Suggest Board Games

[Nylan]

I'm not sure if this is exactly the right place for this thread, but it's worth a shot

I am a bit of a board/card game fanatic, and have been burning through games very quickly. I'm looking for new games, preferably those with deep strategy and replay value. Suggest games you've found enjoyable, presume I don't already know about (NOT Monopoly, Life, etc.), and think might be worth a try.

Games I have played recently include:
Risk
Risk: 2210
Senji
Settlers (all versions)
Candamir
Colossal Arena
Red November
Citadels
Twilight Imperium
Mystery of the Abbey
Mall of Horror
Carcassonne
Bohnanza
Blokus
Munchkin

I know, I've had a busy semester. Suggestions gogogo!

 

[GoodGame]

Other than Clue does have some deep strategy with sharp players that can hash out the rationale for other players' guesses, I haven't played any strategy boardgames in a good long while.

 

[LightFang]

Diplomacy!

 

[Nylan]

Diplomacy!

If I wanted to sacrifice my weekend, I'd play Titan

...though I do miss a certain Civ3 Stories subforum that seems to have "disappeared"

 

[carmen510]

Axis & Allies
Die Macher
Settlers of Catan
Puerto Rico

 

[tycoonist]

i'd second settlers of catan. it is a very good game.

 

[Nylan]

Settlers is in the OP guys.

 

[LightFang]

Junta seems like a pretty cool game you could idle away your time with, but I've never played it myself.

 

[Izipo]

Dune is awesome. If you can find six motivated players, you're in for a fun ride.

 

[Agent327]

Axis & Allies

For more in depth: World at War (or Europe at War, Europe Engulfed, Pacific Engulfed)
7 Ages (way better than the Civ-board game, even Rhye's version)
History of the World (quicker version of the above, sort of a Civ Light),
all of which can be found (and many, many more) on BGG: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/.;)

 

[carmen510]

I've seen 7 Ages, and was intrigued by it, as well as History of the World. Never got to play them though.

 

[Agent327]

I can definitely recommend 7 Ages, which I found much more fun than Civ - the Boardgame. (Even History of the World seems more like Civ than the Boardgame.) BGG has 7 reviews of it: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3870

 

[warpstorm]

Dominion
Small World

 

[Phlegmak]

Civilization!

It's a bastardized version of Civ 3 and it's almost no fun whatsoever.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Dune is awesome. If you can find six motivated players, you're in for a fun ride.

I used to play Dune a lot (never had as many as 6 of us to play it at one time, though). It's a blast. So is Diplomacy.

If you're a Marion Zimmer Bradley fan, there's a hard-to-find board game based on her novel Stormqueen! The object is similar to that of Dune: take over all the Domains (7 of them). The difference is that psychic powers play a much greater part in Darkover, and you can win by not making your opponent laugh (really, it's in the rules!). My dad once listened to a friend and me playing this game and he thought we were nuts... staring into each other's eyes and fighting a forest fire by chanting in unison "One, please don't burn... two, please don't burn... three, please don't burn..." and seeing how high we could count before one of us cracked up (and had part of our territory destroyed by forest fire).

I can also recommend crokinole, although it can be painful at first (you play with your fingertips and checkers) and you need a pretty large board. My grandmother and I played countless games of that when I was a kid.

There are TWO versions of the Civilization board game, and the one I learned (and love!) is the one that came out BEFORE the first computer game. For some reason I always ended up playing Illyria, and making an alliance with Crete... I actually did win once, by an absolutely dead-pan playing of a Civil Disorder card against an opponent in a trading session very late in the game, and having enough tech points to bury everybody else. It can be an extremely cut-throat game, but still loads of fun as players can make deals, alliances and treaties (and break them), and there's a lot of strategizing.


My ultimate favorite, though, is the Rail games put out by Mayfair. The first was Empire Builder, where you try to build a railway line across the U.S., connecting cities with the fastest and most efficient lines, to deliver goods and get money and hopefully not get caught by derailments and other disasters. A later version of this game extended the game area to include Mexico and southern Canada.

Then came Eurorails, Japan Rails, Australia Rails, Britrails, and Iron Dragon (a fantasy version). Later games include India, Russia, and even the Moon!

My two gaming groups each had custom rules for these games, and as one person described it to a non-gamer friend: "You even get to draw lines on the game board with colored crayons!"

These games are very useful for learning basic geography.

 

[Maniacal]

If I wanted to sacrifice my weekend, I'd play Titan

...though I do miss a certain Civ3 Stories subforum that seems to have "disappeared"

NES games are in the OTHER GAMES sub forum.

Snakes and ladders? El Grande? I don't really know of anymore complicated ones than that that havn't been mentioned already.

 

[warpstorm]

If you are actually serious about getting into board games, don't look here. Go straight to the motherload. boardgamegeek.com