Ask YC: What Is Your Favorite Board Game?
Chinese Checkers is a great game which scales from two players to six players, but what do you prefer? Chess? Monopoly? Risk? Escape From Colditz?
With the "penny rule":
On any die roll where you get NO resources that isn't due to the robber, you get a penny. During your trading round, you can turn is as many pennies as you have victory points showing for a single resource.
This reduces the game's tendency to knock someone out of the running three rounds in because of a set of bad rolls.
If you like Siedler, you might like a Dutch card game called "Koehandel".
Also, I like resource scarcity - under your game, I have a high incentive to pick 'bad' locations because I stand to profit more. Initial deployment is a key part of the game--as is trading resources!
Run to the wood and brick and get those roads built!
None of my friends would hear anything along the lines of "Ok, I'll trade you this, and in return, you'll be immune from paying for this long, or you'll only have to pay 30% forever, plus you'll receive this property that you can use to trade Tim for that property so that you can get a monopoly too."
My friends didn't like to think that hard. "You pay what's on the card. If you get this then you'll have a monopoly and that's bad. Boardwalk is the best one."
I always liked thinking a little bit beyond the basics of that game. The railways have the highest yield out of anything, plus there are 4. Monopolies of only 2 more valuable properties are not really as valuable as a monopoly of 3 "average" properties. Utilities are crap.
I'm hoping that in the real world people are a bit more susceptible to "negotiating."
My favorite move in monopoly is to come up with some trading deals that would give everyone monopolies in a single turn, but make it so that I had either a positional (read: my piece is either in jail or far, far away from their monopolies) or money advantage. Then, mortgage/sell all my other properties, build up as much as possible and hope to kill someone quickly. In monopoly, you have to play the 'do or die' strategy. There is no other way to play.
Unfortunately, now they no longer do any deals with me because they know my deals are deadly even though they look fair...
I'm notorious for aggressively pursuing side deals with my friends.
Really, vanilla monopoly is a very carefully balanced game. I've never heard any house rule that doesn't make things worse.
I think a lot of hackers are interested in spoken and written language and like to play around with words and puns, etc.
(My green and white deck from 2001 will kill any deck you have)
The worst was that one of them even had the ability to explain to you that it was all a strategic move to make the guy he had sided with to trust him. Evil guy would then backstab erstwhile ally, using YOU as the hammer. And of course you'd happily go along with it.
But that's not what's really evil about Diplomacy. What's really evil is that you NEED alliances just to survive, so you can't just blow these guys off if they are on your borders.
Evil.
In college, we used to play an internet version of Risk. There were six of us that lived in a four room suite sharing a common hallway. The plots, betrayals, and backstabbing were epic. You could guess at which alliances existed by watching who was sneaking into whose room, although since IM was available as a stealthier method of communication sneaking around was often done for misdirection. There was always a risk, though, that if you tried to plot over IM that the other person would betray your plans to his roommate to gain leverage or trust.
I enjoy Monopoly for much the same reasons. I love to make various financial derivatives using various characteristics of my properties. If it could be imagined, I sold or bartered it, including X-turn immunities, partial property cashflows, and dozens of other goods.
See also, frustration.
1) Go. Emergent gameplay, endless depth. Studying this game will teach you how to think strategically in the real world.
2) Magic Realm, a '70s Avalon Hill fantasy game. It's a fantastically complicated hack & slash dungeon crawl board game. But it's still simpler than D&D, and takes less time for you and all your geeky friends. The creator of the game is (or was, last time I checked) still active on the fan mailing list.
Settlers.
I've also been playing some Clue lately (if you haven't played since you were a little kid, I'd recommend trying again -- but with scratch paper to make notes instead of just the puny sheets that come with the game).
I and some friends were super into Risk a few years back (we even drove from Rhode Island to Pennsylvannia one evening to enter the Risk Tournament of Champions http://www.risktoc.org/)
A big hit in almost any group of people has been Speed Scrabble. Quick, easy to play in teams, and just great fun overall. If you like Scrabble, try it out.
I'm a big fan of games of all varieties, but Go stands above and beyond everything else for me.
I seem to remember a "Grape Escape" or something like that from childhood as well. You were little clay grapes and as you ran around the board you were smashed, cut, squeezed, etc.
Good times.
Chess is probably the best game that exudes all of these characteristics.
And bets of all, it takes a day to learn and a lifetime to master... so you will never get bored.
While chess is good, 3D chess is one you should try. Recommended by my geology lecturer to improve 3D thinking.
That said, when I have a good day to kill, History of the World is a lot of fun.
I left the hobby altogether because of that (and the fact that I can't find other 6 players for a live game [1]).
I plan to some day [2] implement a client/server to play remotely but in real time, with good communication interfaces [3]. So you can set apart an afternoon every other weekend or so, play a game for a few hours, and then the game ends no matter what and you're done with it.
[1] There are some variants with more or less than 7 players, though. I found Iberian (5 players) to be enjoyable, and Hundred3 is quite playable if you can only find 3. If you want to lose your life, try World2, played by 17 (!) players on a wraparound world map.
[2] And seeing so many upvotes to Diplomacy comments around here, that day might come sooner!
[3] There's RTDip, a community for realtime mail games, but communication is forbidden in those games, so it's not nearly the same.
You are right about the background munching though. I kind of like it to have a lot of time to ponder my moves.
If you want to try any of these, my site is Vying Games (vying.org).
http://www.diplom.org for a great magazine and to play online http://www.floc.net/dpjudge (from the same people)
For two players: Scrabble or Carcassonne. For three or four players: Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico
If you can find them: Titan Talisman 2nd Edition and Illuminati are also totally awesome.
I play a lot of them, and can't pick a favorite.
I love chess. The first time I beat my Dad was an event. I love Go, but started to beat everyone around me, which actually sucks.
Risk 2210 is excellent. Settlers of Catan and it's variants are a delight.
Monopoly isn't worth the paper money it's printed on :)
i actually like "settlers" a lot right now. "tides of iron" is pretty cool "B5 CCG" is a blast to play twice a year
but my all time favorite is RISK