So I was already in a gaming mood last week when I had a brief Twitter exchange with ESPN.com baseball analyst Keith Law about the board game Ticket to Ride. He referenced a December post on his personal blog with his top 10 favorite board games, and I decided to shamelessly steal the idea. The only difference is that mine includes card games. Enjoy, and add your own in the comments.
10. Carcassonne--You'll notice pretty soon that this list is heavy on German-style board games. My summary of Wikipedia's description of the characteristics of those games also serves as a pretty good rundown of why I like them: They downplay luck, they have mechanisms ensuring that they won't go on forever, they focus on economic rather than military strategy (I'm horrible at the latter), and no one gets eliminated before the end. Carcassonne is a relatively simple example of the genre: You're working to finish roads, cities, monasteries and farms as the game's map builds and builds. One downside: My brother always destroys me at this one. (That's a common theme among the games on this list, too.)
9. Power Grid--Another German-style game, but this one's much more complex. The goal is simple, though: Use plants, lines and raw materials to power as many cities as you can. What I love about this one is how richly it replicates real-world economic forces. A huge portion of the game is built on anticipating future supply and demand based on your competitors' past decisions and likely needs. The auction system through which power plants are bought heightens the interdependence of each player's decisions, too.
8. Dictionary--Most people know this game in its commercial form as Balderdash. I've never played Balderdash, but when I was growing up, my family played its own low-tech version, picking obscure words out of dictionary, then having everyone write their own ridiculous definitions and seeing if anyone could pick out the real one. We haven't played it in a decade or so, but I always enjoyed the excuse to make up stuff about poisonous shrubs in the remote highlands of northern Mongolia.
7. Boggle--My college roommate Mike turned me on to this one. Pretty simple word game--find short words in a small grid of letters. It's fast and fun, though. It's also one of only a few games here (maybe the only one) that works just as well with two players as with more--a big reason it's become popular among my wife and me. It just usually makes her angry when we play. Why? It's one of the few games on this list I regularly win.
6. Blokus--My wife got me into this one over the past six months or so. The rules of this game are about the simplest of any game on this list--you're just trying to fit all of your differently shaped pieces onto a grid by connecting them at corners. But it's the only game on this list that requires you to think spatially, and I really like that mental exercise. There's also zero luck involved, so it's got that going for it, which is nice.
5. Settlers of Catan--If you've only played a little bit of German-style gaming, chances are this is the one you know. There's a reason it's the most popular: It's got a gameboard that constantly changes from game to game, and it hits that sweet spot of not-too-hard, not-too-simple difficulty. For my tastes, it still relies too much on luck, which keeps me (along with my mathematically minded sister and brother-in-law) from embracing it as much as everyone else does.
4. Scum--In my mind, it's still the classic party game. So easy a 5-year-old could do it, yet it always entertained. It goes by a heck of a lot of names, but in our family, it was called Scum. You're basically just trying to get rid of your cards, and the higher they are, the better. I was unaware until I read the Wikipedia article on it just now that it's primarily a drinking game, but as we were a teetotaling family playing with four kids, that wasn't going to happen in our house. This was the game my dad would bust out anytime we were entertaining friends, and I can't think of anything that fit that purpose better. Oh yeah, and don't ever, ever let anyone make you pay to play this game. Guh.
3. Puerto Rico--I played this German-style game for the first time less than two weeks ago, and it's already at number three. That's a pretty steep climb, but this is a pretty sweet game. You're a governor in colonial Puerto Rico, and you're trying to produce crops, refine them, then sell or ship those goods. It's got a really steep learning curve (it took us almost two hours to set up and read through the rules the first time), but once you play it, everything just falls into place, because the game just makes sense. I have a feeling we'll be playing this one quite a bit at the next few family gatherings.
2. Pounce--If you want to understand my family--scratch that, I don't think anyone will ever truly understand my family. If you want to try to understand my family, participating in a nine-person pounce game is a good place to start. The card game is most commonly known as nertz (that's how my wife knows it), but holy alternative names, Batman! It's more or less simple solitaire modified for a multiplayer environment, but when my family plays it, it's transformed into the most intense and just downright ridiculous card or board game experience of your life. I'm not even kidding. We've suffered pounce injuries. Usually from diving across the table.
1. Ticket to Ride--I have yet to meet anyone who's played this game and doesn't like it. It is, quite simply, the most universally likable game I've ever played. You're trying to build trains across Europe (or the U.S., or Switzerland, or Germany, or Scandinavia) to complete routes that you've chosen. It has a beautiful board, simple rules, a ton of options for strategy, and just the right level of interaction. Color me hopelessly addicted.
