Board games central

Board games general thread ! Surprised there isn't one already but well here we go We can start things up with answering questions such as >What's the last one you played ? >What are your favorites of the moment ? >What do you hope to try/play again soon ? >Why do you like 'em ? >Whatever comes to mind Pics related : - Catan which many of you probably already know. Slow paced but still fond of it, didn't manage to play it recently - Codex Naturalis : beautiful design and rather simple to play - Splendor : relatively easy to start, tactics can lead to pretty close game, also exists as a 2 player game which is nice too I've come to enjoy boardgames more than video games which I really gave up years ago because set up got too expensive and really got tired of the loneliness that got with not having regular friends to play with. Not always easy to gather enough people all the time for boardgames either, but when we do at least we know we're together. That and not finding myself attracted to any videogame that got out in recent years, or repulsed by the time I'd have to spend in it to make it worthwhile. But I digress. I would really love to get my hands on the Discworld's ankh morpork game but it's hard to come by and second hand is expensive as hell (and friends already got enough 7 wonders extensions to keep busy for quite some time)

Oh nice! So I have a little collection of board games. Very very tiny. I have Red Dragon Inn, Root, Splendor, but the latest game I played and kinda obsess over is Flamecraft. I saw the kickstarter a few years back, had no way to fund it at the time, and was very happy to see it on the shelves in a tabletop/larp shop and bought it recently-ish. The gameplay loop is simple. Go into a shop, collect resources from the shop and the dragons in it, add an artisan dragon to a shop, collect the rewards from placing that dragon and use an ability of one of the 1~3 dragons in the shop to finish your turn. Or, take your turn to complete a quest with said resources to gain points and enchant a shop. Add a new shop when one is full of dragons and play until the artisan dragon deck or the quest/enchantment deck is emptied. The player with most points win. The manual offers other ways to play, and even ways to play alone, but we haven't tried them out yet. A game takes about an hour or two to finish once you know the rules. Relaxing even if somewhat competitive. Bought for the art and was very surprised by how fun it can be :) One complaint is that the play mat is quite long. About 40~50 inches if i eyeball it from memory. I'll leave a PDF of the manual for anyone curious.

>>8055 Small collection too, but are the people who have whole cupboards full of games (and we all know some), really a fair comparison ? Looks nice, I see there are some second hand around 20 bucks near me, I might give it a go ! Got a big table so that issue should be covered

Two games I've picked up recently and recommend are Dominion and Kings Cribbage. Dominion is a competitive "deck builder"-ish where you create a deck of action cards that help to grow your kingdom and make you rich. The core gameplay loop is quick to pick up, but building the right cards together creates really nice combos later in the game and rewards smart deckbuilding choices. Kings cribbage is a cross between crib and scrabble, building "hands" on the boards, from tiles numbered A - K. Great fun! Had me and my other half hooked for weeks (we're big crib nerds anyway). It was on the table nightly.

>What's the last one you played ? Go >What are your favorites of the moment ? Go >What do you hope to try/play again soon ? Go >Why do you like 'em ? I think what drew me to Go/Igo/Weiqi/Baduk initially was its simplicity. theres few rules of play: on a 19x19 line grid, a black stone is placed, followed by white one - passing allowed. any "groups" of connected stones are captured by surrounding on 4 sides, and points returned to the other players. stones that would instantly captured cannot be played, except to capture in one turn. a prior board state cannot be repeated - this is called ko. finally, the game ends when both players pass successively. Scoring at the end of the game varies by country, but it generally involves counting up the territory thats enclosed and any capturable pieces within that territory are either not counted or counted towards the opponents score. Go is the oldest continually played board game and it actually inspired a serious area of modern mathematics and artificial intelligence research, cellular automata. It was famously considered "solved" by AI in 2015 by the google acquisition known as AlphaGo, however this was not a mathematical solution and a new strategy has developed that can defeat AI players: https://goattack.far.ai/ AI play has however revolutionized the game considerably with a professional 9-dan player, Ke Jie famously stating >After humanity spent thousands of years improving our tactics, computers tell us that humans are completely wrong... I would go as far as to say not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of Go. This sentiment however is not shared by everyone, and comparisons have been made to particular historical go players who alphago is considered most similar to. There's an old lesson about people who draw connections between the board game and real-life affairs in domains such as statecraft, military strategy, or taoist philosophy, mainly that they turn out to be horrible at both. But something touched me about the quote. Another 9-dan professional, perhaps Lee Seidol is on the record for stating that human players using AI, by fusing the skills of a human and computer, can defeat both purely AI and purely human players and take the game to another level still. This probably varies from player to player, but my takeaway from both of those things is that at high levels of play, superficial concerns like defeating the opponents or proving the greatness of humans or AI becomes secondary to playing Go as a pursuit of some deep, perhaps mathematical truth. I think that thinking of the interest as dismissable for the reason of AI is obviously ignorant not just due to the existence of adversarial strategy, but because the model of jealous, hierarchic sublimations of win/loss dismissals is not indicative of skill, meaning, or satisfaction. in fact it suggests antithetical to it. And this is something I feel can be applied more universally.