Nappi

Board Game Recommendations

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I have to recommend Lords of Waterdeep. Played it twice now and had a blast. Neat worker placement game with heavy D&D theme. Good fun. Plays in about an 45 minutes to an hour and a half depending on number of players and group. Allows for big comebacks and sneaky wins at the end. 

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I played Game of Thrones and didn't like it at all. X:

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I have to recommend Lords of Waterdeep. Played it twice now and had a blast. Neat worker placement game with heavy D&D theme. Good fun. Plays in about an 45 minutes to an hour and a half depending on number of players and group. Allows for big comebacks and sneaky wins at the end. 

 

I also recommend this game highly. As someone who WANTS to be into board games more but often gets frustrated, Lords of Waterdeep actually delivers on what I'm looking for and it's easy to get into. It's also the only recently designed board game my wife has shown interest in, though she ignores the D&D theme.

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Lords of Waterdeep looks and sounds really nice. I think I will get that as well.

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It's a little baroque - the 4-player game can take about 8 hours - but the big, grown-ups Game of Thrones game is really good. Several interlocking systems and a lot of politicking and backstabbing - the different lords have different but balanced strengths (the Starks have lots of territory but few resources, the Greyjoys are psychotically good in a fight but have little room and cannot expand without making enemies), and there is a counter that represents the growing threat from the North, which has to be fought off by all the players together.


So, big and expensive and time-consuming, but worth playing. Not sure I'd recommend it for a light user, though...


Cosmic Encounter is great, as long as you don't feel too strongly about game balance... haven't played that in _ages_.

 

Race for the Galaxy and Lords of Waterdeep are now on my to play list.

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Race for the Galaxy is good, if intimidating if you don't have someone to explain it to you well. I completely lost the thread when my buddy bought an expansion and all sorts of extra stuff got involved. Still, worth a look.

 

On Monday we decided to play a game at my group that had been played like 3 times years and years ago by one of the people there but was completely new to the rest of us. It's a Rio Grande game called Traders Of Genoa. It's a game about manoeuvring around a marketplace to make deals and accomplish deliveries. The twist is that all players share control of one game piece that can only move around a fraction of the board at a time. People have to barter and convince each other to move the game piece to a place that is advantageous to both them and the person in control of it (control rotates through the players). It's really, REALLY good. The bartering was crazy, there are a bunch of different ways to get cash, and the cash is both your bartering tool and the only scoring mechanism. I had one friend who was focusing on acquiring privilege among the buildings in the market, netting him a tonne of points, while the rest of us were getting money in our own ways and working with him to screw the others. This was until it became obvious that he would quickly control the entire market if we didn't step it up, so we bought up the privilege that was left and used it as an emergency trump card when dealing with him for the rest of the game (Look, I really need you to go here. I'll give you a privilege for it.). EVERYTHING is tradeable, and everything is fluid. It's a fascinating game that really takes what a barter game can be about and astounded me with how tense it could make negotiations. I was super impressed. People should play this game.

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Waterdeep is a good choice, Nappi. Here would be my top three recommendations based on what you've mentioned.

 

Bohnanza: The best game about bean farming ever made. An absolutely brutal negotiation game where every player is trying to make the most money planting beans. But you're often forced to plant beans that you don't want, or lacking the beans that you do want and therefore must negotiate with your opponents to maximize your profits. It takes 1-1.5 hours, is super simple to learn and probably wouldn't cost you more than $25. One of my all-time favourites.

 

Hanabi: I haven't played a ton of co-op games, but I have a hard time imagining there being a better one than Hanabi. It's deceptively simple: you've got a deck of cards, with five colours each numbered one through five. Your goal, as a group, is get every colours cards played in ascending order. The problem is that you can't see what cards are in your hand: you hold them so that you see the backs and everybody else sees the fronts. Working together, you have to give each other enough information about the cards so that nobody screws the whole thing up. One of the most challenging and rewarding games I've ever played.

 

1775: Rebellion: This is a new one and was Kickstarted, so I'm not actually sure if it's available for purchase yet, but it's awesome so I'll recommend it. It's a team-based, dice-rolling war game set in the American Revolution. Two players are the Americans, two are the British. It's got a similar feel to Risk, but it's mechanically a bit tighter and has a really interesting reinforcement system that makes every part of the board feel important. It's one of the games that keep running around in my head at the moment.

 

EDIT: Just saw miffy's post about Traders of Genoa. Definitely an awesome game (although it's probably longer than what Nappi's looking for). I got to play it once last year, after it was re-released as simply "Genoa" and I really enjoyed it. I desperately want to play it again. The idea that negoation permeates every aspect of the game is so interesting to me.

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Thanks again for the suggestions, y'all!

 

I bought three games already (Cosmic Encounter, Quarriors!, and Lords of Waterdeep) and I think we'll manage with those and the games my friends already own for a while. Feel free to suggest new ones, though. The ones mentioned already all sound very interesting.

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Roborally is a fun game. Every player program's his/her robot for the next 4 steps, and then they play it. There are different play modes, deathmatch or capture the flag; there are different maps.

 

If you have a lot of people, Werewolf is an awesome game. You need at least 8 people, but the more you've got the better the game will be.

 

 

If you want to check out various table top games I can recommend Wil Weatons webseries: Table Top. It's fun to watch, but you also get a good idea of the game.

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Roborally can get exhausting sometimes, but I love it. The slightly rushed yet fundamentally dry and orderly programming phase contrasts magnificently with the later chaos of everyone's plans suddenly crashing into each other :tup:

 

Werewolf varies a lot depending on house rules, special characters, and the crowd you have. The worst I've played had no debate, just voting, and also allowed metagaming, i.e. people accusing others on the basis that they "heard them move in the night".

 

The best games I've played were at barcamps: To stop metagaming, all the players had to make noise at night (mooing, zombie moans, or showtunes), and all accusations had to be seconded as well as have some reasoning behind them. Those two things seem to bring out a really extroverted combination of the silly and the desperate in people.

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Werewolf varies a lot depending on house rules, special characters, and the crowd you have. The worst I've played had no debate, just voting, and also allowed metagaming, i.e. people accusing others on the basis that they "heard them move in the night".

 

What!? Where's the fun in that. It's all about the meta game.

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If you want to play Werewolf, play The Resistance instead.

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I agree, unless you have more than 10 people. 

 

I find that with more than ten people, playing one game is rarely the right answer. It might work, but it's tough to get that many people to focus on the same thing. Split into groups or just do something else.

 

This is barring certain situations like big events or summer camp or something. But in a regular, casual party situation, playing a game with that many people almost never works.

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Huh, I've never heard that sentiment before. What do you hate about them? I love them, personally. The Resistance is my favourite game ever.

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I don't know how to phrase it clearer than that I prefer conversation to be cooperative rather than antagonistic.

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Do you not like competitive games in general then? And do you mean conversation in general or just conservation in games?

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I like competition just fine. I just dislike conversation being the means through which it is executed. If a game is going to consist of sitting around and gabbing, I'd prefer the gabbing to be pleasant.

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I can understand that. I'm generally pretty good at fooling folks in games with a lot of talking (diplomacy comes to mind) but I feel like a dick and I hate doing it.

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So I just started a board gaming blog (well, there will be card games and party games too). It's called Analysis Paralysis. I thought some of you folks might be interested in such a thing.

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To go along with the purpose of this thread, the article I wrote today was about Jaipur, a wonderful, light, two-player card game. I cannot recommend it enough.

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