This is the second installment of a three-part post about the games that you should really be playing.
For part 1, click here.
To sum up briefly, you should all be playing more games, and I’m not talking about the mass-produced and tired out games of yesteryear. Instead, I’m talking about the games that are part of the board gaming renaissance of the last ten years or so. Part 1 described some cooperative games that you should be playing, and this posts moves on to describing three games of a different type: competitive games.
The competitive board game hardly needs an introduction, because we’ve all played them at some point in our lives. In these games, each player tries to make choices that will lead to victory over the other players, and usually the game ends with one clear winner.
Nevertheless, the games presented here are unlike some of the more common board games that you might have played, in that they move faster and there’s very little monotony during play. The designers of these games have attempted in every case to make the turns go by very quickly and to involve everyone’s attention, all the time.
In these games, players don’t feel like they’re waiting around for their turns or (worse) waiting and hoping that the game will somehow, in any way possible, come to an end (I’m looking at you, Monopoly and Risk).
Here are some of the excellent competitive games available today:
Catan (formerly Settlers of Catan) has become a mainstay of table top gaming culture, and it was one of the first games to gain widespread popularity. It’s enjoyed enormous success, and for good reason – it’s an excellent game and everyone should own a copy.
In this game, players manage resources (represented by cards that they get randomly), and they spend these resources to get victory points or develop their play areas to get more victory points later on. There are a number of ways to win, and most of the time every player feels like she has a chance right up until the final points are counted.
The best part of this game is the resource trading that happens in every player’s turn. All players may always trade their resources with the player who is taking a turn.
Because of this, no one is ever waiting for her turn to come, and there’s always a lot of fun shouting and deal making (“I’ll give you THREE sheep for one brick!”).
I was initially uninspired by the theme of this game (North American railroads), but so many people recommended it to me that I finally got it, and was glad that I did.
In this game, the players try to collect sets of cards of the same color to claim train routes between cities on a map of the U.S. These routes are worth different amounts of points, and completing these routes is the main way that players accumulate points during the game.
Each player also has secret objectives, however, which provide extra points at the end of the game if they are completed. These secret objectives allow for players to develop a number of different strategies, and they make it possible for the player in last place to suddenly become the winner at the end of the game.
The turns in this game go by very quickly, and so players are always trying to pay attention to what everyone else is doing while at the same time trying to complete their own routes and objectives. The result is a fast, engaging game that plays differently every time.
My family and my game club love this game, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
In Carcassonne, the players take turns drawing tiles, which represent small pieces of a map, and they place them on the table touching at least one other tile. Each tile has a fun medieval land feature pictured on it, like a part of a city, parts of roads, or open fields.
In each turn, the player draws a tile and then places it against any other tile on the board so that the sides of the tiles match (rivers connect to rivers, roads to roads, cities to cities). Then, if she wants to, the player can place a small playing piece (a “meeple”) to claim the feature on which it is placed, and the turn then goes to the next player. The turns are so quick that even a larger game moves at a very good pace, and no game take more than an hour or so.
The great thing about this game is the great thing about any really good game. Enjoyment and tactical/strategic flexibility do not cause complexity in the game rules. The rules of this game are so simple that you learn them by playing one turn. When you see what other people are doing, though, and where some of the meeples on the board are going, you immediately start thinking of options, ways to block other players, and plans based on the tiles you may draw.
Also, perhaps the most wonderful thing about the game is that playing the game requires all of the players to create a wonky kind of jigsaw-puzzle-medieval map of the countryside, and it’s always fun to look at and think about this map the end of the game.
