Games, the normal Kind

[rob_donoghue]

So, this has been a really fantastic stretch for me for board and card games, and I figured I'd run through the goodness.

Race for the Galaxy continues to be our go-to game. I have lost track of how many times we've played. The two player game holds up really quite well, but playing with my wife is a welcome pleasure, and the wife-friendliness

Comments

[gillan]

Small World is really fun.

[rob_donoghue]

I've heard enough good things about it to order it directly from Days of Wonder after failing to find it at any local stores. Very excited to try it.

[reverancepavane]

You'll have lots of fun. Remember: live fast and leave the corpses of your last race all over the map.

[mylescorcoran]

I wonder how it compares to Vinci, the earlier game it's based on. I love Vinci but it's not universally liked in my circle. I wonder if the fantasy theming and new powers in Small World would make it an easier sell to my group.

[ect]

We totally need to talk about re-establishing Game Night.

[fadethecat]

I really love Pandemic. It's one of the few (possibly the only?) all-players-against-the-game types of games that I've played, and I love just how vicious it can get. Making it all real world instead of fantasy helps give it that edge of fascinating desperation, but it's just stylized and abstract enough that it's still something you can joke about when Paris gets wiped out by the plague or what not. Definitely one of my favorites for game day.

[grandexperiment]

Fans of Pandemic may wish to check out Ghost Stories from Asmodee. Its very similar in mechanics except you replace the world with a Chinese Village where the urn holding cursed Wu-Feng's ashes is buried, the disease with various supernatural monsters and the various scientists with Daoist Monks.

It is equally as vicious.

[fadethecat]

Oh, that sounds really interesting. I am sort of a sucker for interesting board/card games based on history or mythology from similar regions of the world. (One marvelous game with a name I can't recall, in which everyone plays a poet trying to woo princesses with exquisitely composed five-line poems, springs to mind.)

[grandexperiment]

Ghost Stories oozes wuxia from every pour and is very pretty. It is very hard though, even harder than Pandemic. However, every game has been fun.

[evilhat]

I actually much prefer Dominion to Race for the Galaxy.

Apparently there will be a Pandemic expansion this year, too.

[fadethecat]

Oo, really? What's it adding/changing?

[mylescorcoran]

I think I prefer RftG to Dominion, but it's hard to be sure as I've only played Dominion a few times. It's not popular with my wife unfortunately, who has lost every time we've played it.

She kicks my ass at other games handily. I wonder if it's because she never played Magic the Gathering?

[spiritualmonkey]

I was thrilled to pieces to find out it's possible to play Supremacy online. Risk + resources + nukes = WIN!

Not only is it OOP, but you don't need to leave the board set up for multi-day games.

[rob_donoghue]

oh man, I loved the tiny mushroom clouds!