2004 Board Games Gift Guide 489
The Morning News has come out with a nice guide to good gift boardgames, while Funagain Games has the list of the 2004 Board and Card Games of the Year (and the runners-up). Like a bowling ball with your name engraved upon it, these make great gifts for your significant other. Any other suggestions for good adult boardgames?
Heroscape (Score:4, Informative)
Settlers of Catan! (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/viewitem.php3?gameid
Lord of the Rings (Score:5, Informative)
Graphically, the game is gorgeous. The boards, cards, etc. are all extremely well done.
Mensa Recommended games . . . (Score:3, Informative)
Past winners of the Mensa Select seal can be browsed by year here [mensa.org]. Have some fun while exercising your brain.
Previous winners include Taboo and Magic-The Gathering.
Balderdash (Score:3, Informative)
Without Balderdash, I never would have known that vagitis means "what my wife is going to do to me when I get home" and that a shittah is "a ghetto toilet".
Extensive list (Score:5, Informative)
Pretty much lists everything you won't find at a local wal-mart.
cheapass games (Score:5, Informative)
a) The games sound like fun. Sure, who's going to advertise their games as totally boring and stupid? No one. But, Kill Doctor Lucky [cheapass.com] and Deadwood [cheapass.com] to name two I remember, have funny concepts and sound interesting to play.
b) They are CHEAP. And, seeing as to how most board games I've owned have been played about 3 times, max, the money spent seems much closer to the value derived than the $50 it costs for a lavishly wood-crafted board game.
Again, I don't know much about the product so don't come crying to me if they suck, but I'm probably going to risk a few bucks on them this year.
Fluxx (Score:5, Informative)
In the latter category was in which the player who won, wasn't even there! I played a card which basically caused everyone to play all the cards in their hand. One of the guys got up to answer the phone right before it became his turn. We played for him (since he had to play everything anyway;-) and the *&$*#&*&#*($&%**#&$^%*@&$ won.
Classic Battletech (What Else?) (Score:3, Informative)
Okay, so technically, it's not so much a boardgame as it is a religion and a Way of Life, but is there any geekier reason to throw dice and push things about a tabletop?
Be a Cheapass... (Score:5, Informative)
All their games are imaginative, fun and, best of all, cost next to f-all. It's refreshing to see someone trying to be fresh about game styles.
Personal favorites:
Unexploded Cow - a poker-style game involving incinerating BSE infected cattle in French minefields...
The Great Brain Robbery - Get your Zombie out of the runaway train by stealing brains with special abilities.
Bitin Off Hedz - even works for kids - a standard-ish board game where dinosaurs race to extinction.
They're so cheap you can afford to take a risk anyway.
Settlers of Catan (Score:3, Informative)
1000 Blank White Cards!!! (Score:2, Informative)
The game is totally self-adjusting to the playing environment, creative, fun and good for all kinds of times.
Plus it's the best game ever invented for getting women naked and doing nasty things!
-posted anonymously to protect the identities of women ive gotten naked-
Re:Apples to Apples (Score:4, Informative)
Works best after a case or two when the phrase "Pressing wood into sheep" takes on whole new meanings.
Well, it is a card game, but I would suggest this. (Score:3, Informative)
It's a great game and you never get the same play out of a round twice.
Cashflow 101 (Score:2, Informative)
We got ours through eBay, not the link I provided, and it was cheaper. It was this game that got us started in real investing, not just 401(k) stuff.
Re:Do not pass "Go" (Score:3, Informative)
Lots of nice feature-rich linux clients support it.
Re:Do not pass "Go" (Score:2, Informative)
In short, learning Go at KGS is fun, while learning Go on Yahoo is horrible. Your milage may vary, of course.
Re:Do not pass "Go" (Score:3, Informative)
It has been a while since my AI class. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here.
Re:Lord of the Rings (Score:3, Informative)
Other Kniza games I'd reccomend:
* Through the Desert (think multiplayer Go, but this may be quite hard to find, as I don't believe it's been reprinted yet)
* Samurai
* Schotten Totten/Battle Line (two player card games, and quite portable. I'm not sure if they're currently in print, but they're easy to make with two decks of cards)
* Tigris & Euphrates
Some other good games which would work well as gifts:
* Lost Cities (2 player card game, simple but addictive)
* Guillotine (multiplayer card game where you get to collect the heads of French nobility. funny and silly, even my mother likes it)
* Bohnanza (great card game I've found works well with non-gamers. being cooperative is good strategey, and the cards are cute)
* Warhamster rally (hamsters!)
* San Juan (reasonably simple and quite fun)
* El Grande (this is more complex, but easy to learn and play)
This is just a short list based on what I have in front of me. If I were looking for gifts for people who don't play games regularly, I'd have to look at www.boardgamegeek.com for ratings, and start by looking at Bohnanza and Lost Cities. If you want a party game, try Apples to Apples.
Lea
Mensa best game list. (Score:2, Informative)
http://mindgames.us.mensa.org/participant/past_wi
PUERTO RICO PUERTO RICO (Score:4, Informative)
Then, I discovered why. Every person that I've introduced Puerto Rico to gets hooked. Here's a list of reasons why I'm a fanboy about it...
--) No waiting: When other people take their turns, all players must make decisions.
--) Creepily well-balanced. There is no (to my knowledge) "power move" or "race for a certain card" that lames out the game.
--) Incredible replayability: each time you play is different
--) Minimized randomness: Randomness exists in only a SINGLE aspect of the game. Everything is else is based on seating and "what are my opponents likely to do".
--) Fast games: You can play it three times in an evening. Crucial.
Heroscape! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Do not pass "Go" (Score:5, Informative)
Before I go on, I have to point out that I only have a deep interest in AI, I haven't actually started my post-grad coursework in it yet (hopefully next year). So my information might not be 100% correct (I look forward to someone correcting/supplementing my post). I should also add that I play Go on occasion, but I suck at it...
Go does have a very large branch factor, so brute-force techniques to playing well are nearly impossible (or take WAY too long to compute). Chess doesn't have a large amount of branching (relative to Go), so brute-force is actually somewhat effective. But the real problem comes when trying to actually write an AI that makes decisions instead of exhausting all possibilities.
In Go, there is a very large amount of information to process. The relative strengths of each player in each position of the board, the aggressiveness of the other player, common move patterns, and of course the number of possible outcomes of an action. Simply put, Go is simply too complex to represent and analyze in a simple manner.
It's my understanding that successful Go programs work by simply looking up common scenarios in a large database of pre-programmed moves, supplementing that with some basic neural network pattern recognition, and then narrowing down decisions with a brute force attack on a reduced set.
Munchkin! (Score:5, Informative)
Very fun, quick game.
Days of Wonder (Score:4, Informative)
Mystery of the Abbey is like a thinking man's/geek's version of Clue. Instead of that boring ole rag of a board game, you get an intricate and well designed whodunit that has strategy and tactics involved as to who finds out what and how to play the game to win. This is a favorite in our household and whenever we have a gettogether it's the first board game pulled out.
Ticket to Ride is another Days of Wonder production, designed by a frenchman I believe, who ironically created a game about US train lines around the early 1900's. You have a set # of trains and must build them in tandem across the country. You must connect certain cities according to your "tickets" you recieve at the beginning of the game, always giving you a goal and with multiple paths to each city there is strategy involved as far as how you connect them and by what color (each route is defined by color). It gets more in-depth and is very fun/interesting and fast paced to boot. The younger kids in the family really like this one as its color-based, easily followed, and easy to learn.
As far as other games, we love card games. Bang! [twilightcards.com] is hands down the best multi-player card game I've ever played. Take that as you may, but I've played my share and it is awesome stuff. When a friend/family memeber asks us what we want to play, it's always Bang! Great mechanics, interesting roles to play, fun and funny to boot. There are some expansions to it (about a dozen cards each) to throw some variety to the game, but we've not needed those just yet. This is an absolute must-buy.
Queen's Necklace is another Days of Wonder production and is very cool. I know, a guy saying that playing a card game based on jewelry is cool, but it's a blast and is still fun with just 2 players (me and my wife play it occassionally). Easy to learn, hard to master, plenty of strategy and lots of enjoyment to be had.
Lastly I'll mention that Cheap Ass Games [cheapass.com] is a treasure trove of goodness, particularly Kill Dr. Lucky. This is a game that happens -before- Clue. Instead of figuring out who died and how, you actually get to kill that person! Of course, he's the luckiest guy ever, so it takes awhile and each person chases the good Doc around the mansion in an attempt to finally kill him in a variety of ways.
I think my favorite "Foiled!" card that showed up as I tried to Kill Dr. Lucky said something like "And suddenly...you felt not so fresh."
Hilarious, fun, and cheap!
Hope this helps
Absolute Balderdash (Score:2, Informative)
- Here's a name, make up what s/he is famous for
- Here's a movie title, make up a short plot synopsis
- Here's a date, make up what happened on that day
- Here's an acronym, make up what it stands for
- Here's a word, make up a definition
Each needs a slightly different skill. The "what happened on this date" answers need to be time-appropriate, the "what is this person famous for" is completely open ended and is usually quite bizarre, etc. Great game.Re:Do not pass "Go" (Score:2, Informative)
Humans do to; they are called Joski [wikipedia.org] and there are many of them. The hard part is that a sequence is not definitive -- its just one small area of the board and it's linked to all the other areas with different strategies. This is very different then an opening sequence in chess where all the pieces start in the same place, or even a latter game sequence where a common arrangement might arise. The Go board is just too big for this. Brute force is impractical for the strategic decisions.
Re:Do not pass "Go" (Score:3, Informative)
As someone who has casually played Chess for years and has spent the last month or so learning Go, I'm less certain about this.
In terms of learning the rules, Go is certainly simplier, but it's jarring to many people. While Chess requires memorizing a bunch of arbitrary moves, the core ideas are obvious to people: pieces move from space to space, you kill (capture) other pieces, you're trying to get the leader (king), you're on one side the other guy is on the other now charge. In Go you play on intersections, you surround territory (and have to learn to recognize when surrounded territory is still in play), you rarely remove pieces. As The Interactive Way to Go [playgo.to] puts it, "Go is sharing game." That's a weird idea for most western game players.
Similarlly, basic Chess strategy is relatively obvious; you get surprisingly far with just rough ordering of the value of the pieces (pawn < knight or bishop < rook < queen < king) and a few simple strategies (claim the middle, threaten as much space as possible). This based on my own experiences. I know I suck and my strategies are childish at best, yet I stomp most people I play. It's rare to have a "wouldn't it be fun to play" with someone who plays seriously. Of course, against a serious player I'd be crushed flat.
Go strategy, the on other hand, is harder to understand. You're confronted with a huge number of possible moves (I'm only just becoming comfortable with 9x9 boards; full 19x19 boards scare me). The early game tends to look confused and scattered; you're looking for general patterns. At first you'll be spending your time fretting over forming eyes and seeing ladders. I'm starting to grasp that I'll often need to ignore opportunities to capture or block my opponent's advance because I know I can block them later and can make an offensive move instead. (This is also true in Chess to an extent, but I'm finding I need to track many more "keep an eye on now, but do nothing now" positions, again on the small 9x9 board.)
I'm enjoying the heck out of Go, but I'm not convinced it's necessarily easier that Chess for a new player. To make a crude generalization, I suspect most "Western" minds more easily mesh with a small pile of rules and straightforward strategy than simple rules but holistic strategy.
That said, I encourage everyone to take some time to learn Go. The Interactive Way to Go [playgo.to] is a great gentle introduction with lots of Java boards to practice concepts on.
Re:Do not pass "Go" (Score:3, Informative)
It's my understanding that successful Go programs work by simply looking up common scenarios in a large database of pre-programmed moves, supplementing that with some basic neural network pattern recognition, and then narrowing down decisions with a brute force attack on a reduced set.
Um.. no.
Computer Go is very much in its infancy, and pretty much all computer go programs operate by using hand-coded heuristics to suggest moves, and then doing lots of old-fashioned local search. While there are some pattern databases used, as well as opening 'books' for common beginning-game corner patterns (joseki), in general, large pattern databases are not used, though there are some people working on this approach. Only one well-performing Go program I can think of uses neural networks; it's definitely very atypical.
The problem with Go is not just the branching factor; while obviously it's a difficulty, it's not the largest problem in computer Go. The problem isn't that not enough positions can be checked in a reasonable amount of time, the problem is that not even one position can be accurately checked in any practical amount of time - that is, coming up with a good evaluation function has been a major challenge. In lay terms, a computer cannot look at a Go board and accurately judge how good or bad the position is. When humans look at a board position, they use lots of fuzzy, partially defined concepts like, 'thickness,' 'influence,' 'territory', and 'potential' that are very hard for one human to explain to another, let alone get a program to perform the same analysis.
Modern Art by Reiner Knizia (Score:2, Informative)
Note: the original is in German though it's also available in Enlgish.
Board Game Gift Guides - Another one (Score:2, Informative)
Keep yourself amused by looking at last year's - http://www.gamerdad.com/modules.php?op=modload&nam e=News&file=article&sid=424&mode=thread&order=0&th old=0 [gamerdad.com] They're all still good games.
Re:cheapass games (Score:3, Informative)
I love One False Step for Man... It's a 3-4 hour long board game that takes a lot of strategy, so I'd play it with the same people I'd play Rail Baron (another game I recommend, but it's out of print) or Axis and Allies with. It's biggest problem is that it's a Cheap Ass game; while coming up with a six-sided die for Give Me the Brain or a dozen counters for Agora isn't a problem, One False Step takes literally a hundred counters, in at least as many distinct varieties as you have players. Those of us roleplayers dragged out the mondo bags of dice and used different types of dice, or a Risk set would probably have enough counters, but you've got to be prepared before the game. The board is somewhat random, which keeps variety but makes it feel a little generic. Names like "Desperado City" just doesn't have the feel that using real cities names does. All in all, a great strategy game, but be prepared for a lengthy strategy game and get out the counters to start with.
seeing as to how most board games I've owned have been played about 3 times, max,
Yeah. What's worse, for games that have trivia cards, they start to lose their fun once you get familar with them. I've played Cranium enough times that I know what many of the cards are. (Again, Cranium; a decent game, if you like party games and are willing to spend $50 on a game where you learn a lot of the cards after playing it 3 or 4 times. Me, I prefer to go head to head in a nice multiplayer strategy game where it's strategy, tactics and a little bit of luck.)
Cosmic Encounter and others (Score:2, Informative)
Can't say I recommend them given they are out of print, overly complicated or both but my favorites have always been Junta, Stellar Conquest, Starfleet Battles (made into a series of buggy PC games), Down With the King, Chase, and Ipswich.
Junta is a hillariously frantic trading game, Stellar Conquest a strange semi-limited movement numbers game. Starfleet Battles is unbelievably complex and simulates everything from marine combat on exploding planets to strategic war between dozens of galaxy spanning civilizations down to individual ships. [Ie., Derke Smart has been trying to write it for years. Derek Smart Derek Smart Derek Smart] Down With the King is...oh, heck, there is a table to roll on while visiting the funeral of the player you've just assassinated and results range from impressing the nobles to getting drunk and falling into the grave. Chase was a slick pure strategy release by TSR that got no attention and Ipswich is a similarly dead, brutally difficult word game.
For the truly obsessive, find Magic Realm.