So my friend is developing a 3D version of Settlers of Catan.
http://www.3dsettlers.com/index.html

His plan is to eventually get a kickstarter going. Figured I'd post here to see if anyone was interested.

The regs in this thread have probably heard of him, but if you're looking for new games, the youtube channel thedicetower reviews board games and has a Holiday buying guide. http://www.youtube.com/thedicetower

For "medium" strategy games for not as serious gamers they recommend:

Ticket to Ride
Quebec
Alien Frontiers
Discworld: Ankh-Morpork
Seasons

For Family games, they recommend:

Incan Gold
Duck Duck Go (actually seems pretty cool for the 5-7 year olds that was asked earlier)
King of Tokyo
Flash Point Fire Rescue
Seasons

cool, but would be annoying to rotate the world around to see if you have any settlements/cities on a 3 resource, or any other number for that matter.

We have almost all the Carc expansions. For big games they are awesome.

I don't know how much I'd be into this for regular settlers, though it seems like you could do some really cool seafarers scenarios on that thing

Poker

Finished watching his and the people's top 100 the other day.

I've ordered a bunch of random stuff including Flash Point, all Death Angel expansions, King of Tokyo, Jaipur, a couple of AH invesigator miniatures.
I also scored a pretty sweet self made stone dice tower on ebay for 2 Euro

I think the family game lineup for xmas will mostly be:
7 Wonders (probably most plays), Dixit (usually a ton as well), Stone Age, King of Tokyo, TTR/Carc (depending on what people want), Jaipur, Rattus, Dominion, Escape, Flashpoint/Pandemic/Ghost Stories
Maybe Smallworld but it wasn't all that well received last time. I might try Chinatown as well

Said dice tower:

As a pure game (without the gamble) poker is dreadful IMO. It's also got a fraction of the depth of thought involved in go and the like.

Gamble is part of the game mechanics imo. How would you play holdem without blinds? Even if you don't play for money it's a nice game (assuming players take it seriously) but it suffers from sample size issues.

I wouldn't call it dreadfull and I remain unconvinced that it has less depth than say Bridge. It still remains one of the most interesting card games from my perspective (which tends to be AI analysis).

FWIW I recently updated my lecture slides because Go used to be the goto (harhar) example of a game that computers suck at. The improvement of Go-AIs has been pretty solid over the last 5 years.

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My games arrived today...here's a prediction: I'll probably get enough entertainment ROI out of King of Tokyo simply because it'll be mad fan to shout "RELEASE THE KRAKEN" over and over :P

ok, not gamble, money. Without the money it's pretty dreadful. There are some good hands, but few and far between, and without the money stress it's pretty dull.

But yes, i've posted several times about the improvement in go ai.

Yeah I guess that makes sense. I play for money for the most part and if I don't I mostly analyze the game (AI etc.) and for that it is pretty interesting.
I guess in other words it's pretty fun as an optimization puzzle, more fun than most card games I've looked at.

Poker also has cocktail waitresses.

The funny thing about poker is I find it much more entertaining with fewer people. I would hate to play a 6 handed game with no money on the line, but a deep HU match is still plenty fun.

+1

Poker's a really interesting game primarily from a game theory perspective and also as an optimisation problem. You have to exploit opponents' frequencies and decide which hands to put in which lines - the non linear hand ranking making this a lot more difficult. There are few games like it in that regard imo. Unfortunately the sample size issue kills a lot of the enjoyability of the game.

Oh Hell (which my friends call either "Bullseye" or "Bitches") is hands-down the best card game that no one ever plays and most people have never heard of.

It's a bidding, tricktaking game that resembles hearts and spades, and I actually think it has a ton more depth to the gameplay than either of them.

The rules of the variant I play are as follows:

• The object of the game is to make exactly the number of tricks that you bid -- no more, no less.
  
• First round everyone is dealt one card, second round everyone is dealt two cards, and so on up to the number of your choice (usually 13 for a four player game or 10 for a five player game). Then you can keep going if you want by dealing one fewer card on each successive round until the final round everyone gets one card again.
  
• Each round a card is turned face up to serve as the trump suit (think spades in spades).
  
• Bidding starts to the left of the dealer, and people bid on how many tricks they think they can take. The total number of tricks bid CANNOT equal the total number of tricks in play, which means that the dealer can get screwed by not being able to bid their preferred amount.* This is to ensure that at least one player loses out on making their bid every round. (So if I deal everyone four cards and the bidding before me is one, zero, and two, I CANNOT bid one.)
  
• Once everyone has bid, the gameplay starts with the person left of the dealer, who leads a card. People then have to follow suit if possible, and tricks are taken in the manner of hearts or spades. (You can play a card from the trump suit if you don't have any of the suit led, and it obviously trumps.) The person who wins a given trick leads the card to start the next trick.
  
• Anyone who doesn't make their bid scores zero for the round. If you bid three and only pick up two tricks, you score zero. If you bid three and end up picking up FOUR tricks, you score zero.
• If you do make your bid, you get 100 points plus 1 for every trick you successfully took, which provides a slight incentive for bidding more tricks over fewer. So if I bid three and take three tricks, my score that round would be 103.
  
• Deal rotates every round.
  
• High scorer at the end of all rounds wins, obviously.

It's an amazingly fun, amazingly social game that contains a deceptive amount of deep thinking, because the gamestate is changing constantly and you're forever having to revise your relative hand strength given the number of cards being dealt that round. There's actually an iPhone app for this game that's pretty well-done (search for "Niggle"), but a ton of the fun is in the live gameplay aspect where you get to completely screw people over round by round.

If anyone enjoys hearts, spades, euchre, or poker (or social card games in general), I highly, highly, highly recommend giving this a shot.

*The rule that limits the amount the dealer can bid will make the very first round (where everyone gets only one card) EXTREMELY high-variance, as the person bidding second-to-last has a ton of information and can freely bid either 1 or 0, while the dealer will almost always be constrained before they've even looked at their card. For this reason, when my friends and I play we usually play MULTIPLE rounds at the beginning with only one card...enough so that everyone has to be dealer once when one card is being dealt. These rounds go super quickly, so it doesn't impact the overall time of the game (which generally takes ~an hour or so to go up and down), and it smooths out the extreme early variance.

there was a non-standard deck version of that released in the uk, only it went from 10 down to 1, and had a bunch of bonus cards and stuff. My family played it a bunch when i was a kid.

That's interesting; do you remember what it was called? I can see the game lending itself well to being packaged as a nonstandard deck (like Old Maid or Go Fish or Rummy or whatever also have been), but it's so so good with just any old deck of cards.

rage:

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/568/rage

I like that it's called Rage. When we play, we call the game Bitches because whenever my girlfriend is thwarted at the last minute in her attempts to make her bid, she usually calls everyone bitches.

It's a game that lends itself wonderfully well to agitated outbursts.

Yeah I remember playing it going 7 to 1 back to 7. Also we decided instead of turn by turn bidding, everyone just bid at once. Usually by throwing a fist at the count of 3.

turn by turn bidding is elite though, since depending on your position you have more/less information with which to revise your personal gauge of your hand strength

oh, this will be great for family game night

I ended up buying The Original Wizard Card Game

Sure, but everyone bidding at once causes a lot more havoc. Don't need the multiple rounds to compensate for dealer screwage on the round of 1.

this is certainly true

Read the whole thread. pretty interesting stuff, wrote some things down.

My absolute favorite game atm (since some time...) is smallworld link

really awesome game which differs every round through new combinations of race and ability. If you get bored there are expansions for events, new races and new abilities which aren´t expensive imo. Also, if you want more, just buy smallworld: underground. it´s exactly the same game with different terrain and all new races and abilities. best thing about it: you can combine both games into one really big game (then playable for 6 players).

Funny video which shows the gameplay: ( Day[9])


Review:


All in all: Buy it. Great game.