GKANG's Test: How Does ZU Feel About Board Gaming?

So there's a gaping hole which never seems to have been filled here at General Gaming, and that's any talk at all about Board Games.

There's an entire world of board games just like with videogames, with genres including thematic, euro, dungeon crawlers, adventure, deck building, trading (goods), racing (to victory), abstract strategy, wargaming..

A lot of people think of just Yahtzee, Monopoly and Cluedo when they think of board games, but that's like saying video gaming is simply Super Mario, Carnival Games and Nintendogs.

Anyway the idea here is to see if there are a bunch of you guys who are actually into this, and to see whether I should promote the, uh, 'platform' on a larger scale here. For now this can be a general discussion thread, just to see what you guys all play. Post your collections, talk about your favourite games, all that stuff.

CANNOT WAIT FOR DESCENT 2nd EDITION.

A couple to links to get you started:

- Board Game Geek
Basically contains every piece of information about any board game ever, forums with Variant, Rules, General etc for each game - it's like NeoGAF without the strictness and tons more content besides just the forums. IT'S HUGE.

- The Dice Tower
This guy got me into board games a couple years back. He has hundreds of reviews of games, all pretty well done. The music is just horrible though, like really lol.

I have been and always will be a huge fan of strategy board games, once playing the old axis and allies for a full 24-hours

Pinkie Pie once played a match of Axis and Allies during finals day at school. It started at 8AM, ran till 5PM with people occasionally leaving and returning to take tests, and by the end up the day, we'd eliminated one out of the five people playing.

And it was ♥♥♥♥ing amazing.

:|

Chess is the best board game.

I love board games, but there aren't many opportunities to play them. I used to play them occasionally with my siblings, but all but one are gone for college now. There's the occasional scrabble game at my house but my dad is so ridiculously good at that somehow that it isn't even fun

But yeah, board games are awesome. When we went on vacation as a family earlier in the summer, we played board games a lot for some reason, and the place we stayed at had a ton of them. We played a lot of this game called Blockus Trigon, which is like Go but way way way simpler and with triangles instead of dots on a grid.

And me and my brother had this Stratego match that was ♥♥♥♥ing UNREAL it was awesome. I had a particularly weak vanguard so i got demolished by some 6's and 7's early on, until the General and Marshall started wrecking ♥♥♥♥. Both sides eventually lost the high level units, and in the end it was down to just miners, scouts and bombs.

My brother was ONE bomb away from my flag on my last turn, in which I was able to cut behind his bombs and nab the flag

it was AWESOME

Does Warhammer count? 'Cause I played that thing for years and I loved it really badly, most battles get really intense and important dice rolls are so freaking tense... The downside is that it can get a little bit slow, most of my battles lasted for an entire day unless they were like, 1v1 with a very limited amount of points.

I only really stopped when pretty much every person I played with moved to Warhammer 40000, and I definitely did not want to spend another billion dollars on building another army from scratch, but I think I wouldn't go back to it if I could unless it was with one of those alternate rule-sets that make the whole thing a lot faster.

I would go back to painting the miniatures, though, that was the best.

I had a handful of space marines I got just for painting the models. My brother played the actual game, I just thought they looked cool. He was more of an Eldar guy though

I like games like Munchkin and Ninja Burger. Always great fun with a group of friends.

I love playing chess and Axis & Allies.

I'd like to recommend Neuroshima Hex! to any of you who enjoy the Fallout theme or incredibly intense, deep strategic battles with absolutely no startup / cleaup time and games lasting much less than an hour.



Basic rules:
- You draw three tiles, discard one. You can save, play or discard the others, and every turn you draw up to three tiles.
- Short stubby triangles on the sides are melee attacks, longer triangles are ranged attacks. So one short on three sides would hit all sides for 1 damage, two long triangles at the top is one direction for 2 damage etc.
- The numbers on the units are initiative phases. All units with 3 go first (or if they're boosted the highest goes first), then 2 then 1 then 0. If an Ini 3 unit shoots over the board and hits an Ini 2 unit who was about to hit your HQ tile (each team has a HQ with 20HP), then he'd be dead in phase 3 so couldn't act in phase 2.
- Units have additional abilities, like extra toughness, the ability to move / rotate / push, net units (disable them), use enemy modules (modules buff your units when they're pointing to them, maybe +1 melee damage or can act in an additional initiative phase.)
- You also have instant tiles like sniper which automatically does 1 damage to anyone on the board, battle which triggers a battle when you want it to happen etc.
- When the board is completely full, a battle will automatically start. When someone is out of tiles, a final battles starts and you see who has the least health on their HQ.
- Goal: DESTROY THE ENEMY HQ.

Seriously guys, it's really good. There are like 9 official factions out but I have another7 factions professionally made and printed on top of that. So good.

Originally Posted by silver arrow

I like games like Munchkin and Ninja Burger. Always great fun with a group of friends.

I was tempted to get Munchkin a while back but decided on other deckbuilding card games like Thunderstone. Dominion is alright too, but it kinda seems like you aren't really interacting with anyone so much as getting points by yourself. The expansions help on that point but eh.

KEEP GOING GUYS THIS IS SUPER SWELL.

Originally Posted by GKANG

I was tempted to get Munchkin a while back but decided on other deckbuilding card games like Thunderstone. Dominion is alright too, but it kinda seems like you aren't really interacting with anyone so much as getting points by yourself. The expansions help on that point but eh.

Munchkin is all about being an ass to the right people at the right time. Having someone go after you because you were too much of a dick to them can cost you the game, but in order to win, you have to be a huge dick.

Does yugioh count?

I love me some yugioh

but that's more of a card game, I don't think it counts.

I will want to familiarize myself with backgammon sometime. I took an interest in Senet recently, although more for the novelty of how ancient it is and, y'know, Ancient Egyptians were an interesting bunch.

Card games totally count too, the games don't necessarily need a board to fall under 'board games'. Magic: The Gathering for example is open for discussion too. I have way too many Magic cards, I generally buy a booster box when each new expansion comes out. Recently though I haven't played as much because it's so much work thrifting through all of my cards to make a deck, plus I don't want to buy more single cards to have 'playsets' (you can have at most 4 of one type of card in your deck) if every card I want to use. Still, I may pick up on it more when the M13 core set comes out.

Also Dice games apply. Liar's Dice, Quarriors etc.

I had a feeling that lots of the discussion would be mainly about abstract strategy games, which is TOTALLY COO'. One light abstract which kind of plays like chess that you guys might enjoy is called Hive.



Rules:
- On your turn, you can place or move a piece.
- You can only place a piece so it touches your own colour, so placing white in a space that touches black is a no go.
- When moving pieces, you can't create 'islands', for example if there are a string of pieces and you move one from the middle somewhere.
- Movement:
--- Spiders can move exactly 3 spaces around the edge of the other pieces (the hive).
--- Ants can move any number of spaces around the hive.
--- Grasshoppers can jump over pieces in a straight line, but have to stop at the first gap.
--- Beetles can move one space on top of another, then one space down.
--- Queen Bee can move one space.
- Goal: Surround your opponent's queen bee (can be a mixture of black and white pieces).

Originally Posted by GKANG

We have so many games that we keep them in the basement. I don't even know how many there are; we may have duplicates, as well.

Anyway, we have Hive. We only played several times, but I've been meaning to do it again. It's just that when we have spare time, we're usually too mentally tired to do a challenging round of facing off on the table top.



I can't remember what it was about Hive ~ but there was something that annoyed me. When I play it again, I'll mention it here.

You should! I'm interested in what you have to say about it. Do you have the two expansion bugs too (Mosquito, Ladybird)?

Also I'm just posting that, somehow, I managed to find a copy of Descent 2E on Saturday (the game is massively out of print everywhere right now) and it arrived today. SO EXCITED TO PLAY THIS THING. It looks so much more streamlined than 1E, the map tiles look tons better (and are double sided - one side for dungeons, one side for outdoors) and the monsters / monster cards look really awesome.

All I need now is to find a copy of the conversion kit and I'm set (it basically gives you the new character / monster cards that work with 2E for every monster and hero from 1E and its expansions - which totals to around 30 for me.. haha).

I will admit that I don't play board games as much as I did in the past, however I absolutely love to play cards with a big group of friends at school, usually at lunch or in the orchestra room. The teachers have no problem with it, and some of the games we play are really fun.

I also like to play Risk quite a bit. It takes forever to set up, but the game itself is worth it! Play as Asia, and you play the game. Asia basically has an impenetrable wall of awesome.

Other than those, board games haven't really been a big part of my life. Mainly because I don't like in a neighborhood and so it's difficult to find any local friends that could walk to my house. I usually have to call them and they must get driven over here.

Uhm, I really like Clue... Yeah, that's my favorite.

The way I play it, it's almost like a role playing game, lol.