Games ENWorlders play

[johnsemlak]

Wow, these games bring back some memories.

My wife and I play dominoes, particularly mexican train.

We also play an old board game called Acquire. We absolutely love it.

I've really gotta give Settlers of Catan a try. I've heard great thigns about it.

Has anyone played the LotR boardgames from FFG?

 

[Richards]

My sons and I play chess and a whole slew of chess-based variants, some of which entailed building our own boards (and sometimes the pieces as well). These include:

4-player chess (store bought): a standard chess board with additional rows of squares jutting out from the sides, making the board look like a large "plus sign."

Hexagonal Chess (homemade board, based on a description and list of rules found in a book of games): the board is made up of hexagons instead of squares - black, white, and gray - meaning that a King in the middle of the board has 12 possible moves, making it much more difficult to force a checkmate; each player's army has 9 pawns and three bishops (one for each hex color).

Knightmare Chess (store bought): a deck of cards that allow the players to do one oddball thing each turn while playing standard chess, like swap the positions of two pieces or turn the entire board 90 degrees and thus change the direction the pawns must go in order to be exchanged for higher pieces.

Chinese Chess (homemade board and pieces, from a description in a games book): very different from standard chess: the pieces are arranged on the intersections of squares, not on the squares themselves; the King equivalent must stay within his "command tent" (a box of 9 intersections); there's a "river" running through the middle of the board; pieces include Elephants, Horses, and Cannons.

Shogi, AKA Japanese Chess (homemade board and pieces, from a description in a book of games): very different, as the pieces are arrow-shaped and color coded not as to which army it belongs to but what piece it is (Kings are purple, Bishops blue, Rooks red, Pawns yellow, etc.), with which way the arrow's pointing the only indicator as to which army it belongs to; and captured enemy pieces are removed from the board and placed in your "hand," and at a later turn you can drop a captured piece back onto the game board as part of your army.

Jetan, AKA Barsoomian Chess (homemade board, from a description of the game from Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Chessmen of Mars, a novel in the "John Carter of Mars" series): a 10-by-10 grid, with 20 pieces per army; the game is unusual in that the Queen-equivalent cannot capture enemy pieces (and if she is captured by the enemy, her army loses); a King-equivalent's army wins the game if he captures the enemy King-equivalent, but if anybody else captures the enemy King-equivalent, the game's an automatic draw regardless of how many pieces are still on the board (due to the loss of honor), making the King-equivalent a reckless fellow indeed as long as his army's losing (as he doesn'at have to worry about protecting himself from the enemy pieces as he';s perfectly happy with a draw at that point, whereas the winning army must still keep his King-equivalent safe from all opposing pieces); and there's no such concept as "check" - why in the world should you alert the enemy that you're about to capture the head of his army?

Besides those, we also play the occasional game of Risk and Star Fleet Battles, and my wife and I enjoy Backgammon and Yahtzee. Uno is popular when we have younger relatives over.

Johnathan

 

[Hypersmurf]

My sons and I play chess and a whole slew of chess-based variants, some of which entailed building our own boards (and sometimes the pieces as well).

Transfer Chess can be a lot of fun - four players, two boards, each player partners with the opposite colour on the other board.

When you capture a piece, you hand it to your partner; in place of a move, they can introduce a captured piece to the board.

There was one we came up with in High School - I can't remember what we named it, now! The idea was that any time you capture a piece, all of your pieces with the face value of the capturing piece take on the aspect of the captured piece. So if your knight captures a rook, all of your knights now behave as rooks. If your queen captures a pawn, she now moves as a pawn.

The game tends to involve a lot of maneuvering to try to capture a back-row piece with a pawn

Monster Chess is interesting. Black has a normal allotment of pieces. White has eight pawns and The Monster. The Monster moves as both a queen and a knight, as desired. White wins by checkmate; Black wins by capturing all of White's pawns. Losing The Monster is not immediately fatal, but it makes White's job a hell of a lot harder! (White can promote pawns as normal.)

Then there are a couple that are fun for kids - Scotch chess, where each successive player takes one extra move (so White moves once, Black moves twice, White moves three times, etc) - any time Check is declared, the opposing player gets one free move to escape, before the current player's turn continues. And Machine Gun chess, where the King dies like any other piece; each time a piece is moved, any piece it could capture next turn from its new position is removed from the board.

-Hyp.

 

[Seonaid]

Of the games mentioned, I'll second Empire Builder (the *best* game if you have the time), Settlers (always a good fallback, or for newbies), Carcassone (which we call "River," and is our all-time favorite, right now), Fluxx, and Robo Rally.

A really great game for all ages is Set. It's a card game that kids love, because it's simple, and I love because I'm a master at it.

 

[talinthas]

set is awesome =)
i really should go buy myself a copy.

 

[Korgan26]

don't really go for board games, not a fan of cars, (Except "Lunch Money) Love that game) So I'll have to vote for discgolf, not so much a game as a sport, close enough though.

Z

 

[Altamont Ravenard]

I must say I'm surprised that no one mentioned that they play Puerto Rico...

 

[javapadawan]

I have a lunchbox of card games I usually bring to non-D&D get togethers. In the lunchbox are: Grave Robbers from Outer Space (and its sequels, Cannibal Pygmies in the Jungle of Doom and Kung-Fu Samurai on Giant Robot Island), Once Upon a Time, Munchkin, and Dungeoneer. Other friends usually bring a few sets of Chez Geek and Wizard.

Or, sometimes we just go with pen and paper and play a few rounds of the story game. That's the one where everyone gets a blank paper and writes the first five lines of a story, then folds the paper over all but the last line, and passes the paper to the next person, who writes the next five lines based on the line he was given, then folds the paper over all but the last line, and passes the paper to the next person, and so on. Our group generally reads them out loud when we're finished. We've had some really funny stories come out of these.

 

[CarlZog]

I've got tons of old games I love, but have great trouble finding ftf opponents for.

A particular standout is 4th Dimension, a British game published in the US by TSR. I don't know if it's still played in the UK, but I haven't seen anyone play it here in years. Great chesslike strategy game with a circular board in which pieces can exit the game and return later.

 

[Dungannon]

Outside of rpgs, I tend to stick to more traditional games that the wife enjoys playing as well: monopoly, yahtzee, uno, phase 10...