A long weekend dominated by games

[womzilla]

I have tomorrow off for a stock market holiday, and I'm stretching the weekend out by taking of Monday as a comp day (partial recompense for my 75-hour week at the start of March). I'm going gaming tomorrow evening, and otherwise am planning on spending the vastest part of the weekend attacking my game collection--culling it further and then re-packing and re-arranging it so that it can actually fit in the space allotted it. Fun!

Co-incidentally, I was recently asked to rank my top ten (proprietary) board & card games. Here's my top 25; winnowing it down to 10 was very difficult indeed. I'm sure that on another day I'd have come up with a different 10 and 25, but
I'm pretty sure my top 10 would definitely all be in this list.

Acquire by Sid Sackson
Age of Steam by Martin Wallace
Aladdin's Dragons by Richard Breese
Blokus by Bernard Tavitian
Bohnanza by Uwe Rosenberg
Borderlands by Future Pastimes (Bill Eberle, Peter Olatka, and Jack Kittredge)
Business by Sid Sackson
Can't Stop by Sid Sackson
Cosmic Encounter by Future Pastimes (Bill Eberle, Peter Olatka, and Jack Kittredge)
Dvonn by Kris Burm
El Grande by Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich
Elfenland with Elfengold by Alan R. Moon
Euphrat & Tigris by Reiner Knizia
Klunker by Uwe Rosenberg
Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation by Reiner Knizia
Lost Cities by Reiner Kniza
Medici by Reiner Knizia
Melee/Wizard by Steve Jackson
Mü (from Mü und Mehr) by Frank Nestle and Doris Matthäus
Pampas Railroads by John Bohrer
Puerto Rico by Andreas Seyfarth
Titan by Jason B. McAllister and David A. Trampier
Wallenstein by Dirk Henn
Warhamster Rally by Frank Branham
Wiz War by Tom Jolly

I'm surprised that I had no individual games from several of my favorite designers--Alex Randolph (Twixt, Ghosts!, Sizimizi), Francis Tresham (Civilization and the 18xx series), Klaus Teuber (Settlers of Catan: The Card Game, Adel Verpflichtet), Thomas Lehmann (Magellan, Time Agent, 1846), Al Newman (Dynasties, Babushka, Winds of Plunder), Mike Fitzgerald (the Mystery Rummy series, including Wyatt Earp), Richard Borg (Liar's Dice, Wyatt Earp, the Command and Colors series), Greg Costikyan (Barbarian Kings, Pax Britannica, Web and Starship), or Grant Dalgliesh (Wizard Kings and most of the other Columbia "Block Games" wargame line). Part of that is that many of the games in this secondary list are longer or more fiddly than the games I get to play these days--especially the wargames and the Tresham and Lehmann titles--which makes them less dear to me now.

And, on another day, the list would be different.

Comments

[montoya.livejournal.com]

That's definitely useful information about Medici. (And yeah, I'm sure the rules wouldn't help much; it took a few games of Modern Art before anyone really understood how we were supposed to be playing (I think it's particularly hard to figure out when you have all new people playing it, because everyone's doing such random things that things that would normally be sensible strategies don't really help, making it feel even more random and ungraspable).) I'll put it on my list.

As for Mystery of the Abbey, we (this was with my parents and sisters at Christmas a few years ago) played it expecting something like Clue for adults, and ended up with this bunch of unplayable randomness that had people frustratedly trying to figure out if there was anything they could do that would in any way help them at all. I think we actually quit without finishing the game.