Board Game List
For those of you who may have missed it, a whole whack of games were recommended to me following my “Reliving my youth, this time through board games” post. I’ve played some, fortunately, and I’m working to acquire the rest. I have reposted the list below for your reference, but recommend you check out the original thread to see the posters’ comments that went along with the game recommendation.
4000 AD (Waddingtons Games)
The Creature That Ate Sheboygan (SPI)
Stellar Conquest (Avalon Hill)
Advanced Civilization (by Avalon Hill, I think)
Advanced Squad Leader.
Betrayal at the House on the Hill
Blue Max
Bridge
Carabande (I forget the English version name of this).
Chess
Double Fanucci (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fanucci).
Empires in Arms
Eurorails
Ghost (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(game) )
Hare & Tortoise
King Me, Tsuro
Knizia’s Lord of the Rings
Liar’s Dice
Magic: the Gathering
Memoir ’44
Nomic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic)
OGRE/G.E.V (by Steve Jackson)
Piecepack (www.piecepack.org)
Poker
Republic of Rome (Avalon Hill)
Samurai Swords (aka Shogun
Sanctuary (Mayfair)
221B Baker Street
Diplomacy (Avalon Hill/WotC)
History of the World (Avalon Hill)
Set, and/or Ricochet Robot
Six Nimmt and/or Diamant
Spades
Spellcaster (http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~gc00/reviews/spellcaster.html)
Tales of the Arabian Nights (West End)
Star Trek: The Adventure Game (West End)
Voyage of the BSM Pandora (solo – Ares magazine #6)
Sorcerer’s Cave (Ariel) and its bemusing sequel, Mystic Wood (Avalon Hill)
Barbarian Prince (solo – Dwarfstar Games)
Source of the Nile (Avalon Hill)
King Arthur’s Knights (Chaosium)
Runebound
The Very Clever Pipe Game
Ticket to Ride
Shadows Over Camelot
Pirate’s Cove
Cleopatra and the Society of Architects
Cosmic Encounter
Titan (Avalon Hill)
The Lords of Underearth
Valley of the Four Winds (Games Workshop)
Borderlands (Eon)Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation
Werewolf
World in flames
X-Machina
Applied Game Design 
D’oh. Just yesterday I did all the work of compiling that mess of comments into a list just like that to aid in my finding them among my father’s collection.
I should have waited a day. Or, more helpfully, told you I had already compiled such a list. Ah well.
Haha, Brian! Bummer!
This is a GREAT list! I’m going to have to pillage eBay to see what I can find! Thanks for condensing them! >:oD
GAME ON!!!!
Glad to see that Wits & Wagers has made your list! It’s always fun to see that people enjoy your labor of love.
I figure this is a good place to let people know that Wits & Wagers has now won its 13 industry award making it one of the most awarded party games in history! It is now available nationwide at Target!
Cheers,
Dominic
Designer of Wits & Wagers
Hi Dominic,
Thanks for the comment! Yours is one of the games I have yet to play, but I’ll pick it up on Friday. Tonight, we’re playing Pretty Pretty Princess. This is the price I play for getting my daughter into RISK at 6.
Congrats on getting into Target, too. That’s no easy task. If you have a blog, please let me know. I’d be glad to link to it.
brenda
Hi everyone,
Just a note on this list – I’ll be updating it as a regular page on this blog as opposed to an entry like this one. I’ve just added a new game to it, 1960: The Making of a President.
For future updates, please check that page.
Whoops, I notice you inadvertently repeated a typo I wrote when listing my favorite Days of Wonder games. Where it reads “Cleoparts and the Society of Architects,” that should be “Cleopatra et al.” It’s a game where you play as an architect in Ancient Egypt–you have to build the biggest, most lavish structures that make you the most money, without getting too corrupt. The object design is amazing–you use the box base and lid as your “temple foundation” and the pieces are designed to be built on top of and around them.
It was a indeed a large cut and paste festival. I fixed it in this post and on the ‘board game list’ page.
Just got these in from a fellow designer Ian Schreiber –
Castle of Magic: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/1738
This game unfortunately has such a generic, nondescript name that it’s easy to forget, and it’s not perfect, but it has some very interesting mechanics. The best way I can think to describe it is a combination of Clue, Talisman and Diplomacy. There is a ton of hidden information in the game that you need to uncover (essentially information that tells you how to win, i.e. what actions match up to which outcomes, as these are randomized every game). Each turn you’ll either get a scrap of information, or else you’ll actually, um, influence the outcome. So there’s this interesting balance where if you spend too much time learning the game state then you’re at everyone else’s mercy, but if you spend too much time messing with the outcome then you’re just taking a stab in the dark, and there’s not enough time to do both. (Naturally, everyone has a different outcome that they’re working towards, and all are hidden and randomized each game.) The brilliance is that a couple of times during the game, you take a break from the board to chat with the other players, swapping information and future favors as commodities. It all ends up being very tense, with players forging and breaking alliances as they discover what other people are trying to do and where it overlaps with their own goals. Definitely worth playing once at some point in your life, even if you don’t own it.
Road to the White House: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/470
It’s a pretty realistic simulation (or maybe it just feels that way), with the occasional random event card thrown into the mix to prevent things from becoming rote. Amusingly, while you can play with the (fictional) candidates that come with the game, there’s also a create-your-own-candidate feature. On the down side, it takes awhile to play (3 hours or so, IIRC) — perfect for whiling away the time on Election Day, but of course that means you only get to play it once every 4 years.
Loopin’ Louie: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/327
You know how Katamari Damacy, despite its simplicity and overall goofiness, just has a good “feel” to the controls that makes it satisfying? This is like that. It’s actually a motorized action game (it requires batteries). Very simple rules: a guy in a plane is flying around in a circle, trying to knock down your tokens which rest on the perimeter of that circle. Just before your tokens is a platform. Push a button to give the platform a bump; if you time it right, you’ll send the plane into the air, over your tokens (and hopefully crashing into someone else’s). It’s mindless, silly fun that takes all of three minutes to play (and doesn’t even require any rules explanation; you’re given one button, it’s pretty obvious what to do). And then you’ll wonder why you were spending an entire weekend playing Diplomacy when you got just as much fun in three minutes doing this, and your designer brain will be thinking about the kinesthetic aspects of game design and why a Wii controller is different than a DualShock in ways that people haven’t even imagined yet, and all sorts of things.