We have 215 games and have only played 10 of those!
Every GenCon vlog I’ve seen has shown people lining up for that game…looks interesting, I expect to be playing it later this month.
I have 275 different games that I own, not counting variants (like the 23 versions of Ticket to Ride) or expansions, which would add another couple of hundred. Yeah, I like games!
I grew up playing games regularly with my family, and often still do when we get together. I got together with my group by happenstance in 1975, when a friend asked if I was interested in joining a bunch of guys who were getting together that evening to play a naval war game (SPI’s Frigate). We had a good time and decided to do it again, and a few weeks later decided to make it a regular thing. The friend I went with for the first game never played with us again, but I am still grateful for that first introduction.
If anyone wants Comic Hunters now, it’s available at Barnes and Noble. Both online and in store.
This week I’ve played Darwin’s Journey, The Deadlies, Gnome Hollow, Hegemony, Messina 1347, Red7, Super Mega Lucky Box, Tir na nOg (yes, that’s the correct spelling), and Tribes of the Wind (which is the only game that’s mine).
I love that one! One of my friends and myself are huge movie buffs, we always have to be on different teams to make it fair.
Some other games I’ve played recently are:
Gloomhaven
Pandemic
Dominion
Horrified
Shipwreck Arcana
Code Names
Here to Slay
Forbidden Island
Dang. Where do you live again? Those are some interesting games, I might invite myself over. Hegemony has been on our list for a little while…
Rochester, NY, which has a big gaming community.
I got to play a couple new games at a friend’s party two weeks ago.
Forest Shuffle is a card-drafting game where you plant tree cards from your hand in your forest and then supplement them with other forest flora and fauna by putting those cards to the top, bottom, and both sides of the trees. Trees are drawn into your hand from the deck or from “the meadow”, a discard location holding nine cards face up. When a tenth card is discarded into the meadow, all the discards are taken away. There are three winter cards, shuffled into the bottom 1/3rd of the deck. When the third one comes up, the game is over.
This was really fun one with a lot of ways to win. I concentrated on building up two warrens of rabbits with a couple supplementary foxes, and got some bonus points for having a stand of four beech trees, ending up in second. Other players concentrated on birds, bushes, or highly varied forests (you can get bonus points for having one of each of the eight tree types in your forest). HIghly recommended.
The other new one I played was also set in a forest - Root. I didn’t like this one as much the first go-around - the asymmetry in powers and goals was a bit too hard for me to keep track of. Some of it might have been a mismatch between faction and play style - I was the cats who have a straightforward dominate-the-forest mission while, when playing a new game, I prefer to appear inobtrusive and nonthreatening until the endgame approaches. So a different faction might have appealed to me more. I’d like to try it again to see if I get it better the next time, but it wasn’t an insta-winner for me like Forest Shuffle was.
This is implemented on BGA, including the Alpine expansion, and I’ve played several hundred times. I like it a lot, obviously, and I keep finding different ways to attack it.
I’ve never played the physical version, and suspect that counting endgame points takes a little while.
Root is a 4x ( explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) war game, masquerading as a cute forest ramble. Because of that asymmetry you mention it’s the kind of game that works best when everyone has the same level of experience.
I also didn’t enjoy my first couple of plays (I played the birds), and I’m still on the fence about it, but will try again.
It was maybe 3-4 minutes, at the end, so not too bad. We counted trees, sides, top-and-bottoms, and overall bonuses, and generally the two later folks in sequence had theirs totalled up by the time it came around to them. It also made for a good time to talk strategy with the other players and see how their plays made the score.
Yeah, that wasn’t the case with us. We had to break it up before finishing, though, and the issue was still in doubt. It’s hard, the first time around, to see where the threat is coming from and how to protect yourself from it.
Just wanted to say that as the OP of this thread several years ago, I really enjoy that it is still going and I enjoy reading everyone’s responses. It’s a fun hobby. And now, hopefully, I didn’t just kill the thread 
I’ve searched for an iOS and Steam version without success - which non-physical edition are you playing?
He is playing it on Board Game Arena. A web site that lets you play digital versions of hundreds of Board Games.
Exactly right. I’m always glad to play on it if anyone is interested, either real time or asynchronously. And you can play many of the games for free, or for the premium games be hosted by a paying member.
Game list: Games • Board Game Arena
My wife isn’t into games. I posted on the local FB group that I’d like to learn Go, and it looks like I have some options when the weather puts the kibosh on my other projects.
I’ve been playing Backgammon on my computer. I just learned how to (with assistance from SDMB) last year. It’s my go-to time-waster. I do have a Backgammon set that I bought over 20 years ago (along with the Go game). I don’t know if I can entice my wife to play.
In a few days I’ll get a classic set of wooden Hoyle dominoes. I have a much better ‘ivory’ set. The thing is, I’ve forgotten how to play.
I have a new chess set, since my wife mentioned it once. We haven’t played.
I have Othello. That’s a game my wife likes and is familiar with, but I think I’m too competitive.
Along with the Hoyle dominos, I’m getting a cribbage game. I have no clue how to play it. I’ll see if I can learn online.
Another teacher at my school is a giant boardgamer, and he’s started a semi-regular board game meetup for school staff, which is delightful. So I’ve played a handful of new games over the past month or so:
- Letters from Whitechapel: Most of the players are 19th-century London detectives. One player is Jack the Ripper. In each round of the game, Jack murders a prostitute and then tries to escape to his hideout, while the detectives look for him. If he eludes discovery five (?) nights, he wins. It’s an interesting asymmetric game, but to be honest the super-grim subject matter made it not so fun for me.
- Bohnanza: a cartoonish bean-trading game. It was pretty fun.
- Canvas: this was one of my favorites. You overlay three transparent cards with painting elements on them against a colorful background to create a painting, and do this three(?) times before the end of the game, scoring points according to the elements of the paintings. I’m pretty terrible at games like Dixit in which beautiful images are key to gameplay, but in this game, the gameplay is based around a set of symbols on each card, which I can much better wrap my head around. You strategize around points for your painting, and then when it’s done you can admire it for being all pretty and stuff.
- Wormholes: if this game were exactly the same except it was railroads, I woulda hated it. But it was spaceships, so I had a lot of fun. Players operate passenger spaceships in a cluster of star systems, ferrying passengers from one location to the other. The trick is that you can build up to five wormhole systems, creating shortcuts from one end of the map to the other. You can use other players’ wormholes, but they get a point every time you use one. I think this game would stand up to a lot of replay, and probably has some great emergent strategy that I didn’t figure out on my first play.
Some of my favourites are Summoners War, Bang: The Dice Game, King Of Tokyo, Unstaple Unicorns, Coup, The Mind and Marvel Zombies. My favourite genre is Social Deduction.
Did you see what you did there?
I did, in fact. Thank you for noticing!
BGA has implemented a second expansion (Woodland Edge) and it’s very different from Alpine; in both expansions I’m still finding interesting new ways to win (and lose). Once they allow the expansions to be combined online (currently not allowed because the publisher asked them to not throw them together yet) it will be really interesting. I suspect butterflies may supplant wolves/deer as a hell of a engine.