i haven't read this thread but has stratego been mentioned?

i've just started playing it and its awesome

I think someone mentioned it. I have it somewhere and played it a lot when I was younger. It's a great game for sure but I have a feeling that it can become somewhat predictible. Either way mine-placing mindgames are always fun and the Spy-Marshall (or whatever rank the dude that the spy can kill has) is a fun mechanic

I haven't played any of those

A Castle For All Seasons often gets compared with Pillars of the Earth - same designer, same idea.

Sylla is inspired, I think, by St. Petersburg.

Macau sounds interesting.

& I own an unplayed copy of Zavandor. Not likely to play it in time to give you pre-buy feedback though. (you'll probably buy & play yr copy before I get the shrinkwrap off. let me know how it goes )

I had a pretty awesome miner race earlier this year where my friend ****ed up a move and I could disarm his bombs before he could mine.

I asked my dad about the list of games - he plays a truck load, as should become obvious, he said as follows:


A castle for all seasons: I have owned this for about a year but not yet played it and in no great rush. Seems OK from reading the rules but can't see it ever being a regular game.

Sylla- Not played this and never seen anyone playing it. Curious as the internet reviews are quite positive

Scepter of Zavandor. - Reworking of a game called Outpost. This is a classic economic growth game – fall behind and you’ll never catch up. Good game played it a few times (4 to be precise) but I have rated it poorly on the geek as I never get the economic engine going as well as my fellow players.. I have a copy and you are welcome to it.

St Petersburg. Good game – own it in fact two copies by accident. Experienced gamers who have a great knowledge of the cards in the game do better than amateurs and newbies. But it is still an interesting game in which the choice of which cards to buy is always a challenge. Played it 18 times

League of Six - Very good game – each of the mechanics involves tricky decisions. Played 6 times all enjoyable even when not winning.

Chinatown – a very good negotiation game played it 4 times since 2004 but many time before that. Will play it any time it is suggested.

Macao - Played 2x but not as enjoyable second time as first when I barely understood what was going on. Has lots of cards with writing on so don’t buy the German version!

End of the Triumvirat. - Did not enjoy my 3 plays of this game. Has a very weird turn order mechanism. Happy never to play it again.

Dutch Golden Age - played once and I really liked it but my fellow players didn’t so it has never seen the light of day since.

Preference order :
Chinatown
League of Six
St Petersburg
Dutch Golen Age
Scepter of Zavandor
Macao
End of the Triumvirat

Not ranked castle for all seasons and sylla

I find it odd he thinks he remembers how many times he's played

Thx kokiri. I'm semidecided that I'll probably just buy all of them to have a decent bunch to try for next year. Hopefully the 24th door is smth. like 10% off for orders >X or somthing. Better be big, the graphic of the door already has a different look with a big wrapper around the door

Additions to the calender since my last post:
- Senji
- Guatemala Cafe
- Neuland
- Letter of Marque

After reading up on all of them, watching video reviews when available etc. League of Six and Sylla look best and I have heard only good things about Chinatown and St.Petersburg so those 4 are almost locks.

If he spends a lot of time at board game geek (he seems to judging by his comments) you can enter on there when you play a game & it tracks it all for you

hardest part for me is remembering the damn pieces and not acting impulsively

the guy I play with is a huge pothead so every time I'm over there I smoke which makes both of those things difficult

I've tried using a chess-style-notational-system like repeating to myself "his #1 is on D7" but I fail at even that

I really feel like I would win every game if I didn't misremember and/or make stupid makes

I had a great game yesterday though where I mined up the left side and center, put most of my top pieces on the right side and just marched stuff down and won

but then my other couple games were full of ******ation

**I also think even though there is certainly plenty of room for deducting your opponents pieces— there are also a ton of metagame aspects that are equally if not more important when you play with someone regularly

Looking forward to Christmas, as I just bought Dominion. It's technically my daughter's Christmas present, but whatever.

want to play dominion online?

Heh I was thinking about this as well. They have it on brettspielwelt but I belive the cards are all German, no problem if you know them already though. I'd be in but need to understand the interface first. I tried playing 30 minutes or so ago and people were superimpatiant...well I was reading the rules while playing so :P

Edit: I'll get on AIM, clowntable

you guys should try this online option for Dominion:

http://dominion.isotropic.org/

i'm liking it better that bsw

win/win

...

faq for the link above:

http://dominion.isotropic.org/faq/

Got Dominion and Ticket to Ride for xmas, haven't unpacked Dominion yet (won't play untill my sleeves arrive anyways). Played a bunch of TTR and about 4 games of Ghost Stories. I belive I'm 0-10ish now but somehow the fact that it's so damn hard to win makes me want to play the game over and over again.

Unfortunately I failed hard with regards to the advent thingy because the strategy of waiting untill the 24th and ordering one huge bunch of games was pwned by the fact that almost all games were already sold out by then. Only got Sylla, Castle for all Seasons, Guatemala Cafe, St. Petersburg, Neuland and Um Reifenbreite

I also randomly watched this Review of Labyrinth, War on Terror 2001-? it's kind of like Twilight Struggle except with US vs Jihadists. The theme may offend some people but it looks really amazing. I'm very torn on buying it because I'm not sure if I'd actually find many people that want to play it (due to political reasons)

Got Taboo and a game called Wits and Wagers. We played W & W after Christmas dinner and really liked it. Basically a question is asked where the answer will be a number (not math, but thinks like how tall is shaq or what year did the berlin wall fall or something like that), then everyones answers are placed on the board in order and people place bets on which answer they think is right. The middle answer pays 2 to 1, the answers on either side of the middle pay 3 to 1, the next outside pay 4 to 1 etc. Also, the person with the correct answer or closest without going over gets 3 chips. It goes to seven questions (we played I think 3 times). Oh, you start with 2 "wager chips" and can earn normal chips, you never lose your wager chips so you're never out. Anyways, it was a lot of fun and I'd recommend it.

Taboo is superpopular as a party game in Germany, I'm not a huge fan of it though. W&W is good and I like it

Also I finally beat the damn Ghost Stories today, time to test the expansion next year

When I've played Taboo half the ppl end up using the tabooed word or part of it anyway

I think we used to have a running taboo game and I think it stalled on me when some word I had never heard came up.

I just played Dixit a couple days ago. What an awesome game. I can see it getting old after a few plays, because half of the fun is marveling at the beautiful and intriguing cards for the first time, but I found it really enjoyable. It also seemed like a game that non-gamers can get into. I played with my parents, who are usually game fish, and they did really well.

we played bananagrams, which is a sort of real time scrabble variant, at xmas. That was pretty good as a low-complexity thrash.

Just got Bohnanza, a trading game based on beans (I guess the German word or bean sounds like "bone" or something like that). Then my sister gave me Bang, and another MENSA approved game that we haven't broken out yet. I did bring 3 sets of Dominion and am getting hammered by my cousin's kids (11 and 8)

Yeah we played it a couple of times for xmas and I'm already ready to buy Dixit2 (basically same game, different cards each can be played seperately or mixed) however this game really needs a well balanced group because if two people know eachother well they can kind of crush. The endgame is also a little strange dynamics wise but for the most part we didn't even care about who was winning on the track

There's a really fun dynamic putting people on certain levels of abstraction and analyzing their thought process. Some will be rather blunt/simple and some will be on FPS level 50. After we played i about 5 times I had subconciously memorized most of the deck which lead to an amazing turn where I said "cat with fish" using the card where the cat paints the fish and knowing the card with the cat and the fish in the glass was still out there and everyone was like...lolwat

Bohnanza is a pretty amazing game, one of the best to take on bus/train/plane trips. Bang is really hard to get here but on my wish list. Didn't know there was a MENSA list, will check that out now.

I've already started to work on a Ghost Stories clone (programming, can be played online when done) and will need some playtesters once it's done. My main intention is to experiment with AI a bit and build an AI that plays the game well but the initial game will probably be players only

played bohnanza once with 5 people as a drinking game I think

seemed fun and I won

they called it bean game

Guillotine is a fun drinking game. Pretty simple to learn and who doesn't like to behead French Nobles?