December days: Board games

[cjwatson]

bugshaw asked: "What do you like about boardgames"?

We played quite a few board games when I was a child, so it was always a thing I did, but not really a lot of variety: Monopoly, Cluedo, Sorry!, Ludo, that kind of thing. University expanded my horizons, as it is wont to do. I joined the Diplomacy society for a year or so; Dip is notorious for being an excellent way to lose friends, but I generally find I'm pretty good at treating people's in-game personalities as quite separate as long as they're playing within the rules, so I didn't find that a problem and I loved it. The SF society had a considerable board-gaming contingent as well, so I often joined in with that; I probably ran into The Settlers of Catan or similar games somewhere around here.

I was always more of a card gamer for the most part. Again, we played a lot of relatively simple family card games when I was growing up, various number/suit-following games or things like Cheat, but I ran into better things with CUSFS and later, and in particular when I was working at nCipher back in 2003 I caught the bridge bug, of which more in a later post. If you buy GNS Theory, then that probably indicates that what drives me is fairly abstract gamism: I don't mind as such if a board game tries to establish some kind of character narrative or simulate something, and if it's done well it can be a good source of motivation to play, but it had better not neglect the actual game in the process. (The Voyage of the Mayflower is an example from our shelves that doesn't really work for me: it's a cute idea, particularly in that the odds of abject failure are quite high, but I find the lack of control exercisable by player skill to be annoying. Compare another non-board game I like, NetHack, where much though people like to complain about the RNG the existence of a player who can ascend over 80% of games in controlled conditions is an existence proof that the rest of us are just not good enough at it.)

Nowadays, I have a particular dislike of "go round the board over and over again" type games that you find so many of, and I'm fortunate that even my younger children are quite happy playing things like Carcassonne, when we find time to play board games it's mostly either German "designer games" and similar (for instance, I reviewed Keyflower recently) or cooperative games (Pandemic, Forbidden Island, and the like). I do have something of a competitive streak, but the thing I really enjoy is doing well in a game because I actually did something intricate and skilful, not just because I got lucky or wore down the other players or whatever, so designer games work for me because they usually require non-trivial tactical thought to win, while cooperative games mean that winning isn't at the expense of other people.

Here's a picture of the bookshelf containing most of our games:



I have 17 more slots left to fill. Please do give me more prompts!

Comments

[gerald_duck]

Have you lot discovered Hanabi yet? I'd strongly recommend it — a collaborative card game.

One of the few criticisms I've seen levelled at Pandemic is that it is in effect multi-player solitaire: one player with a forceful personality can run the game for everyone. (I guess this is possibly an advantage with young children, because you can help them as much as necessary.) Hanabi fixes that, though, by the simple expedient of having hidden information.

[sparrowsion]

Pandemic (and, I think, Forbidden Island) both say to only play with open hands when playing at the most basic level. Although there's nothing saying that you're not allowed to fully disclose what you've got, so then it just becomes a picky memory game for who's holding what cards.