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2004 Board Games Gift Guide
The Morning News has come out with a nice guide to good gift boardgames, while Funagain Games has the list of the 2004 Board and Card Games of the Year (and the runners-up). Like a bowling ball with your name engraved upon it, these make great gifts for your significant other. Any other suggestions for good adult boardgames?
Missing from the list, but a really fun game, is Heroscape It is a good blend of luck and strategy and can be played by various levels of expertise. I played it with the kids and they loved it. They actually turned OFF Halo 2 to play!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Discovered this one over the summer and played with some friends online. Would love an actual board game version. Great strategy game, especially since you're forced to barter with other players to succeed, there's lots of strategy involved.
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http://www.boardgamegeek.com/viewitem.php3?gameid
Graphically, the game is gorgeous. The boards, cards, etc. are all extremely well done.
Past winners of the Mensa Select seal can be browsed by year here. Have some fun while exercising your brain.
Previous winners include Taboo and Magic-The Gathering.
Sweet informative mod.
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/rankbrowse.php3?ranki ng=45#45
Pretty much lists everything you won't find at a local wal-mart.
None of the games mentioned are from the eponymous Cheap Ass Games company. I just found out about this company a few weeks ago, when I was looking for cheap ass Christmas presents. I can't vouch for their products but they seem like a good deal for 2 reasons.
a) The games sound like fun. Sure, who's going to advertise their games as totally boring and stupid? No one. But, Kill Doctor Lucky and Deadwood to name two I remember, have funny concepts and sound interesting to play.
b) They are CHEAP. And, seeing as to how most board games I've owned have been played about 3 times, max, the money spent seems much closer to the value derived than the $50 it costs for a lavishly wood-crafted board game.
Again, I don't know much about the product so don't come crying to me if they suck, but I'm probably going to risk a few bucks on them this year.
In the latter category was in which the player who won, wasn't even there! I played a card which basically caused everyone to play all the cards in their hand. One of the guys got up to answer the phone right before it became his turn. We played for him (since he had to play everything anyway;-) and the *&$*#&*&#*($&%**#&$^%*@&$ won.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
my favorite find of the last few years has been Cheapass Games: http://www.cheapass.com/products/index.html
All their games are imaginative, fun and, best of all, cost next to f-all. It's refreshing to see someone trying to be fresh about game styles.
Personal favorites:
Unexploded Cow - a poker-style game involving incinerating BSE infected cattle in French minefields...
The Great Brain Robbery - Get your Zombie out of the runaway train by stealing brains with special abilities.
Bitin Off Hedz - even works for kids - a standard-ish board game where dinosaurs race to extinction.
They're so cheap you can afford to take a risk anyway.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
Settlers of Catan! Quick to pick up, 30-45 minutes for a 4 player game (6 with the expansion tiles) great fun and addictive, no game is complete without loud good-natured badgering of your fellows and monty python quotes.
Works best after a case or two when the phrase "Pressing wood into sheep" takes on whole new meanings.
This is not a sig.
Puero Rico is the #1 ranked game on boardgamegeek.com. That's why I bought it.
Then, I discovered why. Every person that I've introduced Puerto Rico to gets hooked. Here's a list of reasons why I'm a fanboy about it...
--) No waiting: When other people take their turns, all players must make decisions.
--) Creepily well-balanced. There is no (to my knowledge) "power move" or "race for a certain card" that lames out the game.
--) Incredible replayability: each time you play is different
--) Minimized randomness: Randomness exists in only a SINGLE aspect of the game. Everything is else is based on seating and "what are my opponents likely to do".
--) Fast games: You can play it three times in an evening. Crucial.
You're both wrong and right...
Before I go on, I have to point out that I only have a deep interest in AI, I haven't actually started my post-grad coursework in it yet (hopefully next year). So my information might not be 100% correct (I look forward to someone correcting/supplementing my post). I should also add that I play Go on occasion, but I suck at it...
Go does have a very large branch factor, so brute-force techniques to playing well are nearly impossible (or take WAY too long to compute). Chess doesn't have a large amount of branching (relative to Go), so brute-force is actually somewhat effective. But the real problem comes when trying to actually write an AI that makes decisions instead of exhausting all possibilities.
In Go, there is a very large amount of information to process. The relative strengths of each player in each position of the board, the aggressiveness of the other player, common move patterns, and of course the number of possible outcomes of an action. Simply put, Go is simply too complex to represent and analyze in a simple manner.
It's my understanding that successful Go programs work by simply looking up common scenarios in a large database of pre-programmed moves, supplementing that with some basic neural network pattern recognition, and then narrowing down decisions with a brute force attack on a reduced set.
Munchkin is a great tongue-in-cheek board game for the RPGer in your social circle or family. It's a card game (not CCG) with quite a lot of expansion packs. Basically, you try to clear a dungeon & if a friend gets in the way or is going to win first, you screw them over.
Very fun, quick game.
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Days of Wonder just produce some amazing stuff, including the heralded Memoir '44, which was recently released, along with a bunch of others that me and my wife can't get enough of.
:)
Mystery of the Abbey is like a thinking man's/geek's version of Clue. Instead of that boring ole rag of a board game, you get an intricate and well designed whodunit that has strategy and tactics involved as to who finds out what and how to play the game to win. This is a favorite in our household and whenever we have a gettogether it's the first board game pulled out.
Ticket to Ride is another Days of Wonder production, designed by a frenchman I believe, who ironically created a game about US train lines around the early 1900's. You have a set # of trains and must build them in tandem across the country. You must connect certain cities according to your "tickets" you recieve at the beginning of the game, always giving you a goal and with multiple paths to each city there is strategy involved as far as how you connect them and by what color (each route is defined by color). It gets more in-depth and is very fun/interesting and fast paced to boot. The younger kids in the family really like this one as its color-based, easily followed, and easy to learn.
As far as other games, we love card games. Bang! is hands down the best multi-player card game I've ever played. Take that as you may, but I've played my share and it is awesome stuff. When a friend/family memeber asks us what we want to play, it's always Bang! Great mechanics, interesting roles to play, fun and funny to boot. There are some expansions to it (about a dozen cards each) to throw some variety to the game, but we've not needed those just yet. This is an absolute must-buy.
Queen's Necklace is another Days of Wonder production and is very cool. I know, a guy saying that playing a card game based on jewelry is cool, but it's a blast and is still fun with just 2 players (me and my wife play it occassionally). Easy to learn, hard to master, plenty of strategy and lots of enjoyment to be had.
Lastly I'll mention that Cheap Ass Games is a treasure trove of goodness, particularly Kill Dr. Lucky. This is a game that happens -before- Clue. Instead of figuring out who died and how, you actually get to kill that person! Of course, he's the luckiest guy ever, so it takes awhile and each person chases the good Doc around the mansion in an attempt to finally kill him in a variety of ways.
I think my favorite "Foiled!" card that showed up as I tried to Kill Dr. Lucky said something like "And suddenly...you felt not so fresh."
Hilarious, fun, and cheap!
Hope this helps
It's my understanding that successful Go programs work by simply looking up common scenarios in a large database of pre-programmed moves, supplementing that with some basic neural network pattern recognition, and then narrowing down decisions with a brute force attack on a reduced set.
Um.. no.
Computer Go is very much in its infancy, and pretty much all computer go programs operate by using hand-coded heuristics to suggest moves, and then doing lots of old-fashioned local search. While there are some pattern databases used, as well as opening 'books' for common beginning-game corner patterns (joseki), in general, large pattern databases are not used, though there are some people working on this approach. Only one well-performing Go program I can think of uses neural networks; it's definitely very atypical.
The problem with Go is not just the branching factor; while obviously it's a difficulty, it's not the largest problem in computer Go. The problem isn't that not enough positions can be checked in a reasonable amount of time, the problem is that not even one position can be accurately checked in any practical amount of time - that is, coming up with a good evaluation function has been a major challenge. In lay terms, a computer cannot look at a Go board and accurately judge how good or bad the position is. When humans look at a board position, they use lots of fuzzy, partially defined concepts like, 'thickness,' 'influence,' 'territory', and 'potential' that are very hard for one human to explain to another, let alone get a program to perform the same analysis.