Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to enjoy Dominion, but it can become very mechanical. For any given set of 10 cards, you usually want to ignore all but a few of them.
For a while each successive expansion was getting more and more powerful action cards to address this issue. Not sure if they followed that trend past Prosperity though.
Ask HN: What are your favorite board games?
41–50 of 64 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite board games?
#42Hard to go wrong with Baduk/Go. Doesn't really scale to groups though. Terra Mystica[0] and Tzolk'in[1] are both low randomness worker placement game that require long term planning and fun mechanics. If war-games are more your speed, Diplomacy[2] and Twilight Imperium 3rd Ed[3] are some of the best in class. Both take all day (or more if you play Diplomacy by mail). I personally like Exocus: Proxima Centauri[4] a lo…
The enemy's key point is yours
Beware of going back to patch up
Don't chase what you can't kill
Check escape routes first
Big dragons never die
Give your opponent what they want
Don't follow proverbs blindly
http://senseis.xmp.net/?GoProverbsRe: Ask HN: What are your favorite board games?
#43It has relatively simple rules but very solid strategy (rewards logic and duplicity). The games are short, so you never feel "stuck" on a long game and when you're a beginner, you can rapidly absorb new lessons and strategies and apply them to the next round. The replay value is tremendous.
I have observed/heard about the game not "clicking" for some players the first few times. You _can_ reason out substantial amounts of information by sharing claims and thinking hard about what you personally know, and you _can_ tactically disrupt other people. I think if you have a crowd of new people, it helps to have an experienced player sit out one round and emcee, encouraging certain lines of thought and discouraging others. One of my friends said he only really "got" it after the third round, when he saw me spin a story from start to finish so that I could pin a wolf on someone when I in fact was a wolf.
I also love Dominion, which others have mentioned. (That's my personal favorite; Werewolf is my friend group-favorite.) It is in a very different genre, but it also has fast-cycling games, deep strategy vs. simple rules, and huge replay value, which are three aspects of board games that I really value.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite board games?
#441) Heavy Strategy: Eclipse and Terra Mystica (tie)
2) Strategy Cardgame: Race for the Galaxy & expansions
3) Abstract: Arimaa. Runner up: tie between Go and Hive.
4) Real-Time Co-op: Damage Report. Runner up: Space Alert
5) Co-Op: Mysterium
6) Wargame: War of the Ring. Runner up: Twilight Struggle
7) CCG or LCG: Lord of the Rings LCG
8) Party Game: Time's Up Title Recall Runner up: Concept
9) Reaction time: Jungle Speed.
10) Most disliked game: Catan or any spinoff thereof
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite board games?
#45By category: 1) Heavy Strategy: Eclipse and Terra Mystica (tie) 2) Strategy Cardgame: Race for the Galaxy & expansions 3) Abstract: Arimaa. Runner up: tie between Go and Hive. 4) Real-Time Co-op: Damage Report. Runner up: Space Alert 5) Co-Op: Mysterium 6) Wargame: War of the Ring. Runner up: Twilight Struggle 7) CCG or LCG: Lord of the Rings LCG 8) Party Game: Time's Up Title Recall Runner up: Concept 9) Reaction ti…
11) Social Deduction: Two Rooms and a Boom
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite board games?
#46I can't believe that I'm the first to mention One Night Ultimate Werewolf, which has been the consensus favorite amongst my friends for a while now. It has relatively simple rules but very solid strategy (rewards logic and duplicity). The games are short, so you never feel "stuck" on a long game and when you're a beginner, you can rapidly absorb new lessons and strategies and apply them to the next round. The replay…
We play this all the time, but it's a bit ugly for people who get out on the first night.
I talk trash most of the time so some people just kill me on the first round because they want their peace :D
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite board games?
#47I can't believe that I'm the first to mention One Night Ultimate Werewolf, which has been the consensus favorite amongst my friends for a while now. It has relatively simple rules but very solid strategy (rewards logic and duplicity). The games are short, so you never feel "stuck" on a long game and when you're a beginner, you can rapidly absorb new lessons and strategies and apply them to the next round. The replay…
Is it better than regular werewolf? We play this all the time, but it's a bit ugly for people who get out on the first night. I talk trash most of the time so some people just kill me on the first round because they want their peace :D
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite board games?
#481) Shogun. Archetypical Risk-like game of moving soldiers and conquering provinces, but with a unique twist that makes it outstanding in my view: instead of dice, it uses a cube tower to generate randomness. The outcome of fights is based in the number of cubes from each player that come out of the tower. If you get bad luck in a battle (because your cubes stay inside) then the tower will be loaded in your favor for the next battles (those hidden cubes can come out at any moment). I love this because, although I think some randomness is good in strategic battle games to spice things up and so that the game doesn't turn a chess-like prediction game, I don't like the winner being dependent on luck. The tower introduces randomness, but guarantees that no one will be too lucky or unlucky, which is great. Combine with a setting in feudal Japan, complete with rice farming and starving populace revolving against you, and you get an amazing game.
2) Imperial 2030. Another typical Risk-like game of moving soldiers and taking countries... except that it's not. You don't control the empires themselves, instead you are a banker that buys each empire's bonds. At a given point in the game, the banker that holds more bonds for a particular empire is the one controlling its politics. So maybe right now I control China, but I know that you have a lot of cash and are looking at Chinese bonds with greedy eyes, so I send the Chinese army on an unnecessarily painful military campaign to wither down its power in case you are going to control it in the next turn. This makes for awesome mechanics in a really strategic game. By the way, it doesn't have any random elements at all, so it's a good game if you are against that.
3) Galaxy Trucker. This game is great due to its sheer concept... first you use pieces from a scrapyard (competing for the pieces with the other players) to build a spaceship with its cannons, shields, cargo holds, etc. and then all of you have to fly them in a journey littered with space pirates, meteorites than can tear off pieces of your ship, merchant planets, smugglers and more. The feeling when one of your rival ships is tore in two by a meteorite is unbeatable.
4) Star Wars: Imperial Assault. When a friend of mine got this game, I thought "they have the Star Wars franchise so it will probably be a crappy game - they will sell anyway". But no. It's actually a very good tactics game with lots of choices, characters with very different styles, special abilities, and a set of rules that (albeit unspecified at times) go very well together.
5) Robo Rally. A classic from Richard Garfield, the guy that brought you MtG. OK, maybe this doesn't fit that much into "complex strategy", but it's also a game that hackers should like because it's about programming after all! You have to program your robot with randomly-dealt cards to try and survive pits, traps and the other robots' lasers. A huge strong point of this game is that the maps and missions are hugely customizable, supporting different sets of rules like races, capture the flag, deathmatch, and others that you can come up with. It supports up to 8 players, you can build different maps putting together map boards, and there are editors online to print your own map boards, so it's the ultimate customizable game. I think it's out of print but a new edition has been announced, although it only supports 6 players sadly.
6) Carcassone. One of the best known modern board games, together with Catan. But while Catan is IMHO too shallow and too random, featuring few meaningful decisions, in Carcassone every tile you place is a meaningful decision. The experience is very different in 2-player games (much more offensive) than in games with more players. Some expansions (the builder, the granary and pig, the mayor, the resources, etc.) really enhance the game although others are prescindible.
7) Discworld Ankh Morpork. A deception game: you have to work towards your goal and the other characters don't know what it is. You don't have to know Discworld to like it (one of my friends hasn't read any of the books and loves it). Drawback: unbalanced, it's easier to win with some characters than others. If you care much about that, it's probably not your game.
8) Goblins Inc. Similar mechanic to Galaxy Trucker (probably inspired on it), but with goblins that build robots of doom instead of spaceships, and with direct combat. Contrary to Galaxy Trucker, it's team-based (2v2) but it also gives you the possibility of being a traitor to your partner. Less flexible than Galaxy Trucker (this one only really works with 4 players) but loads of fun!
9) Power Grid. A classic game where you have to build a power network. Lots of strategy and decisions, although the beginning depends too much on player location and the endgame turns a bit too much into an arithmetic-fest counting to the last nickel IMO.
10) Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space. A quite original board game in that it doesn't have a board, the board is in each players' head. Some players are humans and others are aliens, but they can't see where each other is, except with certain clues (people making noise) and items. The humans must escape the aliens. It's a lot of fun and it involves both abstract thought and psychology/bluffing/etc. The drawback is that some maps and situations can be unbalanced, especially if you play with the stock rules (a door to exit the ship can randomly work or not) a player can lose very unfairly. It should be pretty easy to customize the rules though.
Also go is awesome, but I don't think it's the kind of game you were looking for advice about (and it's difficult to compare to the others as it's on an entirely different category).
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite board games?
#49I can't believe that I'm the first to mention One Night Ultimate Werewolf, which has been the consensus favorite amongst my friends for a while now. It has relatively simple rules but very solid strategy (rewards logic and duplicity). The games are short, so you never feel "stuck" on a long game and when you're a beginner, you can rapidly absorb new lessons and strategies and apply them to the next round. The replay…
Some reasons ONUW is awesome:
- Each game can be completed in 5-10 minutes.
- Supports a very large amount of players. We've had 20+ players without any issues (with the expansion pack).
- As mentioned above, replay value is high. I still encounter new situations all the time.
- No need to have an individual sit out as an emcee due to an awesome mobile app that leads the round.
- Most importantly, does not seem to lead to interpersonal conflict the way Mafia tends to. Most likely due to shorts rounds and the fact that there's enough information to go off rather than pure speculation.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite board games?
#50Hanabi: multi-player co-op, and you can see everyone's cards but your own. All about reasoning and inference. Betrayal at House on the Hill: cooperative until it isn't, with a traitor arising halfway through the game. Many novel "haunt" scenarios for replay value. Coup: Bluffing game, where you have a couple of hidden "role" cards, each role card has some abilities, but you can use the abilities of any role as a bluf…