Spice Road, 12 Days of Christmas, 5-Minute Dungeon, Escape Plan, Fairy Tale, Lords of Waterdeep, Blue Lagoon, Space Base, and Tiny Towns.
Pandemic and chess. 
I recently played an odd game of Clue. Online.
(Is it still a board game online? Hmmm?)
Whenever I visit my nephew, he wants to play something called Citadels. Basically, you’re trying to be the first to build a fantasy-medieval city, through the use of various characters you choose each turn: The Thief can steal another player’s gold, the Warlord can destroy one of the districts in another player’s city, and so on.
We’ve also recently played Risk, Risk: Europe, and Ticket to Ride (US version), which I think are more familiar.
Last month:
Ticket to Ride
Castle Panic (which is super fun and quick)
Carcassone (does that count as a board game?)
Betrayal at House on the Hill
Coming up:
Clue: Master Detective (expanded version of Clue)
Pandemic
Red Dragon Inn
Axis & Allies & Zombies
probably one or two others…
Wingspan, Codenames: Duet, Lanterns.
My son has gotten his mom and me into Ticket to Ride and Dominion, which I guess is more card game than board game, but we’ve been playing that a lot.
Terraforming Mars has been a trend lately. Before that it was Brass: Birmingham.
Yeah, Citadels is more of a card than board game, too, but I was assuming that we were using a broad enough definition that it qualifies.
Just bought Dead of Winter - it’s really good !
Other than that, lately we’ve been playing Gloomhaven, Arkham Horror (the board game), Betrayal At The House On The Hill and 7th Continent
FWIW everything you play on a table is what I meant so things like Dominion and Carcassonne are spot on…
We like Spirit Island (board game) and Sentinels of the Multiverse (card game).
We just got Dungeon Mayhem, a short and fast card game, and that’s a lot of fun.
I’ve been playing a semi-regular game of Betrayal at the House on the Hill, Betrayal Legacy, which is pretty good. I’m a real sucker for legacy games, and enjoy them even when I don’t much care for the games they’re based on.
I’ve also played Twilight Imperium 4th Edition twice so far this calendar year which, if you are familiar with the game, is something of a triumph.
It’s the opposite for me. I’ve been playing TM for over a year but I just got introduced to Brass: Birmingham last month at Dice Tower Con. Now that I know there are solo rules for it I want to see if it is available in stores.
Citadels is a great little game, but I’ve only ever played it with five or six players - does it work with two?
In the last couple of weeks I’ve played 6 Nimmt, Land Unter (both classic card games of a similar stripe), and had an epic game of Santorini which took almost an hour with both players looking like they might win, I got pushed out right at the end though and lost. Pleasingly I took revenge by beating my opponent at Twilight Struggle. I was playing as the US for the first time and since I had a slight lead in points about halfway through, he conceded defeat at that stage (more typical is for the USSR to be up several points early on, with most of the better cards for the US coming later in the game).
I’ve also been tryi to get the hang of Hanabi with a couple of colleagues, there is a separate old thread on that game if anyone cares to search for it.
Two-player Citadels is basically the four-player version, except each player picks two characters each round. And, of course, you don’t get the political element that shows up in all games of more than two players. It does seem like it’d be great with more, but it still works fine with two.
Just picked one up this weekend that we’ll probably try at the next game lunch:
Game play looks pretty basic (lot of pieces though). Says it plays in 30-45 minutes with 3-6 players - so perfect for a lunch hour when you figure in the learning curve.
Got it for $7 new in the box at (of all places) GameStop. Worth a try, for the nostalgia if nothing else.
One of my favorites that came out last year is Architects of the West Kingdom.
To use gamer jargon, it’s a fairly straight-forward worker placement game, where the amount of workers you build up on a location determines the amount of rewards you receive. But it has an interesting mechanic that allows you to capture workers from a location; so as you build up workers at a location, you make yourself an increasingly attractive target.
I love mechanics like that, where limits arise naturally from the game play rather than being arbitrarily imposed by the rules.