a comic; family board & card games

[kate_nepveu]

I feel personally attacked by this Liz Climo comic.

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The post-dinner game of the moment is Monopoly Cheaters Edition, in which I literally cannot cheat blatantly enough for the kids to catch me. That's mostly because they're not sufficiently vigilant (SteelyKid was playing with slime all during tonight's game), but they also never cheat themselves. I feel like collectively those things probably say something.

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Quick on various family games:

• Sorry. Surprisingly enjoyable yet kid-friendly from really quite a young age? We've been playing it since at least the Pip was in kindergarten and probably earlier. Also, if you deliberately attempt to let kids win or lose less badly--I realize there are things to be said on various sides of this question--it's fairly easy to do so here by tweaking your strategy or flat-out stacking the deck.

• Hanabi. Cooperative card game, we play without the timer element just because it seemed complicated and I was looking for something very low stress. I don't find it very interesting but the kids enjoy it, so I'm willing.

• Exploding Kittens. Fun, quick & easy silliness.

• Qwirkle. Place tiles to match colors or shapes. The rules say have 6 tiles in your hand at a time, we play with a dozen to speed things up. The Pip has thoroughly and legitimately kicked my ass at this on multiple occasions.

• Incredibles Save the Day. Cooperative board game; very little strategy but, again, cooperative and low-stress and the kids enjoy it.

• Sushi Go Party. Card game where you assemble sets to score points, while passing the cards around the table. This is really fun, and the difficulty can be adjusted by judicious selection of the menu (and stacking the deck).

• Monopoly Cheaters Edition. The thing that interests me most about this is the rule tweaks to make it faster (though that's relative, tonight's game was still 90 minutes). An unsold property goes to auction if the person who landed on it doesn't want to buy it immediately; once all properties are sold, the game stops once everyone's gotten back to Go; and one property on each side of the board has a starting boost (free hotel or reduced purchase price). All of those could be imported into regular Monopoly just fine.

  The Cheaters part: there are cards in the center of the board with allowed cheats, like taking an unsold property card or moving someone else's piece. There are specified penalties and rewards for cheating with and without getting caught. I adjust the difficulty by quietly not playing Chance & Community Chest cards that would be too mean and--unsuccessfully, as mentioned above--trying to get caught cheating.

• Bonus: Blokus Trigon. Place differently-shaped colored tiles on a board so that the same colors touch only at points, not along their sides; try to get as many on as you can. Can be played cooperatively or competitively; we haven't played this enough to really get a feel for it, but I can see the potential. Also I'm very bad at spatial things so I think that will level the playing field.

If you have any recs for board games of similar difficulty, please comment!

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Poll #21327

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Comments

[conuly]

Game recs: Sleeping Queens (get the anniversary tin)

Loot

Pick Picnic (this can be tricky to find nowadays)

Zeus on the Loose

Sherlock (tricky little memory game, but it's easy to adjust the difficulty by using more or less cards, and, with care, even setting some cards to only be checked by better players)

King of Tokyo (Yahtzee with Monsters)

Love Letter Batman (I mean, you could get regular Love Letter, but why would you?)

Ticket to Ride (not a laugh a minute, but fun)

Carcassonne South Seas (I love all Carc, but this theme is great in winter)

[kate_nepveu]

Sleeping Queens & King of Tokyo are on my list!

The last two seem like they are best for a little older.

I'll look for the rest, thanks!

[mkozlows]

The "all properties go to auction if not purchased rule" IS in regular Monopoly, and gets brought up a lot when people try to make the "Monopoly is actually good" contrarian arguments. (It makes the game better than if you play it wrong, but... it's still Monopoly.)

[kate_nepveu]

!!!

I had no idea!

[damerell]

It's never going to be a great game, but I always feel a little sorry for Monopoly, which has a terrible reputation because of the near-universal use of house rules nearly all of which make the game worse, usually by causing it to fail to terminate.

Money under Free Parking and rules like it are the worst; whether by accident or clever design, the rate at which the total amount of money in the game increases is pretty small, not enough to keep a player who's got a net outflow on rent afloat... so they go bankrupt. Stop money leaving the game by dumping the fine money back in, and even the player at the table in the worst position has a net positive expected income... so there's a non-zero chance, like a biased random walk, the game will last an infinite time. And yet nearly every house rule keeps money in the game!

Auctions aren't in that category, but they do shorten the game overall by getting property out sooner (with scope for someone to make a colour-group forcing other players to make deals with each other or lose, or for someone to dump too much money on an auction that might make a colour-group and thereby go bankrupt shortly afterwards), and add a bit of interaction at a stage where otherwise all you get is claiming trivial rent.

This isn't the most trivial hill I'm willing to die on but it might be close. :-/

[skygiants]

We were big into Set, a speed card game that matches on color/shape/number/shade (maybe similar to Quirkle?); Milles Bornes, which uses cards to fake a road race (given that I find car chases extremely boring in films, I have no idea why I loved this game as much as I did but we SURE DID LOVE THIS GAME); and Frog Juice (I remember the gameplay as being really simple but enjoyed the spellcasting aspect!)

[genarti]

We were into Set too! And Taboo, though neither of these is technically a board game.

I'm trying to think of other board games, and I know we played them, but all I can think of are card games. (Double-deck hearts is my family's favorite, which is played with gradually increasing ruthlessness as kids age.) Well, that and an extremely old-fashioned pinball game we had.

[dancing_crow]

Thirding Set - excellent for helping you think sideways.

Forbidden Island - cooperative, an island is sinking into the ocean, find the treasure and escape with your lives.

If people can spell, Bananagrams has enormous potential to be modified. We generally played no points, but with admiration for unexpected words, and nicely apropos word crossings.

Concepts - basically a board for Charades, wherein you try to establish concepts and sub concepts for a word or phrase.

Dixit is more about mind reading? But the pictures are so pretty.

[princessofgeeks]

From about age 8 to 15 my favorite board game was Clue. Somewhere I still have that box.

I adored Monopoly too, which you have.

I also loved a board game called Masterpiece, which was about trying to buy and sell paintings and some of them were forgeries. White Collar fans would love it. But I think what I loved about it the most were the beautiful photo cards of the paintings, which were actual paintings from some famous gallery and really sparked an interest in my of visual art from a young age.

We liked Trouble, too, which is kind of like Sorry.

[desdenova]

My family played Masterpiece, too. The version we had used paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago, so when I grew up and moved to Chicago I got to see all those pictures in person, which was neat.

[kass]

We play a lot of Exploding Kittens around these parts, and also a lot of Clank! https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/201808/clank-deck-building-adventure

[mikeda]

Three games that might fit:

Transamerica. Multiple rounds. Goal in each round is to be the first to connect all of your cities with track (can connect through track other players lay).

Cartagena. Advance your pieces by playing cards. Get more cards by moving your pieces back. People sometimes describe it as "Pirate Candyland" because you're moving pieces forward based on symbols on the "track" and the cards and there's a pirate theme to the game.

Tsuro: Each turn you play a tile that creates a path for your piece. Goal is to stay on the board the longest. Quick but fun.

(All of these games say ages 8+, which is the same as Hanabi.)

[desdenova]

Thanks for the recs; one of my nephews (age 9) is really big on games, so I will save this post for reference for his next birthday.

[larryhammer]

We recently got Sorry, and it's been getting a lot of play time. We're mostly into card games and dominoes otherwise, at the moment, but another that's popular and can be pitched to different levels based on how the adults play it is Outfoxed, a collaborative deduction game.

We liked Exploding Kittens the time we tried it, but it'll work better once TBD is reading more independently. Ditto Apples To Apples. I want to get a Hanabi deck.

[darkswordesque]

We are mostly playing:
1. Dixit: It's a lovely game that works for all ages (well, the youngest we tried was 5) https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/39856/dixit
2. Cataan Junior
3. Evolution: The Beginning. R started playing/loving it when he was 6. We still play it occasionally. I love the concept. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/201248/evolution-beginning
4. Ticket to Ride:

[thistleingrey]

There's been some Exploding Kittens, Sushi Go, Sleeping Queens, and Captain Carcass around here. I didn't introduce them and have been leaned upon to play (except for Carcass). Not very much my thing, but +1 Sleeping Queens is of comparable complexity level to the two you've played.

Also, Forbidden Island and perhaps Forbidden Desert? I've seen Island work with a group of curious 5yos. --Ah, I see that someone else has mentioned it, too. Desert is one step up in complexity from Island but should still work for both SteelyKid and The Pip at this point.

[jeliza]

Some of these might be a bit much yet, since I'm only guessing at your kids ages, but we quite like Superfight!, Snake Oil, and Bohnanza.