What boardgames did you just play?

Tigris and Euphrates - I can see why this gets a lot of hype. The board is big enough that there's a lot of possible moves at work here, especially if you have 3-4 players. It's interesting because the game uses several different ways to read the board and puts them in conflict with each other. For example, I can try to connect as many tiles as I can to another temple in order to get that treasure, provided I have the right player piece next to one of the red tiles. If my opponent moves his player piece in, suddenly I have to worry about how many of a certain color of tile I have around that piece. If two tile chains meet, then I have to worry about how many of a certain color I have on that side of the connection. If you have several possible connections...uh oh. Another fascinating Reiner Knizia game, definitely one of his best.

Love the game, unfortunately the only opportunity I have to play it is online at GameTable, where I'm pitted against AIs that play predictably and my win rate is about 100% (no option for changing AI difficulty). I should probably invest in some 'tokens' so I can play vs. human opponents. I suppose I tend to play fairly rigidly myself (I rarely deploy the Priest, for instance).

For myself I've only recently played Civilization (the original board game on which Civ was modelled, not the one based on the computer game series based on a board game) Catan, Arkham Horror, and computerised versions of chess and of Talisman's current edition. Unfortunately the people I have available to play with are - inexplicably - not fans of the amazing Britannia, my all-time favourite board game and one I've not played since childhood.

The closest analogy in computer game terms would be to think of it as something akin to a pre-1066 board game version of Europa Universalis - rather than the freeform 'have a civ and develop it how you will' of the Civilization boardgame, Britannia gives you a fixed historical context with timed events (such as the Roman withdrawal, the Danish Great Army, the Saxon invasion and so forth), and your goal is to achieve specific tribe-specific victory conditions (mostly holding specific provinces in a particular time period, killing units of a particular faction, or killing a specific faction leader) to earn victory points; sometimes victory points mirror the historical achievements of a faction, and sometimes you get points for improving your faction's standing relative to its real-life counterpart. Because of the temporal scale of the game - the 600-odd years between Roman withdrawal from Britain and the Norwegian and Norman invasions of 1066 - and because certain groups vanish from history at specific points, each player controls multiple factions over the course of the game.
 
My brother got me Dominion + an expansion for Christmas. It's pretty good but like Race for the Galaxy the thing I don't like about it is a lack of player interaction. You're all basically playing a single player game against each other. Can't these CCG's have trading or combat or something so you're not just waiting for the player before you to finish their turn? Meh.

I also checked out the official Dominion online game which looks like it's in bad shape. Apparently the company that bough the rights to Dominion and Catan and a whole bunch of other games is totally dodgy and EA-like. Sucks, oh well.

I still play Risk on Kongregate quite often. They have WWII, Rome and Mongolian maps too but the original is still the best.
http://www.kongregate.com/games/Abalore/world-rebellion-ii
 
Depending on which expansions you have for Dominion, you can have varying degrees of player interaction. The most recent Dark Ages and Intrigue expansions are good for picking up cards that interact heavily with other players, and just about all of them have attack cards so you can play pretty aggressive games.
 
Well I've got the alchemy set, it's got one card that lets you play someone else's turn which is pretty mean. But still my point is that there is nothing proactive to do while it is someone else's turn except maybe show your moat and shuffle your deck.

Maybe there could have been cards that stayed in play, like a castle you built up to defend your provinces or something like a counterspell wizard you could use to cancel someone else's card.

Also after playing online I found out about the gardens/workshop strategy which will be fun the first time I bust it out in a game. Overall Dominion is ok but it won't last anywhere near how many times we played Catan.

Here is the lid of my Catan box. Every game played is written up. I have the most wins. : )
 
Well I've got the alchemy set, it's got one card that lets you play someone else's turn which is pretty mean. But still my point is that there is nothing proactive to do while it is someone else's turn except maybe show your moat and shuffle your deck.

Maybe there could have been cards that stayed in play, like a castle you built up to defend your provinces or something like a counterspell wizard you could use to cancel someone else's card.

Also after playing online I found out about the gardens/workshop strategy which will be fun the first time I bust it out in a game. Overall Dominion is ok but it won't last anywhere near how many times we played Catan.

Here is the lid of my Catan box. Every game played is written up. I have the most wins. : )
Spoiler :

The set you would want to look into is Seaside, which introduces persistent actions (the cards stay in front of you for one turn, then are discarded). I think you would like Intrigue, since it has more attacking cards and the Masquerade, an action that forces all players to pass cards to each other (and it isn't an attack so it is unblockable).

I have a record of my Friedrich games somewhere on my external hard drive. That's a game that almost requires learning through analysis of old games because the strategy appears deceptively simple, yet wasn't obvious.
 
Pandemic, hope to get the On the Brink expansion.

Axis and Allies: Anniversary Edition, which took me about 7-8 hours to complete. In my first game as the UK, I ended up with like 8 or 9 ships bombarding France in an amphibious assault.

Settlers of Catan, a classic. Have also played PlayCatan, the online version.

Puerto Rico, both online and offline.
 
Just played Carcassone with bazillions of expansions, but we ignored half the rules, ended up being really crazy.
 
Heading up to a cottage with 2 friends for the Canada Day long weekend. Bringing Settles of Catan, Cranium, cards, dice, and if my order of Cards against Humanity comes in, we'll have that as well. And that's all on top of a fully loaded Wii, so I think we'll be good. All backups in case it rains - or for nightly activities.
 
Cards against humanity is a tremendous game, as long as everybody has a similar sense of humour. . Just make sure you get the Canadian cards expansion of you can (I'm not even sure what it's called).
 
Cards against humanity is a tremendous game, as long as everybody has a similar sense of humour. . Just make sure you get the Canadian cards expansion of you can (I'm not even sure what it's called).
It's a stupidly dumb game. It's basically just a @%#%^ version of Apples to Apples.
 
Let's see...

Agricola (with expansions)
Game of Thrones
Puerto Rico
Caylus
Settlers of Catan
Le Havre
Carcassonne
 
Played some Cosmic Encounter with six others on Friday night. What ridiculous fun. In the second game I drew the Void, which is able to eliminate enemy ships from the game forever instead of just putting them in the redraw pile. Each of us only went once but in two hours someone's planet was destroyed, I whittled someone's armada down to nothing, someone else gained colonies just by guessing who win an encounter, and blackmail was made out of simply holding grudges.

Very unpredictable but hilarious game. At first glance it would seem like the game is playing itself but that's because it actually lives up to its name. Because it's impossible to plan ahead, you have to weigh the options with each immediate encounter and roll with it. Just a blast with seven players.
 
Lords of Waterdeep - Wizards of the Coast scrounged up some worker-placement rules from other games and sprinkled some Forgotten Realms on top. The result is...not too bad, actually. It's a rather basic set-up: place your "agents" in buildings to get rewards that will aid your victory point pooling. Buy more buildings to profit off other players and increase the VP development exponentially. Every once in a while you play Intrigue cards to shake things up with the other players, while your role card adds some multipliers to your endgame victory points. I'm not that great at this sort, so my "strategy" usually falls into completing objectives to get as many VPs as I can without thinking about how to get more resources more quickly. So a game like this could fall on its face without enough variety, but of course Wizards has plenty budgetary snuff to throw in a chockful of building cards to keep your replay value very high for newcomers. My co-players were commenting on this being a very good "gateway" game for that reason. I would also agree with last night's host that this can be just as fun for Caylus veterans.

But I've been holding back from you, All Other Games. I have been playing on the side with my brother when our schedules match. Let me count the chits:

Puerto Rico 2-player variant - Blasphemy, says the PR player. Rubbish, says the mint collector. Huh? says the average reader. I downloaded this (quite official and Andreas Seyfarth-y) ruleset off the Geek a few years ago and finally got to play it. I only played PR a couple times before with a larger group and, like many Euros, couldn't quite grok it the first time. As a white male entrepeneur in the Caribbean, you erect buildings on your plot of land to generate more barrels o' stuff while your opponents do likewise on their identical alternate dimensions. Everyone has their own board, yeah? What makes PR unique for those unfamiliar with the game is that phase order is different every round; players choose the phase that they think will be most profitable while hoping it doesn't trigger splendid results for everyone else. Works quite well for 5-6 players. For 2 players, it becomes fast, fierce, and surprisingly quite functional. The pacing gets more frantic since you're constantly whipping phases back and forth between yourself and your opponent. The balance is just as good as for more players, save for a couple buildings that are just as a nuisance on higher levels. Recommended and free on BoardGameGeek's Puerto Rico resources page.

YINSH - I fast became a fan of Kris Burm's 2-player abstracts when I first played this game. This is Game 5 of the GIPF Project, a series that you can combine into one meta-game. Too costly to buy all at once, of course, but that's why we have jobs and other games to play. You move three rings rook-style across a hexagonal grid, leaving behind a marker of your color when you do so. As you move your rings, they will pass over other markers and flip them over to the opposite color, stopping as soon as they hit an unoccupied space. When you create five in a row of your color, you remove both those markers and one of your own rings. It's a cool, chaotic little Othello variant that doesn't get old because you're constantly having to watch where possible five-in-a-rows could develop. A ring on the other side of the board could easily wreak havoc on a patch of markers you're developing on your side.

ZERTZ - I loved YINSH so much I got this one recently. Woo! This one, Game 3 of GIPF, is just as neat. You add and jump marbles around to claim marbles for yourself. Because both players can move all the marbles, something you're doing could blow up in your face as your opponent uses your own gambit against you. The catalyst for a lot of groans is the fact that with every marble that's added to the board, a piece of the board is removed. As the game board shrinks, there are more opportunities for forced captures and lengthy jumping sequences. Very fun but it requires a lot of thinking ahead, like all good abstracts. Very unique game.
 
Dominion - Oh dear. I might be addicted after one game. Dominion's all-too-easy ABC* deckbuilding mechanic allows you to try out new strategies on the fly, as well as eagerly anticipating what the next hand might bring. Once your deck is as fat as your fist, then the game picks up a ferocious pace, with everyone frantically throwing more amazing combos on the table to pick up more gold, more cards, and most importantly, more of those victory points. It's interesting to see the game start slow, as you sludge through the first few buy phases. Even so, the available supply you can purchase from can be customized with every game, making those expansions all the more enticing. I shudder to think of the day when I own them all.

*play an Action, Buy a new card, Clean up your hand
 
Dominion - Oh dear. I might be addicted after one game. Dominion's all-too-easy ABC* deckbuilding mechanic allows you to try out new strategies on the fly, as well as eagerly anticipating what the next hand might bring. Once your deck is as fat as your fist, then the game picks up a ferocious pace, with everyone frantically throwing more amazing combos on the table to pick up more gold, more cards, and most importantly, more of those victory points. It's interesting to see the game start slow, as you sludge through the first few buy phases. Even so, the available supply you can purchase from can be customized with every game, making those expansions all the more enticing. I shudder to think of the day when I own them all.

*play an Action, Buy a new card, Clean up your hand

Seriously, man, Dominion can be addictive. Watch yourself. ;)



I finished an amazing game of Maria--it's a card-based game of war and politics based around the War of Austrian Succession. Although time-compressed to 1740-1744, so the French are fighting a bit earlier than they should be but I digress! I played as Austria, managed to hold off the Prussians and only gave them Silesia in 1743. War broke out again in 1744. My troops managed to whack the Bavarians early on and earn a temporary truce in the West, but the rapid advance of the Pragmatic Army made the invasion of northern France and a Pragmatic victory look inevitable. Then, in a single turn a series of three battles outside of Reims the entire Pragmatic Army was wiped out to the last man. They even obtained 5 bonus brigades and still managed to lose everything in an amazing reverse. Despite this, it still took over a year for the French to mop up the map in Spring of 1744, with my armies held off by the accursed beer-swilling lederhosen-wearing butt pirates for just long enough to delay my victory until the summer turn.

Amazing. Best five hours I've spent in a long time. Lot of good maneuvering, encirclement, and a couple blunders that were ruthlessly exploited.
 
I haven't played it yet, but I have acquired a copy of Twilight Struggle: Deluxe Edition, a strategic two-player card game based on the Cold War. I really do want to try it out, but not many of my friends would be willing to play a two-player game for 2-3+ hours. Any idea on how to entice some of them into doing so?
 
Twilight Struggle is not the super easiest thing to learn at first either. But it's one of the rare games that cater to that 2-players situation in which we find ourselves very often. A nice epic game, for 2 people you say? Wat!

The way to convince people is that it seems a lot less dumb to "hang out together for 2-3 hours by interacting with each others" instead of just "hanging out with me for 2-3 hours by just sitting on a couch in silence and watching a movie".

Also, the time subject of the game, the Cold War, is quite interesting and if anyone has a mild interest in this stuff, it's a great selling point.
 
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