Board Game Recommendations #stayhome

My Relationship With Board Games

A few years ago I packed about two black outfits into a backpack and flew off to Italy where I toured an English drama show around the country teaching kids English.

About two weeks in I was missing my friends, something fierce. I spent one night when everyone went out just crying in my hotel room alone. Thank goodness for LINE messenger, I was (when on wifi) able to contact my friends and keep in touch.

During that experience I made a promise to myself: that when I got home I would go out of my way to spend time with my friends. And thus board-games day was born. I have now amassed a pretty rad collection of board (and card) games, and I try to arrange a get-together every Sunday to play!

So let’s get right into it, shall we? 

My Favourite Board Games

Board games, games with a board in which you usually put tokens, meeples, or pieces on in order to play and interact with it. Here are my top three favourites in no particular order:

TOKAIDO

This board game is for two to five players, and your only job is to take a nice long stroll along the ‘East sea road’ in Japan and try to have the best experience on your long journey.

There are no dice in this game, rather the person who is in last place is always the person who takes the next turn.

You each get a character (and trust me, it’s a lot more fun if you do a wee bit of role-playing), and the character you choose determines what your “special ability” is, as well as how much money you start with.

You can spend your money buying souvenirs, or donating it to the shrines. You can gain money by stopping and working at the farms along the road. There are some mandatory restaurant stops along the road that everyone must stop at, and no one can progress until everyone has made it. Then everyone has the chance to sample the local cuisine, and depending on how much money you have depends on what foods you can/can’t afford.

Then you can stop at the onsen (public baths), or have encounters with other characters, or just stop to enjoy the beautiful views. 

MYSTERIUM

This game is a metric tonne of fun! One person is the GM (game master), or “ghost”. The rest of you play as paranormal psychic investigators. Your job, as an investigator, is to enter this mansion and try to communicate with the spirit inside (GM) through visions in your dreams in order to discover who killed them, with what, and where!

It has a bit of the idea of Clue to it, eh?

I have played this game several times now, once as the GM/ghost, and it is amazing fun. One of the game’s gimmicks is that the ghost cannot talk. You can only communicate to the other players via a huge stack of vision cards: these are the pictures you are sending to each psychic in their dreams in order to help them investigate each suspect in your murder. The best part about being the ghost is that you just have to sit there and listen while your friends chat and sometimes even talk each other out of the correct answers! 

I hear this game is actually even on Steam, so you could get it and play it online with other people! Good if you are super self-isolated right now. The other good thing is that the person playing the ghost isn’t even allowed to type into the chat. How fun!

MANSIONS OF MADNESS

Are you like me, and do you love all that Cthulhu-mythos, Lovecraftian stuff, then you probably already know about this game!

I’m talking about all of those slimy, decaying, tentacle things. Children of Dagon, cultits, angry mobs of fish-men. That guy had some whacky imagination (I hear he wasn’t all that great of a guy either…)

Anyway, this board game has A LOT of pieces, a lot of little cards, a lot of little tokens, and a game-board that you build as you go along (so a lot of different game board pieces too).

This is what makes it super fun, but it can also be quite complicated, as well, I have NEVER had a game of this go for less than five hours, so be prepared for the long haul of a game if you’re going to get into this one.

When I first played this game (with my friend in Japan back in 2011) he owned the first edition. With the first edition, one person had to be the GM and played as all the evil creatures and tried to kill everyone. So when I went to purchase it to play with my friends in 2018, well… you can’t find the first edition anywhere! Instead you must now get the second edition which has, instead of a GM, an free app you must download and it does the role of the GM instead.

I suppose it’s kinda cool that everyone can play together now (though, I must say that my friend LOVED being the GM, and wanted nothing more than to destroy our party with monstrous tentacle-creatures). But this app-way of doing things does have its drawbacks: for one, having the app on and open all the time is quite the phone battery suck, and my phone died in the middle of a game once. 

By the time we charged it and got it back up and running all our game progress was gone… we had to try to fast-forward through all the steps, but the game is seemingly a bit different every time, and we couldn’t remember all the things we done and killed… so that really ruined it.

The second thing is that only a few of the scenarios come with the base game, after that you have to spend money to purchase new/extra scenarios. Which, to me, is super lame. I hate being nickel-and-dimed on things.

BUT, besides all of that, it is a super fun game. There are a lot of Chuthulu-mythos-type games out there, so it’s all about finding the one you like. The cool thing is that they all kinda have the same characters to play as, and the same sort of sanity/health system, so once you’ve played one, it’s easy to play others.

My Favourite Card-Based Games

Now, I know what you’re all thinking: “This is stuff like Magic: The Gathering isn’t it?”

Well, perhaps, and Magic: The Gathering is actually super fun, strategic and rewarding (when you win). But no, this, for me is just games I play and own on board-games day that are only cards.

Here are my top three, again in no particular order:

HANABI

This is a fun, and quite interesting little card game. I kind of thing of it as a reverse card game. 

See, you always have four cards in your hand, but the trick is that you can never see what cards YOU have. Instead you hold your cards facing everyone else (no cheating!), and then you can spend your turn either playing a card, discarding a card, or giving a hint (if there is a hint token available).

The point of the game is to create a fireworks show that blows minds! There are limited amounts of cards for each colour of firework in the deck, and you HAVE to play them in order. If you make a mistake the timer counts down, and if you mess up (I think) five times, then the game is over and you just count your points.

The best part, for me, when we play it is my friend implemented a rule where none of us are allowed to make emotional noises or faces. And to be fair, it’s true, if you’re cringing and making “MMM” noises right when someone says they’re going to discard and their hand reaches for one of the only fives in the game… well it does kind of give it away.

Give this one a try for some fun, co-opperative, card-fun-times!

DC DECK BUILDING

I don’t know how many people have played a deck building game, but they work like this: you start the game with a small basic deck of ten or so cards. There is then a “pool” of cards that everyone takes turns using the power/attack/currency on the cards in their hand to buy. The cards you purchase this way are added to your deck, which gets bigger and bigger, and which you keep reshuffling and re-dealing out to yourself.

Depending on the game will depend on the end-game criteria, but with DC Deck Building, you are building up enough power to defeat all the super-villains in the super-villain-pile. Once the last super-villain is taken, the game is over and you count up your points.

My friends and I break this game out pretty much every time we meet up. We have a LOT of expansions for it (The Watchmen, Crisis, etc.) and all expansions meld perfectly into the game and add different mechanics. 

Deck building games, from my experience, are always a good time. I also own Ascension: Dreamscape, and I would also recommend it.

BOHNANZA

Or as I, and my friends, like to call it: The bean game. The point of this game is to grow your crops of beans, and then sell those crops for as much coin as you can. The person with the most coin at the end of the game wins.

The deck full of different beans is shuffled through three times, and then the game is over.You get two “plots” to grow your beans on, and there are a few rules around how/when you can sell or get rid of your beans to make room for other beans.

Another big part of the strategy is that you HAVE TO hold your bean cards in your hand in the exact order you pick them up. This plays into the mechanic of planting beans (which is the first phase of your turn, then drawing two new beans to plant or trade, and then putting three new beans into your hand for later).

It’s kind of hard to explain in words, you really just have to play it. It’s the kind of game that even people who don’t like games (my friend’s partner for example) will enjoy (which she does).

Fun For One?!

Looking for something fun to do by yourself because of all this self-isolation-COVID19-stuff? Well, I’ve got a super game that I didn’t mention before because it fits right here so well!

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE: HOUSE OF DANGER

Did you ever read those Choose Your Own Adventure books as a wee child? I did. They are a really cool gimmick, a fun read, and a great way to remember how everyone cheated by putting their finger in between the pages so they could go back if they died (which everyone always inevitably died). 

Heck, it’s such a cool trick, they’ve even used it in the movies: anyone seen/played Bandersnach?

So this is the board game version of that idea. And it is possible to play it solo, so if you’re all alone and looking for a fun thing to read/game, I would recommend this board game. 

There is a little game board that you can move up or down on showing your level of psychic power; there are a HUGE SCHWACK of cards. Many are the story cards, several are little side story pieces, as well as cards for various items you can collect along your journey.

Just like a choose-your-own-adventure, you can end up dying (as I and my partner did many times) and having to go back – reload an old save as it were.

This just adds to the fun. We also found ourselves role-playing a sergeant and captain psychic-investigators. I had a ghost for a mom, and my captain was in love with her without even meeting her. Anyway, it was DANG GOOD FUN!

Fun For Two?!

Stuck in the house with only your partner for company? Well, if you’re getting sick and tired of their face, then why not role-play and pretend to be another couple!? 

This game, I really love it, but it is STRICTLY a two-player-only game, which can make it tough to play during board games day when you’re a group of four or five. 

FOG OF LOVE

This two player game has you role-play a relationship. You get cards that are your basic traits (if you’re kind, or self-serving, etc.), and other cards that are your features (a cool scar on your face, bad B.O., etc.); then you proceed to work your way through several dates (on cards that you take turns choosing).

The dates will have you make choices that will affect your love-level towards your partner, and by the end of the game you’ll find out if you stay together or separate.

It’s really fun, again, especially if you get into the role-playing aspect of the game. 

Ya Can’t Go Wrong With The Classics

MONOPOLY

No word of a lie, my friends and I bust out Monopoly pretty much every board-games-day. Granted, it’s not regular Monopoly… See, I went through a HUGE nerd phase in high school and fell in love with The Lord of the Rings (and I would just like to say that I read the books first, before the movies were even announced!)

So, for Christmas one year I got The Lord of the Rings Monopoly: it uses power instead of dollars, your pieces are Gandalf, Gimli, Frodo, etc., and it has this really cool added feature of “the one ring”.

So on the dice, one of the ones is actually the Eye of Sauron (when you roll it it still counts as a one). The ring starts on the first property, and every time you roll a one the ring moves to the next property on the board. If you land on a property with the ring on it, you either get it for free if it’s unowned, or you have to pay double what it’s worth. Then, when the ring makes it to Mount Doom (the Boardwalk of the game) you can choose to end the game if you want.

This is a handy mechanic that lets you pack it in early if you’re getting tired of the game.

As well, my friends and I like to run around the board shouting “GIMLI!” But hey, nothing beats the classics amirite?

What Does The Future Hold?

If you enjoy funding projects on Kickstarter, and you enjoy board games, then boy have you got it made!

I have funded two board game projects on Kickstarter and I they both got funded (very quickly funded in fact), and I am super excited to get them finally shipped to me.

CALICO 

All I know is that it is a game about making the comfiest quilt to attract cats! That’s enough for me!

 

HONEY BUZZ

I. LOVE. BEES. And this game has you play as a hive of honey bees where your job is to produce various kinds of honey to sell to the local forest animals. I played it at a board game convention I attended last year, and as soon as their Kickstarter came up, I hit the fund button so fast it was sick! 

I should be getting both of these games sometime in the summer. Fingers crossed!