From classics like Chess and Go to newer games like Arkham Horror and all that stuff with miniatures and distance measuring, whether you're a civilized gent who likes to play a round of chess every once in a while, a grizzled old grognard leafing through the manual for your old Avalon Hill game, or just someone who likes to occasionally play a game of Catan with your mates, this thread is for you. Share good playing experiences, ask for advice on picking up a new game, or discuss game rules and your own modifications.
There's also roleplaying games, which are more than welcome here but mentioning them would have hurt the flow of that sentence. Really, this thread is for anything that's played on top of a table (or on the floor when your game takes a year to set up).
Except for Monopoly. That game is
terrible.
So then onto some games of interest to me:
Board GamesArkham Horror
This is a bit of a love/hate relationship. The setup time is manageable, but the game tends to take forever and by the end of it you feel like your brain is melting. Of course, this might be a good thing for a Cthulhu game. And it is honestly really fun to play despite the rather quirky rules. It even fits on a typical table! Of course, then you start to tack on expansions and sooner or later you end up having to play on a tennis court.
Settlers of Catan
A Very Fun Game. The bartering system is great, especially when you get creative. I once paid a friend of mine to cut off another friend's attempt at grabbing the longest road points. She got all the materials to build a city out of it, as well as the new longest road in the game. When it came to my turn, I revealed a bunch of the "make a free road"-cards I had, built like five pieces of road in one turn, got the longest road trophy, and won the game.
Of course, the first friend says she doesn't want to play the game with me anymore. Such is life.
And the game isn't without fault: the random way resources are given out can sometimes completely grind any gameplay to a halt for some players, and I'm sure everyone will agree that having to skip turn upon turn just because you haven't got any resources is kind of boring.
Battlestar Galactica
I've only played three games of this so far, but it's been fantastic. I really like the paranoia-inducing mix of co-operative and adversarial gameplay and the voting system, but I'm not too keen on the small variety in action cards or the power balance between the President and the Admiral: none of our presidents have really been able to do much at all with their power, while it seems like the Admiral gets to decide tons of things and has a pretty good possibility of consolidating all the power on the fleet. Of course, it could be we've underused the Quorum-cards, and the President actually gets some power out of those.
Now, I could list a dozen more games here but I'll save those for a later post if this thread actually gets some activity, so I'll move on from board games with a question: has anyone got experience with Twilight Imperium? It seems pretty interesting, but as with all the big board games it is rather pricey.
Roleplaying Games I started with Middle Earth Role Playing when I was around eleven or so. After that I've played a variety of different systems and fiddled around with designing some of my own. Here are a couple of my current favourites:
Basically anything by Greg StoltzeThe One Roll Engine is an absolutely fantastically elegant system powering tons of great games like REIGN, Nemesis (which is free!), and Wild Talents. He's also made Unknown Armies, which I've heard described as "Quentin Tarantino's Call of Cthulhu". It is great. And Stoltze's writing is excellent.
He's got a kickstarter open for an upcoming game,
Better Angels.
FATEAn incredibly fun game of pulpy adventure, with excellent rules for sharing the narrative responsibility between the players and the GM. Basically, in Fate, the better your character is in a given situation, the more narrative control you have over the scene. It is kind of hard to explain without the rules in front of you, but it works great and is a nice refreshing change from typical old-school rpgs that put all the narrative responsibility on the GM.
FiascoAbsolutely brilliant. Go buy the .pdf and give it a whirl, even if you're generally not interested in RPGs. A GM-less roleplaying game for three to five people, a game of Fiasco tells the tale of a bunch of small-time crooks and other people caught in their -almost always completely disastrous- web of incompetence and ambition. It is "inspired by films like
Blood Simple,
Fargo,
The Way of the Gun,
Burn After Reading, and
A Simple Plan". One game runs for just a couple of hours and requires absolutely no preparation, just four typical 6-sided dice for each player, some paper and pens, as well as a bunch of creativity.
Fiasco is the system I'm going to use for introducing people to RPGs. It is fast to play, very quick to learn, and really makes an effort to bring the creativity out in players. It is very good at making players create characters with distinct personalities and then having them act out situations between them. It's also fantastic at making the story the focus of the game, rather than the success of any one character or the accumulation of points and loot and whatever.
Despite the latter two games, with their "GM-less" gameplay and "shared narrative responsibility", being quite firmly not traditional (and my somewhat evangelical advertisement of Fiasco), don't be afraid to post about your love of D&D or Pathfinder or, idk, Riddle of Steel. I'm not going to yell at you for liking old-school or simulationistic games. Of course, I
am going to ridicule you if you like FATAL or something, though.
TL;DR: gamesgamesgamesgamesgamesgamesiamanerd please talk about games that are played on/around a table/floor/ground.
