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Intelligent Board Games and Social Interaction?
frogcircus asks: "Several weeks ago, at a neighborhood yard sale, my wife found an intact copy of Scotland Yard. I had been looking for one for several years (ever suspicious of eBay), driven by fond memories of group games in the late 80s. We played with a group of friends last night, and while some of us loved the game, others seemed a little less enthralled. It soon surfaced that the logic and reasoning involved in the game made it highly attractive for some of us. This got me thinking that perhaps the game was especially appealing to the geek mind. Which leads to my question: to which board games do you feel a close affinity? And to what degree have they engendered social interaction who don't share your particular interests?"
I play and socialize with Advanced Squad Leader.
www.multimanpublishing.com
Hey, if Curt Schilling likes it (and owns the company), then it's gotta be good.
I haven't played it fo about a decade, but I remember it as being like a "grown-ups version" of Monopoly. Instead of property, you bought shares in companies. The general dynamic was the same as Monopoly, but it was more complex.
My family enjoyed playing this game. Until my Dad (an embedded system engineer) figured out a strategy for winning really fast. He would basically keep track weather or not somebody could disprove a hypothesis (Mr Green, in the Library, with the Candlestick) After a while, when somebody says they can prove a hypothesis wrong, and you have marked that they do not have Mr Green or the Library, then you know they have the Candlestick.
Basically a turn based strategy game. You grab resources and build settlements and cities to be the first to get a certain number of points.
First turn takes 30 minutes. Subsequent turns take 15 minutes each.
Unless you have a very small circle of friends (up to seven others), your social life is over.
I love Junta, which is a game for 3-7 players where each player is either the president or a member of the cabinet of a corrupt government in a Central American republic. The point of the game is to get as much foreign aid money into your Swiss bank account before it all runs out.
The gameplay is wonderful if you like double-crossing.
I. Love. That game.
I discovered it about three years ago. A friend of mine had opened a hobby/gaming shop and had a copy of it there for all of us to play, before starting in on our weekly LARP games. Bad jokes and much fun ensued each and every week.
I couldn't find it when I moved out to Michigan, until I -finally- happened across it at a local gaming store. I bought it as soon as I had the forty bucks (when did board games get so expensive?!? *boggle*) and, sadly, I've played it only once yet. Two person Settlers games are rather boring...
Now that I've suckered someone else into playing, hopefully the game will get some use again.
Besides this...
Lunch Money *evil grin* Granted it's mostly the smack-talking, but noone can deny the fun factor of playing a huge 6-8 person game, and doing a reverse-reverse combo Hail Mary on your best friend.
~Kyrthira Phelan~
First of all, there is a whole class of Board Game Geeks.
It should also be noted that Scotland Yard is still available as a game called N.Y. Chase, but with a different map.
With those points out of the way, I think the appeal of board games depends greatly on the type of board game. There are several board categories that each appeal to a different group of people. Logic games that involve deduction like Scotland Yard probably appeal to technology geeks more than they do to the general population.
Some people play games as a way to relax, and they do not like to spend as much time thinking about things as it takes to play a deduction game. Some of those people prefer "party" games like trivia games and more social offerings.
You could try to create a Venn diagram of different demographics and the type of board games that they prefer, but I don't know that it would be that useful. It is better, in my experience, to just try to find games that the people you plan to play with like and have fun.
Here is a partial list of some broad categories of games (off the top of my head):
Party games that revolve around social interation like Cranium, Apples to Apples, most trivia games, and most board games that are mass marketed for adults in the USA.
Deduction games that involve eliminating possibilities and figuring out the answer like Scotland Yard, Master Mind, Coda, and Clue.
Induction games that involve formulating a theory based on observed evidence like Zendo and Eluesis.
Programming games where the moves are all set up and then executed like RAMBots and RoboRally (Diplomacy uses this mechanic, but it's really a different kind of game).
Abstract strategy games where the players pit their mental abilities against one another. Many of these are limited to two players and frequently have perfect information. Examples include Chess, Go, Dvonn, Zertz, Tigris and Euphrates, Blokus, and Through the Desert.
Dexterity games were players have to use physical ability to achieve an objective, like Pitchcar, Jenga, and Crokinole.
There are many other types of games, and then there are many games that incorporate several of these aspects. There are even games that I refer to as "psychological interation" games because they revolve more around how well you can judge how the other players will act in a given situation (like Citadels and Werewolf).
Many of the Euro/German/Designer games incorporate different elements to create an experience that appeals to many people for different reasons, but a lot of the preference comes down to why people want to play games. I personally like to win, so I tend to dislike games that involve too much luck. I also like to think, so I enjoy games that are "brain burners".
Some of my favorites include:
Go, a classic two player abstract strategy game
Ricochet Robot, a brain burning puzzle game
Zendo, an induction game
Through the Desert, a multi player abstract strategy games similar to Go
Princes of Florence, a complex designer game that incorporates auctions and strategy in an interesting way
Carcassonne, a relativly light tile placement game that still has enough strategy to be enjoyable
Age of Steam and Power Grid, economic simulation games that require tough decisions to try to implement complex plans
However, I own a broad collection of games so I have something that is approprate and enjoyable for almost any situation. It all comes down to having fun, in the end (and winning).
fnord
Stratego is by and large my favortie board game. It's not got a lot of social interation as it's only a two person game, unless you count people watching the game. One thing I like about Stratego is that it is really fun to watch two people play who are good at it. It's like watching a really good game of poker because it's very easy to bluff both on offense and defense. I especially like the now-defunct Electronic Stratego just because you don't know the rank of a piece until that piece dies and the electronic bomb system is more challenging.
The other board games I love are Risk, Trivial Pursuit 80's Edition, and Clue.
I can't believe no one has mentioned cosmic encounter, my favorate social game.
3 or 4 different game companies have produced versions of it and the original had 9 expansions.
Add that to the tons of user created expansions available on the web and you get a game that never gets old.
The best CE site in my opinion (disclaimer, I did the database programming) is The warp
In the same geographical region, I spend too much money and not enough time at Cerebral Hobbies in Chapel Hill. They just moved out of the hard-to-park student-infested downtown and into a nice accessible strip mall...three blocks from my house. Doh.
They stock a goodly number of Rio Grande "Games for Two" including some great German games (with translations enclosed). The Germans have the boardgame business down to a science. I particularly like anything at all by Reiner Knizia. (favorite is "Lost Cities"). There used to be a giant void in the two-player-games market, but these days it's perfectly possible to be a game-loving couple and play a variety of games even if you can't lure your friends to the house...
~
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." -Emerson
With all the postings mentioning RoboRally, I thought I'd mention another, slightly rarer, game where you do some programming, RoboTanks
Each player has a small group of tanks, which you put cards into stacks for their program, which they then follow from that point out. Reminds me of the old Playstation game Carnage Heart, only with many units per side.
It's a lot less direct than RoboRally, and hard to play if you can't think ahead a number of turns, but can be a lot of fun in the right company.
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
I agree. Last Christmas I asked for Settlers Of Catan (the basic 3-4 players box) and I've never regretted it. It's quite an expensive game, and some of the pieces (all the roads) were missing right at the start (factory screw-up?) but the very friendly people of 999games sent me the pieces, I had to wait 2 months but it was worth the wait.
Me, my girlfriend, my brother and his girlfriend regularly play a game of Catan and it's always fun. It takes some time before you get a good insight in the game mechanics, but as soon as you develop some tactics it gets more and more fun every time.
What is especially intriguing about the game mechanics is the balance between luck and tactics. You need to understand the bell curve for 2d6, and the factor of luck is almost totally out of the equation.
If you haven't played it yet, try the Java online version of Catan or find a copy of the cheap but crappy CD-ROM version in Dutch (I think the original was German, so you might find that on CDROM too), details here.
I hate scrabble, but some friends turned me on to something they called speed scrabble. The tiles and scoring system remain similar to Scrabble. You deal out 7 pieces to each player who is independantly trying to make a connected series of words (like their own scrabble board) once they achieve this they announce their success (we shouted take two) and all players draw two tiles). Repeat until the tiles are exhausted (a game is pretty quick with more than 6 players). Once all the tiles are distributed and someone has all their words in a connected group, all players add their word score and subtract unused tiles. It's quick and rewards nonlinear thinking and pretty fun. I lost all night, but still enjoyed myself.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.