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[Davio]

I think I've mentioned this at least a couple of times on the forum, but:

I once played a 5p 10 hour session of Monopoly Stock Exchange edition (in Dutch: Beurseditie) through the night and there was at that point only one player out of the game (probably the smartest one). We just gave up at that point.

When it's played now, we just set a certain time limit.

[Sigismundo]

My view of this top ten:

Haven't played:
Power Grid (but want to try it sometime, not super high on my wish list)
Carcasonne (same)

8 5-6/10 - Settlers -  I'll play this one no problem.  It is fun enough.  The good thing is that it is well known enough that many non board game people own it and are willing to try.  These are the type of people I will introduce Agricola and Puerto Rico to.

7) 6/10 - Small World - Only played once but I think I get it enough to rate it.  Fun enough but I wouldn't choose to play it over many other games

6) 7/10 - Ticket to Ride - Pretty fun that is easy to play with pretty much any group.  If I have people that are into other games though this gets passed up.

5) 7/10 - Pandemic - Really close with TTR.  Great for people that don't like competition

4) 7/10 - Seven Wonders - Not really sure.  This could be between TTR and SW.  It has worked great and it has fallen flat.  Haven't played enough to really say.  But a very strong plus is that it scales well up to 7, is quick and there is little down time with the simultaneous drawing

3) 8/10 - Race for the galaxy - Have played a shit ton against Keldon's ai.  Like Dominion I think it shines with expansions (but don't need BOW).  Base game is still great though.

2) 9.5/10 Agricola:  This and Dominion are really close, really really close.  Luckily they are apples and oranges and there is room for both!  I've introduced non gamer friends to Agricola and it works fine.  It's not too heavy for non gamers that are smart to get into.  I think the farming thing has worked great to help this with my pals.  They think it is fun and probably less nerdy than many other games.  With the cards replay-ability is crazy.  I haven't even been tempted to buy the expansion yet.

1) 9.5/10 Dominion:  I'll give this the nod over Agricola just because it is easier to get to the table and we are on a Dominion forum.  Easy to explain how to play, but with depth.  I'd probably be bored with just the base set though, but with all expansions replay-ability is amazing as we all know.  I've hooked many, many people on this game.  Most of which were not into the board game scene outside of classics and things like Taboo.

Top games not on the list

1) 9.5/10 Mage Knight the Board game - Freaking love, love love this game.  Luckily the solo scenario option is great so I can play this all the time.  I basically keep a game of this going almost all the time and play over days if I don't have a solid chunk of time.  Want to play more with people but this game could easily become my long term #1. 

2) 9/10 - The Resistance -  This IS my go to game for a big group.  It usually takes one game for people to get that you actually have to vote no on missions early, but even those games are full of great tension. 

3) 9/10 Puerto Rico - Classic and easy for people to get into.  I haven't played it as much as some of my other games though.  But it has always been a hit.

4) 9/10 Battlestar Galactica -  Only issue with this is that you need a good group.  If people are not into it the game is a bit much for the time.  It is only so fun if people aren't into the meta game trying to figure out who cylons are.  I'd probably rate it like a 6 then.  But when the group is good this game provides probably the most in terms of pure fun factor of the games I'm into.


Loved but need more plays

Twilight Struggle - My wife resists this, but I shall persist and try and see if we can get into it.  Only played 2 or 3 times
Dominant Species - Only played once, but it seemed right up my ally.  The play time makes it hard to get it to the table.

[Octo]

Regarding Agricola:

I've not played that but obviously it has pretty legendary status. I'm trying to decide whether to get it for my gaming group, but I wonder if people who've played it could help me out:

Is it a long game in your experience? (bgg says 120 mins, but what's your take) And does that time go down significantly when people are familiar with it?

Is it good with 5 players?

I've heard there's a lot to do with the cards and that there's a massive stack of them. Does this take quite a few plays to get a feel for what's in there or is knowing that stuff not very important? Does the game take a good few play to learn in general? (say compared to settlers)

People are saying really good things about Ora et Labora which is in the same vein. Anyone played both and care to comment?

Thanks in advance.

[DG]

As far as I'm concerned, Le Havre and Ora et Labora are just as good as Agricola. I'm surprised in that respect that Agricola has reached the top 10 games list since they are all good (but not ultra fantastic) and the votes could have been split between them.

Agricola can take a long time. I would set aside 3 hours instead of 2 hours until your play group can decide its own timing. Agricola is fine with 5 players but the game will take longer. The biggest asset and biggest problem with Agricola are the cards that provide the variation from game to game. You get all 14 cards at the start of the game and there is too much to take in for casual players. Absolute beginners can play a game without the cards but that won't satisfy the experienced players.

Le Havre has a gentler introductory curve but perhaps slightly less feel and can slow down too much with 5 players. I've only played Ora et Labora once and I saw it as a continued development of the agricola game system. It might be a better game but I'm sure many people with the other two games are wondering whether they need to buy that as well.

For me, Acquire is the game missing from the top 10 list. I'm sure it has been a mainstay of gaming groups for many years and is still good value today.

[theory]

One of the great things about Agricola, as a way to introduce gamers to the hobby, is that you're building something of your own.  I think this is part of why Dominion succeeds too.  Of course Agricola is not as gateway as Dominion, but it's surprisingly accessible.

[Davio]

The cards are overwhelming, but they weren't an issue for us.

For me personally, sorting the cards really helped.
I had two cards which were only active on turn 12, so I put them at the back.
The cards which were useful early on I put in the front.
Then I had some cards which provided food on turn 10-14 for instance, so I put that somewhere in the middle.

Minor investment cards list a required number of craftmanship in the top left, so you can sort by that or by required resources.

If you sort your cards, you get more of an idea about the flow of the game.

I think the hardest thing is agriculture: You have to plow first (1 Action), then get the grain/vegetables (1 Action) and you have to sow it (1 Action), so at the start it's 3 actions to go from plowing to sowing. And then you can only harvest during harvest time. It just seems like a lot of work for some food and if you're not an experienced player you may think this is a reason to skip it entirely.

[SwitchedFromStarcraft]

Snip

For me, Acquire is the game missing from the top 10 list. I'm sure it has been a mainstay of gaming groups for many years and is still good value today.

Do you play the Special Powers variant?  It really is a spectacular game with those 5 extra tiles for everybody.

[theory]

Snip

For me, Acquire is the game missing from the top 10 list. I'm sure it has been a mainstay of gaming groups for many years and is still good value today.

Do you play the Special Powers variant?  It really is a spectacular game with those 5 extra tiles for everybody.

What is that?

[Kuildeous]

Why Monopoly is rubbish (and it is genuinely bad in my opinion):

1) Too long. Games that are too long kill the evening (for my group at least) as everyone feels drained afterwards and doesn't want to play any more. It's so long that people usually give up or wander off before it ends (this is true of many classic games actually).

If you're curious, there is a thread where I "defended" Monopoly.
http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=2244

Though, really it's not so much defending as me saying, "It's not as bad as most serious gamers say it is." Although, most of your points aren't really things that could be defended. The time constraint is one, though. A game shouldn't take several hours. Granted, I haven't played with more than 4 players in a very long time. I can concede that if a group has 7 or 8 players, it's going to be a long game (and first-player advantage would be huge).

I have to disagree with your point 5 that it's a bad thing that someone could be blocked from building houses. I think this is one of the few tactically sound things you can do in Monopoly. With your movement dictated solely by luck, you pretty much can hinder other players through house-blocking, house-building, or trade-screwing.

I can't really say that Monopoly is a great game, but I can say that with all its flaws, game length generally isn't one of them.

[Davio]

If you're going to talk about Monopoly, you have to look at it in the time frame it was in.

In those days, you did have an entire evening or weekend to spend doing all sorts of things.
Nowadays, life is so stressed that you often don't have time for longer games.
And there weren't any other good games. I mean, you could play Scrabble or Rummikub, but it was thinly spread.

It's so easy to just hate on Monopoly when you start discovering real good games, but I've had a lot of fun with it playing with my family when I was younger.

[SwitchedFromStarcraft]

Snip

For me, Acquire is the game missing from the top 10 list. I'm sure it has been a mainstay of gaming groups for many years and is still good value today.

Do you play the Special Powers variant?  It really is a spectacular game with those 5 extra tiles for everybody.

What is that?

The version published by Avalon Hill in 1995 contained some additional Special Powers "tiles" (more like very small cards made from thick cardboard - they do not get played on the board like other true tiles, so I'll substitute the word "card" for the rest of this discussion).  There were 5 different cards, and every player got a copy of each one at the beginning of the game.  Each of these "cards" could be used once, so upon using a card, it had to be surrendered, leaving you with only those cards you had not used.  Each card gave you a special power to use immediately.  Several of the cards (maybe all of them) had a requirement related to the portion your turn at which it could be played - if you went past the applicable point in that turn, you could not use that card.  This isn't a big deal, as the timing constraints all make sense and keep the cards from breaking the game, but you did have to familiarize yourself with said constraints.  You could only play one card per turn.

I've looked on BGG for the rules of that version with no success, and my copy is in storage, so I'm working from memory here:

A) One card (played at the end of your turn?) allowed you to draw 6 tiles at the end of your turn, bringing your total to 11 instead of 6.  You did not draw tiles at the end of subsequent turns until your total was again <6.
B) One card (played before you bought stock?) allowed you to buy up to 5 shares of stock instead of the usual limit of 3 shares.
C) One card (played before you bought stock?) allowed you to acquire up to 3 shares of stock free of charge
D) One card (played before you placed your first tile?) allowed you to place 4 tiles on a turn instead of one (this was obviously the "mega-turn" enabler, as you could start-merge-start-merge in one turn). All effects of tile #1 had to be resolved before placing tile 2, and so on.
E) One card (played before you bought stock?) allowed you to trade 2 (matched, obviously) shares of an existing chain for 1 share of any other existing chain.  You could do this up to 3 times with any source pair traded for any end result share (e.g., 2 Luxor for 1 Continental, then 2 Worldwide for 1 Continental, then 2 Imperial for 1 American).  Play of this card did not invalidate your buy phase, so you could then buy stock, up to the normal limit of 3 shares.

I feel these cards really made the game better - allowed for come-from-behind possibilites, kept you in the game if you were out of money (Card C), let you rush a chain if you were behind in ownership (and were willing to pay the price) and in general made the game a lot more interesting, and fun.  Acquire is really one of my favorites.  Unfortunately, it really suffers 2p; it needs 3 minimum, and 4 is better.

Edited for this note: This version of the game was vastly inferior in several ways.  The board was flat cardboard instead of the more compact plastic version with the raised frames that hold the smaller plastic tiles in place, and the board takes up almost double the space on a table.  The true "tiles" (A-1, A-2, etc.) are printed on thick cardstock, and when played just sit on the board. They can become dislodged if the table is jarred, or when playing outside in the wind.  Finally, and most tragically, the colors of red used for shares of the two red chains (Imperial and Tower?) were virtually indistinguishable.  It was so bad that I took a copy of one card for each of the 7 chains to a color copier and altered the colors (the reds pretty drastically).  I then printed all new shares on heavier paper, laminated all the sheets, and cut out the 175 shares.

[DG]

I do have that version but we have never played with the special powers. My friends like Acquire as a staple game that's always simple to get on the table and play quickly.

[theory]

This edition?

BGG talks about it a bit and shares your disdain for the production quality.  This and this are the special powers?

[SwitchedFromStarcraft]

This edition?

BGG talks about it a bit and shares your disdain for the production quality.  This and this are the special powers?

Yes, and yes, and yes, though I think the titles on the cards don't match what I recall, but the concepts are correct.  All you need now is a copy of the rules, to determine precisely what times the cards are playable.

@DG - You may want to encourage just giving the cards a try, particularly if your group already knows the game well.  It's almost like getting a new game (expansion isn't quite the right word, but isn't far off the mark, conceptually.)

[ipofanes]

And there weren't any other good games. I mean, you could play Scrabble or Rummikub, but it was thinly spread.

For a sufficiently narrow definition of "there". I mean, how old have you been when Settlers (for instance) was released? Are you any older than Cosmic Encounter?

As an aside, I once played a Scrabble variant with the same set of letters for everyone, placed in the middle of the table (not really, since that space is taken by the board), nick the two-minutes hourglass form Boggle, have everyone take their score based on their solution, and lay the most successful solution on the board. That was quite enjoyable.

EDIT Re-reading your post I gather you are not referring to personal experience but the time frame Monopoly was released. Yes, boardgames were really in their infancy back then. Chess and Backgammon would never gain the popularity they enjoy if they were introduced today, with all the competition around.

[Davio]

And there weren't any other good games. I mean, you could play Scrabble or Rummikub, but it was thinly spread.

For a sufficiently narrow definition of "there". I mean, how old have you been when Settlers (for instance) was released? Are you any older than Cosmic Encounter?

As an aside, I once played a Scrabble variant with the same set of letters for everyone, placed in the middle of the table (not really, since that space is taken by the board), nick the two-minutes hourglass form Boggle, have everyone take their score based on their solution, and lay the most successful solution on the board. That was quite enjoyable.

EDIT Re-reading your post I gather you are not referring to personal experience but the time frame Monopoly was released. Yes, boardgames were really in their infancy back then. Chess and Backgammon would never gain the popularity they enjoy if they were introduced today, with all the competition around.

Well, I was referring to my own time frame.

Settlers is from '95 I believe, but it was introduced to us a couple of years later. I think I played it when I was 14 in '99.
Hey, we didn't have no internet! Games didn't spread like diseases like they do now and the market wasn't filled with so much to choose from.

If you would go to a toy store in the 90's/early 00's (no game stores yet) you could buy Monopoly, Risk, Scrabble, Rummikub, Yahtzee, Clue and that was about it. I'm not saying that there weren't any good games already published, but me and my family were part of the broad audience back then. We liked playing games, but had no clue what was out there other than in stores.

In Holland I guess it took a while for games to lift off and close the gap to big brother Germany. Settlers was the game that initiated this move towards more serious gaming in the Netherlands. Nowadays we are very proud to have White Goblin Games as a publisher with some licenses, but also successful original releases. 999 Games is a big publisher in the Netherlands which brings a lot of popular foreign games to our Market. Not only Settlers and Carcassonne, but also Dominion, The Resistance et al.

So growing up in the 90's it was mostly Monopoly-style games for us. In fact, almost everything was "roll-and-move" like Life and some others. When we played Settlers it was a big turnaround for us. "We roll a die and don't move, but get resources instead?" We all loved it immediately and it has opened the door to a lot of other very exciting games.

[ipofanes]

For a sufficiently narrow definition of "there". I mean, how old have you been when Settlers (for instance) was released? Are you any older than Cosmic Encounter?

ok, given that you would have to cater specifically for the Dutch-speaking market maybe the range of products was slim. I, for one, was delighted when I saw a copy of Agricola in a toy shop in a smallish Dutch town. But I'd say it depends on perspective, and more on age than cohort. If you'd been brought up in the 1980's, it would be surprising if you'd been playing Monopoly for want of anything else until the age of 22. The narrower range of products tailored to the local language, together with the proficiency of Dutch people with foreign languages, especially English, would have led any half-serious gamer to trying and ultimately enjoying imported games.

but me and my family were part of the broad audience back then.

Yes, I think the trick is how to get to be a "half-serious" gamer, and chances of first contact to awesomeness are greater than 20 years ago. I maintain that once you got there, you had a fair chance of having fun with games even in the 1980s. (But you had to be willing to spend more time. Titan, Britannia, the 18xxs were all around back then but they tax your time.)

I must admit that I can't think of any Dutch game designer before Joris Wiersinga (if I am not mistaken, Stratego is Flemish).

[Kuildeous]

Also in the 80s, there wasn't as much knowledge of alternate games. Sure, I played on the BBSes, but I didn't join the right circles to learn about other board games.

My introduction to RPGs helped me out there. It stoked my interest in games that weren't Monopoly, Trouble, or Life. They were still extremely luck-based (Dungeon, Saga, and Dragonlance, to name a few), but they at least provided more choices. They prepared me for a world outside of what mundanes consider normal board games. In the 90s, I did learn of Settlers of Catan, Hacker, and Lunch Money. By then I had hooked up with a network of friends who got into RPGs and board games. I had a friend who worked for Mayfair, so that really broadened my horizons. And now the internet has really allowed us to learn more about these games and even try them out before buying them.  In the 80s, if you weren't sure about a game, you usually had to sacrifice the money because nobody in your circle of friends knew anything about it.

So, yeah, some people grew up with Monopoly because they had no idea of the variety of games out there. You had to have a particularly nerdy friend to introduce that world to you (I sadly never played Titan or Cosmic Encounter in the 80s).

[Octo]

@Kuildeous:

Interesting points in that post you linked.

To elaborate on the blocking: I like the barter/trade element of the game and of course refusal must be an option. However, I think the problem stems from having so few options sometimes - you have 2 pinks and 1 blue, maybe a station too, and the guy with the last pink is just not trading it with you. You really need the pink because getting both of the blues is usually not going to happen, but you only have one real way of getting it in a timely fashion - from the other guy. It's the lack of alternative routes the causes the block I suppose, rather than that player refusal to trade.

The collection of money on Free Parking etc is something I was thinking of mentioning, just in terms of there's always house rules that people want to play with varying levels of silliness, but ran out of steam. I think these combine with the length thing for me and makes me want to clarify my position in so much as saying that while the game may or may not be a dud, I find the experience of playing is pretty much always a dud. Regardless of why it's so long (house rules, hesitant to eliminate etc.) is just always is - it's never been 90 mins for me, though I'm sure it could be - and combine this with frustrating blocking, occasional house-rule spats and everything-is-negotiable chaos and I find that I never want to play Monopoly. These may not actually be the fault of the rules as such, but I still rarely enjoy the experience of playing monopoly. I feel the same way about football for example - it's a fun game to play really, but unless it's really really casual among friends there's often an unnecessary amount of argy-bargy, fouling and generally macho nonsense & aggression that sucks the fun out of it for me, particularly if you play with strangers. Some people might dig that, but I don't, and it's not the fault of the rules.

[ipofanes]

So, yeah, some people grew up with Monopoly because they had no idea of the variety of games out there. You had to have a particularly nerdy friend to introduce that world to you (I sadly never played Titan or Cosmic Encounter in the 80s).

Maybe I was the particular nerd myself 

I remember meeting with school friends weekly for board games. Some day I must have found out about the brilliant games shop "Das Spiel" ran by Claus Voigt in the 1980s in Hamburg. Maybe I noticed it while being a tourist in Hamburg. This opened quite a world for me. Railway Rivals maps, Cosmic Encounter, Quirks ...

Oh, and living not too far from Essen helped too. [hipster]I went to Essen before they changed the venue from the Volkshochschule (at the center of http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.454107&lon=7.020007&zoom=18&layers=M) to the Gruga (http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.428735&lon=6.994773&zoom=18&layers=M).[/hipster]