First of all, I hate to be negative, but I have rarely had a less fun gaming experience than when playing Cranium. It has these weird random rules where you get on the fast track if you’re already doing well, which doesn’t seem to encourage a close or competitive game. Secondly, most of the questions and clues seemed ridiculously easy. I do enjoy the sculpting however.
My favorite straight board game is Tigris and Euphrates, which is perhaps the ultimate expression of simple elegant rules leading to incredible complexity. (Although in this case, “simple” means “compared to advanced squad leader”, not “compared to checkers”).
Recently, I’ve been very into Carcassonne, which, like Settlers, is a game that almost everyone likes. It involves playing tiles into an ever-growing landscape, building cities and roads, and placing your little guys in an attempt to score points. If you follow the official rules, it’s a bit too luck-based, but the rules are easily modified to overcome that. (For anyone who’s interested, in the official rules, each player draws one tile at random on her turn and must play it. Thus, much randomness. The way we play is that on a player’s turn, she flips over n+1 tiles, where n is the number of players. Then she plays one of them of her choice, the next player plays one, etc., until the flipper plays the last of the revealed tiles. Then the next player flips over another n+1, etc. This flattens out the luck, and it adds enormous strategic decisions, since you know what tiles are coming, what tiles you don’t want your opponents to have, etc.)
Oh, and all the Catan games are great, although Knights and Cities is the clear winner.
I also positively adore party games. My two favorites are homegrown pictionary and chain reaction.
In our version of pictionary, each player takes 3 or 4 sheets of paper and, on each one, writes a clue that she would like to see drawn, then folds them up and keeps them in front of her. The players then randomly divide into two teams. Players take turns, alternating between teams. On each player’s turn, she takes a clue from someone on the other team, reads it, and has a few seconds to decide whether to draw or challenge. If she decides to draw, she has 2 minutes to attempt to draw that clue for her teammates. If she succeeds, she gets 1 point, 2 points if she draws it within 1 minute. If she challenges, then whoever wrote the clue must attempt to draw it for his or her team. The team of the challenger still gets the points, but they are reversed (0 points for <1 minute, 1 point for <2 minutes, 2 points if it’s not drawn at all).
You play until all the clues are gone, and whichever team has the most points wins.
There are various things that, imho, make this lightyears ahead of regular pictionary, funwise:
-no silly all-plays where you’re trying to draw “dog” as fast as you possibly can
-no dice
-you can put in inside jokes
-it’s possible to communicate some pretty sophisticated clues in two full minutes. Things that have been succesfully drawn have included “Henry Kissinger”, “Saturday Night Live”, “contemplate”, “ambiance”, etc.
-few things are more fun than watching someone try to draw something that you thought up. But beware, if you make it too hard you’ll be challenged.
But Chain Reaction is the most fun game of all. (It’s loosely based on the bonus round of an old game show of the same name, but it was invented in its modern form while I was in college). Here’s how it works (you really need at least 8 to play):
-Each player takes 7 or so slips of paper, and on each one writes a clue. This can be anything that everyone has heard of which could be the answer to a simple question… ie “cancer”, “windmill”, “the san francisco giants”. These clues are all folded up and placed into a bowl.
-Divide into two teams.
-Teams take turns. While one team is going, one member of the team is the guesser, and the rest are askers. The guesser sits by himself. The askers huddle around, pull a clue out of the bowl, read it, and ask a question about it. The trick is that they have to take turns saying words, going around in a circle, forming a sentence. So if Al, Bob, and Charlie were the askers and the word was “Abraham Lincoln”, it would go something like this:
Al: Who
Bob: Was
Charlie: The
Al: President
Bob: Who
Charlie: Freed
Al: The
Bob: Slaves
Charlie: Question Mark (yes, he says “question mark” out loud).
Then the guesser tries to guess the answer, and either succeeds, or eventually gives up and passes (the askers can also pass). Once the clue is either gotten or passed, the askers pick up another one, and try to get as many as they can in 90 seconds. Then the other team goes. Repeat until the bowl is empty, and whichever team succesfully got the most clues wins.
What makes this game so fun is the ridiculously malformed questions that come up… perhaps the classic example being “Who flew an invisible breast?” (answer: Wonder Woman).
(there are a few other technicalities about how the game works… email me if you’re interested)
