Board Games

[monkfromhavana]

Does anyone actually still sit around and play Monopoly? Game Of Life? Yahtzee?

Just had a game of Monopoly and I have to say, I ruddy well enjoyed it - especially as it took my mind off the horrendous gastric flu I've had for the past couple of days. It was the online version though, with me and my equally sick girlfriend playing against a computer player.

Anyone else still play them? Or are you all too busy playing Gears of Grand Theft Sim Pokemon to care?

Has anyone ever played a game of Monopoly where there was a player for every piece? What's the longets you've ever played for? How has my life came to this???

[poo]

Adore board games. Risk! Is my favourite. I must've played it a thousand times or more.

[poo]

Hang on, you played online? Doesn't count.

[monkfromhavana]

Adore board games. Risk! Is my favourite. I must've played it a thousand times or more.

We have some lukewarm commie version called "Eurobusiness" if we wanna get physical, but as for Monopoly, only laptop based.

As for Risk - we played it as kids but I don;t think we ever played to the actual rules, we just made up our own.

[Danger Man]

Last month

http://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,37766.0.html

[monkfromhavana]

ahhhhh well, fuck it. I wasn't paying attention.

[Mr_Simnock]

I've played chess for twenty years. By far the hardest board game to master by absolute light years. It's also been around for at least a thousand years with no sign of it going away any time soon. I also have a lot of respect for Backgammon, incredibly simple but tough to become very adept. Risk is fantastic as is Game of Knowledge.

[Danger Man]

By far the hardest board game to master by absolute light years.

Hmmm....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)

[Hangthebuggers]

Not so much a board game, but since the age of about 12 I've been playing DnD[nb]Not so much these days, generally maybe one game a year, as opposed to two a week back when I was a weird teenager[/nb]. I almost always Referee/DM, so more often than not the characters are playing in a world of my own creation. It's a great feeling when things work after a lot of studious effort has gone into the world design and character creation and players seem to flow and adapt with the world. I always rewarded XP to players who could pull of some decent role-playing / story-telling rather than being an obnoxious rule nazi.

Of course, it's even better when something goes wrong - criticals and fumbles always ensured even the hardiest characters had a chance of failing and/or even the lowest level characters could accidently pull of some good stunts.

--

I also second Chess, but I'm not too good. I just enjoy the game. Drunken chess has knocked me down a few pegs though on chess.com .

[gabrielconroy]

I also love chess, to the point that playing 1 minute bullet games online was becoming an addiction. I've just looked at my stats on chess.com, and over the past five and a half years I have played the frankly ridiculous 27, 709 games of bullet chess. It is an amazing game, though, but I haven't really improved much in that time.

[Mr_Simnock]

Go is fine but no where near as complex as chess. Gabriel whats your rating on there, I hover between 1700 and 1850 on play chess at bullet time settings.

[Danger Man]

Go is fine but no where near as complex as chess.

Hmmm....

Computers have pretty much cracked chess but are nowhere near beating Go.

Go is very dull, though.

[gabrielconroy]

Gabriel whats your rating on there, I hover between 1700 and 1850 on play chess at bullet time settings.

At bullet I'm at 1718 at the moment, with a glorious peak of 2045. I'm on 2110 for the 3 day-a-move version, although that's more like correspondence than normal chess.

[Ronnie the Raincoat]

I play dominos. Not sure it counts. In a ward I worked in there were loads of Caribbean people who played it loads and taught me and now I'm awesome.

I played monopoly a few weeks ago and was so bad at it my friend built hotels on the go square.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

I'm fucking awful at chess but that doesn't stop me. There's some mental satisfaction to be had from it- in the post-modern and the traditional sense of the word.

Risk is okay but compared to Civ or Total War it is a load of fucking bullshit.

[Sony Walkman Prophecies]

I had a game of Kerplunk the other day. Possibly the only game in existence that takes longer to set up than it does to play, apart from sex of course.

[Danger Man]

Kerplonk.

[Sony Walkman Prophecies]

That's what I wrote - you're obviously going blind Danger Man!!

[monkfromhavana]

I had a game of Kerplunk the other day. Possibly the only game in existence that takes longer to set up than it does to play, apart from sex of course.

You've obviously never played Mousetrap or Domino Rally.

[ThickAndCreamy]

I don't mean to shit on everyone's chips here but come on, Risk and Monopoly are shit, but especially Risk.

Risk is a tedious borefest. A game in which you lose the will to live after an hour or so as the game is too simplistic and too reliant on chance. It's an endless back and forth of someone taking your pieces, then you taking theirs back and then both of you losing the will to live. I've never completed a game of risk actually caring about who the eventual winner is. There is just too little skill involved and simply not enough variety in terms of the gameplay. It's just a matter of rolling dice and attrition. It's incredible it's become so popular a board game considering just how weak its mechanics are even compared to something like Escape From Colditz. Whilst monopoly is dull, Risk is absolutely hopeless and meaningless, an extended exercise in futility.

Scrabble is probably the best standard and popular board game, maybe along with Articulate[nb]Trivial Pursuit should probably get a mention too.[/nb]. What Articulate loses in complexity it makes up in fun with short, sharp games that are rarely dull in groups. It's quick and easy to learn and fantastic to play with someone you know extremely well as it morphs your brain into thinking in such bizarre ways at times. I can also lose hours just playing scrabble by a fire and being a complete bastard with an ever building knowledge of obscure two letter words and never opening up the board. My girlfriend often refuses to play with me because of this, but I just think she's a bad loser.

Settlers of Catan is perhaps the best board game I know of. For those uninitiated it's much like Age of Empires but in board game form. I am lucky to live with someone who has spent over £200 on the original game and all expansion packs. The expansion packs can add enough complexity to the game that it can turn a normal game taking 40 minutes into something that may instead take five hours of intense fun. It's a game that can require a lot of skill and thinking power, with multiple ways to win a game and multiples versions of the game to play. It's surprisingly easy to learn and is very difficult to master when playing the more complex versions of the game. There are so many ways to approach the game and it has the perfect balance of skill and luck. It always feels like you deserve to win, that it's not just reliant on the fate of a dice roll. The board also looks amazing.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Risk can seem very much based on luck, and the tactical 'endgame' is too protracted- you can tell who will win 20 minutes before they eventually do. However, the decisions you make, and the risks you take do have some sort of strategy to them.

Why you'd bother when you can play Total War Campaign Mode or Civ, or Hearts Of Iron, I dunno.

[the midnight watch baboon]

Articulate is fun but if my virtual in-laws pronounce it ArticuLUT instead of ...Articul-EIGHT one more Christmas then I think I'll scream! Or maybe-

Quoth the baboon, I'mma kick 'em in their collective prawnhives and ruin every Jesusfest for evermore.

[Zetetic]

There's no reason for involving humans in a game of Risk beyond some sort of particularly small-minded malice. Diplomacy is notable for clarifying how shit Risk really is.

[gabrielconroy]

In Risk, can't you just always win by holing yourself up in Australia and New Zealand, building up a huge army then invading in your own merry time?

Settlers of Catan has been really good the two times I've played it, and Articulate is properly hilarious. There's something heart-warming and funny about witnessing a half-drunk gran trying, with increasing desperation, to mime 'Bobby Davro' to a team of baffled strangers and family members.

[Replies From View]

Risk is a tedious borefest. A game in which you lose the will to live after an hour or so as the game is too simplistic and too reliant on chance. It's an endless back and forth of someone taking your pieces, then you taking theirs back and then both of you losing the will to live.

I've never played it but it sounds like an almighty game of Top Trumps.

[Vodka Margarine]

We've got an original Trivial Pursuit from the 80s, complete with all the olden days questions. Playing it is a uniquely maddening experience.

[Eight Taiwanese Teenagers]

Settlers of Catan is perhaps the best board game I know of... . It always feels like you deserve to win, that it's not just reliant on the fate of a dice roll. The board also looks amazing.

I agree with you about Risk although more so about Monopoly. But I cannot agree with your statement above about Catan. An enormous amount rests on the roll of the dice! It is tactical and I do like it, but to say that luck doesn't come into it is silly.

However, many of the games that go to great lengths to remove any luck become horribly complicated and tedious in my opinion. The games rated highest by true board game geeks can leave you with so much to think about that while your own turn can be frustrating or slow, waiting for other people to take their turns can lead you to lose interest entirely. 

Having said that, possibly my all time favourite is really complicated and takes at least two hours to play: POWER GRID! In the game, each player represents a company that owns power plants and tries to supply electricity to cities. Sounds thrilling eh?

[Gavin M]

I can also lose hours just playing scrabble by a fire and being a complete bastard with an ever building knowledge of obscure two letter words and never opening up the board. My girlfriend often refuses to play with me because of this, but I just think she's a bad loser.

I think this is what puts me off playing the game, these alleged words that not even some top Scrabble players know the meaning of.  Fuck the Official Scrabble Words, if it's not in the nearest dictionary to hand it's not going on the board.

[Jerzy Bondov]

I fucking love board games me. I tried to write a post in the last board game thread but it got out of hand. This year I've developed a bit of an obsession and spent quite a lot of money on these things. Here are some of the games I'm into at the moment:

• Escape: the Curse of the Temple This is a co-operative game where you and your friends try to escape a temple. You all have five dice and need to roll combinations of symbols to move around and find the way out. The best thing is you don't take it in turns - everybody plays at the same time, making a lot of noise with the dice and shouting at each other. On top of this there's a CD soundtrack that occasionally starts a countdown. If you don't make it back to the start before the time runs out you lose a dice! Brilliant. It's amazing how tense and panicked you can get playing this one.
• Tinner's Trail A bit more calm this, it's about tin and copper mining in 19th century Cornwall. I bought it because I'm from Cornwall, just for the novelty value, but it's actually by a well respected designer (Martin Wallace) and is very good. It seems quite complex at first but it's quite elegant really and nowhere near as dull as it should be.
• Love Letter It's a card game rather than a board game but it's amazing. There are only sixteen cards, and you only ever have one or two in hand. You need to bluff and deduce what the other players are doing. Rounds are over really quickly so if you get knocked out you're right back in there soon enough. Really ingenious and it costs less than a tenner.
• The Resistance: Avalon When I explain this to people, usually by saying 'Welcome to Camelot! We are knights of the round table in the court of King Arthur, and there are traitors in our midst!', they couldn't look more disgusted with me. But within minutes everybody is accusing each other of lying, shouting and pointing fingers, threatening to break up with each other. The game itself is really simple; the real meat is in discussing what's going on. You need 5-10 people to play it so I don't get this out very often but every time I do it's fun.

There's no excuse to be playing Monopoly these days. Ticket to Ride and Catan are the best places to start.

[Mr_Simnock]

 

Computers have pretty much cracked chess

Er no they haven't, not by an absolute mile. Computers on their own can play chess to a very high level but a person + a computer beats the computer almost all the time in a match (of which there haven't been many). For me if computers are to have considered to have 'cracked' chess (which won't happen in my lifetime) then someone would have to show a computer being able to definitively announce which side could win a game about 10-15 moves in in all positions. That might happen, one day, in the very far future, with perhaps a quantum computer with about a quadrillion bits of ram.

with a glorious peak of 2045. I'm on 2110 for the 3 day-a-move version

That's excellent gabriel, how long have you been playing?

I can understand why anyone would consider Go more advanced than chess because of the way computers can now play chess to a very high level yet not so with go. The problem with this is two fold. There are an awful lot of chess programmes out there, many more people working on trying to improve chess engines than for Go. Secondly there are certain features of Go which make it difficult to produce a strong engine with computers, namely possible number of moves per turn and quite a few general chess attributes (like doubled pawns, controlling  a file) are more easy to define within a program than for its equivalence in Go.

What I find interesting is that Go is a lot easier for humans to grasp certain strategies and the overall game playing concepts than it is for computers but sort of a reverse for Chess. However one commonality with both games is that computer programmes still don't actually understand long term game strategies for both games, chess engines still rely an awful lot on simple brute search strength as they have always done.