-looks over at his giant stack of board games- Well...I guess it's my turn now -cracks knuckles-
In no particular order
Betrayal At House on the Hill A game for 3 to six players that consists of two parts. Exploring a house dealing with scary events, getting items and suffering through horrible omens. The game eventually joins the second half where players will have to fight for their lives through one of 50 scenarios, oh and given the name, ONE of you is a traitor. This game is a huge hit with any gaming group I've ever been a part of. If you'd like to take a look at it first, I recommend watching the Table Flip episodes about it on YouTube.
King of Tokyo A competitive game where giant monsters strive to beat the crap out of each other or earn renown. This is another popular one with my gaming group friends. The base game is a lot of fun, but there are expansions that add more. King of Tokyo is a prime example of an "easy to learn, hard to master" type of game as there are a lot of different strategies to employ to become King. I would also like to note that a whole new game based on an updated system, King of New York, is supposed to come out within the next couple of months.
Marvel Legendary This is a cooperative deck builder game where you and your friends try to stop an evil mastermind from completing a plot. These can be anything from Red Skull trying to complete a secret invasion of Skrulls, or the last one I played was Moleman trying to...I forget, but the advantages the plot gave him meant we got our asses kicked...by MOLEMAN. This is one of my all time favorite cooperative games, but with the victory point system, there is always a "winner" if you need that in your group. Anyway, you buy heroes, fight villains, build your deck up with lots of Marvel characters. It's a great time. This game also has a bunch of expansions available or the new stand alone Marvel Legendary Villains edition (which can also use cards from the original game or any of the expansions)
Shadows Over Camelot This game is hard. I mean HARD. This game HATES people. This game was bullied in high school and takes it out on everyone else. It's a cooperative game (unless one of you is a traitor...) where every turn you have to perform an evil action before you can perform one good action. There are like 3 ways to lose, but only one way to win, and trust me, those ways to lose will come up FAST, even more so with a traitor. It's a pretty fun camelot themed strategy game to play with friends, just don't bust this one out if you want to feel like a winner (unless you do win, in which case congrats)
One Night Ultimate Werewolf This is an AMAZING party game, but really only fun if you're playing with a fairly large group of people, the best part is this game can cost you very little to play. Now the base game online is like 20 bucks and you get some cool stuff, but if you're feeling super cheap, go scour your local comic/game shop for like 25 cent Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, or Magic cards, find artwork that matches the character roles, look the rules up online, and download the free app that will handle the hosting duties for you. This is basically a spin on the old Mafia style game with a lot of different roles. There's not much to the game itself, the real thrill are the lies, deceptions, and finger-pointing that will be going on around the table. You can play a round in like 5-10 minutes, but don't be surprised if you play enough rounds to eat up hours of your time
RARRR!!! This game just got funded and released by Kickstarter, and I love it. It's a super simple card game where you use giant monsters and a card draft system to raise power and conquer cities. It's almost like Poker since a lot of this game is knowing when you go all in or when to just fold. What's that? Bogota is only worth two victory points? Don't spend a lot of your power on that. But Tokyo being worth 5? Yeah, lets chuck in a few extra Electrical power on that one...This game is simple stupid fun, and it's got great artwork.
Smash-Up A competitive card game. The base game comes with 8 decks of 20 cards. You pick two of them and shuffle them together, that's your team to try and conquer bases. That's about it. Use any combination you want. Aliens and Pirates, Dinosaurs and Ninjas, and expansions even have stuff like Plants and Bears.
Superfight Rather than explaining this game, I'll just go over the events of one round using actual examples from the decks themselves. First the referee for this round flips over one character card (white card) and two trait cards (black cards) this gives them A Velociraptor with the power to summon anything from a supermarket who is also holding a baby. Now each other player plays their white card, Bill Clinton and one black card armed with a portal gun. The other player has A Boy Scout who is made of water. Now the two non-referee players play a black card on their opponents side. So Bill Clinton now can't stop sobbing, and that Boy Scout has one million followers on Twitter. Now those two players just make their arguments for why their character could beat the referees character. It's the best kind of stupid fun, where you're just pulling stuff out of your ass to make the best argument you can. I LOVE this game.
Honestly, I could go on and on, but these are just some of my favorites to bust out at game sessions. I hope some of these have raised interest from some of you reading these. Happy Gaming.
