Bongo_clive

A nifty little game from the designer of Catan, this is a much more punishing experience. It takes careful planning to make sure your Domaine isn’t chewed up, swallowed whole or engulfed by the other players, and defeat is very, very often snatched from the jaws of victory with a sneaky play that will leave your friends seething.

Place borders, recruit knights and negotiate with your fellow barons to protect your resources.

A tremendous little game (you can comfortably get the entire game into a zip lock bag, which makes this game very suitable for travelling), it really comes into its own if played with family or friends, where perceptions of those familiar to us can be used against us.

Nothing like watching a grandmother, who has manged to convince her entire family that she’s clean as a whistle, jump for joy as the spies bring down the rebel group, much to the chagrin of the teenage grand kids.

Not many games can induce real belly laughs, but this game manages it comfortably.

…and the reason I’m such a hopeless game fanatic into my thirties. Heroquest was, and still is, absolutely brilliant, and was my introduction to what gaming could be. Role selection, hand management, dungeon crawling, tough decisions, brilliant theme, it was doing all these things 20 years before it became fashionable.

Can be found for peanuts on ebay, and well worth picking up.

A true classic.

One of the many, many strengths of this game is the community. You will struggle to find such a passionate, dedicated and enthusiastic fan base in all the gaming world. It is these fans who have refined and evolved this game into the absolute classic it is today.

Get a league going, with a good spread of teams, and there really are few experiences like it. Watch as rookies pull off outrageous moves, star players are crippled with injuries, coaches lose the plot, refs get bribed, players get mutations and blood is spilled everywhere.

Oh, and sometimes you score a touchdown.

Beautifully designed, with more character than is good for it.

Such a simple, clean and easy to learn game, yet the original is still one of the best games in years. With expansions or without, this still presents an outstanding time to be had with all potential gamers, from young to old.

This game, along with Settlers of Catan, is how I get people into board gaming, but a sign of its strength of design is that it still gets played more than any other game.

Quite brilliant.

This was the first game I bought in my current board game ‘life’, and opened a whole new world to me, but my interest in it has faded quite quickly.

To my inexperienced eyes it looked remarkable. No dice! Interesting little parts! Weird rules! No set up! This is incredible!

But as time wore on, and I started dabbling with other board games, it became easy to identify the games weaknesses.

If you play with more than 2 players, then the time between your turns can reach into minutes. Anything more than 1 minute of doing nothing but watch other people playing is unforgivable in my book, and thus Carcassone has been expelled to the back of the gaming cupboard.

But it will never be sold, as Carcassone truly is on of the best ‘gateway games’ out there.

It’s difficult to get serious gamers involved in a game with such ludicrous place names, and despite my best efforts to inject some character into the game with some hammy voice acting, it’s too easy to slip into ‘game mode’, where instead of playing up to the scenario, the game mechanics are analaysed, and the quickest route to victory is deduced by studying loop holes in the rules.

A disappointing game that left everyone feeling flat.

Maybe better with kids, who will play the game while suspending their reality.

But she hated this game. Too many times we had to stop to check rules, explain concepts and undo or redo actions. I’m not joking when I say the first turn in our 4 player game took 45 mins.

The steep learning curve is not for the faint hearted, but once you get into a really deep game, with players who know the rules, there’s few better games for atmosphere, theme and mechanics. The opportunities to really screw over your fellow man are almost limitless.

Brilliant game everyone should try once. Just get over that learning hump.

tailed off quite quickly.

The initial turns are full of tough decisions, always a sign of a good game, and literally giving points to other players is a stroke of genius, but if you don’t get your destination tickets, or if someone gets lucky and gets 3 30+ points worth of destination tickets in their first hand, it’s difficult to see a way to victory.

A bit too much luck involved to be a great version.

How do you get your friends and family as hooked on board games as you are? You pull out and play Settlers of Catan, and previously oft heard statements like “I don’t play board games”, “I don’t have time for this” and “German!?!?!” will become a thing of the past, as your Nan gleefully slams down enough Victory point cards to win the game, your Dad gets the road building bug and your daughter keeps slipping the robber onto your tiles.

Incredibly simple to learn, devilish to master, it is the game all others are measured by. A classic.