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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   1436 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 2, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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One of my New Year's Resolutions was to pick up playing board games. The primary goal here was to stare at screens less and engage more face-to-face with friends. This is working great, and I recommend it to anyone else with the same general goal! I picked up Wingspan and one of its expansions and my wife and I have been having a great time playing it even when we don't have anyone else to play with. Throw on a Spotify playlist with some bird-centric theming, pour a birb-on, draw some cards, and you have a pleasant evening.

What are you playing these days? What should be my next purchase to add to a very thin game library? My current inclination is towards Ark Nova, which BoardGameGeek users score highly and recommend specifically for two players.

For a weighty game, I love power grid. It's nearly pure decision making about marginal benefits and marginal costs.

For a light game ticket to ride and splendor are easy to learn and quite fun.

Castles of Burgundy or Vinticulture are fun engine builders that are a bit less competitive, if you want a change of pace.

Blockus is a fun quick game.

Small World is an excellent board game I recommend heartily to everyone.

I will second this. I've taught at least 40 people SmallWorld. All of them have loved it. I have a collection of expansions and laminated single-page rules for each player and race/power combo. Low skill floor, high skill ceiling.

Second this. It's accessible enough that players who shy away from complex games can have fun, but has enough depth to keep it interesting. It's really a top tier game.

Pax Pamir, Here I Stand, Candyland, Twilight Struggle

I've been boardgaming monthly for some time now with friends who own a lot of board games. They like to switch around the game(s) to play a lot, but I've liked Scythe and Barrage, at least.

I’ve been playing Wingspan with my family. It’s a lot of fun, and just the right weight to get non-board-gamers in. Other successful plays from the last year, in rough order of weight:

  • Dixit is a fun party word game. Only played it once; my sister swears by it, so it will definitely see some more play this year.
  • Azul is an elegant set collection game with great, delicious-looking pieces. Very easy to learn. I don’t know how well it plays with only 2 players.
  • Pandemic is a cooperative game where you try to eradicate diseases. I love how the spreading epidemics arise from simple mechanics. Good intro to its genre.
  • 7 Wonders Duel is a great 2-player engine builder.
  • Dominion basically launched the deck building genre. Might be my favorite board game. Definitely has the most plays.
  • Kemet is a really cool area-control battle game. My brother and I like it, but it’s rare to get other family members invested enough.
  • Hansa Teutonica went over pretty well. It’s a mercantile game where you improve your position by influencing the map. I plan to try and get it some more action.
  • I coaxed two family members into Axis and Allies after I found an original, used copy at work. It was kind of insane, kind of fiddly, but a really cool experience. We were willing to give it shot because of…
  • Twilight Imperium 4e. This is a space opera. It takes ages to play, so we tend to split it out into several shorter sessions. But it’s a sprawling, thematic, unique game where you send fleets to conquer your friends and mine their worlds for artifacts, only to be foiled in the galactic senate. Amazing. We come back to it every so often when the table in the spare room is free.

Make of this what you will.

Fun list, I wish I knew someone with Kemet, its been on my "to play list" forever

I also wish I could just regularly get people to play Twilight Imperium 4e. I manage to wrangle a group of 6 together for a session this weekend. Hopefully I can turn it into a monthly or bi-monthly occurrence.

I coaxed two family members into Axis and Allies after I found an original, used copy at work. It was kind of insane, kind of fiddly, but a really cool experience. We were willing to give it shot because of…

Amusingly, this is the one other tabletop classic that I do have and have had for a long time. I think it's pretty much the only one I ever played with friends back when we could just hop on an XBox and play Halo instead.

Thanks for the suggestions! I'm debating about setting up a room that we currently use for a mishmash of fitness stuff and beer/liquor storage as game room, which would provide a nice space for keeping something like Twilight in place even if it takes a week to get around to knocking out.

What sort of metrics are you looking for when adding to your collection? Great at Two-player? Strategic Depth? Complexity? I ask because Ark Nova is a pretty big jump from Wingspan. It's a much more complex, strategic game, much closer to it's spiritual predecessor Terraforming Mars.

It does play great at two player. My stats tell me out of the 12 games I've played of it, 80% was at 2p and average game time was ~2.5/3 hours If you want something closer to the Wingspan level of complexity I'd recommend:

  • 7-Wonders Duel
  • Splendor Duel (much better than the original)
  • Azul (also scales well for when you want to play with others)
  • Everdell (Another worker placement like Wingspan)

If you want to scale in complexity, I can personally vouch that these are all amazing plays at both 2 and greater play counts

  • Ark Nova
  • Brass Birmingham
  • Spirit Island (Cooperative)
  • Frosthaven (Cooperative campaign)
  • Inis

Good recommendations. I also appreciate your username, Schoolman.

Only question: how is 80% possible? 12 games isn’t divisible by 5.

how is 80% possible? 12 games isn’t divisible by 5

technically 83% 10/12. I find it easier to just round.

I also appreciate your username, Schoolman.

Thanks, I suppose Bakker fans would be more common among this forum's participants

It's a much more complex, strategic game, much closer to it's spiritual predecessor Terraforming Mars.

Yep, that's the goal. We're enjoying Wingspan, but I'd love something to dig into that has substantially higher weight and complexity, particularly if it's two-player friendly. I think my wife will enjoy the same (she says she would!), but we'll see.

Thanks for the recommendations!

Wingspan was an absolutely fantastic first choice of game, you really knocked it out of the park from the outset. The wife and I just got Ark Nova as a Christmas present, we haven't played it yet as the back of the box conveys a staggering amount of complexity. We're not tabletop newbies by any means, but we're a bit intimidated.

For my money, it would not be possible to make a better addition to your thin game library than Everdell. The gameplay, presentation, theming, art direction, and mechanics are at the top end of anything we've ever seen achieved in a board game. It also has very little "screwing over your opponent"-type gameplay, which I think makes it a very pleasant 2-player experience compared to many other games. I would highly suggest grabbing the Collector's Edition of the base game, if you can swing it. That should provide many evenings of entertainment on its own, and then any time the game starts feeling a little stale you can pick up an Expansion (there are ~5, each of which adds enough to make the game feel VERY fresh all over again). I would not recommend picking up all the expansions right away, there's no really need to binge them and you may become overwhelmed with the complexity. My wife and I have steadily explored the expansions over a series of years and it's been a magnificent experience. We're maybe 3 years into Everdell being the default board game at our regular Board Game Nights with friends, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. I give it the strongest possible recommendation.

I recently taught my girlfriend to play backgammon. It's great because you can play a game in five minutes for low stakes (we start at 10 cents).

These are some of my favourites:

  • Dead of Winter (2+ players, better with more)
  • Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space (4+)
  • Mysterium (it's like Cluedo + Dixit) (3+)
  • Pandemic (2+)
  • Codenames (4+, best with at least 6)

Personally I cannot bear dead of winter. It's incredibly slow and tedious. Expect even a "quick" game to take over an hour with 4+ people and you'll be begging for the zombies to just kill you by the end of it. The crossroads cards are a cool mechanic though.

I do second the last three (never played escape from aliens).

I also like the "Sherlock Holmes: consulting detective" series. Be warned, lots of reading, the first entry in the series has some insanely dubious French translation and typographical choices. Unfortunately nobody I know shares my enthusiasm for these games (anymore) so I have several unsolved cases.

I think I played Consulting Detective once. I was playing it with a group of non-native English speakers of vastly varying levels of spoken English, which made it rather confusing.

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