Non traditional board games

I'd really love to play some of these games but i've not got anyone that would play them with me.
Arkham Horror and Elder Sign look awesome, the Lovecraft setting looks fantastic.
 
Spent all of xmas playing Settlers of Catan with my wife, it is an epic game.
Most of the expansion pack are really good as well.
 
We (three couples) played this game in the late '70s. It's really good fun with lots of quirks. It was board game of year in 1975, easy to learn for all ages.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rio-Grande-...CWAS/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1360689999&sr=8-3

Some guy's feedback on the game (he's obviously much more clever than I am): Hare and Tortoise is a great example of a really simple game that can be played with very little skill but can also be enjoyed at a higher level using more sophisticated strategies. It is a simple race along a route but instead of throwing dice to move you have to buy squares using carrots and try to earn extra carrots along the way. Move along slow and steady buying one square for one carrot and you will get round in 65 turns but if you want to rush ahead it will cost 3 carrots for 2 squares, 6 for 3 squares or 10 for 4 squares and so on. But you will run out of carrots well before you get to the end. Incredibly simple but different players use different strategies and the game becomes fascinatingly frustrating when you are 30 squares ahead and you have no way of winning! Without a doubt my favourite ever board game and highly recommended!
 
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I recommend munchkin and a game called order of the stick, its a boardgame that take light hearted micky taking of D&D type games and has a good system, one of my favs.
 
I like War on Terror and Pandemic. WoT is a bit like Risk but no so serious and Pandemic is a really good team work game.

One of my friends has recently got some zombie based game but I've not played it yet.
 
Been playing a lot of cities and knights recently, really good expansion to Catan. We all seem to get fatigued though and not see really obvious things towards the end :o :D
 
iviv - if I lived down your way I'd certainly be turning up each week.

We play H&T with my wife's sister, her husband and two sons a few times a year and it is REAL quality time. It's good to see my nephews playing with something other than their mobile phones. My brother in law is very competitive and thinks the game through, my nephews haven't got the concentration but they certainly don't want to loose, me and the Mrs are usually too sozzled to win. When me and the Mrs have popped our clogs our nephews will remember us, not for the presents or money we've given them but from the quality time we spent with them.

Yes I wish I could come to your club.

We played Risk on operations in the Army. How we didn't land up in fisty-cuffs I'll never know.

One group of guys used to play a game called Diplomacy where they would write each other covert notes between moves. They certainly enjoyed it.

I have another game called Kensington, it's a good enough game but NOT as much fun as H&T or Risk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_(game)

I seem to remember that it too won an award.
 
If anyones in the Essex area, pop along to my friends do Triple B con (Beers, Boards & Bellylaughs) from 21-23 July in Southend-on-Sea.

I wish I was back in the UK so I could go as I still need to find a gaming group.
 
http://boardgamegeek.com/

BGG is probably the number one source for board game information, with something like 10k games all listed. Often there are copies of rulebooks, there's a forum with reviews, strategy talk and general chat for each game. Its pretty much the best place to go if you want to know stuff about a game.

DotA said:
I recommend munchkin and a game called order of the stick, its a boardgame that take light hearted micky taking of D&D type games and has a good system, one of my favs.
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Munchkin was one of the first games I played, discovered it when I joined the Northumbria uni Gaming and Roleplay society and really enjoyed it at the time, we played it nearly every week. But nowadays its more of a 'once in a while' game. Its fun, but the games tend to drag on for ages, every extra player makes the game exponentially longer.
That said, last week I won a super quick game. Got up to Lv6 fairly quickly despite having only one item that gave me bonuses, and I was a gnome warrior. Looked for trouble against a Lv6 or something just to get another easy level, and someone wandering monster'ed in a Lv17 to get me. So I used the gnome ability to play the Lv20 Katrina from my hand as an illusion to help me win, someone else wandering monster'ed a Lv11 in so I was loosing again, so I played a couple of monster enhancers on Katrina, nobody else could do anything and because of all the monsters they threw in, I hit Lv10 :D
 
Looking over at my shelf right now I've got:

Call of Cthulhu LCG (+ a few expansions)
Warhammer: Chaos in the Old World
Last Night on Earth
A Touch of Evil
Cash 'n' Guns
Munchkin (+ expansions)
Munchkin Cthulhu (+ an expansion or two)
Cthulhu Gloom
Braggart
Zombies!!! (+ expansions)
Monopoly (how'd that sneak in there!)
Scrabble (oh yeah, the wife's)
Funny Business
Cranium
Arkham Horror
Mansions of Madness (+ all the print on demand scenarios)
Space Hulk: Death Angel
Munchkin Zombies
Pandemic
Forbidden Island
Family Business
GUBS
Elder Sign
Cutthroat Caverns (+1 of the expansions)
Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel on Mount Skullzfyre
Tannhauser


Still haven't gotten round to giving Tannhauser or Chaos in the Old World a spin. Might pick up the tabletop of Ticket to Ride, as both the wife and I do enjoy it on Steam. I'm forced to resign to only playing Memoir '44 on Steam, though, as she really doesn't like WWII themes. BOOOOOOO!
 
I've recently discovered the PC game Dominion.net. As the name suggests, it is a copy of the game Dominion coded in .net with all the expansions included. Its only single player, but the AI is surprisingly good for a fan game like this.

The rules can be found here, but essentially the game is card drafting. You start off with a deck of 10 cards - 7 copper and 3 1vp cards. There are 10 randomly selected cards you can buy on the table, and there are 10 of each of those cards. There are also stacks of copper, silver and gold which you can buy, and 1, 3 and 6VP cards you can buy.

On your turn you start off with one action and one buy. An action is essentially playing a card, and doing what the card says. They can give you more actions, more buys, more coins for the round, and many other things. Once you have no more action cards to play (Or no more actions to play them) you play all the treasure cards you have, and use the money they generate to buy a card from the table. Then you discard everything left in your hand and draw 5 cards, and your turn is over and the next person plays. If you don't have any cards to draw, you just shuffle the discard pile and draw from that deck again.
The game ends when either 4 of the stacks of cards have been emptied, or the highest VP stack of cards is empty. VP cards are important because obviously they are what you use to score, but they are also essentially wasted space. You win simply by having them in your deck, but when you draw them into your hand, they are a dead card. You can't play them, they aren't worth money to buy more cards with, they just get discarded at the end of the turn, taking up a space which could have had something more useful in. But equally, you need the cards to win. So you have to make the balance between having useful cards in your deck while making sure you have enough VPs in your deck to win. Its a very interesting balancing act, and the game plays out very well.

And despite being a relatively simple game once you understand the rules, there are so many different action cards that can be chosen to form the 10 available on the table to buy, it means that every game is going to be different due to different combinations of cards available to buy. Some interact really well together, some are a real pain.
 
I am surprised it took this long to get a boardgames thread on here. Boardgames and technology/IT seem to be quite synergistic. I notice that a lot of people I meet at board game clubs (and tabletop rpg) seem to work in I.T. (I don't).

Over the last six months I have been playing a lot of Mage knight. I have two v young kids which somewhat restricts the possibility of going out, or having people round, therefore I tend to play games that work well as 2 player games, which i can play with my wife. Mage knight, is one, as is civ the board game, elder sign and obviously card games like dominion.

There is a good board game club in a nearby town (Hemel hempstead), but at the moment I am tending to save my weekly gaming nights for tabletop rpg (rogue trader).

Any more great 2 player games that you would suggest?
 
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I also got into this from watching Tabletop, started last year and finally mentioned it to someone at work in December, surprisingly he didn't laugh and we've now got a regular games night, plan is for every Tuesday evening from 5:30 onewards, and once a month a Saturday/Sunday from noon-ish onwards for some bigger games :)

Done 4 nights so far (literally just got back from it to see this thread :p) and played:
Small World - Really good, great to start with for a bunch of n00bs as well
Pandemic + On The Brink (twice) - Like the co-op aspects
Munchkin (twice, earlier today) - Quite like, some great moments and some dull moments imo.

We've also bought/played (not really proper games as such):
Zombie Dice
Zombie Fluxx
Cthulu Fluxx
Pirate Fluxx

We like Fluxx. :p

It is good as a nice 'time consumer' though, couldn't use it as a main game as it can be over in less than 5 minutes, but on the other hand we played a game at the end of tonights session that went through the deck 3 times I believe, which was a fairly lengthy game. Crazy rules at times as well :)

Onto the longer game days, we're doing the first on Saturday, got Arkham Horror for it, I also want to play Game of Thrones, Eclipse and Twilight Imperium on the longer sessions over the next few months :)
 
Down for my first game of thrones on Sunday, can't wait! Going to be a load of newbies learning and backstabbing, just what you want in a game! Just reading the rule book but still looking forward to it.

But now, time to promote a couple of small filler games which while being simple, are amazing ideas and great fun to play. The fist one is callas Hanabi. You have a deck of cards, the cards are one of 5 colors, and each card is numbered from 1-5. There are three 1s for each colour, two of each 2-4 and one 5. The idea is simple, on yor turn you play a card from your hand onto the table, and you have to go from 1-5 with each colour. The catch is that you hold your hand backwards. That is, you can't see what cards you have, only the other players can. If you play an invalid card ( a red 4 when there is only a red 2 out, or a blue 1 when a blue 1 has already been played, you loose a life. 3 and it's game over for the whole team. But instead of playing a card, you can use a clue token. You start with 8 of these, and they allow you to tell a player one of two things. Either indicate to him all of the cards of a certain colour, or all of a certain number. It is up to them to decipher the information given to them. Of course, giving other clues or hints is cheating, so no pointing harder at one card or winking or things like that. Finally you can discard a card from your hand instead of playing one. This obviously removes it from the game, so better hope you don't discard a 5! But by discarding, you get a clue back.

The game itself is so simple, but the level of thought to play it is surprisingly high. If someone points out to you that two of your cards are fours, how do you keep that info. Does it mean you should play one since there is a green 3 on the table, they might have told you because they were both green 4s so you will be safe! Or they might hope you wait so someone on their next turn can tell you which is green. When I've played it, we tend to score around the high teens, actually getting a 5 played only happens a couple of times per game.
 
I've "discovered" board games via TableTop on YouTube, and we're beginning to have semi-regular gaming nights, although more people is always good!

Could do with finding or setting up a group and do this regularly, need something in the Nottingham/Mansfield area!
 
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