I've always loved board games - growing up I spent a lot of time begging various friends and family members to play The Amazing Labyrinth, Bandu, and anything else that was lurking in the family game cabinet. My parents and siblings were usually good sports - we had a lot of fun playing games and doing puzzles during vacations and over Christmas. I remember a couple Christmases when Santa gave the "family" 6 games and after they were all played during the holiday we took turns picking which ones we would get to keep.
Anyway, this year I've decided that I am going to make board gaming more of a hobby. So I joined a board game group that meets every Tuesday for several hours in a local community center. People each bring several of their favorite games, and we just hang out and play them. I won't lie to you, we're an extremely dorky group, but I have a lot of fun. Everyone is very smart (lots of CS people and engineers) and I got schooled regularly when I first started playing with them, but I've started to hold my own a little more often.
Most of the games we play fall into the broad "Eurogame" theme, which are generally very heavily strategy based without too much luck involved. There are some really interesting game mechanics in some of them, including "cooperative games" where everyone plays together to try to defeat the game, "auction games" which involve bidding on various objects and trying to get a bargain, and "trading games" where there is a free-form market between the players. They've come a long way since Monopoly!
I'm not going to go into much detail on the games, but thought I would suggest a couple of my favorites in case anyone is in the market. All the links are on boardgamegeek.com, which is a great game website which has tons of reviews, variants, and helpful rules modification for just about any game you can think of.
Settlers of Catan - A classic "trading game" that we just got for Christmas (thanks Wendy and Jon!). This is a great introduction into Eurogames for newbies - super fun, relatively easy to learn, and highly addictive!
Pandemic - A cool cooperative game where all the players are working to stop the spread of four diseases around the world. Each person is randomly assigned a "character" with special abilities to help fight the diseases and you all work together to capitalize on these skills.
Puerto Rico - An economic game where you have to build buildings, produce goods, and ship them off for profits. Lots of different ways to win, which is always cool. This is probably the highest-rated game among the gaming community, and is very fun.
For Sale - A real-estate trading game - perfect for those of us who can't possibly afford to buy anything in real life. It has an auction mechanic - you bid on various "houses" (ranging from a leaky cardboard box to a space station) and then try to sell them at a profit. Only takes 20 minutes and has been very popular among our friends.
Let me know if there are any more that you love and I should check out!
4 comments:
Did you invite Broer to come?
So when I was over in Oakland a few days after I saw you guys last month I toured my aunt & uncle's new house.
Talk about heavy strategy games... you've never even CONCEIVED of a collection anything near the scale of what my uncle's sitting on top of. It's outrageous. Incomprehensible. He's got a lot a lot a lot of games over there. I don't think anyone's ever heard of 98% of them.
Yes, I sent Broer an e-mail a couple of weeks ago. He says he has a regular Tuesday commitment so he won't be able to make it.
A lot of people in the gaming community spend outrageous amounts of money on games. Like thousands and thousands of dollars. I don't have any desire to have a collection that large, but Tom may have to keep me on a budget nonetheless.
Carcasonne!
Pandemic sounds like my kind of game (or is it because it's the kind of work I used to do in real life?).
I hope we're geeky enough to try it when we see you in April.
-Parental Unit, still in FL
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