ITT Board Game appreciation

thanks for the recommendations. I think I'm going to steer clear of Dominion for the moment because it just looks to me like a game that won't appeal to my girlfriend (and I play most games with her). It just has a bit too much in the way of geek factor.

But I'm definitely looking at the following as 2 player games:

Small World
Race for the Galaxy
Twilight Struggle
Mr Jack
[FONT=&quot]1960: The Making of the President[/FONT]

We already have Carcassone and like it a lot, but we want something with a bit more complexity.

I wouldn't say they're "bad" that way - plenty of people enjoy them with two (BGG is loaded with 2p and solo variants of most games that are still quite enjoyable), but yes, they are much better with more people.

That's a pretty good list. If you wanted to go even a step or two above those in terms of complexity Caylus and Reef Encounter from my list are some of the ultimate strategic games that work very well with two players.

Yeah. This is the thing. My girlfriend is actually a geek like me. But she doesn't like to think of herself as one. So the theme of the game is important in her enjoyment of it. She loves the complexities, but she just doesn't want a fantasy theme. Carcassone was okay because it was historical, not fantasy.

Now you mention it, a sci-fi theme probably wouldn't go down too well. Given what you say about the replay value of RFTG I might replace it with something else. Same goes for Small World. So I guess a good list is:

Caylus
Reef Encounter
Twilight Struggle
Mr Jack
1960: The Making of President

Cool, thanks for your help.

Wow, no wonder you don't think RFTG is replayable if you think it doesn't have any player interaction. It's like most Euro games in that the interaction is more subtle and indirect, unlike the head to head clashing of wargames and such. Even putting aside that with the 2nd expansion you have the potential ability to directly conquer military worlds in other player's tableaus, a huge part of the game in general is paying attention to what your opponent is doing and choosing phases based upon what you expect they will do (and what cards they've played and how many they have in hand), and whether it benefits you more than them. It's really not any less interactive than Puerto Rico if you're playing it right. I've played it over 40 times and feel like I'm still learning the game, and regularly hear people who'v played it hundreds of times say they still discover things they hadn't realized before. It's one of the most replayable games I've been exposed to so far. My group doesn't marathon it quite as much as Dominion, but it does still get marathoned fairly often.

But in terms of what Whitefish is looking for, yeah, it probably isn't the best choice due to the theme (but not because of the replayability or interaction).

They discuss a slew of ways in which there is interactivity in RFTG in this thread. A lot of them aren't immediately obvious, many are of a different form than interactivity in other games, and you can choose not to take advantage of them, but they are there. If it truly is a multi-player solitaire game, then the person saying that (assuming roughly equal skill levels) should win half the time even if they couldn't see the other player. But I'd guarantee that in that situation, if I had the ability to see their tableau and hand, and they couldn't see mine, I would win the lion's share of those games.

http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/299298

I just won a copy of Twilight Struggle on ebay, and I ordered Mr Jack and Caylus yesterday. Can't wait to play these games!

Twilight Struggle arrived in the mail today. This game looks badass.

oh my shit, just finished a 7 1/2 hour marathon game of twilight struggle. I won playing as the US. It was turn ten, and hence final scoring was about to take place, but I managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by playing a cuban missile crisis/star wars combo that allowed me to search through the discarded cards to find wargames, which allowed me to end the game by sacrificing 6 victory points (if we were at defcon level 2). I had 12 victory points thanks to earlier domination of Africa and Europe, and we were at defcon 2 thanks to the cuban missile crisis, so I ended up with a 6 VP win.

If I hadn't ended the game there it would have gone to final scoring, and since my opponent was dominating asia, africa, central america and the middle-east, and there was no clear dominant force in europe or south america, it looked likely that he'd just about edge me out on VPs, cancelling out my 12 and probably winning by 1 or 2.

holy crap, what a fucking game. BGG said it should take 3 hours, but it was the first time playing for both of us, so 1 hour of the 7.5 was learning the rules. I guess a lot of time was added because we had to think longer about each turn.

man, i can't wait to play that again. seriously, if any of you guys are looking for a great two player game I really recommend it. most fun i've had with a boardgame ever. loads of replay value as well. i kind of wish we could play again tomorrow to see how we'd do things differently.

true. need to play it a lot more.

the forums on BGG suggest it has a lot of replay value though.

I meant to respond to this awhile ago, but forgot before I finished collecting my thoughts. Now with a lot more RFTG play under my belt, and hence understanding of the game, I'm sorry to say that you're still wrong as ever.

So let's say we ignore the expansions and just look at the base game. There is a small amount of luck in what is drawn, but the idea is not to hope to draw "the right" cards, but to use what you've drawn so far and the tableaus/hands/strategy/patterns of your opponents to optimize the cards you're getting. Most of the time if your hand looks completely unsynergistic it's because you aren't familiar enough with the mechanics and nuances of how the cards work together throughout the game to piece them together into your tableau. I'm not just talking about your first few games where you learn the basics of how everything works, I'm referring to the little tricks you can pull off that may take dozens or hundreds of games to fully be able to utilize. And there are always actions like exploring and trading goods that allow you to increase your knowledge of the cards in the deck and in your hand.

There are a wealth of things you can do which are entirely situational relative to what your opponents are doing. If you just "hide behind your hand" the whole time you're not going to be very successful most of the time. There is even a poker-like mechanic of bluffing in role choice. A few examples of interactions.

*You have a windfall good in hand, and observe that your opponents have full hands, and deduce that at least one of them is likely to settle (maybe because they're military). So you play consume/trade, put your windfall down to leech their settle, and then you've just put down a world and filled your hand. If their hands had been low, it isn't nearly as likely that they'd have settled, so paying attention to them becomes extremely important.

*This time you have a decent-sized hand, an empty production or windfall world or two, and your opponents still have loaded hands. You again deduce that they'll want to play settle or develop to reduce their hands and get cards into play. This time you choose produce, leech their settle or develop (possibly putting down a production world to produce on), and now you have goods on your planet(s) to trade or consume. This wouldn't have worked if you weren't fairly confident that they were going to settle or develop themselves. This sort of move gives you an edge over your opponents if you predict right.

*Mining conglomerate, which you have to be sure you're going to be producing more rare goods than your opponents to make full use of.
*Possibly avoiding playing settle if an opponent has colony ship in play, which could give them an expensive world for free.
*Avoiding produce if it will load up your opponent with goods to consume.
*Avoiding settling when a military opponent is likely to be able to settle a strong world (perhaps you noticed that they did explore +5 last turn and almost instantly happily plucked a card from the explore without even having to think about it).
*Choosing consume if you have something to trade and can force an opponent to loose their alien/gene good for only a measly point or card if they didn't choose consume themselves.
*Settling/developing when they don't have any cards to play.
*Consuming the limited supply of VP chips before they can.
*Holding cards like 6-cost developments that your opponents would benefit from to discard after the deck has been reshuffled.

*Etc. A lot of it is the same sort of thing as you can do in Puerto Rico. Honestly in a multi-player I spend almost as much time looking at my opponents' tableaus and hands as I do mine, because it is so vital to know what they're up to and how you can take advantage of their choices. There's just as much skill involved as in Puerto Rico. And then when you add the expansions you get even more options and interactivity, with takeovers, goals, etc. You absolutely have to pay attention to what your opponents are doing, because there's often a race for these. If you're going for most brown/blue planets, you have a brown planet and a green planet in hand, your decision will probably be completely different if you're neck and neck with another player in brown/blue planets than if you're the only one that has any of those colors at all. And that sort of thing works for all of the goals. "Interaction" doesn't have to mean directly trading, talking, conquering their pieces, etc. The whole Euro model is built on expanding it to include a wide variety of mechanics, and RFTG does precisely that.



tl;dr: If you're dismissing the game as having little/no interaction and very little replayability, you're mistaken and missing out on a lot of what the game has to offer.

I have it and have played a few times, and while it's a very good game, I still don't get the hype.

Have you tried Battlestar Galactica again, Chz? I can see how it wouldn't be as much fun with the wrong group, but if you have some people that get into it it's amazing, and I play several times a month typically. There are always stories to tell, like two games where we screwed up the loyalty cards and had four cylons by the end instead of three, or when we had a cylon who said he was "role playing" his character and only took actions that helped the humans (which pissed me off because I was a cylon leader that game). It's even more fun if you've seen any of the shows.

i gotta agree with litho on Agricola. Ive played it a couple of times with my roomate, and solo as well (dont look at me), and while it's easy to see how every game plays differently (like, really), i found it far too much of a pain to set up, and was more of a mathematical headache in trying to figure out my best moves than a fun game. Also it took a longgg time before i fully understood all the rules

I think I seriously need to get Twilight Struggle.

Played a game of Junta last night. it can be difficult to get together because it really requires 7 players, but it's fucking fantastic

Get them drunk enough and they won't even remember how badly you backstabbed them in the game next time you play.

I got Saboteur recently. Haven't played yet but it looks fun.

Have you played the expansion yet?

Yes! A new edition has just been released with 4 new cards that balance the game better (it's already plenty balanced enough for me) and a new variant (Chinese Civil War) that makes things interesting.

I'm going to try and get the new edition soon.

I played a game of TS the other day, introducing it to a new player. It's completely unfair when you're teaching a newbie, but still superfun to play.

A few of us have just started playing Caylus. First time I didn't really get it at all and was confused the whole time, but second time in I understood a lot more and it was super-intense. It ended up as a tie for first place. I would have won but I miscalculated some things on the final turn. Awesome game though. Very much recommended.

Caylus is a fantastic game, and I can't wait for the re-print of it. I'm also looking forward to getting TS now that it's in print again.

Monopoly is fun indeed.

So I bought the new edition of TS. I haven't played it in hard copy yet, but I've been playing it online on wargameroom.com. I've played 5 games of it so far, and it seems to me that the new edition actually manages to improve on the original. The problem with the original was that the US could easily get overwhelmed in the Early War portion of the game (first three turns), and so there was a pro-Soviet bias. In the new edition, the US now starts with two additional influence in Canada, and two good new US event cards are in the Early War deck. So far I haven't actually used these two cards as events much, but the fact that they're there stacks the Early War deck slightly more in the US's favour, making it more likely that US cards come up. And as one of the new cards is 3-Ops there's the opportunity for a strong coup or placing of influence with that card. The fact that Canada has two US influence on it makes it harder for the USSR to dominate Europe early on.

Those two tweaks seem to make it easier for the US to survive the early war, so it's a fairer contest now.

Playing on wargameroom is really cool. People are great at the game. I've played 5, won 2 and lost 3, but the amount I've learned in those 5 games is huge. Suddenly I see the value of realignment rolls (I basically kept my most recent soviet opponent out of South and Central America using them, having been defeated as the US before through being completely shut out of both regions). I understand better how the USSR player has the coup advantage, and how the US player can attempt to counter it. I also have a better understanding of territory: Keeping the opponent out of a region by not placing influence in an unstable country, and holding key choke points like Iran (that was obvious from the start) and Thailand.

I've played this game about 15 times now, and its depth is only starting to become clear.

If anyone wants to play online I'm up for a game. It's kind of hard to get the hang of wargameroom without having played the hard copy of the game first though.

I received the update of TS for my birthday, so I've been really looking forward to getting it to the table soon.

Have you played it before or will it be your first time?

First time.

Cool! If you're playing against someone else who's played before, expect to be beaten. If you're playing with another newbie, expect for luck to play a big part in the victory of whoever wins.

You need to play the game 3 or 4 times to begin to get the hang of it, and many many more times to get good at it. But it's great fun from the very beginning because it's tense, has an excellent historical theme, and has lots of factors to consider and tactics to try.

But yeah, the tension is the main thing I love about this game. Pulling off a coup to shift the balance of power in a region just before that region is scored is so satisfying. Seeing your well made plans destroyed by being tactically outmanoeuvred at a critical point is pretty devasting. And when you have the initiative and your opponent is on the run, it's so much fun to see everything they try to do fail.

I'd probably be gaming online myself if I didn't have numerous groups in my area to game with regularly.

I think at this point I've played over 100 different games, some of them over a dozen times, and own maybe 70-80 new ones.

Hunt for deals online, maintain a good relationship with a local FLGS, and cut back on expenses for other hobbies.

I've been meaning to play that one. I know someone who has it, but she really dislikes the amount of time it takes to play it.

Oh, the time doesn't bother me, just the person who owns it. I've played Advanced Civilization, Age of Mythology, several 5 hour games of BSG and such.

I've played it twentysome times, and it's usually 2-3 hours, but depending on table talk and how the crises play out, it's gone that long a couple times.

Hey Chz, have you played the Dominion: Alchemy expansion yet? I finally played it last night.

Not exactly a board game, but how many of you have played Werewolf (Mafia) before?

norbert88