Hullo! I'm a big board game fan, and wonder how much crossover there is with this forum. My favorite game is an abstract strategy game that I don't recommend to most people. However, I do enjoy more approachable stuff like "Camel Up". I recently enjoyed the 1912 Ticket to Ride Expansion. Anyone else?
I love board games, though after breaking up with my girlfriend, I only play them occasionally. Terraforming Mars is my favorite one. Also, I like the extremely expensive and lesser-known niche of tabletop miniature games.
Have you played the new version of Terraforming Mars that Came out last year? Ares Expedition, I think it was called.
Yep, I'm a pretty big fan. My whole family is, actually, so our smallish collection of board games are mostly the family-friendly type and have an hour max playtime. Some of the games we own include: Jaipur, Cottage Garden, Kingdomino, Big Book of Madness, Forbidden Island, Horrified, Stuffed Fables, and Alien: Fate of the Nostromo. We also just added The Grim Forest over Christmas, but we've yet to play it.
I like board games and have several. But I suspect I might not like them for the reasons their creators intended. It's the sheer decadence: the ludicrous fantasy that as many as four other people might come round my house, and not only that: they might spend 4 or 8 hours or even several weeks pretending to be coal-haulage businesses, or medieval town-planners, or Napoleonic diplomats. Secondhand copies of old games are often only couple of quid, and the charity shops have stacks of them - but I only have space in the house for the intensest, most over-embellished examples of the art. Reading the rules of a board game and looking at the counters enables me to experience what rich people used to fill their minds with in their grotesquely-expansive free time. Were they anything like me? As players become more experienced they will recognise the parallels between the moves they made and the military and political strategies of the Napoleonic years - the strength of the closely grouped force, but the slowness of its movement; the quick successes of the very light force, but its vulnerability to sudden counter attack; the need of allies when menaced by a skilful (and perhaps lucky) opponent, but the need to keep open a line of retreat should the ally prove untrustworthy.... Campaign is a game to be studied as well as played. No of course they weren't! Rich people in 1971 were complete aliens.
Unfortunately, not yet. But it's on my to-buy list. Saw it when I was exploring Stockholm in search of nerdy shops, so it's probably gonna be in my collection soon
That's nothing compared to the sheer delusions of video game fans (including myself). For only a few dollars, you can delight your ego in the pretense that you are the world's ruler. Or a courageous knight. Or a super-duper soldier that can singlehandedly take down thousands of aliens. All of that when in reality you just press buttons on a keyboard and look at a bunch of pixels on your screen, dancing to create colorful illusions
I have a little collection of wargames (some Avalon Hill stuff, a couple GMT games, Axis and Allies, etc.) I really need to purge it--it's damn hard to find someone to buy them, though. I really only play one of them with any regularity anyway. Viktory II is an excellent game. I can recommend it to anyone who likes strategy. It uses hexes like cataan does (although they are much smaller) so the game is entirely different each time, and the size of the map is adjustable as well. The rules are really simple, so you can teach them in about 15 minutes. Pretty deep strategy, too. I've been playing it once a week for months now with a friend and neither of us have gotten close to tired of it. What sets this game apart is its total elegance and complete lack of pointless minutiae. It's really incredible; I haven't found anything else like it.
The only board game I ever truly loved was called Samurai. It was a little like chess and each samurai had a detachable sword. If you could position a piece of yours, opposite an opponent’s, you could remove their sword and render them ‘weak’. Face then again, while weak, and you get to remove the piece from the board. It was brilliant. Damn! Can’t find any images so it may not have been called Samurai.
That’s it! How did you find that?? I did an image search on ‘samurai board game’ and not a single one of them was the one I remember. And now I know the manufacturer, I’ve found an image of the actual version I had.
Goodness, I feel a bit staid in this company. The only board game I genuinely enjoy is Scrabble, though Trivial Pursuit can be a lot of fun with the right folks.
Same. I only became aware of the wider boardgame community a few years ago. The new, overly complicated games can be fun after you learn the many, many unintuitive rules, but accessibility can be a challenge. "Catan" type of games are easy enough, but the only boardgames I truly want to play are SCRABBLE and chess.
I haven't played chess in years. Back in the seventies and eighties, I used to play by myself using a book I found to set up problems for me to solve. Never got very good, but it was fun.
Have you ever tried banangrams? I played it last night again. It's a faster scrabble. Definitely not the same, and missing the same slow puzzliness, but a good alternative in a more restricted time/group
I like this, too, but I’m bloody hopeless. I think ‘trivial’ is a bit misleading because the questions are anything but.
I have kind of a trivial mind, so do okay with everything but sports. I am miserably bad at sports trivia.
My strongest suits are history and science. I do okay at literature, sports and geography. Absolutely suck at entertainment. I'm reasonably good at chess, but hopeless at go. I rock at snakes & ladders.
My kids and I like to play Jumanji. We have the original game that came out with the movie and my wife recently got an upgraded version they released that has an actual screen instead of the red plastic card revealer on the old one. It same fun though...and yes I make the bump bump bump bump bump bump noise when my kids draw a card....
