Board games; what are your favourites? What would you like to play more of?

[ghoti_mhic_uait]

The main thing for me is that I'd like to play *more* tabletop games of all types. For this reason, I seek out games that are interesting family games (ie, at least two of the children want to play them, and they're not boring for adults). I grew up playing games after dinner, I always thought that would be how my life would go, and I get grumpy when it's not going that way. Games in this category include Carcassonne (Andreas enjoys if the game play is generally quick), Continuo (a rather nice tile/colour matching game), Pandemic (this is one for B not A :)), Ascension. I'm sure there are more but it's quite hard to tempt B out and A is really little yet. Hon. mention: I like Hey, That's My Fish but A is too young and B is not interested.

So let me talk about Ascension. Ascension is a bash-the-monsters game that has a very simply game play. The play reminds me of child-friendly card games like Qwitch: when we regularly played games with xanna, we used to open her card game book at a random page and play a game, and a lot of those games had a mechanic of 'draw a hand, play the cards, discard' which is exactly the mechanic here, so it feels comfortable and accessible, and the hit-the-monsters-buy-stuff-get-points aim is also fairly standard, but combining the two really works for me. I'm told by people who play Dominion that they two are very similar - I have never played Dominion.

I tend to choose a game for Date Night too, whereas Colin usually goes for a film (last night's choice was his, and we watched Fight Club, before that we had a few times in a row where we both wanted to watch the same thing) but two player games are good. Lord of the Rings is great for date night; we've played Keyflower for date night once and that worked, so we'll definitely do that again, Smash Up is awesome.

The prompt is quite specific, but I'd like to mention card games too. I love Bridge, which Colin introduced me to, but find it difficult to get enough practice and often muck up because of lack of familiarity. So I'd like more opportunities for that - when we were newly weds we'd semi-often have couples over for dinner and bridge. Now we have three bridge players in the house, it seems like it should be easier to just grab a fourth! Or fifth if we're playing somewhere that needs a parent to be watching the littles more closely. I'm definitely looking forward to Judith learning :) I'd like to play Mao more often, too, and have vague plans for late night Mao parties, which we managed a couple of times when away in the summer. And I miss the gin rummy which was the game I played most often as a teenager, even though my family version bears very little resemblance to the wikipedia version. We recently bought card holders but have yet to try Judith on gin rummy, which was one of the reasons I wanted them.

Comments

[alextfish.livejournal.com]

Ascension is exactly like Dominion except all buys work like the Black Market in Dominion does. In Ascension, rather than having free choice of all the kingdom cards to buy, you have a big deck of one-offs, and you only have a chance to buy the ~three that are revealed on your turn. Someone else happens to get lucky and have all of the first three trashers appear on their turn? They've won that game through nothing but luck. I really dislike Ascension.

(I can see it might be okay for playing with kids like ghoti describes.)

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

But normally you don't have enough money to buy the big things straight off, and it's only through buying small things that you get there, and that depends on whether you've bought up infantry or mystics. I've not found the first few rounds to be that influential.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, I'd like to clarify 'you only have a chance to buy the ~three that are revealed on your turn'. The cards don't go away at the end of the turn, so there's a limited amount that can be bought in the first turn anyway, and they'll stay there until someone buys or banishes them. In a 5 card hand that can have at most 5 money, there's at most one good card that the first person can buy, and as the starting deck only has 2 militia, no good monsters can be killed first round.

Now, I'm perfectly prepared to accept that you will just never like Ascension, and I can just play different games with you, but I wondered whether you were discarding all cards in the centre row at the end of turns, which would make it more about what turns up on your go rather than everyone having similar luck?