Lets hear some recommendations on fun tabletop games

[edgecult]

Card games to board games. Big scary multi book role playing things to a goofy deck of cards and a big bottle of something to burn the memories away. A massive board of some world and a billion tiny figures. They're all fun but sadly just really getting into them so... I reach out to you wonderful people of the escapist board. Share with me (and anyone else who might be creeping silently in the corner... we can see you steve.. join the party)any fun, interesting, and otherwise just good to burn a night on games you can play if you can wrangle or kidnap enough people with.

As for me. I like games that let me work out my bastardry on people. Any game I can stare someone done.. get in their head with a few smiles and some crypic words to get them to play just into my hands or let me sneak something away with them knowing. I played far to long on starcraft 2 to just creeping about in Mafia because it was a perfect way to get this out. but there's just something so much more fun about lieing to friends and family right to their face without the lasting consequences that normally come with such a thing >.> so anything with this kinda mindset at the center would be wonderful but I'll take any suggestions if you can sell me on it. (i'll play generally anything once really)

As for things I already got..

Dominion (intrigue at least. Will probably get the other 6 billion expansions one time or another)

Talisman (ack.. it seemed like fun.. but drags on for bloody ever less you know exactly what your doing and the dice roll in your favor..)

Android: Netrunner (Wonderful 1v1 card battle thing. Neat that each side functions totally differently making playing either side a new experience. Gotta look into the little extra pack things and I think they made 2 new full Xpacs too. seriously great fun.)

Arkham horror (Plenty of fun but need a far larger table and a few more people than I can usually pull together to get the game really rolling. Plus managed to misread a few rules the first time making our first full game far longer than it needed to be)

Flux (star, cthulu, zombie: All fun. all appeal to a different stupidly nerdy side of mine. easy to play, easy to take places to play. wonderful all around. dunno bout the other versions. played a few but none really hit the right balance of nerdy appeal and interesting gimmicks.)

Elder sign. (Great fun, far easier to play than it's bigger brother. Lots of dice, lots of luck. but that makes it great fun to laugh at the misfortune of others only for them to get their shots in when you someone how manage to roll 6 terror dice and melt your own characters brain in a massive one hit K.O. >.>)

Seven Dragons. (It's domino with special cards and more complexity.. seemed silly till I got a few games going and realized just how much fun it could be with a few people all desperatly trying to figure each others color out and cover their own tracks.)

Citadels. (Literally just came in the mail. dunno bout it yet but looks like the kinda game I'de enjoy so ah.. might add this later when I can wrangle my roommates and get a game or two played out)

Played a few goofy party games. Apples to apples (and yes it's after dark cousin Cards against humanity.. I still gotta get my set made actually..) those are fun too if ya for a quick laugh and night of drinking.

Also played but don't own the big table top monster that is D&D (4.0 I think..) Bit of a cluster getting it all together and never really got to the meat of the game. (played a cookie cutter dungeon crawl.. that I joined half way in with a premade character sheet. Not quite what I was looking for but had potential with a regular group and my own character.)

So anyway, Share with me some of your own games you like so we can all benefit each others experiences and such. I never knew anything about most of these till someone shared with me so now we must share to the next people in line.

 

[DoPo]

Well, first of all - any TT RPG. OK, almost any with few notable exceptions. Anyway, with those aside, any other PnP RPG has the potential to be great fun with the right group (also, any game can be a great disaster with the wring crowd).

But if I had to choose one to showcase, then I think I'd have no doubt about it: Ninja Burger. You want fun - there have fun. I'd advise getting ahold of 1st edition. Not that I don't like 2nd edition or anything, but the 1st edition is just so fast to pick up and play - the book is 40 pages and you need about half of them to play the game. Heck, you can start a game in about 15 minutes, including character creation and rules explanation, even if you have a group of newbies. At any rate, the game revolves about you being a ninja and delivering fast food. AAA Service: Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere - within 30 minutes or we commit seppuku - that's the motto of the fast food restaurant the ninjas work for. You also need to make the delivery without being seen. Great hilarity ensues when you have ninjas running around the place delivering burgers and chips to random people.

Another RPG I can recommend is Kobolds Ate My Baby! - it's from the same people who made Ninja Burger and it's similar in style but with a different tone - while ninjas are supposed to be awesome and they can do a variety of superhuman feats, the kobolds are on the opposite end of the spectrum - being pretty much useless. With more game-speak - ninjas have possess all the skills from each of 4 different areas (but are better with some), while kobolds have 1 skill from each area and they aren't that good at them either. A kobold could quite literally be unable to hide, if he doesn't possess the skill to do so. Thus the hilarity ensues from a group of creatures sent on a mission to steal babies for which they are underequipped, underskilled and pretty much under-everything. The game plays like a roguelike for you'll be losing kobolds a lot - but whatever, for it's usually quite amusing when it happens.

And finally, there is Paranoia. Yeah. Well, just go play it, I suppose. Oh, and do bring in some friends - what could go wrong?

 

[Sub_par]

my friend, my girlfriend and i just tried this new game from kick starter. its called machine of death and its pretty fun. the most basic way i can explain it is you are given a target who you have to assassinate, three items to use (they are described like something heavy, something metal and a public domain character) and a word describing how the person is to die. you make up a strategy on how to kill them assign each action a difficulty and roll a die to see if it succeeds. if it fails you pick a new item and have to make a new plan, but you only have 90 seconds. it can get wacky.

 

[TakerFoxx]

Betrayal at House on the Hill. Awkward title aside, awesome game where you explore a haunted mansion. Despite having a complex system, it's strangely easy to get the hang and is never the same twice.

 

[EyeReaper]

Munchkin!
It's nothing but a big ball of fun. The game's got a great sense of humor, a really simple ruleset, expansions in every variety that are each different in their own way. (my personal favorite is Munchkin Apocalypse)

If you want to laugh, stab your friends in the back, and generally have a good time, I'd definitely recommend Munchkin to anyone.

 

[Launcelot111]

I just picked up a couple expansion characters for Sentinels of the Multiverse today, which I'm a big fan of. It's a superhero themed cooperative game where everyone chooses a hero and builds up an arsenal of equipment and powers over the course of the game. You choose what supervillain you wish to fight and what environment you want to fight in, and between the various expansions, there are maybe 30 heroes and 20 villains, which makes for a lot of variety and replayability.

Beyond that, I love Alien Frontiers and Castles of Burgundy for combining the strategy of a good euro game with the goofy fun of copious dice rolling.

For more party-centric games, I love Avalon and Coup (both offshoots of The Resistance series), which are all about identity deduction. Coup is more of a time filler, with games lasting 20 minutes at most, but with the right group, Avalon can fill a whole night of gaming.

 

[Naeras]

I'm mostly just copy-pasting everything I posted in this thread [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.837752-Any-good-board-games-Read-OP#20552524]:



Ticket to Ride
Hands down the best family board game in existence. It's incredibly simple to get into, plays fast and interestingly, and at the same time has a lot of strategic depth. If you're only ever going to buy one board game, this one is it. It's not my personal favorite board game (that would be a tie between 7 Wonders and BSG), but it's an incredibly good buy because it's a game almost anyone will enjoy for years.

Settlers of Catan
Almost everything I wrote about Ticket to Ride also applies to this. It obviously plays differently, but at the core it's got the same appealing features as TtR: it's accessible, the turns are fast, and it has a good amount of depth to it. I remember a Cracked.com-article referring to this game as the "the binary test for 'Have you actually played board games, or just terrible family ones?'", and it's pretty much that. Highly recommended.

Carcasonne
This game is one of the most replayable I know of, simply because building the game board from scratch is the entire game. It's thoroughly enjoyable if you're playing this with the right people. It's, however, quite rage-inducing if you're playing it with the wrong people. There's few things in the world that are more enjoyable than finishing a mega-city, and there are few things that make me as angry as having a twat ruin said city(or worse: steal the credit for it). Still, ruining/stealing cities and fields from others is fun, so it definitely get a thumbs up from me.
..I'm a horrible person

Dominion
It's a card game about using your cards to buy more cards from a selected set of card piles, in order to buy even more cards from said piles. You also get to vary which types of cards that are available for the game, which means the games will often turn out differently. Very fun, and very varied, but not quite as fun with only two people as it is with 3 or 4.

Munchkin
It's a silly parody of tabletop RPGs that's great fun in more than one way. It's about backstabbing, being a jerk to the other players, and getting loads of treasure. And having fun while doing so. There are a load of different versions out, but the difference between the versions is usually what kind of setting they're making fun of.
As a note: I've played a couple of other games from the same company, Chez Geek and Ninja Burger. They're fairly similar and also quite fun, but I definitely prefer Munchkin to them.

7 Wonders
It's basically "TCG-drafting: The Board Game", which makes for some damn compelling play. It's one of my personal favorites, and while you'll need 10 minutes to learn the rules before you can start, the game plays fast and has a lot of mindgames and other interesting stuff. It's also very well balanced and has a multitude of effective strategies, giving everyone a chance while usually allowing the better player to win. I cannot recommend this game enough.

Cards Against Humanity
Also a cheap alternative, and one of the best party games I can think of. Provided you and your friends don't mind the game being about setting up jokes about racism, holocaust, teen pregnancy and dead hookers, to name a few of the things in the game. If you can handle that, this is one game you don't want to miss out on.

Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game
This one seems a bit impenetrable at first. It's got quite a few rules, takes up a lot of space, needs at least 3 players(5 or 6 is preferred) and a session usually lasts 2-4 hours. And with that being said: BSG: The Board Game is a fucking masterpiece. It's incredibly tense, as the entire premise of the game is that you don't know if the guy sitting next to you is trustworthy or wants to destroy humanity, and the game mechanics are otherwise incredibly solid and balanced. If this sounds at all interesting, and you have 3-4 friends that could be interested in giving this a go, I'd say go for it.

Chess
Because chess. It's awesome. Seriously. I don't need to write much more.

As for me. I like games that let me work out my bastardry on people. Any game I can stare someone done.. get in their head with a few smiles and some crypic words to get them to play just into my hands or let me sneak something away with them knowing. I played far to long on starcraft 2 to just creeping about in Mafia because it was a perfect way to get this out. but there's just something so much more fun about lieing to friends and family right to their face without the lasting consequences that normally come with such a thing >.> so anything with this kinda mindset at the center would be wonderful but I'll take any suggestions if you can sell me on it. (i'll play generally anything once really)

You sound like you really, really need to try BSG. The tension of not knowing whether or not a certain player is on your team or not is incredible, and I still have conversations about in-game moments I've had in that game.

 

[chozo_hybrid]

Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game
This one seems a bit impenetrable at first. It's got quite a few rules, takes up a lot of space, needs at least 3 players(5 or 6 is preferred) and a session usually lasts 2-4 hours. And with that being said: BSG: The Board Game is a fucking masterpiece. It's incredibly tense, as the entire premise of the game is that you don't know if the guy sitting next to you is trustworthy or wants to destroy humanity, and the game mechanics are otherwise incredibly solid and balanced. If this sounds at all interesting, and you have 3-4 friends that could be interested in giving this a go, I'd say go for it.

Then there's the expansions! God I love that game, it's one of out most played.

DoPo got one of the best suggestions in, but I will second it. I recommend Pathfinder, but that's just me

I'll throw a huge suggestion in, Twilight Imperium, but only if you get the first expansion too, it balances the game out better. It's a 4x strategy game, galactic empires, politics, researching, warfare, you name it, it's got it. Great with at least 4 players, but can take a while to play, so set a day aside There is a lot to learn, but it is soooo worth it.

Spoiler: A small look at it.

For a shorter game, one that is co-op, I'd recommend Elder Sign, it's based on Lovecraft stuff, a simple dice game that can be fun to play with friends to try and stop an ancient one from destroying the world.

 

[Berttheduck]

Got a couple to recommend off bat. Firstly in the PnP roll playing games section I have to recommend Anima beyond fantasy. Its quite a complex system which has a really good lot of background fluff to set your game in. It also has the best character creation system Ive ever used, almost any fictional character you can think of can be created relatively easily within the rules at level one and every character even using the same class will play differently right from go. The only thing to take into account with this system is it was originally written in Spanish and as such some of the translations in the rules are a little clunky at best. As for board games I highly recommend the Forbidden Island and Desert games, there cooperative board games where your team has to work together to escape from a dangerous situation.

 

[Mersadeon]

Well, I can always recommend tabletop games in the vain of D&D and Shadowrun - but those are really a different category alltogether!

I will recommend you Zombicide. A bit on the pricey side of things, but great fun with easy to learn rule and ridiculous amounts of figures on the board once excrements hit the fan. It's fun. Card games? I... Magic: the Gathering... I can't ever stop.

 

[Tanis]

I REALLY loved playing RIFTS, back in the day, though I ended up mostly just reading the books because the flavor/world building text was just so damn good.

Catan is also REALLY fun, if you get the right group of people.

 

[rcs619]

Blood Bowl
It's literally fantasy-football, only with less rules and more death. I guess I like the unpredictability of it. It's a game where you could have the soundest tactics in the world, but the dice will still destroy them. Usually in hilarious ways. The sense of progression you get as your players level up, and the knowledge that any of them can die or get maimed at any time during a game is also fairly compelling. If you like some turn-based strategy that is more about completing an objective (getting to the other end of the field) than just killing all of the other guy's pieces, Blood Bowl is a really fun change of pace.

OGRE
OGRE is basically Boss-Fight: The Tabletop Wargame. One player gets to control an OGRE, a nuclear-armed, 100ft tall futuristic super-tank. The other player gets deployment points to spend assembling an army of normal tanks, planes, hovercraft (seriously fuck those hovercraft, lol), artillery and infantry. The goal is simple, the OGRE player has to advance to the other end of the map, to destroy the other player's HQ. The opposing player has to destroy the OGRE before it can do that. The OGRE has several different parts that can be attacked, damaged and potentially destroyed (the treads, the missile launchers, the guns, etc), so it's about figuring out the best way to use your units to wear the thing down before it obliterates your entire army.