What boardgames did you just play?

CivCube

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I just met up with a new gaming group last week. We'll see if it keeps going. In the meantime, I got to play some boardgames for the first time in a long time. Anyway, here's what I played:

Ingenious - I own this one. It's a Reiner Knizia game where you get points by matching tiles. In typical Knizia fashion, your best score is only as high as the color you score least on.

The Castles of Burgundy - I admit, my head turned to mush when learning. I've become more fascinated now that I've had time to think about it. You can use workers to manipulate your dice roll into a result you want. The dice rolls are ultimately used to create access to buildings and goods, which in turn allow you to place buildings on a tiled landscape. If you place buildings in clever positions, you can create a cascading build-up of victory points.

Tobago - Ended the evening with a light game. You roll your vehicle around a randomly-generated island looking for treasure. By playing cards that specify certain conditions ("It's not on the sea", "It's next to the largest jungle"), you eventually create a location for the treasure. When you or your opponent dig up the treasure, you get to separate the spoils through the number of cards you ultimately played to reveal that location. Fairly unstrategic but not without some chances for bluffing.
 
Through the Ages: A civilization-like game without a map. And it works! One of the best designed games I have played so far - the game mechanics are interacting so well with each other. And thanks to the random card ("tech") distribution, there is no first order strategy - every game is completely different.
 
TTA is excellent. It can be quite frustrating though. I played a lot of Innovation this weekend. Awesome card game. Basically you have 105 different cards representing technology from the stone age to the modern era, and you try to find the best combo for your situation.
 
Dominion - My most favourite board game. It's a deck-building card game where you buy interesting things to make your deck stronger and move on to getting points. You have 10 different cards to buy, but out of a potential ~150 cards, the game changes every time, and new interesting strategies are possible. It's remarkably fun for what is effectively a fairly simple game.
 
I've been playing chess and risk recently with my family.
 
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.
 
My current group are Catan fanatics, so that's all i get to play. I really want to try out Village sometime, however.
 
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.
Indeed, the options in the game blows my mind every time I play it.
 
Recently, I've played...

Battlestar Galactica - I love this game and I usually hate mafia-type games, probably because I'm a fan of the show and the sudden betrayals can lead to some nail-biting finishes. For the uninitiated, the robot apocalypse occurs and you are on the one surviving warship escorting a civilian fleet to safety. However, the robots have started building human models so someone amongst you has a hidden loyalty and will eventually try to screw over the team. There's a lot to do in the game--every character has different abilities and drawbacks, some can be pilots, others are heading the presidential administration or the admiralty and have control over other parts of the game, and you have cards that can be used as abilities or can be used for points to overcome crises that occur every turn. There are several ways to lose (ship gets taken over by boarding parties, ship is destroyed in battle, you run out of fuel, food, morale, or people) and the humans are holding on until they jump a distance of 8+ units to get away from the menace. Highly recommend, especially for decent-sized groups (i.e. the 5-7 gaming group).

Power Grid - Never win but I still love this game. It has auction mechanics where you bid on power plants that consume coal, oil, uranium, or garbage (and there are green plants too), you have to manage your resource portfolio to make sure you can power your connections, and a map where there is some strategy required to expand and block opponents' cheap connections. The game has a catch-up mechanic where the players who have fewer cities or smaller plants receive better prices and the ability to place connections on the map first, so there is a bit of manipulation where you are fighting for the turn order you want to execute your plans as well as actually executing them on the board. Also highly recommended.

Tammany Hall - This is a new game I've only played twice, but it's a lot of fun. You play as sleazy politicians trying to run a political machine in New York. You can settle immigrant groups in different wards and collect political favors, which you then use to intimidate rival voters and stuff ballot boxes to win the elections. Slandering your political opponents and removing their ward bosses are important late-game tactics to ensure you can hold onto a few wards. There's a lot of pure game theory-type figuring here where you know how many tokens the other guys have and you have to figure out where they will commit their forces, which makes it surprisingly deep.
 
It was a favorite at my old weekly boardgaming group. It has sufficient depth to keep the game interesting, some meta strategy and resource management. Plenty of ways to mess with people.

I especially like the endgame condition--using powered cities instead of maximum number of cities means there is always a bit of trepidation for the guy who tries to build out to 17 quickly because he might lose a tiebreaker on cash. It's a game where I solidly land in 2nd place all the freakin' time. I just can't figure out how to win due to runaway leaders who never get caught due to lucky power plant draws, or come-from-behind guys, and I've even lost a tiebreaker by $2.
 
How do you all find people to play these games with? The games look like a lot of fun (I myself have not played much beyond Catan) but I cannot imagine very many people know of them, let alone own any.
 
You'd be surprised. The scene is slightly bigger than a few years ago. Try searching on BoardGameGeek's forums for other players in your area. I found a 10+ size group here in South Dakota that didn't exist a few months ago.
 
You'd be surprised. The scene is slightly bigger than a few years ago. Try searching on BoardGameGeek's forums for other players in your area. I found a 10+ size group here in South Dakota that didn't exist a few months ago.
Yeah, ask around on Boardgame geek, you can also look at Meetup.
Or just come to Dallas. We have BGG con (the guys who run BGG live here), and a local group meetup that rents it's own place just for playing boardgames. There's 100s of boardgamers around here, so playing stuff is really easy for me.:smug:
 
How do you all find people to play these games with? The games look like a lot of fun (I myself have not played much beyond Catan) but I cannot imagine very many people know of them, let alone own any.

In your situation, you need to take initiative and just roll with it. it took me a while to figure out that I really wanted to play table-top rpgs again, and board games, and after so many failed attempts at doing everything to find people I know who would be interested (basically doing everything except meet new people), I had to resort to online methods and meetup groups and whatnot in my city. I found several groups of people. In my opinion, it's perfect for board games. For table-top rpgs, well it's decent but it's hard to beat the experience you get with people who are good friends, and not just people you see for the purpose of gaming.
 
Online board gaming forums like BGG mentioned above is a great place to start. Additionally, sometimes universities have board game clubs that allow outside members to join (at MIT, there is a weekly board game night for undergrads and a second one for grads and members of the community). Additionally, I find hobby shops and dedicated board game shops, or if none of those are in your area combination bookstores a great place to ask around. Sometimes, they will host weekly events at the store, you just have to find out when and you can join in.
 
Ticket to Ride A good strategy game where 5 players are building train routes to link destination cities. I have the North America board, my brother in-law has Germany and there are also Europe, China, India, Africa, Nordic Countries and Switzerland maps. Each one has slightly different rules such as tunnels or ferries needed.

Pandemic I've only tried this a couple times. It's like the computer game but everyone plays together to stop the diseases instead of trying to spread them.

I also enjoy Munchkin, Catan and a friend of mine had us try 7 wonders which was fun.
 
I like the Europe, North America, Switzerland, and Scandinavia maps, but I can't stand Germany. They have these goofy passengers and there are a ton of little cardboard bonus point chips for your passengers riding your trains. It was a pain to set up and it felt too gimmicky.

Pandemic is a really good game to play to break up a board game night where you are usually fighting head-to-head. Since it's cooperative, it's less acrimonious and it can let really competitive friends cool off between close games.

I've never gotten the hang of 7 Wonders because I don't get to play often, but it is a neat concept for the game. Apparently, there's an expansion out with great people, only played it once and I lost terribly.
 
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