Board Games You Love

[GagHalfrunt]

Can one of the people that voted for Monopoly please explain why? It's perhaps the most mind-numbingly tedious exercise in time wasting ever invented. It's what parents taught kids to do when the parents wanted to do something fun and had to keep the kids occupied for a couple of hours. There are few decisions and almost no strategy, it's just a long, pointless war of attrition.

 

[fatpat268]

Can one of the people that voted for Monopoly please explain why? It's perhaps the most mind-numbingly tedious exercise in time wasting ever invented. It's what parents taught kids to do when the parents wanted to do something fun and had to keep the kids occupied for a couple of hours. There are few decisions and almost no strategy, it's just a long, pointless war of attrition.

What's funny, is that modern monopoly took away one of the educational aspects of the game, counting cash, and replaced it with electronic banking.

 

[shortylickens]

Can one of the people that voted for Monopoly please explain why? It's perhaps the most mind-numbingly tedious exercise in time wasting ever invented. It's what parents taught kids to do when the parents wanted to do something fun and had to keep the kids occupied for a couple of hours. There are few decisions and almost no strategy, it's just a long, pointless war of attrition.

Once people start to own most of the property, there is some serious strategy to be found. Its best to speed up game play by randomly passing out 2 mortgage cards to each player. Same amount of starting cash. I played the computer version (the recent Windows one) and if you disable all the bullshit animations and just keep clicking through, you can beat a game in one sitting.

 

[Dr. Zaus]

Once people start to own most of the property, there is some serious strategy to be found. Its best to speed up game play by randomly passing out 2 mortgage cards to each player. Same amount of starting cash. I played the computer version (the recent Windows one) and if you disable all the bullshit animations and just keep clicking through, you can beat a game in one sitting.

Oh. I thought it was just people trolling...

 

[shortylickens]

No some folks really love Monopoly.
I dont.
In the table top days I never once completed a game. Computer is so much better. When you get bored, save and walk away.

 

[Bignate603]

How are you at bullshitting other people?

Balderdash.

The only drawback is the game is best played with 4-6 people, no more or less.

I came in here to post this. Awesome game as long as your friends aren't idiots.

We just played Settlers of Catan for the first time, that was very cool. It takes a huge amount of strategy.

 

[shortylickens]

I came in here to post this. Awesome game as long as your friends aren't idiots.

Thats probably why I never got invited to games.

 

[Stuxnet]

Cool. If you are playing the board game while watching the show then you should only get the first expansion after finishing out season 2.

I would then suggest waiting until you are done with the show for the second expansion.

Will do :thumbsup:

 

[Stuxnet]

Can one of the people that voted for Monopoly please explain why? It's perhaps the most mind-numbingly tedious exercise in time wasting ever invented. It's what parents taught kids to do when the parents wanted to do something fun and had to keep the kids occupied for a couple of hours. There are few decisions and almost no strategy, it's just a long, pointless war of attrition.

We play it quite a bit with our kids, both of whom love the game. We've started playing with a new house rule to speed the game up and make sure no one gets left behind because of a string of bad dice rolls:

For your first trip around the board, you MUST land on a property available for purchase. If you don't, then move forward until you reach the first available. No one pays rent the first time around, no Chance, Community Chest, Luxury Tax, Jail - NADA. Only property.

This does a very good job of keeping everyone in the game and it gets everyone dealing soon and often.

 

[AstroManLuca]

Played a 7-player game of 7 Wonders this past weekend. Wow, it was a bit crazy. I'll say this - whoever is most familiar with the game (usually the one who owns it) has to basically take on the role of game manager with so many people. And when you have noobs, they screw up and forget to play cards, get a turn behind, or play cards that they're actually not allowed to play. You just have to be very, very careful.

In the first two games, at least once in each one, someone messed up and wound up with one more card in their hand than everyone else. Because you pass the hands around, it's impossible to tell who screwed up. We eventually remedied it by declaring when we were all supposed to pass our hands and how many cards we were supposed to be passing, and it didn't happen again, but it took longer.

I imagine that a game with all veteran players would be a lot better. No worrying about someone building something without having the prerequisites.

 

[vi edit]

Played a 7-player game of 7 Wonders this past weekend. Wow, it was a bit crazy. I'll say this - whoever is most familiar with the game (usually the one who owns it) has to basically take on the role of game manager with so many people. And when you have noobs, they screw up and forget to play cards, get a turn behind, or play cards that they're actually not allowed to play. You just have to be very, very careful.

I've played a lot of board games and 7 wonders was very hard to grasp my first go-round. Trying to play it with 2 or 3 new people in a single game would be a pain. It has simple mechanics but a very complicated scoring system. I'm still a bit fuzzy about the scoring of the acedemic cards.

 

[AstroManLuca]

I've played a lot of board games and 7 wonders was very hard to grasp my first go-round. Trying to play it with 2 or 3 new people in a single game would be a pain. It has simple mechanics but a very complicated scoring system. I'm still a bit fuzzy about the scoring of the acedemic cards.

I didn't find the scoring to be that difficult, just tedious. You have to make sure to count everything exactly once. You don't want to go through everything and then forget if you counted your money and military victories/defeats at the beginning or not.

Scoring academic cards is pretty simple - 7 points for each set of all three, then the number of each one squared. So if you have 3 tablets, one gear, and one compass, you get 7 + 9 + 1 + 1 = 18 points.

 

[Possessed Freak]

Once people start to own most of the property, there is some serious strategy to be found. Its best to speed up game play by randomly passing out 2 mortgage cards to each player. Same amount of starting cash. I played the computer version (the recent Windows one) and if you disable all the bullshit animations and just keep clicking through, you can beat a game in one sitting.

This, very much this. Remember, you can make any deal you can think of as long as all parties involved agree (we added a requirement that the non involved parties can state the deal is grossly unfair and not allow it (stops the giving of all property for a buck: screw you deal)). If your game is taking multiple hours then you obviously have very stubborn players who do not know how to make deals. The giving out of property is by far the longest part of the game when we play. After most of the property is dealt, the deals happen and people go belly up in a hurry... unless you are luck incarnate (damn you Billy!).

Friend was in from Boston so we had a weekend of 4 player board-gaming.
Had probably the best game of Power Grid I ever played (difference between first and third was 10 dollars, I won by 4 bucks)
Played a few games of Dominion (forgot how dull the base set is)
2 games of Ticket to Ride (won one, lost one epically despite having the ONLY trans continental railroad)
Couple games of Race for the Galaxy (all about the 6 developments)
San Juan (Library, Prefecture, Chapel are all powerful)
Racko (what a fun light card game)
Citadels (won by abusing the hell out of the Warlord and Assassin)

We were going to play Railroad Tycoon but ran out of time.

Games I hate, but will play if others REALLY want to play them: Settlers of Catan, Civilization.

Games I hate so much that I would rather stare at a wall then play them: Twilight Imperium, Neuroshima Hex.

 

[Possessed Freak]

I've played a lot of board games and 7 wonders was very hard to grasp my first go-round. Trying to play it with 2 or 3 new people in a single game would be a pain. It has simple mechanics but a very complicated scoring system. I'm still a bit fuzzy about the scoring of the acedemic cards.

Scoring in 7 wonders was never an issue for me, perhaps it is because I had prior games with interactive scoring like Race for the Galaxy and all the inter-related scoring of the 6 cost developments. I liked the drafting mechanic on card draws/plays. I also love the concept of burying cards you know will help opponents a crapload more than you by using them in your wonder.

The last key I will say in the scoring is do not allow anyone to put their cards/chips away until everyone scores. We had a major fail when somebody's points was based on how many of a certain card his neighbors had. Whoops.

 

[vi edit]

Maybe complicated wasn't the correct word to use for 7 wonders scoring...abstract may be more appropriate. There's like half a dozen different ways to win. I've only played a couple games and trying to absorb all of that in your first couple plays is a bit of a challenge. Once you get going on it then it plays very fast, which is great. But that initial learning curve was a bit steep for me.

 

[AstroManLuca]

Yeah, I think the hardest part is figuring out precisely how to play in order to win and not get screwed in the third age. Only way to do that is to screw up and lose horribly several times. In my first few games I'd always build a lot of resource cards in the first round, then be unable to play anything later on because I lacked the prerequisites.

I don't think you can go into a game with a strategy in mind. You have to look at the cards you get early and just play them and build off of them. I tend to gravitate towards green or blue cards, but some people prefer yellow or red cards. I usually avoid those since they don't directly give you points. Yellow cards just help you save money and reds eventually lead to points, but they're not strategies in and of themselves.

 

[Stuxnet]

we added a requirement that the non involved parties can state the deal is grossly unfair and not allow it

We've done the same. Our rule states that a deal cannot be made if one of the parties in the deal cannot expect to benefit from it in the long-run.

The downside is that the rule is ambiguous and subject to interpretation, but the spirit is the same as yours and, so far, hasn't led to a single disagreement. This prevents the game from turning into a popularity contest when someone knows they're going to die, and they cherry-pick who they're going to lose all of their assets to. Kids are usually the guilty parties here... an adult who tried this would never be invited back.

 

[Stuxnet]

Talisman, Legend of Drizzt, Warhammer Invasion, Runewars (awesome), Civilization, Last Night on Earth, Thunderstone, Munchkin from time to time, Arkham Horror, Mansion of Madness, C&D Ancients...and my last baby, Dust Tactics which I painted all minis in 2 weeks

Holy cow... I just looked into what it takes to paint these little baddies... nice work!

 

[mugs]

Once people start to own most of the property, there is some serious strategy to be found. Its best to speed up game play by randomly passing out 2 mortgage cards to each player. Same amount of starting cash. I played the computer version (the recent Windows one) and if you disable all the bullshit animations and just keep clicking through, you can beat a game in one sitting.

Skip the roll-and-move crap, play Chinatown instead. Chinatown is all about the negotiations with just enough randomness to make decisions more difficult.

 

[sourceninja]

We just started a board game night back up at my house.

Here's our top 3.

1) Descent
2) Mansions of madness
3) betrayal at house on the hill

We are looking for more games in that line of gameplay.

 

[vi edit]

Played Small World for the first time last night. Won against three other guys that have played it a couple times. Very interesting game...sort of like a combination of Risk and Carcassonne.

 

[Dr. Zaus]

Played Small World for the first time last night. Won against three other guys that have played it a couple times. Very interesting game...sort of like a combination of Risk and Carcassonne.

Small world is a good one

 

[pmv]

Can one of the people that voted for Monopoly please explain why? It's perhaps the most mind-numbingly tedious exercise in time wasting ever invented. It's what parents taught kids to do when the parents wanted to do something fun and had to keep the kids occupied for a couple of hours. There are few decisions and almost no strategy, it's just a long, pointless war of attrition.

I hate that game, but to be fair, I think the reason I hate it is actually kind of the reason it was invented.

I hate it becuase it so massively depends on luck in the first part of the game. If you are unlucky, and fall behind, the game is over for you, you just linger on in a very boring way with no hope.

I have more than once played the game where during the ENTIRE GAME I never once landed on any property square that hadn't already been bought.

At no point did I get to make any decisions at all, I just followed other players around, landing on streets they'd just purchased, or landing on tax squares.

However, the first version of the game, I believe, was originally invented by some Quaker follower of Henry George - the unorthodox economist who was a contemporary of Marx, but unlike Marx approved entirely of capitalism but didn't like land ownership because, well, it led to monopoly as there was only a limited supply of it. And he has a point, land speculation is a very socially unproductive kind of investment and can be an exploitative way of making money.

I think its quite relevant to here (the UK) now, given how the property boom has left one generation wealthy but the following one with no chance of buying a place themselves (houses have more than tripled in real value in the last 15 years). The oldsters have been round the board several times buying everything up already. before the next generation get to start.

(I think the version of the game that eventually became the famous one was somehow based on that first version but not the same, I dunno, I'm too lazy to check wikipedia).

So, in being kind of crap and unfair and based on who gets lucky early, the game does sort of make the point, that land ownership is not a fair game and early starters get an unfair advantage.

 

[pmv]

I prefer Scrabble.

 

[BassBomb]

trouble