Advanced board games I recommend

[Father Francis]

WH40K is a fun game, the classic Warhammer, not so much. Takes two hours just to set up and get your archers in firing range. Not to mention all that time I spent painting my Skaven army...

Once again, THIS IS THE BOARD GAMES THREAD, **NOT** THE MINIATURES THREAD!! YOU’LL GET YOUR CHANCE A LITTLE LATER! HAVE PATIENCE!

Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

[Physics Guy]

Boardgames are a huge thing in Germany. Every year we, along with literally millions of other customers, buy the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) for Christmas. In recent years the SdJ prize has been split into categories of children's games, regular adult games, and advanced games (with more complex rules). So by now we have a lot of games. There are so many games in the world that most that have been mentioned so far in this thread are actually new to me, but here are a few more.

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Carcassonne. It's a tile-laying game where the whole game consists of laying out the map, piece by piece, and it has been about as big a hit as Catan for over twenty years, so there are lots of expansions. Like a lot of great games it combines neat mechanics with some kind of basic aesthetic appeal. It's fun to lay out the nice-looking map; you get excited like a little kid every time on your turn when you get to rummage around in the bag to try to pull out just the right piece that you need to complete your road or your city or whatever it is.

A recent entry in the category of bag-rummaging games (I'm not sure it's weird that there are already two games in this category or that there are not already dozens) is The Quacks of Quedlinburg. The temptation to go for just one more ingredient, and risk exploding your cauldron if you get one white mushroom too many, is so hard to resist.

One of my favourites because it's simple but fun is Camel Up. I'm not sure it really counts as advanced, because it's quite easy to get into, but it's not just Parcheesi. The game simulates a camel race in Egypt, with the odd feature that the wooden camel pieces can stack on top of each other, and when the bottom camel moves, it brings all the camels on top of it with it. You don't play any one of the camels, however, but rather a spectator betting on the camels. Camel movement is controlled by dice, so there's a lot of luck in the game, but there are several betting rounds in each race, as the camels all move along, and if you calculate odds each round and bet accordingly then you can give yourself a big edge over the course of the race. So it's not just a game of chance. Wild changes of fortune are common, but you can react to them—or anticipate them.

Another classic is Kingdom Builder, which is a kind-of Catan-like build-your-kingdom game, with a map assembled randomly each game, but also with several other important elements that are randomly different each game (victory conditions, which special tiles are in play). Its most distinctive mechanic is a rule that tends to force you to play new pieces adjacent to your old ones; a lot of strategy is about creating loopholes in this rule so that you can place pieces in new areas. This permanent rule gives all Kingdom Builder games a similar feel, but each game is also quite different.

A weird one that we haven't yet played too many times is Small World. You play one of many different races of fantasy creatures competing for territory in a rather small world; each race has distinctive powers and goals. The unusual feature is that each race tends to enter the game with a lot of units and abilities, and rampage happily for a while, then run out of resources and stagnate. So what you do then is declare your race to be "in decline", and you abandon them into non-player status and start with a new race. So in a sense dying is an important tactic. It could be a game-winning move to send your Trolls into early decline, even though they still have some juice left, so that you can be the player who gets the newly available Amazons at just the right moment to exploit their unique power.

A great one I almost forgot because I've given away our copy and not yet replaced it: Colt Express. You're one of a group of Old West bandits robbing a train, but you are NOT all in it together—you're competing to get the most loot for yourself. Each turn you have to plan a set of moves in advance, laying down cards in a stack, and then the moves are all resolved together in sequence. So your great plan can be derailed appallingly by the unanticipated movements of the other players. Even when your plans are thwarted, though, it's somehow entertaining to see what actually happens each turn, as all the movements unfold. There's a good chance that other people's plans fail epically just like yours.

Ah, and how could I forget that epically great terrible game Titan? We used to spend days playing it. It's a horrible game with several brutal design flaws, but somehow it was great. Or maybe not and we just didn't know better. Oh well.

Then of course there is always Diplomacy. You play a European Great Power just before World War I, and of course you're trying to conquer the continent. It has a map cut up into regions like Risk, and you move armies and fleets. The thing is that the actual mechanics of combat are trivially simple and heavily biased for stasis. It's essentially impossible to accomplish anything militarily unless you outnumber the enemy, and the powers are all balanced. So the essence of the game consists in persuading other players to help you achieve things. The way to win is to betray people—but only at the right time, because the game is quite long and you can't afford to make yourself hated too early. It's safest to play this game with family or strangers, rather than friends, because people can really get upset. It's also almost impossible to win two games in a row, because people bear grudges. Sometimes the sneakiest and most persuasive people are bad at Diplomacy precisely because everyone knows they're persuasive and sneaky, so they just refuse on principle to cooperate with them in any way, no matter how plausible the argument sounds. An improved version of the game, to my mind, is Machiavelli, which shifts the setting to Renaissance Italy and adds a few extra strategic elements that somewhat dilute the raw betrayal.

I could mention a lot more games but maybe I'll end with a really weird one even though I've only played it once so far: Mountains of Madness. It's a cooperative game based on H.P. Lovecraft's story "At the Mountains of Madness", about an archaeological expedition that turns up mind-bending ancient horrors. Your team has several turns to make its way into the mountains and explore different sites, then escape; you have to plan things together each turn and it's kind of urgent and hectic (I think there's a timer running or something). As the game goes on the players tend to accumulate insanity cards, which have to be kept secret from the other players even though you're all cooperating. The reason they have to be kept secret is that they all impose restrictions on how you as a player have to speak and act during the game. The restrictions range from weird quirks like having to drum your fingers on the table whenever you're speaking, to awkward constraints like only being able to speak to someone who is looking you straight in the eyes, ultimately up to debilitating sabotage like having to lie all the time about what you're going to do in each turn. I expect that after playing the game several times you get better at recognising the madnesses afflicting each other player, and coping with them, but at least in the first few playings it's an eery game in which the cooperative team slowly descends into, well, madness. It's not easy to win.

[Father Francis]

You do realize that the boogeymen, Eldritch terrors or whatever you want to call them were black people, Papists and "southern Europeans" in Lovecraft's mind? The guy named his cat the N word for God's sake...

[honorentheos]

I've played Small World and really like it. Diplomacy...our daughter has it and she wanted me to play it with her and her friends. I read through the rules and said no thanks. It sounded interesting but I couldn't imagine having a chance at winning when she had primed all her friends against me. But against strangers? It looks really fun.

[Dr. Shades]

I played Small World once and thought it was fun. I was the Halflings and ran them as long as I could before going into decline; I never considered that you could do so early for strategic effect. Thanks for the tip.

Regarding Diplomacy, I've heard that it's a friendship-ender, so everyone has to agree beforehand not to take the game personally and to metaphorically leave it at the table when it's over.

[Res Ipsa]

My group of co-op friends started Pandemic Legacy Season Zero yesterday. It starts with a prologue that can be played multiple times to get the hang of the variations on the basic Pandemic Rules. We loved Seasons One and Two and have heard good things about Zero.

Season Zero is set in the Cold War, and the generic prologue characters were fresh young CIA recruits. The four characters were variants on classic Pandemic characters. But the set collection part of the game has a completely different function. The Country cards drawn by the players at them of each turn have a political alignment: allied, communist, or neutral. The players can a safe house in any country. Playing five cards of the same alignment at a safe house in a country of that alignment creates a mobile team of that alignment. Mission objectives have to be accomplished by a team of the correct alignment.

This mechanic applies the basic Pandemic mechanic in a very different way. For an example, the prologue mission requires the players to look for a missing agent in Novosibirsk, which is a communist country. That means we had to build a safe house in a communist country (requires discarding that country card, but one role can build without discarding), then one player had to be at that safe house and play five communist cards (one role can do it with four) to create an anti-communist mobile team, and then we had to drive the mobile team’s van to Novosibirsk and target the mission. Whew!

And that was the easier of two prologue missions.

Other differences. Disease cubes are replaced by communist agents (at least in the prologue). Placing a fourth agent in a city doesn’t cause any kind of spread to other cities. Instead, it triggers an “incident,” which is something bad that can happen — blowing cover, dismantling safe houses, adding agents elsewhere, which can cause cascading catastrophic failure leading to a loss.

The basic Legacy Mechanic appears to be the same as in the two previous games: 12 months, two attempts to succeed per month, complete the required number of objectives to win, lose by running out of communist agents to place, triggering too many incidents, running out of country cards, etc.

The theme, mechanics, look and feel are all great. Next week we start playing for keeps, which should be fun.