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So recently I puchased Forbidden Island and we've been playing it a good bit lately, it's a lot of fun and I'm really enjoying the concept of it. FI is my first co-operative board game, but I want to buy others like Forbidden Desert, Dead of Winter and Betrayal at House on the Hill.

 

Anyway, my family loves board games, and I know that we aren't the only ones. What are a few of your favorites? Mine are Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride and Risk.

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Ever play Starfarers of Catan? It's like Settlers of Catan, but with alien races, epic battles with space pirates, thrilling races to the distant corners of the galaxy, and the exploration and colonization of distant star systems. :D

 

Another game I adore but rarely see mentioned is WildLife, a game designed by Wolfgang Kramer. Players take the role of one of six different species of wild animals, all competing in an evolutionary arms race to become Earth's dominant species. The game centers around adapting to new environments and surviving difficult situations like plagues and famines, and is one of the funnest board games I've ever played. :)

 

(My family owns the German edition of the game, so an added benefit is that it teaches us the German nouns for six different species of animal, as well as that the word for famine appears to be "hungersnot." :lol:)

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I'm the guy among my group of friends that finds the odd or obscure board games and gets everyone hooked. For example, I'm the one who introduced my friends to Betrayal at House on the Hill. Betrayal is definitely one of my favorites. Another good one is Resistance, a streamlined version of Mafia essentially (it's spin-off Avalon is also good). If you want cooperative board games, one of the best is Arkham Horror, all of its expansions and spin-offs as well. If you intend to play it, expect to put in a lot of time learning the rules, but once you know them the game is great. Very difficult though, expect for your team to lose mildly often.

 

Another good cooperative game that involves some backstabbing is Cutthroat Caverns. This is the game I've got my friends hooked on currently. The game advertises itself as a table top RPG without the dice rolls. That's not entirely true, but essentially you are a member of a party that has delved into a cavern and has found a very rare and valuable treasure. On your way out, though, you must overcome 9* obstacles. These include beasts of the deep, as well as traps and the like. The tagline for the game is "Without teamwork you will never survive. Without betrayal you will never win." It's a blast. The game has released 4.5 expansions as well, providing more replay value than Betrayal does (as once you've played all 50 scenarios of Betrayal, like I have, it's a bit unfair to continue playing) and adding easy mechanics to the very simple mechanics that v1.0 had. It's truly an easy game to pick up. I spent more time shuffling the cards than I did reading the rule book before my first time playing. Highly recommended.

 

*Certain encounters can and will add more encounters to this number, making the game longer than 9 encounters.

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eclipse, axis and allies, hannibal (rome vs carthage), twilight struggle, shogun, peurto rico, tigris and euphrates, dominant species, LOTR LCG, Game of thrones LCG, Game of thrones board game, lord of the rings coop, BSG coop, caverna, agricola, kemit, pirates cove, power grid, libertalia, merchants and marauders.... etc.

 

lets just say i played my first game of axis and allies when i was 8 years old and haven't stopped playing games since.

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If you want a co-op board game, one of my personal favorites is Eldritch Horror. It's basically a spiritual successor to Arkham Horror, and plays so much better than it.

 

If you want Co-op with a bit of vs to it, I can't recommend Mansions of Madness or Descent 2nd Edition enough. These basically play like call of cthulhu/D&D (respectively) lite, and is an adversarial game with the game master vs a group of players.

 

Also, it's not really a "board" game (its a card game), but Sentinels of the Multiverse is also a great co-op game.

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If you want a co-op board game, one of my personal favorites is Eldritch Horror. It's basically a spiritual successor to Arkham Horror, and plays so much better than it.

 

If you want Co-op with a bit of vs to it, I can't recommend Mansions of Madness or Descent 2nd Edition enough. These basically play like call of cthulhu/D&D (respectively) lite, and is an adversarial game with the game master vs a group of players.

 

Also, it's not really a "board" game (its a card game), but Sentinels of the Multiverse is also a great co-op game.

 

I've been considering picking up Mansions of Madness. I'll have to grab it once my friends are over the Cutthroat Caverns craze.

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I play a lot of board games; Carcasonne, Power Grid, Catan, 7 Wonders, all the usual stand-bys.  There's also this fantastic little card game called Chrononauts that I enjoy.

 

And, of course, Ticket to Ride.  I have friends who like to call it "Ticket to Rosemary Wins" so I usually only get to play it online.  Amusingly enough, amongst the online community with their mad strategists and such, I'm merely an average player.

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I play less than I would like to. My friends kind of suck, but I hope that now that I've moved into a house, I can set up a regular gaming gig going. 

 

As for the games themselves, I love Pandemic. For shorter sessions, The Resistance (though it turns out I am a much better loyalist than spy) or Avalon are tons of fun. I've been meaning to find some people and play The Forbidden IslandThe Forbidden Desert, but that's in the future still.

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Settlers is a favorite, but I haven't played a whole lot of others (would, but just haven't had the opportunity).

 

in the not quite a board game category: a friend of mine has this card game called "Bang!" which is great.  it is basically a game version of the whole spaghetti western genre, right up to the fact that it was created in Italy and translated (not always well) into English later.

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Settlers is a favorite, but I haven't played a whole lot of others (would, but just haven't had the opportunity).

 

in the not quite a board game category: a friend of mine has this card game called "Bang!" which is great.  it is basically a game version of the whole spaghetti western genre, right up to the fact that it was created in Italy and translated (not always well) into English later.

I've heard of Bang! before. My brother played it at a party once and he describes it as Mafia but with cowboys.

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eclipse, axis and allies, hannibal (rome vs carthage), twilight struggle, shogun, peurto rico, tigris and euphrates, dominant species, LOTR LCG, Game of thrones LCG, Game of thrones board game, lord of the rings coop, BSG coop, caverna, agricola, kemit, pirates cove, power grid, libertalia, merchants and marauders.... etc.

 

lets just say i played my first game of axis and allies when i was 8 years old and haven't stopped playing games since.

Eclipse!  Yes!  Twilight Struggle!  Also yes!  LotR LCG, Game of Thrones board game, LotR coop, BSG 'co-op', and Power Grid...all yes!

 

If you want a co-op board game, one of my personal favorites is Eldritch Horror. It's basically a spiritual successor to Arkham Horror, and plays so much better than it.

 

If you want Co-op with a bit of vs to it, I can't recommend Mansions of Madness or Descent 2nd Edition enough. These basically play like call of cthulhu/D&D (respectively) lite, and is an adversarial game with the game master vs a group of players.

 

Also, it's not really a "board" game (its a card game), but Sentinels of the Multiverse is also a great co-op game.

Mansions of Madness is one of my all time favorites.  Even if you lose as the investigators, it's always an interesting and hilarious time! 

 

I've been considering picking up Mansions of Madness. I'll have to grab it once my friends are over the Cutthroat Caverns craze.

Do it! :D

 

Pandemic is a very good co-op game of players vs the board. My friends and I are pretty good, and we have about a 60% win rate on regular.

That's a pretty fun one.  You should try to the new XCOM board game as it has some similar mechanics. :)

 

I play a lot of board games; Carcasonne, Power Grid, Catan, 7 Wonders, all the usual stand-bys.  There's also this fantastic little card game called Chrononauts that I enjoy.

 

And, of course, Ticket to Ride.  I have friends who like to call it "Ticket to Rosemary Wins" so I usually only get to play it online.  Amusingly enough, amongst the online community with their mad strategists and such, I'm merely an average player.

Oh man, my mother-in-law played Ticket to Ride with us once.  We have the Europe version, so the locomotives are absolutely necessary to building most routes.  She basically hoarded them until she had like 15 of them and wouldn't spend them on anything.  No one else could build a thing.  We had to create a house rule that this was not allowed in future games by honor system.

 

 

So, I'm just going to upload pictures of our game closet and the corner of the dining room where all the Star Wars X-Wing and Armada ships and the SW card game live (pretty much permanently). (Click on the links to see pictures...they weren't showing up right in my comment, alas.)

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Here's a list of some of the best ever.

Settlers of Catan, Settlers of Catan knights expansion pack, Settlers of Catan Seafarers expansion pack, Risk, Swashbuckled, Ticket to ride, Stratego, Blokus, and 3d Blokus.

   Card games are awesome too, so I'll just say the top 5:  Munchkins, Dominion, 7 Wonders, Bang, and perpetual commotion.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well, both my parents love board games so I grew up on them :)

 

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^That is a large chunk (though not all) of our family collection.

 

Rather than make a long list of games I really like, I'll just note that my current favourites:

board game - Alien Frontiers

card game - Thunderstone

 

Ever play Starfarers of Catan? It's like Settlers of Catan, but with alien races, epic battles with space pirates, thrilling races to the distant corners of the galaxy, and the exploration and colonization of distant star systems. :D

We have that, tis a very nice game :)

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Been trying to build up a board game collection over the last year.

Re: Co-op games - Have Forbidden Desert, Pandemic, and Flash Point. Thus far Flash Point's been my favorite - my sister and I find Forbidden Desert and Pandemic a bit predictable, though we've not played a whole lot of either game. They are easier with just two players, but even when we've had 3-4, we only had a bit of trouble with Forbidden Desert, and that's was only until we worked out what we did wrong the game we lost. Maybe we just got lucky draws in the handful of games we played, dunno. Flash Point felt a bit more immersive, so if we were to pull out a co-op game it'd that.

 

Oh, and there's Escape: The curse of the Temple. Now that is quite some fun.

 

Betrayal games: BSG: The boardgame, Saboteur, The Resistance (plus expansions). Unfortunately only been able to have one game of BSG, and card's weren't shuffled well. Basically had no conflict. Need to play that more. Otherwise, The Resistance is lots of fun, and Saboteur works nicely - you don't reliably have a traitor, and the game encourages everyone to backstab each other - the first player to the end gets the most stuff. You have the nice balance of 'I want to be first to the finish' with 'if we mess each other over enough, the traitor will get everything'.

 

Love Letter is a nice little filler game - name/theme has nothing to do with the mechanics, really, but it's the mechanics which are cool. There are a number of cool themed variants too (Hobbit, Batman, few others I think).

 

Now, what I'm looking forward to is a pair of games I kickstarted - Asking for Trobils and Viceroy. Those should be hopefully be here in the next week or so.

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in the not quite a board game category: a friend of mine has this card game called "Bang!" which is great.  it is basically a game version of the whole spaghetti western genre, right up to the fact that it was created in Italy and translated (not always well) into English later.

 

I adore Bang! My brother's best friend keeps up on the European games of the year, so he's got a lot of foreign games in his collection. Since he's also a family friend (he used to live in our basement), I've played a great deal of them. Or I did about 10 years ago. Bang! was among those. It's been interesting to see the progression of it, from the first edition to the second and onwards, and the addition of Dodge City and the Bullet. Personally, I like the base game the most. With the addition of Dodge City if you have a huge group. Early editions as well. That friend has the first edition and most of my family has the second edition (which I think is the best edition). Some of the cards added/changed later in the base game sort of take away the old Western feel. But it's such a fun game.

 

Other great cards games: Cards Against Humanity, Munchkin, Fluxx, and Dix-It. (There are more, but those are the ones right off the top of my head)

 

As for true board games. Scotland Yard is great: a group of detectives chase a criminal around London using different modes of transportation. I also rather like Betrayal at House on the Hill, Ticket to Ride, Risk, Monopoly, Stratego, and Carcasonne. I've played Settlers twice and I enjoyed it, but I was introduced to it very late, so I tend to avoid playing it with groups of people who have all played for years. The only time I did that, the group was very serious about their playing, and it took all the fun out of the game. Games shouldn't be played if they're not fun. :P I've played Forbidden Island once, about a month or two ago, and that one was a lot of fun.

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I adore Bang! My brother's best friend keeps up on the European games of the year, so he's got a lot of foreign games in his collection. Since he's also a family friend (he used to live in our basement), I've played a great deal of them. Or I did about 10 years ago. Bang! was among those. It's been interesting to see the progression of it, from the first edition to the second and onwards, and the addition of Dodge City and the Bullet. Personally, I like the base game the most. With the addition of Dodge City if you have a huge group. Early editions as well. That friend has the first edition and most of my family has the second edition (which I think is the best edition). Some of the cards added/changed later in the base game sort of take away the old Western feel. But it's such a fun game.

 

Other great cards games: Cards Against Humanity, Munchkin, Fluxx, and Dix-It. (There are more, but those are the ones right off the top of my head)

My friend has I think the base plus the first or second expansion of Bang!, and I've played it a good amount, including one time where the renegade (I think that is the term for the role, its been a few months) went almost the whole game without being found out by the sherrif and deputies.  she started cackling when they finally determined what her role was.

 

also, I'll second Munchkin and Cards against Humanity.   we have the latter, and, if you're in the right mood, it can be a lot of fun.  on the other hand you can't play it too often or you kinda become desensitized to the humor of it.

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My friend has I think the base plus the first or second expansion of Bang!, and I've played it a good amount, including one time where the renegade (I think that is the term for the role, its been a few months) went almost the whole game without being found out by the sherrif and deputies. she started cackling when they finally determined what her role was.

One time, we played it at my grandparents and I was the Sheriff. My cousin and my sister were my deputies. My brother was the Renegade. He tricked me into killing both my deputies. Somehow, I still won. I have no idea how. Most of the time I play, the Renegade makes it at least halfway through. It's infrequent that they win though. Which is sad, since it's my favorite role.

I know exactly what you mean about becoming desensitized by Cards Against Humanity. It's a great game and I love it to bits, but it's a lot more fun when the cards played are more of a surprise.

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I know exactly what you mean about becoming desensitized by Cards Against Humanity. It's a great game and I love it to bits, but it's a lot more fun when the cards played are more of a surprise.

exactly.  it helps if you give it a little time and have a chance to forget some of the cards that are in there, then when someone plays one, it hits harder.  I think this is partly why I like the pick two and pick three cards more than the regular ones.  there are exponentially more choices of combinations of 2 and 3 cards than there are singles, and so you are more likely to get that surprise element from a new combo than from any individual card.

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I also play Candy Land. Not in the boring way you're thinking of though. In my version, most of the characters are characters and can kill you. It's actually pretty hard. Muahahaha.

 

And no, I'm not a 6-year-old.

Edited by ChullRider
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I didn't read every comment, so sorry if this is repetitive. But if you like cooperative games, you have to try Pandemic, Pandemic: the Cure, Escape: the Curse of the Temple, Castle Panic, Arkham Horror, and a free game call Dead of Night you can download here. I play a lot of board games too, so if you want any more recommendations just let me know.

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