Q: Dear 100 Hour Board,
What are some of your favorite board games? Why do you like them?
-Kodak
A:
Dear friends,
I love King of Tokyo. You get to choose between a bunny, an alien, a dinosaur, a dragon, a kraken, and King Kong, and make them fight each other. I enjoy the strategy and teamwork aspects of Pandemic, and the unpredictability of Dominion. But my all-time favorite game is Bohnanza. My siblings and I play it pretty frequently, and it always involves a lot of yelling, card throwing, and threats on each others' lives. Ah, family.
Peace,
-Stego Lily
A:
Dear Kodak,
Dominion has endless variations and is completely addicting.
Agricola is frustrating (whyyyy can't I do all the things I want to do!) but fascinating and challenging.
Seven Wonders is slightly easier than Agricola (though what isn't) and is interesting in its strategy and gameplay dynamics.
Trivial Pursuit is wonderful because very few other places reward me for knowing random factoids.
Bonus points for Boggle, Speed Scrabble, Anagrams, and Bohnanza, if you count not-quite-board but not-quite-class-card games in your question.
-Petra
A:
Dear Kodak,
One of my new favorites is Ticket to Ride. It's got a lot of the exciting parts of RISK, without the competitive, cut-throat atmosphere. One of my old favorites is The Game of LIFE- the version from the 60's or 70's. The spaces on that board are so much better than the modern version: Uncle left you skunk farm, pay $ to get rid of it. It's brilliant.
-Squirrel
A:
Dear Kodak,
Space Alert, because it's a simulator game played in real time and it can be really hectic but really entertaining.
Mystery Express, because it's like a much more difficult (and frustrating) version of Clue.
Betrayal at House on the Hill, because it's unpredictable and terrifying, there are so many different scenarios, and the heroes always feel like they're going to lose.
Carcassonne, because I like to get in wars over field control that usually allow someone else to win.
Pandemic, because apparently I really like disaster-driven co-op games.
Scrabble, Boggle, Quiddler, and Bananagrams, because I love word games.
Love Letter and Coup, because they're relatively simple strategic card games with a premise similar to B.S., and it's fun to call people out for lying (even though I'm usually wrong).
--Maven
A:
Dear Kodiak,
Ticket to Ride - I'm a huge fan of Eurogames, and this is one of the best. The game is different every time, it's easy to play, and complex to master.
Carcassonne - Again, a fantastic Eurogame that has endless variation. You have to strategize in placing your tiles and placing your little meeples.
Settlers of Catan - Good, solid fun. It gets old occasionally, but that's just because Longest Road Guy won yet again due to some lucky dice rolls.
Dominion - I love games that let me do combos, and Dominion is one of those.
Munchkin - This game is so much fun, but only with at least 5 people, and only if the players actually get into the game.
Bananagrams - I may be The Obvious Loser in most board games, but word games are where I shine. It's like Scrabble but without a board and faster paced.
Smash Up - I discovered this game recently at a friend's house and it is super fun. You shuffle together decks of random things, so you can have an army of dinos and zombies or plants and aliens, etc.
Risk 2210 - My biggest problem with Risk is that it's incredibly boring and slow. Risk 2210 solves every slow bit of Risk and makes it fun, rather than tedious. You get to set up on the moon if you want! How cool is that!
-Inverse Insomniac
A:
Dear Kodak,
Repello: I like it because it is a brilliant concept and it's a rush to see how things will play out. Also, I am good at it.
Betrayal at House on the Hill: I like it because it's an RPG light and it's not that hard to get people to play with you. Plus, it's fantastically creepy and there are so many different ways the heroes battle the traitor. If you can get past the fact that almost all the cards and almost all the different things that can happen to the players are handicaps, it's fun.
Dominion: I like it because it is versatile and strategic.
Double Quick: I like it because it's really fast and Scrabble-y, but it's all about beating the clock.
Nerts: Does this count? I love it because I like speed games and I grew up on this one.
-Olympus
A:
Dear Kodak,
Netrunner is like Magic: The Gathering in that you build decks beforehand and you need to think about what your partner is able to do. But it is so much better! It's a "living card game," which means that instead of buying booster packs, like in Magic, you can buy the core set and be able to play, and you can also buy expansions. The gameplay is asymmetric, which means that you and your opponent play by different rules and have different strategy. One of you is a hacker trying to break into the other player's servers (they're a big corporation). Also, it's a two-player game, so my husband and I can play it together. The only downside is that sometimes the game takes a long time, and if you don't make a good deck it isn't as fun to play.
Skulls and Roses is a bluffing game, much like poker, but without the poker chips and impossible hands. It's good for a medium-sized group of people who might not love playing weird board games.
Icehouse pyramids, or Looney pyramids, are these cool plastic pyramids in three sizes and a variety of colors that you can play many games with. Tic Tac Doh! is my favorite short pyramid game, and Zendo is my favorite medium-length pyramid game. I realized that sometimes I just enjoy reading game rules and figuring out how they work, but I didn't necessarily want to own tons of games. Looney pyramids scratched that itch for me, although I would like to try playing more of the games with other people instead of with myself.
I have backed five or six board game Kickstarters. PrimeClimb is one of my favorites from the Kickstarters I backed, at least in theory. It's a little like Sorry! in that you can bump your opponents off the board. But unlike Sorry!, there is a little more number strategy involved. Your piece rests on a space numbered from 1-101. Each turn you roll two d10s, and you can add, subtract, multiply, or divide by the numbers you roll to move. It sounds really cool, although in playtesting, our pieces tended to get stuck in the 30-70 range. It might be more fun with more than two people.
I recently played Tragedy Looper and it is such a fun concept for a game. It is pretty complex, but it is kind of like the fun parts of Clue (deductive reasoning), without the stupid parts (rolling dice and trying not to show the wrong person your cards). It requires exactly four people to play it. One person is the Mastermind, who wants you to lose, and the other three of you work together to find out which characters are affecting each other in specific ways so you can win. I hope I can play again!
Someday I will write up real reviews of these and other games on my BoardGameGeek list. I like Scrabble when everyone has access to the "legal" two-letter words, although they do seem a bit arbitrary.
-Whistler
A:
Dear Kodak ~
See also Board Question #82054 about what's in my game closet.
~ Dragon Lady
A:
Dear Kodak-
It's been mentioned several times, but we also love Betrayal at House on the Hill. I keep hearing similar things about The Mansions of Madness, so I'll have to pick that up sometime as well.
Several Board writers have joined us at various times for a session of Arkham Horror, a pretty outlandishly complicated game set in Lovecraftian 1920s New England.
Pretty cliche, but Settlers of Catan is always fun (probably the modern gateway drug of board games).
Twilight Struggle is a lot of fun if you're a poli-sci/IR ubergeek and have a friend who is as well. It's the Cold War in board game form, with one person playing as the US and the other playing as the USSR. Fight for influence through proxy wars and incited coups! Cope with assassinations! Race to the moon! Play the China Card! Ignore your significant others in the next room marveling at your geekiness! It's a bucket of 5-hour-playtime fun.
-Foreman
PS- no board, but Cards Against Humanity is a favorite if we're in the right crowds. Which are probably not common at BYU.
A:
Dear Hermes,
I wasn't going to put this because it's a card game, but I'm seeing other card games in these answers so: Bang! is an awesome game kind of like Mafia, but you have more cool things you can do than just kill people. It's designed to fix the problem of odd numbers of players and can be played with 3-8 people, and it's fun because even if you're someone who's supposed to kill people, you don't know who else is supposed to kill people too. Also I made a Harry Potter version called Stupefy! and have gotten positive feedback during playtesting.
-Owlet
A:
Dear Kodak,
Have you gotten enough suggestions yet?? Clearly we are board game nerds here. I want to second so many favorites already, especially Twilight Struggle and 7 Wonders. My other favorites that haven't been mentioned yet are Castles of Burgundy and RoboRally. Both of these games have great themes and replayability. Castles of Burgundy is a pretty classic euro-game (resource management, taking turns). RoboRally is "computer-driven chaos" (one of the stupidest sounding taglines for a game I've ever heard). Despite it's silly tagline, it is great. Each person is racing to a flag and you move your robot around the board by programming it beforehand. This means everyone programs their robot then lets them go and this often ends up in running into each other, shooting each other with lasers, pushing people off the board, etc. It is ridiculous and fun.
-Mico
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