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Can you guys recommend me a fun four-player board (or card or whatever) game to play with my friends at a summer cottage? Preferably one where a single game does not take ages to complete (1 hour is okay, 3 hours is too much) and where the rules can be learned in a game or two. Also one that can be played slightly drunk.

 

So far we've played — and enjoyed — Dominion, Carcassonne, and Seven Wonders but we'd like to try something new. I'm a complete novice when it comes to board games (I know Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit) so feel free to list also the "obvious" choices. The game doesn't have be a popular classic, though, and we don't mind if the game is heavily themed as long as it's fun. We might also be interested in trying out a board game that requires teamwork (either 2 vs 2 or 4 vs 0) or some role play / dungeon master-ish stuff.

 

Are there any good board game review or recommendation sites? BoardGameGeek.com gave me a massive headache. 

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Power Grid! Weinhandler! Those are two good competitive games. Also, the Obvious recommendation is Settlers of Catan. I know a lot of people who dislike it because they've played it so much, but that's not really relevant to your situation. It's a very good game. For co-op games, I'd recommend Ghost Story. MAYBE Arkham Horror if you're okay with spending a lot of time looking up rules.

 

By far my favorite, though: Cosmic Encounter. It's a race to conquer the galaxy in a very lighthearted fashion. Do that one! It's competitive, but since two players can win at the same time, you often get people teaming up with each other. Every game feels very different because there are so many races (that you randomly choose from!). Some of the races are broken, especially when teaming up with another specific race, but that's just part of the fun.

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Sorry everybody, didn't mean to post twice.

Well uh. . . I'm playing a lot of Stone Age on my iphone and Pegs and Jokers is a blast with two teams of two.

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By far my favorite, though: Cosmic Encounter. It's a race to conquer the galaxy in a very lighthearted fashion. Do that one! It's competitive, but since two players can win at the same time, you often get people teaming up with each other. Every game feels very different because there are so many races (that you randomly choose from!). Some of the races are broken, especially when teaming up with another specific race, but that's just part of the fun.

 

I second Cosmic Encounter without reservation, because it's fun and light on rules, which every race breaks its own way anyway. I don't own a copy myself, because I'm unspeakably bad at the game for reasons unknown to me, but it's the perfect game for people just getting into the medium. It's the best example of a game that whisks its players away from the "Well actually, you can't do that because of this" and to the "Oh my goodness, this is like hanging out with friends but on steroids!"

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Thank you guys for recommendations! I really appreciate it.

 

None of us are overly competitive and we play these games just for laughs. Cosmic Encounter seems like a perfect match for us and I will definitely check it out. Thanks again!

 

Also, has anyone played Space Alert? It sound quite interesting and something that we might get into.

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Space Alert is unbelievably stressy to me, I enjoyed the chaos but it wasn't my cup of tea (I like to think about my actions).

My favourite game to play when drinks are involved is probably Cash and Guns.

If you like deckbuilding games like Dominion, I found Ascension to be excellent as well.

Nefarious is a great rules-light game about being mad geniuses building stuff like space lasers and pheromone rays. It takes some tricks from Cosmic Encounter by breaking the rules in some ways every game.

Finally, the best game to play with people who don't really play games is Dixit. It's sort of an interpretative storytelling version of Apples to Apples (also great fun).

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I highly recommend Quarriors. It's a dice building game that's pretty easy to pick up and learn. It's been our go to game for lunch gaming sessions at work lately. I ended up buying a copy and bringing it home to play with my kids and they love it as well. Usual play session time is about an 30 min to an hour depending on how many people are playing.

 

I didn't see any mention of Ticket to Ride, that should be on the list of any looking to get their feet wet in board gaming.

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I found Quarriors to be a cool idea but to have rather bad balance problems and too much randomness to my liking. I play way too many boardgames though so that might just be me being picky.

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Space Alert is fantastic, but probably not necessarily summer cottage material. You need to play an audio CD with it.

 

My recommendations for light games:

-Pandemic

-The Speicherstadt

-El Grande (not really light, but I recall it playing quickly)

-Love Letter

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Also Ticket to Ride is good, but in my experience it usually takes 2 to 3 hours to play, not 1. Then again, my friends are pretty competitive about Ticket to Ride, so your mileage may vary.

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I don't think I've EVER had a game of Ticket go longer than an hour. What the hell are you doing?

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I ended up buying Cosmic Encounter and Quarriors. We only played one game of Cosmic Encounter so far but it was incredibly fun. The game-breaking alien powers and flares are great. We ended up in a situation where we had to let each attacker win and each negotiation fail (so that one player wouldn't win by tokens), where the second player would win an encounter by smallest attack total, and where the third player could mirror attacks ("15" to "51"). By the end of the game we were all like "What the fuck just happened?"

 

Quarriors! has one of the most confusingly laid out rulebooks I have ever seen (and I have not seen many). Fortunately, the actual rules seem simple enough.

 

Thanks again for the suggestions!

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Now I wanna play Cosmic Encounters.

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I don't think I've EVER had a game of Ticket go longer than an hour. What the hell are you doing?

 

A lot of sizing up bluffs.

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I think these are my 3 favorites:

 

Lords of Waterdeep: Nails everything I like about resource management and worker placement types games, plus I'm a sucker for some D&D flavor. In a nutshell, you get Quest Cards, worth victory points. To complete quests you need to recruit different amounts of hero archetypes, that you get via the random pile of buildings. Completed quests can give you bonuses, powers, or ongoing rewards that can alter your play style, and the different professions/buildings can make games wildly different. We definitely get through games faster than similar styles. 

 

Race for the Galaxy: My favorite card/deckbuilding game, and the most complicated game to explain to new players, even though the mechanics are in one sense simple. You draw some cards, which you will use to build a little space empire in front of you. Each player gets a starting planet with a specific power/bonus which can inform the strategy you employ. The same cards are discarded as currency to pay for the card you want to use. No direct interaction between players. 

 

Stone Age: I'll second this one. Plays really fast, and seemingly has a decent variety of paths to victory. 

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Race for the Galaxy: My favorite card/deckbuilding game, and the most complicated game to explain to new players, even though the mechanics are in one sense simple. You draw some cards, which you will use to build a little space empire in front of you. Each player gets a starting planet with a specific power/bonus which can inform the strategy you employ. The same cards are discarded as currency to pay for the card you want to use. No direct interaction between players.

 

Race for the Galaxy has a really good computer implementation, hosted for free here. I had a great time playing it for several weeks, to get a good feel for the cards and the systems they represent, but of course it's missing your friends' smiling faces across the table.

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I could beat it maybe three times out of ten at the end of my run, mostly by pushing incredibly aggressive military strategies to short-circuit the AI's preferred efficiency engine. It teaches you to go for the kill, which maybe isn't the best thing in the long run, but I had my fun.

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Lords of Waterdeep: Nails everything I like about resource management and worker placement types games, plus I'm a sucker for some D&D flavor. In a nutshell, you get Quest Cards, worth victory points. To complete quests you need to recruit different amounts of hero archetypes, that you get via the random pile of buildings. Completed quests can give you bonuses, powers, or ongoing rewards that can alter your play style, and the different professions/buildings can make games wildly different. We definitely get through games faster than similar styles.

 

LoW is a beautifully presented game too :tup:

 

I love the way the lord you draw defines your playstyle; I've played this a bunch of times and don't think I've followed the same strategy more than once. The buildings, ambassador and lieutenant give it enough variation to feel varied/modded without being overcomplicated too.

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I'm debating getting the GoT board game to try and get some friends to play a board game.  As much as it probably isn't the right game (it's a long strategy focused game and a short fun/party type game would be way more up their alley) I think I have a massively larger chance at getting them to play it than anything else.  I've been trying to get them to play stuff all Summer and so far nothing has worked (I picked up a copy of The Resistance: Avalon and so far it's still in plastic) and at this point I'm nearly willing to make a $60 gamble because they're all really into the books and show, even if I don't care for either.  I asked some of them if they'd play it and explained it was a strategy type game that would take a few hours and I got the closest thing I've hear so far to them agreeing to play, just because it's Game of Thrones.  Even http://vimeo.com/70647384 did little to sway them to want to play a board game. 

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My experience is that long strategy games are off putting to most people who don't already have the intent to play them. I run a games night based around shorter games that don't take an amazingly large amount of concentration; someone bought Battlestar Galactica along once and it fucked the whole room up by pulling in spectators and creating a massive brooding well of alternating silence and debate. Usually, people turn up, make friends and get a bit noisy, maybe scream at each other a bit if they're playing Lifeboat or Saboteur. That night though the room was more or less silent. New people turned up, went "Ohhh", and left.

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GoT is a blast with 6 invested people. It's not too difficult to learn, but it's also a lot to bite off if you're not already into games. Though if all the players are equally new nobody should get crushed. Every game we've played has hinged on a final turn pitch for support or somebody flipping loyalties.

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