Last summer several of our board games were scattered

[conuly]

which sucks, and our plan was to replace them one by one, but none of us really wanted to do the part where we looked at the games and figured out which ones we were missing.

I've done that today, and the list isn't quite as bad as I'd feared!

Here it is:

King of New York, plus expansion
King of Tokyo, plus expansion
Ticket to Ride, plus expansion
Ticket to Ride Europe, plus expansion
Carcassonne: The River (maybe, it's possible this is stored apart from the rest for some reason)
Clue Master Detective (out of print, and I swear this is the last time I'm replacing it)
Parcheesi (note: I want to find somebody to custom make me a six-person board)
Fairy Tale
Pick Picnic
Stone Soup (out of print)
Coloretto (actually, this was lost separately)
Scrabble (I have no idea why you can't replace tiles online but have to mail order them)
Machi Koro

And we already replaced Forbidden Desert, Forbidden Island, and Sheriff of Nottingham, plus Tsuro.

Some of those are a bit spendy, but they're all doable if we do it paycheck by paycheck. (However, if anybody has old copies they'd like to send over at a low cost, I'm happy to bargain!)

Any recommendations for the future, after we've restocked what we lost?

Comments

Board Game Recommendation

[jtthomas]

The Captain is Dead is one of my favorite board games of all time, if you don't own / haven't played it. Cooperative and up to seven players, and I've seen multiple reports of those as young as five playing with adults and needing minimal help once they understand the rules.

Re: Board Game Recommendation

[conuly]

Noted.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Do you know which tiles for Scrabble you are missing?

[conuly]

We did at one point but then I realized I'd have to print this form and mail it in and I think I forgot.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Blue, plain wood, reddish, which tiles are you?

[conuly]

I'll have to check and get back to you after I walk these doggies :) It's my mom and sister who like Scrabble, I've never ever been a big fan.

[conuly]

Wood tiles. Just to confirm, you're not asking out of a general sense of interest, right? Because I don't want to go count out all the tiles on the assumption you're offering to mail me one for less hassle than Hasbro would provide if that's not the case at all!

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I'm not baiting you. I've got tiles in each of those colors. I can't swear which letters, but if you just need a few I can probably get them into an envelope.

I can't promise it'd be real quick. Each of those colors are wood, btw.

[conuly]

Sometimes, even on the internet, I'm a little slow on the uptake when it comes to social things, so I like to make sure I understand everything properly :)

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Np. I just happen to live near one of the places board games come to die. I'm more than happy to let some Scrabble tiles get back to their work.

[fred_mouse]

As a back up, I also have spare tiles. I buy old sets at op-shops which are missing some letters, because more sets mean more people can play go-scrabble. So I would completely not care about rehoming some, if I have the right match.

[ioplokon]

The Battle Star Galactica game is a great social game, though it is a bit complicated and has one of the worst-written rulebooks of any game I've owned. It's still so much fun that it's worth dealing with that, as long as you're willing to just say "Okay, this is the house rule for that scenario then." It's a really great mix of cooperative and competitive.

Ultimate Werewolf is another staple for me, especially bc it works for pretty much any number of players.

[lusentoj]

Do you have Risk? That and Monopoly are the only board games I ever played.

[conuly]

You should consider expanding your scope, then!

[grammarwoman]

Those are a lot of great games!

In our group, we regularly play Arkham Horror (which has a ton of expansions) and Eldritch Horror (ditto for expansions), both of which are spendy but wonderfully collaborative and great for replays.

I also played Paperback once in a group and really enjoyed it. It's like the best parts of a deck assembly game and a word construction puzzle.

[thewayne]

My problem with AH, and I assume it also applies to EH, is it takes so bloody long to play! I'd guess that if you played it often enough with the same people that everyone could cooperate in the setup/teardown and you'd learn the rules well enough that you could play quickly, but it doesn't work for me for a casual play game. In my experience.

[grammarwoman]

Oh, totally agreed! They both are complex and long games (a 3 hour game is "quick"), but my group has been playing together for years, so we've got a good system down.

[thewayne]

Here's a couple recommendations:

Castle Panic
Guillotine
Knights
Flash Point Fire Rescue
Kittens in a Blender
Cards Against Humanity
CAH w/Bards Dispense Profanity questions
Exploding Kittens
To Court The King
Dead Men Tell No Tales
Nuclear War
Delve
Batman Flux
Car Wars card game
Race to Adventure
Alhambra
Space Poo
Zombie Cafe
Dice of Crowns
Splendor

This is not remotely my entire game collection, this is representative of my travel bag (it's a big bag). My last job had a lot of downtime, and my bosses had no problem with us playing games as long as we got the job done. So we did. I've been building my game collection for over 35 years, so some of these games might be long out of print.

Castle Panic is a cooperative/competitive game: you're killing orcs/trolls/goblins defending the castle. If you win, then you count up the value of chits that you individually killed and get an overall winner. You can do some card passing back and forth and discuss strategies. Not an easy game, lots of fun. There is also a Star Trek Panic which I desperately want but haven't been able to find.

Guillotine is a lovely card game of chopping off the heads of French royals and undesirables. Pretty quick play. Might not be easy to find.

Knights is a nice card/dice game: hold tournaments, capture special cards, attack castles, topple the king. Pretty quick play.

Flash Point Fire Rescue is my #1 favorite board game of all time. Period. I've written about it a lot on my gaming blog. Cooperative fire fighting with lots of fiddly bits. Their last expansion Kickstarter was last year, so they should have another soon. Usually available at Target and Barnes & Noble or your Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS). You play until the building collapses, four people whom you should have rescued die, or you rescue seven or more people. Can take a couple of hours. Each map is double-sided, each expansion is an extra map and sometimes an extra player role or two.

Kittens in a Blender. Very warped card game, lots of fun. Quick play. Save the kitties!

Cards Against Humanity and Bards Dispense Profanity. CAH is a horrible game for horrible people and tremendous fun, but not a game for younger ears. BDF is the same game, made by different people, for those with a reasonable grounding in The Bard. CAH has TONS of 30 card expansions available, BDF none.

Exploding Kittens. A horrible little game from the creator of the web comic The Oatmeal. Fast playing, lots of fun. There is a NSFW version.

To Court The King. Not a card game, though with an absolutely beautiful set of cards. It's a dice game with sort of a Yahtzee and poker element to it. You roll the dice to build the best set in order to collect cards to collect the king. Not a quick game, but not a slow one either. Maybe an hour play time or so?

Dead Men Tell No Tales. A cooperative pirate game. Your crew just defeated the pirate king! Now his ship is burning and you have to raid it for booty before it explodes. The only problem is the undead crew. A Kickstarted game that just successfully Kickstarted an expansion, The Kracken, which I did not participate in. Tough game! Lots of fun.

Nuclear War. This game came out over 50 years ago! A card game in which you get to throw nuclear weapons at each other! Or you could practice diplomacy, but only until some knucklehead starts throwing nukes, then diplomacy is over. The nice thing about this game is that when someone is nuked out of existence, with your dying breath, you press the Launch All button, and get to throw all your remaining missiles at one or more enemies - a Final Retaliation - which may trigger another Final Retaliation, which may mean NO WINNERS!

Delve. I can't recommend this game highly, but only because I've played this only once. I thought it was OK, but I don't have a thorough feeling for it. Dungeon exploration with random tile layout. It seemed fun.

Batman Flux. For the most part all of the Flux games are fun and inexpensive card games and play fast. The rules change literally with every card played, and they have an amazing variety of decks available: Dr. Who, Firefly, Wizard of Oz, etc.

Car Wars card game. I don't know if this is available, I bought it in the '80s. Armored cars mounted with machine guns, rocket launchers, etc., in an arena shooting the crap out of each other. Lots of fun, fairly quick to play. It's been reissued a couple of times.

Race To Adventure. A race around the world to get your passport stamped, then back to the Adventurer's Club in New York City to show off your accomplishment and brag. Published by Evil Hat Games. The tricky bit is that there are item chits that you go around the table collecting that give you movement or certain special abilities, and you'll need certain items to get your passport stamped in each location, so it's not straightforward. And the tiles can be flipped over for a dark side version which makes movement much more difficult.

Alhambra. Another favorite game of mine. Construct a garden, but follow the rules! Collect money to buy tiles. It's a Spiels de Jahr (Game of the Year) Eurogame winner, beautifully built with really nice mechanics. Multiple ways to score points with three scoring rounds.

Zombie Cafe. The game that I built and sold. Everyone operates a cafe/deli, selling brains to zombies. First person to sell out of brains, wins. But everyone is trying to screw with your inventory, making it harder to sell your stock - that's OK, you're screwing with theirs, too.

Dice of Crowns. I bought in to this on Kickstarter on a lark, and it is an amazing game! Comes in a small tin, consists of a small number of special dice and tokens, and it is an incredibly fast dice game. Huge amounts of fun, very inexpensive. Might not be easy to find.

Splendor. One of the newer games of this list, you collect gems in order to collect more valuable gems. It's a card game, but more accurately they're laid out in a tier fashion of increasing value. Not all cards are worth points, but they help you collect more valuable cards. First player to collect 15 points in gems, wins.

[conuly]

Guillotine is extremely easy to find, we've gone through three copies of it.

[zesty_pinto]

I've gotten Cheer Up! which is more of a group fun thing.

Dear Leader finally came in and I would recommend it, ESPECIALLY the Presidentiapocalypse expansion in your case. I mean, just look at some of the things you get to mock:


If you want something more educational, there's always the stuff from Genius Games.

Finally, I'm always a sucker for Axis and Allies.