Please, Carcassonne Was My Father's Name: The Board Game Thread

King of Posters
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hi parkbench, let me know what name you use if you sign up on boardgamearena

Also if you LOVE citadels, I can safely recommend that you check out Masquerade and Coup (if what you love is the mind games element) and Mission: Red Planet and Broom Service (if what you love is chaotic but not high-randomness game mechanics and would like a similar role-selection mechanic but applied to something with a board)

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I donā€™t know shit about board games, but obviously Iā€™m plenty good with ā€œmechanicsā€ in the abstract. My wife is not a gamer but likes traditional board games and is blisteringly intelligent. We have no time for friends any more. Recommend good games for just the two of us? Cooperative would be grand, but competitive is OK too.

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pandemic legacy is one of the only 2-player co-op tabletop games in recent memory that my wife and I both like. highly recommended. and I speak as someone who hates most tabletop stuff that isnā€™t 3-5 person competitive play.

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Patchwork is a recent favorite.

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I keep recommending Hanabi and Iā€™ll even recommend it as a great 2-player Co-op. This is by far the most difficult player count possible (because the amount of information you have is 5 cards plus any clues you receive, whereas in 4 players you know 15 of the cards plus clues you receive and thus can much more safely deduce your own hand from scant clues) but thatā€™s what makes it so satisfying when you do well.

If you have a lot of time to play a single board game and want maximalist everything but also actually legitimately good game design, the Mage Knight board game works for this. It has both co-op and competitive game modes and 1-2 players is the ideal player count.

If you want, Iā€™ll organize my thoughts on competitive games in a minute, but thereā€™s a lot more good choices for competitive games than co-operative games.

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  • Lost Cities - head-to-head solitaire & press-your-luck
  • Battleline - 9 hand 3-card-stud poker
  • Commands & Colors: Ancients - light war game with blocks instead of miniatures
  • Twilight Struggle - Area control consim of the Cold War

In increasing order of length, weight, and direct competitiveness

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Played this (Hanabi) for the first time with my sister last week and I think Iā€™d recommend it too. Super easy to pick up, and she was really into it (despite not really being much of a gamer herself). Thereā€™s something oddly satisfying about it; itā€™s sort of superficially simple and not as dry as Iā€™d imagined it would be.

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Competitive 2 Player Games

without repeating anyone elseā€™s recs

  • Race for the Galaxy
    indirectly competitive but if youā€™re not paying attention to your opponent you will lose miserably. It is certainly not a multiplayer solitaire game.
  • BattleCON
    You can get any of the BattleCON games but Fate is the cheapest (though also most complex) This is the good board game adaptation of fighting game mechanics and concepts (Sirlinā€™s Yomi is a very boring, too random simultaneous action selection game. Go ahead and play it if you can play for free but it is not worth the $10000000 cost), integrating priority and mind games into a turn based game. All characters have the same base set of moves and then their own set of cards that act as modifiers. Players select one base card and one modifier card and then everyone reveals the cards they picked.
  • Tash-Kalar
    Now that I have actually gotten to play it, I can heartily recommend it. A fine marriage of abstract and thematic. This game rewards good pattern recognition. 2-player high form is the best. If you donā€™t like abstracts at all thereā€™s a small chance you wonā€™t like this game but if you can stand to play a game that involves putting pieces on a board so that you can flip other pieces, you should play this.
  • Valley of the Kings: Afterlife
    Definitely best played two player. I am recommending the stand-alone expansion because the base game is a little too ā€œTake Thatā€. The first game wonā€™t feel like much but once you learn the card abilities and the basic strategy, it grows rich with potential competitive optimization, several independently viable strategies and high levels of tactical play on many turns. It manages to be a deckbuilder that feels competitive without feeling completely luck dependent.
  • The Duke
    A pretty great abstract tile-manipulating game. I think I like it more than Hive, though that may be because I suck at Hive.
  • Brass
    Medium heavy economics sim that actually feels like it has something to do with economics. The way it abstracts the development of an industry is genius. The 2 player variant was originally fanmade but it was so well regarded that it became official with the current edition of the game (unfortunately I own the old edition; I just cover up the removed connections with post-it notes.)
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Dominion - the original deckbuilding game, still my personal favorite. Has a million expansions for nearly unlimited replayability once you get bored of the base game.
Keyflower - a knife fight with little wooden men, highly aggressive game in the ā€œworker placementā€ genre
Earth Reborn - I mentioned it before, but itā€™s the best tactical miniatures game that comes complete in (a ridiculously large) box.
Theseus: The Dark Orbit - mancala in space, with cards. Comes with different factions that all have a unique feel, while playing pretty fast.
Through The Ages - youā€™ll probably want to build up to this one, but itā€™s basically civilization: the boardgame, but without a map and entirely through cards.

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Thanks for all the recs my brothers. If/when we can actually buy and then play some of these things I will report back with impressions.

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Lots of good two-player games mentioned already that Iā€™d second, such as Lost Cities, Race for the Galaxy, Twilight Struggle, Dominion, Hanabi, and Patchwork.

Lost Cities is a good one to start with, in my opinion. Iā€™ve played it many times over the years and never tire of it. And Iā€™ve always liked how each card has unique artwork that shows expedition progress.

Another good one is Kahuna. It got a reprint recently. Itā€™s simple and starts out seeming almost friendly. But the strategy gets surprisingly intense in the latter part of the game.

I really like the GIPF series of abstract 2-player strategy games. And my favorite of the series is DVONN.

275

battle bowl is a good 2-player game. i donā€™t know if itā€™s still in print, though. itā€™s a futuristic america football game with robots that can kill each other.
it uses dice in a cool way: each type of player on your team uses a different die. like, the fast guys use a d20, and the big slow guys use a d4 (iirc). you use the die to see how far a player can move in a turn, and if two players fight, they both roll and the lowest score wins.
i recommend making a slight change to the rules though: move two players each turn instead of one, and it flows much more nicely

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I only own Zertz but just based on playing that one Iā€™m sure the rest are also great

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I now have my custom bottle for when the game arrives. I stopped by a hobby store to get a little bottle to use and happened to see a pack of tiny toy dragons.

bottle_imp.jpg600Ɨ800 138 KB

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Fabulous. I want to do this, no idea where I would find a tiny bottle like that though

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Played a few games of the Spaceteam card game last night. Itā€™s pretty cute and fast filler, would probably make for a good opener or closer on game night. Only problem is I guess itā€™s too easy, though that might also have been because we were playing 3p.

Also I havenā€™t gotten a chance to play it yet, but man is the insert tray for the the new Through The Ages nice. Slots for each of the 8 card decks, slots for the 3/4 player cards, bigger slots for people that sleeve their cards, and indented wells for the various action/resource/worker cubes. Then there are Indents on the top of the insert that the boards fit neatly into, acting as a makeshift lid for the components inside, all of which is diagrammed in the handbook. Well, with any luck Iā€™ll get an actual game in tonight.

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got some new stuff recently so thought Iā€™d list my whole collection for the first time:

Consulting Detective
Chinatown
Galaxy Trucker
Through the Ages
Tash Kalar
Agricola
Codenames
Pandemic Legacy
Concordia
1830
Pictomania
String Railway
Carcassone
Space Cadets
Mysterium
Cosmic Encounter
Eclipse

some pretty good stuff in there imo

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Argent: the Consortium
BattleCON: Devastation of Indines
Brass
Broom Service
Carcassonne
Citadels
Codenames
Consulting Detective
Coup
Discworld: Ankh-Morpork
Dixit
Eldritch Horror
Fairy Tale
Hanabi
Mission: Red Planet
Mysterium
Noir
One Night Revolution
Race for the Galaxy
The Resistance
Space Alert
Sushi Go
Tragedy Looper
Twilight Imperium
Valley of the Kings
Welcome to the Dungeon

plus innumerable tabletop RPGs

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Lists!

Games I own:

Acquire
Agricola
Carcassonne
Cosmic Encounter
Coup
Dominion
Hanabi
Hive
Jaipur
Love Letter
One Night Ultimate Werewolf
Puerto Rico
Race for the Galaxy
The Resistance
Roll for the Galaxy
Space Alert
Suburbia
Tichu
Terra Mystica
Vinci

Games that the only other person in my gaming group who buys games own:

7 Wonders
Android Netrunner
Arkham Horror
Dixit
Lords of Waterdeep

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  • (this is Coloretto but the Baltic edition and the thumbnail is stupid sry)