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

[matt_rah]

SJ actually came out between PR and Race, and is much more a simplified version of PR than it is of Race. I like it, but nothing could replace PR in my heart, neither SJ nor Race.

Matt

[rob_donoghue]

I really dig PR, but lately my schedule has demanded a move towards faster games, so a lot of good games have been gathering dust, including PR. (This is why I haven't tried Android yet, though it looks super fun).

[word_geek]

I've never been able to play Puerto Rico, because I got into it a bit late, and my regular gaming friends were already heartily sick of it, or felt it takes too long. Most of them had moved on to San Juan, which I have played a lot of.

Race for the Galaxy was described to me as "like San Juan, but better," and while I agree with the first half of that statement, I can't agree with the second. I found the card design difficult to follow, and the extra complexity to be a bit too much.

That said, I've never encountered the Guildhall problem you're having. Production buildings just aren't powerful enough by themselves to justify having a lot of them; I usually just ignore them. In a two-player game, if one player ignores the production buildings, the other player needs two turns to produce and sell, and that takes too long. Give me a Library, a Chapel, and a City Hall, and I can beat somebody with a Guildhall and a slew of Indigo plants.

[rob_donoghue]

It may well be an experience thing - the guildhall approach was consistently scoring in the high thirties and low 40s. Purple that have exceeded that have seemed very flukey by comparison, but we are perhaps missing some combo.

[drivingblind]

Oddly, and granted I've played it less than y'all have, but RFTG is a second placer to Dominion for me. Dominion, I feel like I can grasp its wholeness at once, while RFTG feels... bigger than me, in a way that has a bit of "I'll mostly only ever be stabbing in the dark with this one" to it.

[evilhat]

That might explain my preference for Dominion as well.

[justinjacobson]

I'm simply in love/awe with/of Pandemic. Most notably, for my tastes, they got the difficulty level spot on. It's not so impossible that it becomes frustrating; it's not so easy that it becomes boring. Winning is satisfying and rare and invariably because the group made good decisions throughout.

Been playing Wits and Wagers for awhile now. It holds up very well.

If you get a chance, check out Word Blur. Another fun, party game for wordy types such as yourself.

[philreed]

I have a copy of Revolution here at home, one of the 26 or so copies currently in the US. We've got MIBs out running demos of the game at stores/cons, but the full shipment should hit our warehouse late this month or early next month.

My favorite part about Revolution? You can learn the game in about 5 minutes, play in under an hour, and constantly curse the other players at the table. And changing who you play with drastically changes the tone of the game. It's very much a "adapt to the players" style of game in that some games have a lot of negotiation while other games have a lot of brutal head-to-head interaction.

[drcpunk]

mnemex has Dominion and Intrigue in, I think, 3 of those plastic boxes for CCGs -- you know, cards go into bottom, then top piece goes on.

I like Dominion better than Race as I don't keep forgetting the rules and the cards are easier to read. But then, I don't play many board games.