Waaay obscure, but one of the few board games I’ve ever really enjoyed is solarquest.
I’ve played plenty of the usual board games over the years. They just weren’t anything I ever played because I wanted to play them. It was something to do, and people seem to naturally gravitate towards card and board games.
I had a chess phase in my younger days. I still play checkers checkers from time to time. “Chinese” checkers too, along with go. But those are still things that I’ll suggest when I’m with someone and looking for something to do while bullshitting.
I hate Life, and only play monopoly with the understanding that when I’m done with it, I’m going to give everything I have to whoever is the most behind. Sorry is okay, as is parcheesi.
But solarquest, I’ll find people willing to play with me because I like it. That and heroquest, but heroquest isn’t really a board game the way I think of the term, it’s a constrained ttrpg.
Both of those, my mom got me for Christmas after I begged for them, and I’ve never once been disappointed with them. I got both of them the year they came out, so we’re talking decades of play with both.
Heroquest, I used as a board with the figures good my d&d play for a long time as well as playing it as its own game.
Heroquest is cooperative, so I can definitely recommend it for low to zero conflict play. You’re uncovering a map, finding treasure, building a character. It’s d&d lite, in the best way. Original versions are expensive, but there’s a ton of printable versions out there, and it was rereleased in 2021.
Solarquest is essentially space themed monopoly on the surface. But, beyond your pieces being rockets and the concept of buying up parts of the solar system, there’s the flight mechanics where you have to have the fuel to go from one planet to the next. It adds a layer of thought and fun to it. Plus, you’re learning some local astronomy.
There’s rules for laser fights, and special roll actions, available as optional rules. It’s just fun. There’s an updated version available with more recent astronomy, fancier supplies and such, but I haven’t bought it yet.
Both of them are games I play with other old farts, as well as kids of all ages. I genuinely can’t recommend either of them enough.
Just wanted to add, for the fully cooperative Heroquest experience, they came out with an app for the new edition (but it’s compatible with the original base game) that fully takes over the Zargon/DM role.
Imagine is one of the favourite games in my IRL friend group whenever we get together. It’s basically Alias, but instead of explaining the word verbally, you use transparent cards with shapes drawn on them that you can overlap and move around. It’s chill, fun, and fits any group size.
Calico is my personal favourite, because the concept of making a kitty blanket is just too cute to pass on.
P. S. The link isn’t where I bought the game - I just googled the English version and posted the first link I found.
One I haven’t seen mentioned is Puerto Rico. One thing I like is there is essentially no random chance to this game; everything that happens is a result of choices you or your opponents make.
Tiny Epic Zombies is a cooperate, often hilarious, always satisfying zombie survival simulator. +Tiny Epic Dinosaurs is a mildly competitive, generally delightful Jurassic Park / Petting zoo simulator.
Tiny Epic pirates is a crunchy but quick pirate simulator where most interactions are your human controlled pirates evading the automated Navy while racing for loot.
The Fast and the Furious (board game) is a fantastic quick co-op romp.
Here to There is a story driven light economy game ever the focus is on building your economy engine to unlock the next interesting story twist.
Machi Koro lacks a co-op variant, but it’s pretty chill and it’s easy to house rule the aggressive competitive cards to pay out from the shared bank.
The Book of Madness is a fantastic light Co-op deck builder with great positive interactions and a fantastic theme (students at Hogwarts trying to close an evil book)
Caverna is a robust building game with chill interactions.
Already mentioned, but worth reiterating:
The Crew
Tokaido
Ticket to Ride
Forbidden Island/Skies/Dessert/Forrest
Pandemic
And he sure to check out Rhado Runs Through for game reviews. He plays mostly with his wife, and so always reviews how the game feels to play together without backstabbing.
Here’s some suggestions, just games I find I get lots of play out of and people are always willing to play.
Dune Imperium is probably my favorite. It’s a deck builder with worker placement. It’s got a lot of different strategies you can take to win, there’s not one set way. Dune Imperium: Uprising is an updated (for the 2nd movie) version of the game that fixes some things from the first one, tho I think I still prefer the original. This one is a bit more serious, but I’m including it because it’s my favorite.
Everdell is a great game and very easy to get into. Mostly worker placement with some engine building. Cute theme and it looks great on the table. Definitely recommend giving it a look. Avoid the expansions when buying, they might add too much to the gameplay. There is an updated version Everdell: Farshore, which I’ve heard is better, tho I haven’t played it.
Clank! And any in that series are also super friendly and easy to get into. It’s a dungeon exploration deck builder. Personally I’d recommend going with Clank! Catacombs, which is the updated version that adds a tile based map so each play through is a little different. I have not played Clank! In Space or any of the others.
7 Wonders is a fun pick and pass type game. You build up your city and try to win via military, economic, or scientific power. Easy to pick up, and has more strategy in it than first glance. The 2-player version 7 Wonders: Duel has to be my favorite 2 player game. Note on Duel, if you get it, the only expansion I’d pick up is Agora, Pantheon just isn’t as impactful.
Black Hole Rainbows, absolutely ridiculous game, everyone scoffs at it at first and then has a stupid good time playing it. It’s stupidly colorful and definitely over produced but that’s part of the charm. If you can find a copy, buy it. Hard to get right now.
Tsuro is a very quick, Zen game. It's tile placement and stone movement.
Obviously if you don't like S.H., you probably won't like The Resistance or Avalon. But from the same publisher, there's Coup (a game of creative lying), and Grifters (an engine-builder made up of resource collection with a crime theme). I like them both and they're very quick.
I don't think Fluxx could lead to long term frustration, because it's just so wild.
Catan is a classic and it's never caused tempers in my group.
I don’t know if I’d considered it a board game, but the Forbidden Island game (and the others like it) spring to mind. The idea is that you and the other players have to work together to gather everything you need including the treasure you came for before the island you’re on sinks into the ocean.
It’s fun working together and I always thought it did a good job of incentivising that.
Seconding Forbidden Island/Desert/Sky. Island is what I break out to introduce new folks to co-op gameplay, then switch to Desert once they get the hang of it.
Pandemic hits a lot of the same notes, and can get really hairy at the end.
The problem with monopoly is that it fits your description…BUT!!! nobody actually plays it the right way. House rules are so ingrained into monopoly culture, that I’ve incorporated my own house rule. Anyone who puts money under free parking gets stabbed with a knife. When they tell me that’s not in the rules, I tell them to show me where money under free parking is in the rules. There’s so many of these house rules that people legitimately think are in the rulebook. They aren’t. So if you want to put money under free parking, I want to stab your hand with a knife. House rules and all.
One time I was playing monopoly with my mom. She had 53 dollars, and landed on boardwalk. It was unowned. I yhen said "I bid $54. She said “you can’t do that…”. I showed her in the rule book where I could, and she got angry at me.
So, the problem with monopoly is that most people assume they know how to play, and also assume they know the best stratagies. They don’t.
The best stratagy is actually to buy 1 of each property that can have houses built on them. Prioritizing the low cost properties first. Make THEM buy 2 of each, thinking they’ll get the monopoly, thinking they’ll get a trade. Then drain them further with the railroads and utilities. Eventually they’ll run out of money. Just NEVER trade them a property that would allow a path to them getting a monopoly.
Of coarse, all of that is easier said than done. That’s what makes it a game. But it all falls apart if people aren’t playing the same game.
the strategy is to buy everything you can ASAP but focus on monopolizing and developing the orange and red properties. they are statistically much higher to land on than other properties because people get sent to jail so often. When exiting jail rolling 6, 8, or 9 is very likely to hit orange first and then maybe red on the next roll.
tldr; punish the poor fuckers getting out of jail. yay capitalism!
I really don’t like Monopoly. It’s very widespread in the US, I’d guess one of the top three games, but it has a lot of technical failings as a board game.
I think that it’s actually a really good example of why popular American board games are not that fantastic. Europe has a stronger board game tradition, stuff like Settlers of Catan. I really didn’t appreciate how bad things were until I spent a while poking at European games.
Monopoly has a hard-to-predict game time. One thing that a lot of European games that I’ve looked at do is to have a fairly-predictable amount of time a game will last. That makes it much easier to plan fitting a game into a schedule.
Monopoly eliminates some players from the game early. They then have nothing to do while the rest of the players continue to play.
Monopoly tends to wind up in a situation where a losing player will know well in advance that they’re going to lose. Yeah, they can concede, but it’s not a lot of fun to play the thing out.
There’s a limited amount by way of strategy and it’s not very sophisticated. There aren’t a lot of variable paths that one weighs against each other. When it’s not your turn, there’s not much you can be planning or doing, just watching the person whose turn it is play. This gets more annoying the more players are in the game.
It has a high RNG dependence.
Most of the actual tasks you spend time doing aren’t very interesting. Linley Henzell, who wrote the roguelike Crawl, has a famous quote, something like “everything you do in a game should be an interesting decision, and if it isn’t interesting, it should be removed from the game”. I think that that is a very true element of game design. The banker counting out money to players or players paying rent or whatever is just drudge work – they aren’t making interesting decisions.
The game was originally designed by a Georgist as an educational game to argue for a land value tax. It wasn’t principally to entertain.
I really wish that a new, better game would replace Monopoly in the US as the big non-ancient (checkers, chess) board game.
Ticket to ride is really fun. You kind of do your own thing building train routes the whole time. Not too much overlap to block other people unless you know the routes super well, and even then you don’t know what people are going for based on the routes they have to complete. All in all, it’s one of my favorite board games.
Yeah. It’s super easy to house-rule Carcassonne as a pure co-op game. Remove the farmers (to keep your sanity, because co-op is actually much harder), keep the rules about Castle and road occupation (where a tie gets scored for each tied player), and play to maximize the combined players score. None of the strategy is lost and trying to carefully double occupy everything is sometimes a nail biting challenge.
There’s actually a specifically cooperative expansion for Carcassonne, called Mists Over Carcassonne. It adds an element of managing a ghost population while trying to cooperatively reach a target score based on certain scenarios.
Because that is part of the cycle of collapse and shock doctrine these corporations rely on to keep from being clowned on by moderately competent smaller game studios who actually are excited by the challenge to convince people to buy their art instead of shoving derivative slop down their customer’s throat as the cinematic monochoice for entertainment product category no. 1254…
If you mow the grass, the longterm benefit of preserving a strict monoculture is well worth the temporary mass destruction (from the perspective of the person driving the mower, it smells quite pleasant actually).
To be clear, the blades of grass are the smaller game studios on Microsoft’s lawn.
bin.pol.social
Gorące