Morgoth, on 01 October 2012 - 06:49 AM, said:
Anyways. I Aquired a copy of Small World for a ridiculously low sum at the local bookstore. I figured it would be a good war game for my brother's visite (the youngest of the brood. He's 15). Increadly easy set of rules, quite amusing gameplay. All in all a good family war game. Not something I would take out for a fully fledged boardgame night, but good for a quick battle.
I got introduced to
Small World recently and I really enjoyed it. It felt to me like you got a lot of the same thrills you'd get from a game of Risk, but in a much better balanced and coherent format. I'm looking to buy a copy.
My house's boardgame night has become a regular thing over the last year or so. We've got a loose but large rota of games that consists of:
Railroad Tycoon - Pretty long and involved, but I do enjoy this. Played on possibly the biggest board for any board game I've every played. I tend to mess around and try and get the Western Link though, which never quite seems to pay off.
Priests of Ra - I really enjoy this game because of the value estimation elements involved. It feels like with enough study you could come up with a concrete strategy for it, but even just played casually it leads to a lot of interesting strategy and discussion in its own right. You're bidding on gaining sets of tiles to score points, but it's not always clear how much each tile is worth.
Ticket to Ride - Pretty light and fluffy like Morgoth says, but we need the change of pace sometimes. We found a random destination generator online that's quite useful for adding a bit of variety (otherwise you start to get to know the destinations a bit too well).
Agricola - Very entertaining game where you always feel like with one more turn you could do it all. Does take a few plays to get used to the general strategy though. It's one of those games with a bewildering array of resources that you have to somehow translate into points.
Caylus - Similar sort of game to Agricola (through various means translate resources into points), but has some entertaining "screw each other over" sorts of mechanics. Perhaps runs slightly too long sometimes, but I really like the game as a whole. Have had some very close finishes.
Settlers of Catan - Obviously a classic. We've got various expansions lying around too that we went through a phase of trying out. It's started to get left out more now though, I think we've played it enough to have seen most of the different permutations of game that can get thrown up.
Dominion - We've got the Intrigue expansion, which as Tapper mentioned up thread adds a lot of versatility to the game. Always a favourite standby when we've got an awkward number of people. Also not an easy game to get bored of, so it gets a lot of play time.
Torres - We've been playing this quite a bit recently. Interesting abstract strategy game, although occasionally suffers from everyone following the same strategy. Difficult game to explain in a few words, but the gist is that you're building towers and trying to get your men to the top of them. Problem is, that's what everyone else is trying to do as well.
Puerto Rico - another classic of the genre. I'm not such a huge fan of it myself, but the mechanics are interesting and you usually get a fun evening out of it.
Citadels - Card game where you pass cards around. There's a strong strategic element and a lot of trying to outthink your opponents. Way back in the depths of time I tried running a Mafia game using the core gameplay mechanic...didn't really work, but might be ripe for further experiementation.
Then there are few that have fallen out of the rotation due to various people not enjoying them (tragically, in my view):
Robo Rally - If you've got a group with reasonable attention spans, this can be great. You program robots to move around a course to try and reach various checkpoints. And you get to shoot at each other while you're doing it! The problem is that if one player gets out into the lead it can just be tedious for everyone else. I think it works better with a small number of players controlling two robots each - less chance of someone being stuck with no hope.
Junta: Viva El Presidente - This is a pretty lightweight game, but I enjoy the interactions it involves. The Presidente mechanic (in which the Presidente gets to deal out the cards to the other players in any way he likes in order to buy people's support) is fantastic and leads to a lot of fun gameplay. The major complaint against it is that some players feel like it is too difficult to assert any control over the game and as a result it feels a bit random. I disagree though.
Through The Ages - A proper heaviweight game. Mainly gets ruled out for being too long, but I've had several fun afternoons playing this one. Closest game I've played to Civilization in a box (although I've seen other attempts at the same thing that seemed even more
Don't look now, but I think there's something weird attached to the bottom of my posts.