Post your favorite boardgame!

[Crushmaster]

Err...

...Does chess count? It has game pieces and a flat playing surface...
God bless,
Crushmaster.

[Colouredbox]

Chess

[Hulavuta]

No love for the classic Monopoly?

[krotop]

Phases end when the pot is empty of words, then words are counted, scored and put back in the pot for the next phase. It's a pretty fun game. We had no name for it, but a friend decided it would be named fou de bassan

This game is definitely a lot of fun! I'm used to the name Time's up! which is basically a preset of famous characters using those rules, but it is indeed cooler to have the players decide their own characters (or words) for inside jokes (I especially remember a friend making an epic mime of Actarus, using a wheeled desk armchair)

I enjoy playing Alambra & Railroad of the World too.

No love for the classic Monopoly?

Nah, monopoly is braindead, Evilness itself designed this game.

[Quetzalcoatl]

Brass is the ultimate board game of all times.
Besides that Fury of Dracula and obviously: Talisman.

[Great_Mage_Atari]

Chess

[Joram]

A Game of Thrones

Incredible, incredible game. There is practically nothing random about the game, yet the options are so varied that there's a huge amount of room for ingenuity, bluff, and brilliance. One of the few games where I can execute a brilliant move that no one saw coming and totally feel like a genius afterwards (no lucky gamble, all skill baby ). Of course, I can also feel like a dope, but hey, ya win some, ya lose some.

This game I'd rate a solid 9-9.5 out of 10. Purchase A Storm of Swords (second expansion), play with 4 people, and it makes one of the few (if not the only) game that I'd rate 10 out of 10 (Note that a high rating doesn't necessarily mean that I like the game, nor does a low one mean I dislike it; I try and be objective about their merits. For example, I'd probably give The Settlers of Catan a 6.5 out of 10; it doesn't stop me from hoping I never have to play it again in this world or the next).

Honorable Mention:

Age of Renaissance
Civilization
Dungeon Lords
Gunslinger
High Frontier
Imperial
Merchants of Venus
RoboRally
Red November
Serenissima (1996)
StarCraft the boardgame
Twilight Imperium, third edition
War of the Ring

I'd love to get my teeth into ASL or Terrible Swift Sword, but can't find people to do it with

[lipk]

Yeah, Game of Thrones is great. Unfortunately, when I accidentally have enough time and enough players around, I'm usually not in the mood to explain those 20+ pages of rules

Ah, 6.5 for Catan? You have just proved that you have never heard about probability computing

Does anybody play BattleLore or Memoir 44? I'm just wondering if we could implement a battle system like that in an add-on era. I know about Ranged Era, but it's not really feature complete from this aspect.

[Mountain_King]

Risk
Chess
Battleship
Settlers of Catan
(seeing a theme? )

The Farming Game
Cribbage (there is so a board!)

[Velensk]

I can understand why one might not rate Catan very high especially if one has played it a lot. I generally only pull it out for the reason mentioned in my first post.

I've played Memoir 44. Personally, I don't see the point of implementing an battle system like that in an add-on but it would be possible. Using the ranged era code it would probably be pretty easy even aside from the retreat result, you'd just have to modify the determine chance to hit, make every strike worth one hit and set the number of strikes to be related to the situation. Implementing the card system would be more work.

Titan is the game I've wondered about recreating in wesnoth somehow as I think that the stratagy in Titan combined with Wesnoths more interesting tactical system would be rather fun to play. Unfortunately, that would prove to be a ton of work and it would take forever to play

[Joram]

I actually have a great amount of respect for Catan. For what it is, it's a great game. I don't consider 6.5 to be a 'bad' rating at all; 5.5 should be an average game that has nothing to make it stand out, being a collection of mechanics that, while not 'bad', don't add anything to a game collection that couldn't be filled better by other games. 6.5 is still worthwhile to pick up.

The biggest problem with the game (and something that separates it from a lot of other 'dicey' games) is not that it is very random, but rather the type of randomness. There are in general two types of randomness.

1) Players choose their actions and randomness is used to determine the results
2) Players use a random method of determining what actions are available to them

The problem with 2 is that if the dice gods don't favor you, you're stuck doing little to nothing. In 1, even if you're getting the worst luck imaginable, you're at least doing things (albeit failing at every turn). Even in heavily random games such as ASL, Gunslinger, and Twilight Imperium, you can still push your pieces round and try and do something useful while praying to Ihmtehdys that you'll finally get good rolls. Games like Catan and Monopoly, on the other hand, can see you essentially locked out of the play; to my mind, this is a flaw that, regardless of whether it affects your enjoyment of the game (I actually don't mind all that much), it should still be factored into an objective assessment of it.

Not that I'm qualified to make objective assessments. I personally can't stand the game, but that's largely due to overplaying and annoyance at the idol-worship that it gets in college environments.

[Groggy_Dice]

As alluded to in both my handle and my current sig, I am a wargamer. Some of the games I like:

Caesar Alesia
D-Day
Russian Campaign
Decision at Kasserine
No Trumpets, No Drums
Olympica
Bloodtree Rebellion
Fortress America
Panzergruppe Guderian

Though I haven't played much of it, Wizard's Quest seems like a possible fun crossover game to play with non-wargamers.

[tekelili]

For those that think Settlers of Katan is a good strategic game... may be should improve their skills

I have a group friends, all of them pro or semipro poker players. We have played tons of board games for more than 10 years, so.. well, there is some skill level in our games. We played a lot Settlers of Katan, it is a fun game... but at some moment our understand of it reached to a point where we could predict where every player would settle firts 2 villages and roads, we also knew what cards of resources had everyone in hand, what trades would they like and wich of them would be accepted for other players. So I am totally agree with Velensk in is a perfect game for newcomers, but hard playerds can find it not very challenging.

There is already a computer simulation of Titan board game. I dont see why need wesnoth combat system. I really think, among all board games I played, Titan was one where I could have higer victry% over weaker players (besides chess and no random games, of course). I mean, was board game well randomess, bad luck and other players cooperation to weak me had less influence in my chances of win, due to huge amount of important decisions every turn where superior skill had too heavy impact on game.

[Velensk]

I didn't quite understand what you were saying in that last bit, but if you know a Titan simulation with a decent system for online play with strangers could you post a link to it?

I find Titan strategic aspect a touch frustrating at times because as Joram phrases it, the dice determine what options you have and sometimes none of them are good and sometimes none of them make you more likely to get a good result next time. The tactical set up has it's nuances but it never feels hard to me to find the right move after it starts and deciding whether to fight there is generally the larger concern, and I do feel like the dice have a large sway on the battlefield, more so than wesnoth. That said, I agree that Titan is surprisingly deep. It looks like a game for people who just love to roll lots of dice (and they can certainly enjoy it) but there is quite a bit of thought that goes into the decision making.

[lipk]

Ah, 6.5 for Catan? You have just proved that you have never heard about probability computing

Why so serious, everybody? This was intended to be a joke. By the way, I don't like Catan either.

2) Players use a random method of determining what actions are available to them

For example they draw event cards on the beginning of every round, and they can only recruit new troops if a certain card is presented. Some class 2 randomness from Game of Thrones . And it's still a good game. Furthermore, my personal favorite, El Grande includes some class 2 mechanisms too. I think it rather depends on the amount of randomness, not the type of it (if we can classify the types of randomness at all).

Unfortunately, I don't know Titan