EPTToday, being somewhat older, most people seem to forget about boardgames, some consider it boring, some would call it an inferior medium compared to video games and yet even more would call it entertainment for nerds. In the natural order of things it is normal people that call starcraft 2 players nerds but it is starcraft 2 players that laugh at the back of the boardgamers. Truly we are the lowest on the social ladder, but perhaps undeserved? Afterall is a boardgame not enjoyed sitting around the table sharing witty banter as one proceeds to construct a farm, raise armies or construct a railroad, whatever the theme might be.
Truth be told i like when a new game is released, a game i have looked forward to for a long time but there really isn't anything like buying a new boardgame and going over the individual pieces, often crafted with the greatest of care.
Now this isn't a thread dedicated to my love of boardgames both old and new, but rather a thread for like minded people to share their love of boardgames and to hopefully entice a few more people to endulge in the world of boardgames.
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The average kind of person that you can expect to find at a session of boardgaming.
An always important part of getting into boardgaming is finding out what boardgame is right for you. The type of boardgame depends on what you like and what your possible companions like. Dropping down a game of Arkham Horror for a bunch of people expecting Monoply is never a good idea.
Still, just because people expect Monoply doesn't mean you should give them Monopoly. Here are a few games expected to be suitable for the Monoply-crowd whilst at the same time involving a little more player contribution then rolling a dice and saying yes or no to a property purchase. Most of the games ill mention here are games i own myself, a few i will place here just out of fame.
Beginner games
Settlers of Catan
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Settlers of Catan is a pretty well known boardgame and rightly so. It's easy to explain and easy to play yet at the same time it makes players get involved, it allows players to make long term plans and influence the degree of luck involved.
In Settlers of Catan the goal is to, as one might guess, settle the island of Catan. By placing towns and cities adjacent to resources players increase the liklihood of obtaining those resources wich are in turn used to construct roads, towns and cities. All of these things are worth points and the first player to obtain 10 points wins the game. An average game will last you about 2 hours. It is quite family friendly in the fact that no player can ever be knocked out of the game. Nothing spoils the fun as quikly as a person sitting at the table moaning about how he is out of the game and how it's unfair.
Agricola
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Agricola is a game that revolves around building a farm. The theme itself might sound dull but the game itself is anything but. The game is quite popular within the world of boardgaming as a new-player friendly boardgame, and in my opinion even better then Settlers. It hasn't however achieved the same fame as Settlers.
The theme of the game is building a farm as stated earlier, but the actuall gameplay revolves around carefully planning your next moves. As the game progresses the harvesting rotations become more and more frequent and you find yourself stressed in choosing between expanding your farm and feeding your family. The game soon gives you the feeling of having to juggle a dozen balls and you know that dropping a single one means the whole damn thing is gonna come crashing down on you.
This game is also very friendly in that it doesn't allow players to be knocked out of the game, it only works with a point system. The only off-putting factor for some is that there is very little direct interaction. Players build their own farms and fight somewhat over who gets to the resources first but there is very little direct interaction.
A huge plus for the game is it's scaleability. It's rules allow for a very basic game and a massively complex game. In the very simply rules you won't be needing much of each other but the more complex the game gets, the more options people get for screwing each other over. The downside is somewhat fixed as the game gets more complex but at the same time the more complex it gets, the more it loses it's charm of being a simply and acceseable game. But as stated, you can scale it perfectly to the crowd that gathers at the table.
Carcassonne
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Carcassone is a game of placing tiles. Once again i warn you not to let such a brief theme description put you off. Again a friendly game in that it also works by points and never knocks players permanently out of the game.
Personally i never cared much for it, but i have found that many players do enjoy it quite a bit and it is rather popular so i felt that despite my feelings it did deserve a mention. In Carcassonne players take turns placing tiles adjacent to other tiles and slowly but surely spell out a map. The game can be explained in less then 5 minutes but then again, so can chess.
The only rule for placing tiles is that they have to "make sense". A road does not sudenly transition into a city and a city does not have a field of grass in the center.
As players place tiles they get to place their peoples on a tile and when the image that said tile paints out is completed (like a city completly finished) a player collects all the points, counted by the number of tiles in total and modified by the type of tiles (cities are worth more then roads for example).
The trick is that a player cannot remove his peoples and as a result players begin to wage the benefits and downsides to placing their tiles in order to finish their own creations and collect points, or place tiles in such a strange fashion that it becomes very difficult for other players to finish their creations, if not outright impossible at times. A clever game of manipulating the playing field and trapping the other players pieces.
Advanced games
These games i call advanced but the title can be deceptive. Some of these games involve a greater strategic depth then the beginner games but for some it is the theme that i consider "advanced". The truth is that your mom isn't likely to be intrested in waging intergalactic warfare but wouldn't mind building a farm.
Cosmic encounter
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Cosmic encounter is an old game, several decades old to be exact. In this game of intergalactic warfare players attempt to establish a total of 5 colonies on foreign planets.
Despite it's theme this game revolves around mind games. As far as mind games go i have never played a game that captures it so perfectly. The game comes down to bluffing, double bluffing or being an idiot, not bluffing, whilst your opponent thinks your bluffing, and winning anyway.
Players attempt to use atack cards and negotiate cards to fight their way to galactic victory. Forging alliances when they need them and stabbing people in the back when they are done with them.
The theme of the game can be offputting to some but all the times i have played the game people grasped it within 10 minutes of playing. A game lasts about 1 hour and is easily played several times in a night.
The twist that makes Cosmic such an amazing game is the addition of aliens. Each player receives a unique alien race that they play. Each alien race has a unique power wich changes how the player should play and this makes every game completly different. What about an alien race that has to lose in order to win? What about an alien race that wins when it has lost all of it's ships? The addition of alien races makes the game completly unique everytime you play is and provides near infinite replayability.
Axis and Allies
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If i had to sum up Axis and Allies, and i feel like i have to, it would have to be Risk on steroids. It has more rules, more pieces, more dices and more theme then Risk. Where in Risk each player takes on the role of a nameless dictator bent on world domination fighting against similarly shadowy figures, everyone players very specfic countries in this boardgame of world domination.
Three players take on the role of America, England and Russia as the Allied forces. Two players take on the role of Germany and Japan as the Axis forces.
If i had to critique this game for anything it is that perhaps it is a bit to historically accurate. Germany get's to have all the fun and field massive armies wich he will naturally shove down Russia's throat as Russia tries to field a massive army of soldiers in an attempt to halt an enemy who has tanks.
Japan gets to smack America around for a turn or two but quikly finds himself on the receiving end of the pain stick. England will find that with all of it's colonies it is actually best off just building a lot of planes and bombarding the shit out of Germany.
So basically, just like history. The problem is that you will find most of your games to go like that. Axis and Allies is a fun game to play but after 5 games you will have seen most of the variations and after that people will have to force themselves to do some crazy things to spur things up.
Still, if you are a fan of alternative history then it's a fun game. What happens if Germany invades the UK? What if Japan invades Russia? There are certainly some variations to be done before things get repetitive.
Dominion
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Domion can be called a collectable card game without the steep price, but that would be silly.
Domion is a very popular game but also very acceseable. Just like all the games in the beginner section nobody can be knocked out of the game before it ends. So why is it in the advanced section? Well that's because it's a card game, and not everyone loves playing with cards. Personally i love cards but i can understand that a game that comes with 200+ cards and that's it, it can be scary.
In Dominion everyone begins with the same cards, a few copper cards wich can be used to buy cards. At the start of the game there are 10 stacks of 10 different cards face up on the table. Every game can have a different combination of cards because each set of Domion has 25 different cards and 10 of each.
Players shuffle their tiny deck and draw a starting hand of cards. They then use their money cards (copper, silver, gold) to buy some cards from the table and add these to their deck. When the deck is fully depleted they give it a good shake and draw again. This process repeats for everyone and slowly but surely the decks begin to bulge and more importantly, they begin to diverge.
There are many styles of decks that players can construct. Some players might like the kind of decks that can quikly grow, others like decks that consist mostly of high priced cards. Some other players might enjoy building massive decks that are so smoothly constructed that they can take more then 50 different actions every game. And yet again other players might prefer a deck of cards that does little more then fuck over their fellow players. It's intresting to see how each player goes into a different direction and how each deck works off each other.
Disregarding the fact that it's a card game, it's no more difficult to learn then most of the beginner games.
Mansions of madness
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You have to understand i adore mansions of madness. No i LOVE mansions of madness. The theme of this game is itself the biggest selling point.
The game takes place in the world of H.P Lovecraft. Not everyone is familiar with his writing but those that are often adore the thick gloomy atmosphere. For those not familiar H.P Lovecraft was a writer who is best known for his horror writing and his particular style. His horror did not focus on gore and shock but rather the fraility of the human mind. Terror and fear stood at the center of his writing as his human protoganists attempted to battle star born gods so alien that simply seeing them would drive most men insane. The famous Cthulu for example, is his creation.
In this game for 5 players a team of 4 investigators attempt to find their way through a mansion as one player taking the role of overlord attempts to make their life a litteral living nightmare. Investigators might one game find themselves flooded by zombies and the next victim to monsters from a different dimension. All the while investigators run through the mansion searching for clues to unravel the mystery.
All the while a thick layer of theme is spread all across the game. Combat is resolved via cards that explain exactly what happens in short, yet well written pieces of story. One needs not be a great roleplayer or a dungeon and dragons veteran to visualise their investigator ripping off a monsters tentacle with this bare hands as the gore sprays across his face.
The game has two downsides. The settup time is a bitch with a good half hour for each scenario. The second downside is the fact that each game of mansions consists of carefully constructing a scenario, aka the story you are playing. The problem with this is that you only get 5 stories in the box. We went through these 5 stories in little more then 3 weeks and after that it's just not as much fun. There isn't a lot of excitement if you allready know the story. Expansions are on the way but truth be told, i feel like they should have just given me more scenarios right out of the box.
Upsides are that this is probably the best themed game in the world and the miniatures are god damn incredible. I don't hype all that much about game pieces but holy shit, these are incredible. I can only imagine how great the game would look if someone took the time to paint them.
Descent
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To round all of this off is a game that i don't actually own yet but hope to soon do. You can call this game Dungeons and Dragons light or maybe Diablo the boardgame. This is a game of dungeon exploring, killing monsters and getting phat lewt.
Each player takes on the role of a hero and in a party of 4 you attempt to make your way through a dungeon whilst one player being the overlord (yes, same company) controls the dungeons. From it's traps to it's monsters the overlord attempts to kill the heroes at every turn.
For those intrested in the game i might add that i have been told that it's best played with an expansion called Road to Legend wich turns the game from loose dungeons into an overarching storyline where players cross over a worldmap in a campaign against the overlord that can last many months.
I am afraid i can't tell all that much more since i don't actually own it yet.
That took a long time but let's hope it was worth it. I shall leave it on a final tip, read the rule book, practice explaining the rules, and keep it under 10-15 minutes. Last thing you want to do is bore the people out of your house when you went through blood sweat and tears just to get them to sit around and player a boardgame with you.
These were the games i felt most important to share but i have a few more in my collection and even some good ones that really aught to be mentioned. I shall keep those for later posts. Meanwhile i hope that everyone that loves boardgames as much as i do proceeds to discuss their own favorite games and i hope many more people can get intrested in this often ignored hobby.
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