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I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology

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Re: I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology

#11

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

mingus88 wrote: post #3

> I enjoy solo board gaming—largely because I haven’t fully converted my family yet—but nothing compares to a game night. I’m just going to get this off my chest here because I think a lot of “board game people” might not really understand why their enthusiasm doesn’t catch on with a lot of people I know a decent number of board game “enthusiasts” that will pull out a fancy new game to show off, and spend a couple of…

I am into board game and was into complex game because I thought they were more fun to play. Then playing a bunch of Spiel games, where the rulebook is 2 pages and the setup time is 5 minutes, I changed my mind entirely. I now refuse to buy complex games. I want little rules with a lot of depth.

There are many of them, every match is intense and yet you can explain the rules in a few minutes.

Re: I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology

#12

Post by pavel_lishin »

DauntingPear7 wrote: post #10
jader201 wrote: post #2

Board games are my favorite way to accomplish two things that I find hard to do as an introvert that works from home: 1. Getting off screens 2. Socializing But it still also accomplishes one of my favorite things to do: thinking — specifically problem solving and optimizing. And, as an introvert, socializing actually naturally is secondary in our group, but that’s ok — a good heavy heads-down board game (think 3-5 ho…

As a college student without too much spending money, what’re some board games I should check out? I have wingspan, catan, and azul and wanna expand my collection with other must have games

I'm not the person you asked, but I'd highly recommend Splendor. Very easy to learn, very fun to play.

Re: I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology

#13

Post by r-johnv »

DauntingPear7 wrote: post #10
jader201 wrote: post #2

Board games are my favorite way to accomplish two things that I find hard to do as an introvert that works from home: 1. Getting off screens 2. Socializing But it still also accomplishes one of my favorite things to do: thinking — specifically problem solving and optimizing. And, as an introvert, socializing actually naturally is secondary in our group, but that’s ok — a good heavy heads-down board game (think 3-5 ho…

As a college student without too much spending money, what’re some board games I should check out? I have wingspan, catan, and azul and wanna expand my collection with other must have games

'Terraforming Mars' is a game that I've come back to more times than I can count.

The beauty is that it visually looks really complex and advanced, but the gameplay isn't really that much complex more than wingspan.

Over the years I bought the 'prelude' expansion which speeds up the beginning. (Highly recommend)

And then once you've played it more than 10-15 times, the Hellas& Elysium adds more maps for variety.

Re: I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology

#14

Post by shoo »

DauntingPear7 wrote: post #10
jader201 wrote: post #2

Board games are my favorite way to accomplish two things that I find hard to do as an introvert that works from home: 1. Getting off screens 2. Socializing But it still also accomplishes one of my favorite things to do: thinking — specifically problem solving and optimizing. And, as an introvert, socializing actually naturally is secondary in our group, but that’s ok — a good heavy heads-down board game (think 3-5 ho…

As a college student without too much spending money, what’re some board games I should check out? I have wingspan, catan, and azul and wanna expand my collection with other must have games

+1 to pavel_lishin's Splendor suggestion. There's also Splendour: Duel [1] which is a more complex version of the game designed for 2 players.

Another quick, low-complexity game that is easy to teach & pretty good fun is Century: Spice Road [2]

Chinatown [3] (re-themed as Waterfall Park [3b] ) is a simple highly interactive game that is basically 100% negotiations between players who are trying to make real estate deals with each other. Can be played in 90 minutes, including rules explanation, plays up to 5. For a more complex asymmetric game that's more focused on engine building, with a healthy dose of negotiation, check out Sidereal Confluence [4].

For more complex games that take a bit longer to play to teach and play, that are largely focused on players doing their own thing ("multiplayer solitaire"), building their engines without much negative player interaction, check out Ark Nova [5] or Terraforming Mars [6]. These might take 3-4 hours or so to finish, provided there's an experienced player to teach everyone the rules.

For another moderately complex strategy game with a little more player interaction, check out Brass: Birmingham [7]. Takes around 4.5 hours to finish a 4 player game, including the rules explanation. If you have a group that enjoys complex strategy games and wants something with spikier negative player interactions, where one player's actions can completely wreck another player's plans, check out Barrage [8].

This probably doesn't help "without spending much money"! One trick is to find or create a regular board gaming group where everyone brings along different games. That way if, everyone buys a new game or two every year there's a lot of variety without everyone needing to buy heaps of games.

[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/364073/splendor-duel

[2] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/209685/century-spice-roa...

[3] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/47/chinatown

[3b] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/396618/waterfall-park

[4] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/202426/sidereal-confluen...

[5] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/342942/ark-nova

[6] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/167791/terraforming-mars

[7] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/224517/brass-birmingham

[8] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/251247/barrage

Re: I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology

#15

Post by r-johnv »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #12
DauntingPear7 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a college student without too much spending money, what’re some board games I should check out? I have wingspan, catan, and azul and wanna expand my collection with other must have games

I'm not the person you asked, but I'd highly recommend Splendor. Very easy to learn, very fun to play.

Love Splendor! It created a category of its own!

Re: I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology

#16

Post by r-johnv »

DauntingPear7 wrote: post #10
jader201 wrote: post #2

Board games are my favorite way to accomplish two things that I find hard to do as an introvert that works from home: 1. Getting off screens 2. Socializing But it still also accomplishes one of my favorite things to do: thinking — specifically problem solving and optimizing. And, as an introvert, socializing actually naturally is secondary in our group, but that’s ok — a good heavy heads-down board game (think 3-5 ho…

As a college student without too much spending money, what’re some board games I should check out? I have wingspan, catan, and azul and wanna expand my collection with other must have games

+1 to shoo for the bgg links!

BoardGameGeek is the place to read up on games before buying them.

On the 'without spending money' front, depending on the city where you live, there often are board game cafes where you can go to rent games and play over there.

More economical if you are playing the game once or want to try out different games. Also very good if you struggle with learning rules from the rulebook.

Re: I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology

#17

Post by r-johnv »

shoo wrote: post #14
DauntingPear7 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a college student without too much spending money, what’re some board games I should check out? I have wingspan, catan, and azul and wanna expand my collection with other must have games

+1 to pavel_lishin's Splendor suggestion. There's also Splendour: Duel [1] which is a more complex version of the game designed for 2 players. Another quick, low-complexity game that is easy to teach & pretty good fun is Century: Spice Road [2] Chinatown [3] (re-themed as Waterfall Park [3b] ) is a simple highly interactive game that is basically 100% negotiations between players who are trying to make real estate de…

This is the kind of positivity that I love finding find once going down the rabbit hole of board games today.

So make amazing suggestions in this list, including two of my favorites: Terraforming Mars and Brass Birmingham.

Just chiming an opinion that Brass Birmingham is high on the complexity scale for beginner board gamers. Or more specifically, high on a frustration scale because there are so many placement restrictions that there are often only 1-2 legal moves to play and figuring out what they are is quite a challenge for people playing the first time. (From experience that we as well as several others we know had on their respective first times)

That said, I absolutely love the game!

Re: I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology

#18

Post by shoo »

r-johnv wrote: post #17
shoo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 to pavel_lishin's Splendor suggestion. There's also Splendour: Duel [1] which is a more complex version of the game designed for 2 players. Another quick, low-complexity game that is easy to teach & pretty good fun is Century: Spice Road [2] Chinatown [3] (re-themed as Waterfall Park [3b] ) is a simple highly interactive game that is basically 100% negotiations between players who are trying to make real estate de…

This is the kind of positivity that I love finding find once going down the rabbit hole of board games today. So make amazing suggestions in this list, including two of my favorites: Terraforming Mars and Brass Birmingham. Just chiming an opinion that Brass Birmingham is high on the complexity scale for beginner board gamers. Or more specifically, high on a frustration scale because there are so many placement restri…

> Brass Birmingham [...] there are often only 1-2 legal moves to play and figuring out what they are is quite a challenge for people playing the first time.

Also, some of those legal moves will set up a board state that the player taking a turn immediately after you can exploit for a lot more benefit than you got, so not only are the legal builds hard to identify for new players, half of those legal moves are also traps! If new players aren't comfortable learning the hard way, the player who is teaching the game can always call these out, explain what is going to happen & give people the opportunity to redo their move.

An alternative strategy game that is less complex than Brass is Friedemann Friese's classic Power Grid (2004) [1]. It has some of the same elements (network expansion, building stuff to make money) and parts of it are highly interactive (auctions!) but it is less complex and doesn't feature so many negative player interactions. The main down side of Power Grid is that some of the "admin" rules are pretty fiddly, but provided there is an experienced player to teach the game & be responsible for the admin, players who are learning don't need to care about the details.

[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2651/power-grid

Re: I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology

#19

Post by sssilver »

barbs wrote: post #9

I love boardgames too and could wax lyrical about them for ages. Sucks that this article was clearly written by AI.

Man I suffer from this recently. Everything I read feels AI written but because it’s just a guess I get into this loop of questioning myself and then the whole read is ruined for me.

I hate it so much.

Re: I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology

#20

Post by aaronblohowiak »

DauntingPear7 wrote: post #10
jader201 wrote: post #2

Board games are my favorite way to accomplish two things that I find hard to do as an introvert that works from home: 1. Getting off screens 2. Socializing But it still also accomplishes one of my favorite things to do: thinking — specifically problem solving and optimizing. And, as an introvert, socializing actually naturally is secondary in our group, but that’s ok — a good heavy heads-down board game (think 3-5 ho…

As a college student without too much spending money, what’re some board games I should check out? I have wingspan, catan, and azul and wanna expand my collection with other must have games

carcassonne!
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