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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.
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!
...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.
Well, this is the best of 2003, and I know that I got my first copy of Fluxx in 1999. It wasn't even the first edition. It not being new probably has something to do with it not being on this list.