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Traditional Games 100 - Rating 2003's Boardgames
Thanks to OgreCave for pointing out The Traditional Games 100, the favorite board and card games of 2003, as voted by the editors and playtesters of GAMES Magazine. The site explains that "...each year since 1980, GAMES Magazine has published a Buyer's Guide to Games in their year-end holiday issue", and this year's overall winner is Alan Moon & Aaron Weissblum's New England from Uberplay. Elsewhere, "Face 2 Face Games tops our Family Games category with Sid Sackson's hilarious I'm the Boss! [and] Days of Wonder won the Family Cards category with Queen's Necklace", among many other category winners.
Do people still play boardgames?
There have been a lot of attempts to implement boardgames as PC games, Monopoly is a big example, but they have been very unsuccessful.
Some online card games are popular, and Wizards of the Coast have been desperate to get Magic played online (and still reap huge profits by not even having to print cards anymore).
Personally I'll stick to GTA (which, if ever made into a boardgame, would suck), and maybe a game of 500 or bridge or poker in the flesh world.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
what this generation needs is a new version of the good OLD game O'Mega Virus
Fun!Fun!Fun!
Ahh, or perhaps the Steve Jackson game, Illuminati! Now that was fun. I'll use the Clone Arrangers with the assistance of the Orbital Mind Control Lasers and Goldfish Fanciers to try and take over the Semiconscious Liberation Army!
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
So boring, in fact, that in the picture they felt the need to throw in a corn cob, a telescope, a burlap sack (woo! fun!) and some fetish gear (!) as props.
See for yourself.
I mean, the last 3 boardgames I played were Monopoly, Risk, and Civilisation... and civ was the fist one I'd bought for many years. Boardgames are becoming a strange oddity these days.. while there's a desire by boardgame-players to see them computerized, there's also a trend in the reverse (as Civilisation is an example of).
After having slugged through setting up civ, I've realised that neither way is going to be easy, by the simple fact they're just two wildly different social interactions.
I look at boardgames now and then (on my way to EB ;), but the effort required to train enough people to play a new game with weird or complex rules just isn't worth it anymore.
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
My wide and I spent last Saturday at home playing snap. You know, where you each take turns to put a card down, and if they're both the same, you shout "SNAP" and win all the cards? Maybe it's called something different in the US.
Anyway, I didn't want to play at first, bacause I thought it was a stupid kid's game, but actually there's a lot of skill in volved - just not the sort of skill usually involved in card games - more speed of pattern recognition and quickness of reactions (hence this post being wonderfully on topic).
After a while, we both got so fast that we had to put an empty cigarette packet on the table, which we hit as we shouted "snap", so , by seeing who actually hit the packet first, we vcuold break ties.
It gets more complex, too - snap can actually be quite a deep game:
We were both playing our cards to separate stacks in front of us; a snap situation was defined as when the cards on top of both piles matched. However, we often felt the urge to call out "snap" when putting a matching card on the same pile. So we put another cigarette packet on the other side of the table, and defined such a condition as "autosnap". Calling out the wrong sort of snap or hitting the wrong fag packet counted as a foul. Next time we plan to implement more features: contrasnap, where the top card on one pile matches the second-from top on the opposite pile, consecutive snap, where the card is one away in sequence from the other, autoconsecutive snap, and contraconsecutive snap.
We'll need six empty cigarette packets (or similar, to count as "bases" in different parts of the room. Should be quite a workout.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
Games Magzine does not sell these games. Funagain, the online vendor of games, however is hosting a copy of the Games 100 list, with links to their own database.
If I wasn't personal friends with the owner of a local board game store I would buy all my games from Funagain. They've got a fantastic selection, and since Games's top 100 list is only listing games that are in print, there's no reason Funagain should not carry each and every one of them.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
New England, and most of the games listed in the Games 100 have more depth, and are more fun to play than the top 100 video games on the market today!
How could they not include FLUXX?
Anyone got any recommendations along the lines of "If you love FLUXX, you'll also love..."?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
...the effort required to train enough people to play a new game with weird or complex rules just isn't worth it anymore.
I can relate to your problem -- there are a lot of games that you can't just sit down and play with anyone. In fact, some of those are my favorites. But there are a lot of games with fairly simple rules that you can teach almost anyone in a matter of minutes.
"Apples to Apples" and "Fluxx" come to mind as games that almost anyone can be taught and jump right in and play. They also have the advantage that, while someone can win, no one can get eliminated. Nothing puts off new gamers like being eliminated from a game they barely understand.
Games like "Settlers of Catan" or "Carcassone" are a good "next step" for people that you try to get to play board games: the strategy is a little deeper and the rules require more explanation, but they're still fun and fairly easy to get into.
And finally, you're right -- trying to find these games is a pain. However, you can get a lot of these online. The original article should lead to funagain games, one of many places online that you can purchase these games... heck, for cheaper than you can get them in a store.
If you really like FLUXX and can deal with some open ended complexity, you might consider nomic. It's basically a rules set that defines how changes can be made to the rules set and has an arbitrary victory condition (which usually gets changed quickly).
fnord
Kill Doctor Lucky is especially recommended.
And the Mario Party series of Nintendo games are all fantastic, and are all basically board games. Mario Party 5 night tonight! :)
I've been a GAMES subsciber since about 1978. There were 4 or 5 years on non-publication. The original publisher was Playboy. The current publisher keeps changing almost yearly. The GAMES 100 has been one of the few steady things.
GAMES used to include old games in the list, but they had several games repeatedly, so they retired the best to the "Hall of Fame." The board games are usually excellent games if you can find them. Many are foreign (not English) language, so make sure they're translated if you need it.
You used to be able to get many boardgames from Wizards of the Coast stores, but the last time I was there, they had cut their selection drastically because it's a niche market. Good boardgames cost $30 on up! I'm guessing that's why you can only find these at Funagain.
Something to be wary about, though. The games reviews are always upbeat and positive. The mini-reviews are doled out to their writers. Like any review, the games are to the taste of the reviewer. Try to research the game online before buying.
And finally, GAMES also publishes the Top 100 Electronic/Computer games. The list is the top video games for people who don't play video games regularly. Although they pick a lot of good ones, they always seem to pick flash over substance.
They have Dvonn & Tamsk on the list, both of which are from The Gipf Project, but they are missing one of the best games from the project: Zertz! I am a pretty big fan of Dvonn as well though, but not as much...
-Magiluke
Earl Grey, Hot.
You can buy these games at:
Funagain
Games Surplus
Fair Play Games
Boulder Games
You can also sometimes find them on Ebay (a good place to look for out of print ones) and The BoardGameGeek marketplace