Best board Games?

[JessicaMonroe]

So the holidays are approaching and I've been tasked with finding some really awesome, but not really mainstream board games for my nieces and nephews. Admittedly, I am not really up with all the most recent board games. I found a list of what people have voted as the best board games of all time (http://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-best-board-games-of-all-time) (then was tempted to add my own votes because I didn't agree, but that's another story) but it was not really what I was looking for.

So I ask you gamers, what is the best board game I've never heard of? Why would it make a great holiday gift?

Thanks much!

[Asheram]

Well, if you've got a few hours to spare, I'd say Talisman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talisman_%28board_game%29).
It'll take a while, but it's really fun.

[Erloas]

Well there have been a couple threads about this, in fact I have posted 2 of them over the years. While you couldn't post in them because of thread necromancy, nothing people said in them has changed.

The only new game I've played lately is Qwarriors (or something like that) which is a dice set/deck building game. It has a few balance problems but overall it plays fairly quickly and is fun with a few people.

[ObadiahtheSlim]

I'm partial to Settler's of Catan.

[Keld Denar]

Does it have to have a "board"? Cause Dominion was 2008's board game of the year, and there are now 4 full size expansion and 2 mini-expansions. Thats like, 155 different play cards.

Of course, I wouldn't recommend buying all 7 boxes for someone at once unless you don't mind dropping ~$250 US on one presant.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Let's see, there's a bunch of different styles of boardgames, all rewarding in their own right...

Arkham Horror: Long, very RPGish, rather involved and fun take on the Lovecraft mythos. You go around a town, trying to stop Elder Evils from coming to the world. Builds up to a big boss showdown, if you aren't good enough.

7 Wonders: Short, sweet empire-building game. If you know what you're doing, the game plays in 30 minutes.

Pandemic: Potentially brutal cooperative game where you're a CDC team trying to eradicate diseases from the world before they eradicate humanity.

Carcassonne: A classic and simple tile-and-worker game that has a lot of expansions. I recommend getting at least a few, such as Princess and Dragon or Builders and Traders.

Claustrophobia: A streamlined dungeon crawl that I feel captures the essence of Wizards' Castle Ravenloft boardgame in a much easier-to-play process, with some cool mechanics.

A Game of Thrones: A medium-weight diceless boardgame themed after GRR Martin's fantasy series. A very worthwhile game, although it takes a while. The reprint is coming out soon. It's "A Storm of Swords" expansion (for 4 players) is very, very good and faster.

[Diskhotep]

One important question is how old are your nieces and nephews, and what kind of games are they familiar with? That will greatly help in getting good recommendations. I also suggest spending a lot of time at www.boardgamegeek.com for reviews and such.

[houlio]

Agricola and Puerto Rico are great games.

I believe that Puerto Rico is cheaper, but I find Agricola to be the superior game since it can be played at multiple levels of complexity, giving you more "bang for your buck" in my mind.

[thegurullamen]

Ticket to Ride. Easy to pick up, beautiful art and enormous fun. I also suggest the 1910 expansion if you prefer normal-sized cards instead of ones smaller than a Monopoly 'Community Chest' card.

[JessicaMonroe]

Thanks much for all the suggestions!

[Balain]

How about Order of the Stick Board game (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/24157/order-of-the-stick-adventure-game-the-dungeon-of-d) :)

Let's see how about Mystery of The Abbey (http://www.daysofwonder.com/mysteryoftheabbey/en/) The best explanation I heard was Clue on steroids.

There is also Bang (http://www.dvgiochi.com/giochi/bang/?id=1) Old West type card game

or how about Robo Rally (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=ah/prod/roborally) Computers decide to race robots in a factory

or you could go old school if you can find them now Star Traders (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/673/star-traders) or Shadowlord (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1146/shadowlord)

My personal fav is Napoleon in Europe (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3518/napoleon-in-europe)

Indiana Jones eat your heart out The Adventurers (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/43868/the-adventurers-the-temple-of-chac)

[GoblinGilmartin]

If you can find it, Vampire Hunter is cool. it has this battery operated tower in the center of the board and it glows either red or blue for day and night. when you play it in the dark, the board and the dice change depending on what color the tower is.

[Wookieetank]

Merchants & Mauraders by Z-man. You can be a pirate, or a merchant or both really. The more you are a pirate though, the more the different royal navies are after you. If you're soley a merchant, the pirates (player and NPC) are after you. And if you do it right all the royal Navies are after you :smallbiggrin: Only "downside" to the game is after playing it you really want to go watch the Pirates of the Carribean Movies :smallwink:

[banjo1985]

As someone above said, the ages of your nieces and nephews are important here. Catan, Arkham, Mansions of Madness and Carcasonne are great, but not exactly ideal for under 10's.

Ticket to Ride on the other hand works for all ages, despite what the box art and slightly dull gameboards may suggest. It's a great tactical game that's really easy to get the hang of.

If either of them are gamers, the Gears of War boardgame might be an option. I personally hate the game series, but I really can't complain about the quality of the boardgame.

If they're quite young, Hey, That's my Fish! could be a nice option. Only takes ten minutes to play, so they won't get bored, but it's diverting enough for adults too in a silly kind of way. Entertains my game group no end, and the majority of them are far older and harder to please than I am. :smallbiggrin:

[Ninjaman]

How old are they?
And what do you think they would like.

[flabort]

I would agree with some of the above, and recommend Carcasonne.

A few expansions would be nice, but there's also spin-offs. Carcasonne: Hunters and Gatherers is not an expansion, but a totally different game. And fun in it's own way. It's good for a younger audience than the main game, although still has small parts (which you don't want them to swallow).

[iyaerP]

So I don't know if this counts as a necro or not, the thread was last posted in about a month ago, but given how small it is, I think it would be silly to create an entirely new thread about it.

That aside, something that got brought as a new game to Quarterstaff board game night this week was a game called Ninjato.

In short, it is a game of resource management, minor gambling, manuvering around how other players are building their power base, and planning ahead, all set in the backdrop of being NINJA in the era just prior to the rise of the Shoguns in Japan. Whomsoever has been the most valuable to the various houses will become the ninja that serves the new shogun that comes to power.

Long version:
The mechanics are good, but somewhat confusing on the first playthrough, especially as you don't start with the cards you need to be able to do anything in with in your hand, so everyone's first action is to draw cards, as there is literally nothing else you can do. This is something I would probably house rule out pretty quickly if I was the one who owned the game, because having everyone with identical first turns is slightly boring.

Speaking of drawing, the draw mechanic is interesting in that there are three cards showing, as well as the hidden deck. When you draw, you can either draw so that your total hand is now 4 cards, or you can draw 2 cards. You choose which of the face up cards you take as well as any number of facedown ones from the deck. Usefull for avoiding cards you may not want for your planning ahead. Also, at the end of each round, in which each player has three actions, the first player for the next round is determined by whoever drew most recently. Good for allowing players to set it up so that they control the start of the next turn.

In additioin to drawing, there are also a few other actions you can take to work your way up to being the most influential ninja in the empire. They are: raiding houses for a chance at defeating guards for prestige as well as carrying away loot for bribery, visiting the sesai to learn new ninja techniques to make said raids more effective, bribing various nobles of the great houses to support your cause, and spreading rumours about how good you are/how terrible your enemies are.

For one of your numbered ninja-cards from the draw, you can visit the sensai and learn new ninja skills. These come from one of three "schools" crane, tiger and snake, and if you already have a skill from one school, you don't have to spend a card to get a new skill from that school. Skills mostly effect how good your ninja is at the house raiding, but also allow things like disguises, which make you have effectively more nobles for a noble clan than you actually have. Good stuff.

When raiding houses, you have three fundamental mechanics which come into play. These are fighting/evading guards, looting the house, and changing the house's power. Before invading each house, you have to decide weather your ninja will enter by stealth, or fight his way in. Each guard card has a number printed on it. The higher the number, the better the combatant he is (a samurai for instance is a 5, the highest non-elite value), conversely, the lower the number, the harder he is to sneak past. To defeat each guard, you want to play a card lower in value than their number to sneak by, or higher than them to fight past them. Each guard defeated gets you the next most valuable treasure in the house. However, since you don't know what each guard beyond the first is, and you can't switch between combat and stealth without a special ninja power from the sensai, it is important to have a hand that is good at one or the other, not both. Failing to be able to defeat the next guard drawn results in the loss of all but one treasure, and the house resets to the first guard and gets another treasure from the bag. Each new guard for the house has a chance to be an alarm guard which causes the last treasure of the house to be guarded by an elite guard, which are usually very hard to defeat. However, defeating them is worth victory points at the end of the game where defeating a normal guard only gives the treasure associated with it. Finally, once a house has been defeated, either by stealth or fighting, you get to choose which clan that physical building now is subject to. This is important because every 3 rounds, there is scoring based on who has the most prestige with each clan, and the total value of each clan on the board is how that scoring is determined.

Once you have treasure from the houses, you need something to spend it on. What better way to spend it than bribing the nobles of each clan to support you? This is one of the other primary actions, and while each noble takes a certain amount of treasure, often of specific type, when they are bribed, not only do you score immediate victory points equal to the value of the bribe, but that noble joins you and when clan prestige is scored at the end of every third round, if you control the most nobles of a clan, you can score VP equal to the total of that clan's power on the board (this is the number we get to change around by successfully raiding houses). Ties in noble counts are broken by whomever has the oldest member of that family. Proper bribery and manipulation of the houses is what enabled me to take a victory with my first playthrough of this game.

Final mechanic is buying rumors. Rumors also cost treasure rather than cards, and each one is more valuable than the last. For every rumor card, thereis an associated card type, be it nobles, elite guards that have been defeated, ninja skills, and even rumour cards themselves. Rumour cards are culumanative in effect, where having 2 rumour cards about the elite guards you have defeated may only result in having 4 victory points, having the same rumour cards about four guards would be worth sixteen VP.

After seven rounds, the game ends and winner is determined by VP total. As previously mentioned, I managed to win the one game we got in, and had a great deal of fun over the course of doing so. It took about an hour and a half to play our first playthrough with us figuring out the rules. I have no doubt that that could go down to less than an hour per game with some experiance with it.

I recommend this game. 5/5 stars.

[warty goblin]

As someone above said, the ages of your nieces and nephews are important here. Catan, Arkham, Mansions of Madness and Carcasonne are great, but not exactly ideal for under 10's.

I bet you could do Catan with a reasonably bright and engaged ten year old with a small number of modifications. I'd ignore the robber completely, and probably lift the restrictions on needing continuous roads to your new settlements. Playing this way eliminates most of the potential for passive aggression and focuses the game pretty much entirely on building stuff.

[Driderman]

So the holidays are approaching and I've been tasked with finding some really awesome, but not really mainstream board games for my nieces and nephews. Admittedly, I am not really up with all the most recent board games. I found a list of what people have voted as the best board games of all time (http://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-best-board-games-of-all-time) (then was tempted to add my own votes because I didn't agree, but that's another story) but it was not really what I was looking for.

So I ask you gamers, what is the best board game I've never heard of? Why would it make a great holiday gift?

Thanks much!

Depending on their age and interests of course Flying Frog productions makes some very fun and easy to master boardgames that I'm personally very fond of, my favourite being Fortune & Glory: The Cliffhanger game which is a game set in 1930's pulp where you play intrepid adventurers travelling all over the globe to find lost treasures before the Nazis (or gangsters) do.

A very nice feature in FF games is that they're usually very easibly moddable, they even come with extra tokens that aren't used for anything in the game rules so you can make up your own extra rules and scenarios.

[late for dinner]

Dominion and Carcassonne are my 2 favorite board games, probably. They offer enough luck and enough strategy to where its hard to break the game...(Dominion its a little easier to Break though as card combos can be memorized)

Formula D is an awesome Car racing board game. There is a Giant map of a track and depending on what gear you are in, you roll a ceartain colored/sided die and move that many spaces. On the turns there is a number saying how many times your car has to stop (the final space you move on your die roll) in the turn, so you cant just blow through turns in 5th gear without taking damage...most of the time. It is a lot of fun and you can play with 10 people and there are 3-4 track expansions for it...so like 8 tracks total. plus there are little colorful cars that make for good presentation.


I recently picked up Powergrid: You play the roll of an Energy Tycoon. You buy (auction) powerplants and buy cities across the United States or Germany or about 6 other expansion maps and purchace resources that vary in price depending on how many are left (supply and demand) and then you cash in the resources to power your stations which power your cities and give you money so you can bid on better plants/buy more cities/buy more resources...and the winner is the person at the end of the game who can POWER the most cities...not OWNS the most cities...so if you have 7 and can power 4 and I have 5 and can power 5, I win. It is a lot of fun and not that complicated...just some simple addition and subtraction.

Citadels is a fun card game. You secretly pick a charachter to be at the beginning of the round and depending on who you pick, gives you turn order or the ability to chose first, kill someone, rob someone, imunity from destruction of buildings..ect...Its fun because you target characters not players. so there is a lot of bluffing involved and your goal is to build the best city worth the most victory points.


Last Night on Earth: One of the better Zombie survival games out there. The quality of the product you buy is top notch. It even comes with a cd soundtrack (kinda cheesey and poorly produced) that you can play while you play the game. You either play as the Survivors or Zombies. there are multiple expansions, but in the basic game, you get a variable map along with nice plastic miniatures of zombies and survivors. All the photos are photo realistic or photos themselves, on durrable cards/cardboard. There are multiple game settings...(kill 15 zombies, defend a house, find survivors, find keys and gas for a truck and drive away...ect) that make for a very entertaing game. The Zombies and humans are well balanced too, so depending on your strategy, no one really has the upper hand unless they create it themselves.

And finally, while it is becoming more mainstream every day QUELF is probably one of the most fun games you will ever play. It is a mix between Scategories, Trivial Persuite, Poetry Writing, Cherades, Pictionary, Goofy Sayings, Goofy Rules (one card says, Must keep one elbow on the game board at all times when it is not your turn) and funny characters. Roll the dice, move to a color, pick up the corresponding colored card, and do whatever it says...whatever it says. If you can play this game without laughing your head off, you have no soul.

hope this helped...I tried to name some games that werent listed yet..besides the top two of course :)

After you get the game(s) you should post what you got, so we know who won ;)

[DropsonExistanc]

I agree with pretty much everything that's been mentioned here. Ones like Catan and Carcassonne are nice because you can buy them expansions for the next couple of birthdays/holidays.

Pandemic is one I'd recommend to pretty much anyone. It's a cooperative board game out of Z-Man Games (I believe) where the players attempt to save the world from a number of disease epidemics.

The card game Race for the Galaxy is the game I play the most right now, because it's quite good with 2 people. Expansions can take it from 1-6 players. Players race to build their own galactic civilizations.

Munchkin is a classic gateway card game, with versions that parody everything from D&D fantasy to space to spies to vampires. A really competitive, fun game where you "Kill the monsters and take their stuff!"

I can also verify the fun-factor on Puetro Rico, Powergrid, and Bang.

[Wookieetank]

Pandemic is one I'd recommend to pretty much anyone. It's a cooperative board game out of Z-Man Games (I believe) where the players attempt to save the world from a number of disease epidemics.

+1 to this, and pretty much anything else from Z-Man games. Their games are nowhere near as rule heavy as Fantasy Flight games, but you can still get the same level of strategy and complexity out of most of them.