
Ask HN: What are your favorite board games? - andrewstuart
Can you recommend some great board games, along with a little about why it&#x27;s great?
======
karmakaze
Go. Not modern except as an application of ML. I like to play on the KGS Go
Server which also has a bot library/interface. I might use that as an
opportunity to try out Rust or some other low-ish level language. I started
one in Go (the language) but since I already know it probably isn't worth the
laugh.

What impresses me about learning to play Go is that even if I take break of a
year and come back to it, I've improved because my ability to organize and
think at a higher level has been developing elsewhere. Similarly, when I first
started playing the game as I progressed through levels I could see changes in
how I approach situations outside the game.

It's been really interesting following the advancements in game research where
I could beat any of them to where the Monte Carlo ones got better, then of
course AlphaGo and AlphaZero happened. I haven't plateau'ed so long that I
lost interest but not near the dan levels yet so don't know if/when that will
happen.

------
sdrothrock
Forbidden Desert is one of my favorites for groups of mixed skills. It's a
teamwork exercise hidden in a game; you don't necessarily have to know
anything esoteric to win the game, but you do have to work together. It does a
lot better job of preventing one player from dominating the game than its
predecessor, Forbidden Island.

The randomness of the tiles/parts and also the player jobs keeps things fresh.

I personally like Dominion a lot, though it's a card game, not a board game.
Deck-building games like that push all the right buttons in me: memorization,
statistics, strategy-building, and sheer competitiveness.

For two players, I also really like Jaipur because it pushes a lot of the same
buttons and is incredibly simple and a quick play. It's so much simpler and
general than Dominion that I feel ok introducing it to people who haven't
played card games before (that is, I feel much less like a fox in a chicken
coop).

~~~
jdpigeon
+1 for Forbidden Sky as well, which I think is the sequel to Forbidden Desert.
I don't play many board games but had a fantastic time with it recently. It
does a good job of making everybody feel included and engaged until the end,
whereas most competitive games I feel like it can become clear within the
first couple minutes who's going to run away with it.

~~~
saluki
I just don't like the Forbidden series, I'd try it at a friend's house before
you buy.

------
ThrustVectoring
Hanabi is absolutely fantastic, with surprisingly deep gameplay given how
simple the rules are.

Basic gist of it: each player has a hand of cards that they hold facing
outward so that everyone else can see them. The goal is to work together to
play as many cards as you can in each color, in order from 1 to 5. Each player
takes turns either giving a limited quantity of hints (indicating all the
cards in another player's hand of the same color or number), discarding a card
to regain a hint, or attempting to play a card in their hand.

------
plusbryan
As much as I’m a fan of meaty strategy games like Diplomacy and Game of
Thrones, the best games are the ones you actually take out of the closet to
play!

Usually I find myself playing in groups where some people are unfamiliar with
a given game, so I also prefer games that are fun for new players. For me,
those games are:

Pandemic Original or Legacy: one of the best cooperative games I’ve played.
Fun for groups or just two players. My wife and I had the best time playing
Legacy Season 1 over many months. There’s something so magical about a game
that changes AND self destructs as you play it.

Acquire: easy to learn and set up, with the right blend of luck and strategy
so that players of mixed skill levels can enjoy together.

Carcassonne: same positives as above with slightly higher learning curve.

Puerto Rico: quite a bit more complex than the above, but relatively
accessible and quite fun once you learn the strategy. Takes a game or two to
really enjoy.

Blokus: a fantastic informal game for a lunch break. Easy to learn with deep
strategy. Quick game best for 4 players.

Eight minute empires: fast paced and easy to learn civilization building game.

~~~
achoice
+1 for Carcassonne. Easy to learn and good balance between luck and skill.
Good to bring while traveling.

~~~
saluki
+1 for Carcassonne, a great board game, they have an iOS app too that is well
done, has been slow to match up with other players lately.

------
ElliotH
I love playing The Resistance with friends. It’s great because you’re talking
the entire time. It provides a good balance between logical problem solving
and persuading people around to your (potentially nefarious) way of thinking.

New to my collection is Azul which has been growing on me because of how well
made it is and how oddly competitive it gets despite the player interaction
being actually quite limited.

~~~
elvecinodeabajo
The Resistance is awesome, but it's too easy to go postal after some games
with some people.

~~~
dorchadas
I feel like that's true with _all_ social deduction games. One reason I don't
tend to play a lot of them, even though some members of my gaming group love
them.

------
michaelmior
This is a bit of a niche recommendation, but Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is a
fantastic game. For those not familiar, Pandemic is a cooperative game where
you work with other players to travel around the globe and stop a global
pandemic.

The legacy variant adds new elements of the game which unlock and change the
board, characters, and rules as you play. On my opinion, it's best best played
with the same group of four people over the course of several months. (Each
session takes a couple hours and there will be 12-24 depending on how the game
progresses.) I can't speak to the quality of Season 2 as I haven't found a
crew to play with yet.

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philipkiely
Star Realms is a 15-20 minute deck building game where you build from a shared
pool of cards, the standard library. It has a lot of the appeal of games like
Magic the Gathering but is much simpler to teach and is a 1-time purchase
(though I hear that there are new expansions, which I haven't played.)

Monopoly is an old favorite, I've played it for years. The game is very
engaging especially once you've memorized the board, the best properties, the
costs, etc. because either you get to play with a massive information
advantage or if the other players are equally familiar then you have a really
interesting game.

~~~
BoiledCabbage
As much as I loved it as a kid, monolopy has been a terrible game as an adult.
9 times out of 10 the "decision" to make when landing somewhere is "buy".
There is almost zero strategy, heavily weighted on luck. And due to the nature
of its mechanics the game quickly spirals out of control in favor of one
player.

And to add insult to injury the game is decided long before it ends, and it's
just a bunch of players watching the winner accumulate more while they
inevitably go bankrupt.

Yes it has nostalgia, but it's not a good actual game.

------
clavoie
I'm an avid, avid player. Multiple times a week, helping run a local meetup,
with a multiple-hundreds-games collection that has rapidly expanded to take
over my whole living room. That said, there's seven games I've ranked a 10/10:

* Cosmic Encounter -- a zany, crazy game of negociation and dynamic alliances where you can work with your best friend on one turn and find yourself forced to attack him the next. Some of the most hilarious moments of my gaming career have been induced by this game.

* Sidereal Confluence -- a zany, crazy game of trading and engine building where the game is "just" building cubes according to equations on cards ("2 blue cubes and 1 green cube gives you 5 orange cubes") that can then be traded for other cubes with other players. Sounds dry and boring... but manages to turn even deep introverts into a mix of slick used car saleswoman and deep south auction runner.

* Deception: Murder in Honk Kong -- a simple game of social deduction, with 5-12 people trying to find who amongst them is guilty of a horrible murder. Simple mechanics, simple game, another one that turns even introverts into, in this case, strongly opinionated detectives.

* Yokohama -- a Japanese, thinky, planning game involving moving a president meeple on a randomly built map about trading resources in the city of Yokohama. Love the puzzle, the theme and the mechanics.

* Teotihuacan -- a recent release, also thinky planning game involving moving dice instead of meeples, on a less randomly built map about using resources to build the great pyramids of Teotihuacan. Not entirely dissimilar to Yokohama, that one also hits on theme, mechanics and puzzle to solve.

* Clash of Cultures -- the civ board game of connoisseurs. Sadly, requires a deeply out of print expansion to truly shine -- one of the rare civ games with a map, a tech tree, player conflict that can still be played in 2-3 hours and explained in 20 minutes.

* The Colonists -- a city building game that can last 10-12 hours even at just 2. If you've played that way back, its theme is akin Colonization (the game by the Civ team based on colonization of the Americas).

I'd also give honourable mentions to Hanabi, Power Grid, Android: Netrunner,
Istanbul, Innovation, Chinatown, QE, Dune, The Mind and Trade on the Tigris.

------
nfrankel
Cutthroat Caverns: looks like a cooperation game, at the beginning. But since
there can be only a single winner, the goal is to start betraying at the right
moment. And if it's too soon, everybody can loose

Explosive Kitten: fast-paced card playing games. A lot of randomness, but
great fun

Evolution, the origin of species: just played it once, but I liked it a lot.
Everything is about card combination

Unstable unicorns: another card game, the goal is to reach a stable of seven
unicorns. Each round, one can add a new unicorn to one's stable, if one has a
unicorn card. Of course, interventions by other players will make it hard to
win the game

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janober
A while ago I was on a quest on the perfect board game for me. One which
involves very little luck and a lot of strategy. For that reason did I scrape
all of them from a page which did rate them and made it possible to sort and
filter by that properties.

It is publicly accessible here:
[https://app.link.fish/#/collection/6B/list/entries/extended](https://app.link.fish/#/collection/6B/list/entries/extended)

~~~
janober
Ah btw. will not work properly on a mobile device.

------
veli_joza
One Night: Ultimate Werewolf is always popular with bigger crowds. It's
streamlined version of Mafia game, with convenient phone app that acts as
moderator.

One match lasts no more than 10 minutes, but no one ever wanted to stop after
just one game. The game never gets old. There are different roles and variants
to mix things up, but even with same setup the player strategies will evolve
and develop.

------
nkzednan
Hanabi - co op solitaire where you can't see your own cards. ~45 minutes, up
to 5 players. It is a thinking game - how to give good hints to other players
and how to interpret hints from others - did they give me this hint to play
this card or do I need more info

Azul - relatively recent game. Tiling game where you take tiles from the
center and place them on your own board.

Others that are good and can be played in under an hour: Splendor and if you
like Splendor, try Century Spice Road.

7 Wonders

Fleet - bidding on fishing licenses, fishing for fish.

Magic Maze - up to 8 people - 4 meeples exploring a mall to find the items to
steal and then escape the mall. The catch is that each player can move any
meeple in only one direction, and you can't talk. It's a race against the
clock and there are no turns - everyone can move any meeple at any time.

6nimmt - good filler game that can fit up to 10 player with a round taking
about 15 minutes. Can be good while waiting for more people to show up.

No Thanks - 30 minutes up to 5 people.

More complex:

Settlers of Catan Russian Railroads - worker placement where you are building
out a railroad and/or advancing on a science track

Power Grid - building powerplants and powering them - 3 hour game

Thurn and Taxis - map of Germany and you are building routes thru cities

Suburbia - taking tiles and building out a city

Yellow & Yangtze - only played once recently but liked it. Placing different
leaders on the board and tiles and fighting other leaders.

See
[https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame](https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame)
for a list of boardgames. See their ranking but also see their complexity
rating.

If you're looking to try new games, there may be some boardgame meetup
groups(on Meetup.com etc) where people will bring different games and split up
and play (and teach) those games.

------
Adamantcheese
Not really a board game, but Once Upon a Time is really fun. You tell a fairy-
tale-esque story with your friends using a deck of places, things, events,
etc. If your friends are creative, it's a whole ball of laughs and you might
even make some nice in-jokes to tell each other.

------
ezconnect
Chess

~~~
ttonkytonk
A bit off topic, but here's a chess variant: piece demotion.

The rules are the same, except when any piece moves to one of that player's
original pawn squares, and they have less than all of their pawns on the
board, they have the option to "demote" that piece to a pawn.

~~~
yesenadam
I can't imagine when demoting a piece would be a good thing to do. Hmm except
now king + 2 knights wins against king etc.

------
E765
Secret Hitler! It's fun to play with a group consistently and watch the meta
evolve over time. Also, yelling at people and telling everyone they are a
fascist gives a special feeling.

~~~
amerine
A very close group of programming friends had years-long fun meta gaming and
what not via a similar game, Avalon. It’s a King Arthur re-skin of resistance.

Every year, at every Ruby on Ales, the same group of us organizers, speakers
and friends would gather at a house and play Avalon for hours and hours after
the conference. So many good memories and wonderful friends were made through
that game.

------
tashoecraft
good intro game - Smallworld - It's easy to pick up, the combat is so common
you don't feel ganged up on and you go through boom and bust cycles
consistently enough everyone feels like they're doing well at some point.

Intense game - Game of thrones board game, For those enthusiasts of the show/
and board games. Be prepared for a steep learning curve and be sure to 5
committed friends or family that are totally okay stabbing each other in the
back for 4 hours.

~~~
plusbryan
If you have a dedicated group of players, like a group at work, one fun way to
play Game of Thrones is to only do one round per day (usually about 30-60
minutes, perfect for a lunch break). It actually breaks the game up well, and
builds the intensity. Up to you if negotiations are allowed away from the
table!

------
tylerpachal
Powergrid is my favorite free for all game at the moment. If you have enough
people together then Scotland Yard is a great 1 vs many game to play as well.

------
raptorraver
Race for the Galaxy. Wonderfully deep and strategic card game. Learning curve
is quite steep but once your in you’ll never get bored.

------
Pinckney
Citadels: A game of repeatedly drafting different secret roles while trying to
puzzle out what your opponents have taken. I don't know how to describe it in
a way that makes it sound exciting, except to say that it can be very tense
and interactive. The box says 2-7 players, but I don't recommend it with more
than three.

Codenames: A fun word association party game. The play area is a grid of 25
words, and two teams compete to identify their team's words based on clues
from their "spymaster". It's a good game for large groups, and has lead to
many amusing stories we still talk about months later.

Bohnanza is a classic trading game. You're trying to plant beans, and to do
that best, you want to play multiple copies of the same bean card in a row.
The hitch is that you must play cards in order, and you can't rearrange your
hand. You need to trade with other players to wind up with a workable hand.

Sol: Last Days of a Star: This game has some really cool mechanics. Honestly I
think it's probably the most exciting euro of the decade. You launch
"sundivers" to build infrastructure and exploit the resources of the sun. But
your infrastructure can be used by all the other players, who share with you
some of its benefits. Your mothership from which your sundivers are launched
is constantly moving. You need to carefully time your actions so your
sundivers don't waste time flying across the map, or sit idle in the hold. And
the game's clock is controlled by players. The deeper you move into the sun,
the faster you bring about its destruction, and the end of the game.

Brass (Lancashire) is another mid-heavyweight euro with a cool shared
infrastructure mechanic. You're all industrialists in the English midlands
circa 1800. Your build factories and mines. What's cool is that these
industries do nothing until you can find a market for them, and that market is
often generated by the other players. You can build a coal mine, for example,
knowing that everybody is soon going to need lots of coal for their railroads,
or corner the market in ports and profit when other players go to ship their
cotton. But it's also possible to misjudge demand, or be to late to market,
and find that your developments are completely worthless.

High Frontier is my favorite simulation-type game. It's about industrializing
the solar system. You can build all kinds of rockets (chemical, electric,
nuclear, solar heated steam, solar sails, mass drivers...) to fly factory
components out to asteroids, moons, or planets, possibly stopping to refuel
along the way, if your rocket is equipped for that. The rocket equation is
modeled, along with different efficiencies for different kinds of thrusters.
The map is innovative in how it presents the trade-offs between delta-v and
time for various missions. It's also gorgeous:

[https://boardgamegeek.com/image/2585121/high-frontier-
third-...](https://boardgamegeek.com/image/2585121/high-frontier-third-
edition)

------
a-saleh
I have many, so in no particular order:

* KingDomino, simple, relaxing, can be played with 4 year old, as well as two tired parents in around 30 minutes. It is a simple game, resulting map of your kingdom can look nice and it has cute art on the tiles :) [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/204583/kingdomino](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/204583/kingdomino)

* RailRoad Ink, everybody has a little whiteboard map and every turn somebody rolls some dice to see what kinds of railroad tracks will you need to scribble into the grid of your map. It is a nice puzzle, you score points for connecting pre-printed railroad exits on the edges on your map, but you only know four pieces of the railroad grid at the time. It is quick (after seven rolls of four dice, you are done), and if you are lucky, your map can look really nice in the end. Only drawback is, that everybody solves the puzzle on his own, and I do like boardgames where you interact a bit more :) Second drawback is, that the puzzle itself is too complicated for my 4 year-old :D [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/245654/railroad-ink-deep...](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/245654/railroad-ink-deep-blue-edition)

* Carcasonne, a classic. Another tile-laying game, where you slowly build up a map dotted with many walled cities (hence the name :) You can claim an unfinished city or road or a field with your meeple to claim points, but if it happens i.e. two unfinished cities belonging to two players are connected to form a single whole, the player that has more meeples in the city scores points. This creates a fun dynamic of complicated city take-overs (because you can't just invade, right, you build next-door and hope for a city- connecting tile) My wife managed to get the big box, with several expansions, and even though it is longer than other games we use to play, we play this fairly regularly. And the map at the end of the game can look really nice (I am starting to see a trend :P) [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/822/carcassonne](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/822/carcassonne)

* PatchWork - a slightly abstract puzzle, reminds me of tetris a bit, playable in 20 minutes for two players, but it still retains the "Don't you take that tile, I need it for my board!" that can be fun :)

* Hero Realms - a reasonably quick deck-building card-game. I use it to scratch my magic-the-gathering itch :) And when you get a good card-combo going it can be really satisfying :) [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/198994/hero-realms](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/198994/hero-realms)

* Colt Express - a wild-west-train heist game. Weirdly we found it fun only when playing as two players or more than four :D With several players, the game devolves into comedy of errors, you everybody trying to get the best of their foiled plans. With two players, the experience is much more tactical, as you play as a team of two thieves on the train, giving you bigger chance to plan and anticipate the oponent. Feeling of actually executing your plan in this game is amazing :) [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/158899/colt-express](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/158899/colt-express)

* Hive, probably the last game we actually get to the table at home, a interesting, chess-like game for two players. Unfortunately, the first player seems to have a big advantage? We still like it :-) [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2655/hive](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2655/hive)

* Ticket To Ride, that we no longer have at home, but if I ever make space for the big box, I might get it again :-) Connecting USA with rails is fun, hoping your oponents don't snatch the one route you need is exciting, and scoring points for your networked cities you were tasked to connect is rewarding. Only thing I don't like that much is the way you build the tracks by collecting cards of the same color, that can take too long. At least it is simple enough to play with casual board-gamers. [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9209/ticket-ride](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9209/ticket-ride)

* SmallWorld, the game I enjoyed the most while still at high-school (even though we played Bang much more) It is really well balanced for all the numbers of players and the gimmic of trying to choose the most overpowered race available is fun :) [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/40692/small-world](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/40692/small-world)

* PowerGrid, probably the heaviest economic game I have played. Trying to power half of germany with you electric company can be a mind bending puzzle, then you add a layer of trying to out-bid your opponents to get the _good_ power-plant, and moment later you realize you bid too high, you won't have resources to _run_ the power-plant and your opponent could get his plant really cheap :D [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2651/power-grid](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2651/power-grid)

* SecretHitler, the game we played the most at the office at my previous team? Reasonably quick, rules are simple and hidden-role games are nice for large groups of players [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/188834/secret-hitler](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/188834/secret-hitler) (runner-up would probably be Coup [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/131357/coup](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/131357/coup))

* GalaxyTrucker, the epitome of "Loosing is fun". You cobble together a space-ship and then you fly through various hazards and in the end your ship is barely standing, but hey, you survived :D If you liked FTL and don't mind randomness, it is a great game. Only drawback is, that if build too good of a ship, the game stops being fun. We tried to solve this with my cousin by limitting the time you have to build the ship even more and then we even hacked togegether a PVP phase where we destroy each other's ship with all those weapons you'd usually use to defend against pirates and asteroids :D And it does scratch my itch of "look at all these tiles laying besides each other, my monstrosity of a sip is beautiful" :D

Man, almost a 1000 words just listing some of my favourite boardgames. And I
might keep going. I should probably start a blog :D

------
paradoxparalax
I use to be taught this game with different kinds/colors of rice/porridge
beans, by my mother's youngest sister, that year's later I came to find was
actually my older sister.

It was similar to what later I came to discover was sold as Hasbro
Mastermind[1]. Some border smuggling at the top of the cold war gave me access
back then to this other game aswell, that I enjoyed playing with my sisters
and we still sometimes remember it to this day: Supremacy[2]

1-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_\(board_game\))

2-[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_(board_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_\(board_game\))

:How could I forget this one,that's is not exactly a board game, but is
perfect in a spree of fun to get everyone's drunk with a shot of takju
everytime someone looses, and you play with regular playing cards, as I always
did, not necessarily buy the expensive branded one that I found years
later(again?) to exist, But try to keep your clothes on.

3-[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uno_(card_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uno_\(card_game\))

