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Carcassonne was one of my own “gateway” games that got me into Euro board games and it remains one of my favorites. It’s an easy-to-learn tile laying game named after a medieval French town. You lay down one randomly drawn terrain tile each turn. You may place it wherever you like, as long as it’s adjacent to an existing tile and all the sides match up so that roads connect to roads, fields to fields, cities to cities, etc. Then you may place one of your seven followers, little wooden people affectionately known as “meeples,” on one of the tiles to claim a city, road, field, or cloister. On to the next turn. It’s really pretty simple. When the element you claimed gets completed, you can remove your meeple and gets points based on what the element was and the number of tiles it took up. If it never gets completed, your meeple stays on it until the tiles run out and you get your points then, but you may not get as many. A lot of the game is dictated by luck from the random tiles. But strategy is still very important. You may choose to conserve your meeples for bigger claims down the road, or you may wickedly try to take over another player’s claim.

THE BASICS:

Play Time: 40-60 minutes

Number of Players: 2-5. I haven’t played it with more than two very often, so I can’t say what the ideal number is. But BoardGameGeek users voted 2 as the best.

Suggested age: 8 and up.

Designer: Klaus-Jürgen Wrede

Published: 2000, Rio Grande Games (English version) and Hans im Glück (German version)

Buy: This game is widely available. It looks like you should be able to get it in the $15-20 range online. Or you can skip the shipping charges but pay a little more and support your Friendly Neighborhood Game Store.

There is also an awesome iPhone version out now. You can play it online or locally with a friend who has it, and includes a great solitaire game, with which you can challenge your friends to beat your high score. There is at least one big game-changer I noticed about this version though: it gives you the ability to see how many of each kind of tile are still left in the virtual tile bag. When I played with John I felt this gave both of us a new advantage we never had before. Sure, you could conceivably figure out how many of each tile are left in the original game, but it would take a lot of keeping track and counting. I’m not sure if I like this new feature, but either way, I very much recommend BOTH the original and the iPhone versions. There’s even an Xbox 360 arcade one if you’re interested!

How DnD is better than WoW:

1) The Snacks.

I don’t have a snack ritual for WoW. I just, you know, eat stuff like normal to ensure I’m not a hungry gamer. But whether we order out or make food or a combination of the above, snacks are always an integral part of playing DnD. They determine the breaks, give us stuff to talk about and do between turns, and they are YUMMY. DnD is possibly the only game I associate food with.

2) The Unknown.

If I’m going into a raid or a 5-man I’ve never been to before in WoW, I better read up on how each boss fight is gonna go so I’m prepared. But DnD? Nope. None of that. No peaking at the Monster Manual! (Depending on your DM.) We walk into a new room and have no idea what will jump out at us. We figure out tactics on the fly, find and exploit weaknesses, and solve puzzles. And then we don’t repeat it, because there are always new adventures and lands and dungeons to go explore!

3) The Face Time. (Ugh, is that term trademarked by Apple now?)

This one probably goes without saying, but I just can’t leave it out. Getting together, face-to-face, with friends for the common goal of fun and conquest is awesome.

How WoW is better than DnD:

1) Math. Lack of.

Unless you’re so heavily into theorycrafting that you’re actually making spreadsheets instead of just plugging numbers into them, you don’t really need to do math in WoW. Not with the regularity of DnD math. Of course, math in DnD isn’t hard, and it’s probably helping us keep dementia from aging at bay. And there’s a certain charm to adding die rolls together and knowing how all the stats work to make you awesome. But there’s something to be said for not having to do math every time you make an attack.

2) It’s faster.

DnD can be slow. Sometimes too slow, especially in this age of short attention spans. WoW is fast and snappy. You’re in and out of a raid in a matter of hours. It took many 5-8 hour sessions to get through our DnD dungeon. And that leads into the last point…..

3) You don’t have to coordinate schedules to play WoW.

You can log in whenever you want. You don’t have to email back and forth with all 25 people you raid with to see what works best for them. The guild sets a raid time and people show up. Our DnD group didn’t meet in May at all because we couldn’t find a time all of us could get together for a 5-hour stretch.

RoboRally is a hilarious robot race through a dangerous factory. It’s possibly the last thing I’d expect from the creator of Magic: The Gathering. Each player has to race to different check points in a certain order and the winner is the first to reach all of them. The challenge is that it isn’t exactly turn-by-turn. These aren’t androids or Cylons we’re talking about. They’re simple robots, and they need to be programmed.  Ahead of time.

So using the movement deck, each player has to program their robot’s next five moves before they happen. Then the round begins and you have to make those moves NO MATTER WHAT.

Easy, right?

Wrong. You were planning on moving your bot forward three spaces? Well your nemesis, the Twonky bot, has priority and slams into you, pushing you on the conveyor belt heading nowhere fast! (Twonky really is one of the RoboRally robots, and also has a presence in Borean Tundra.) You still have to move forward those three spaces because it’s in your program, but the conveyor belt has turned you around, so you’re really going the opposite direction you intended!

This game takes a lot of thinking ahead, visualization, and anticipation of possibilities. It’s easy to learn, hard but fun to play, and quite unique.

THE BASICS:

Play Time: 2 hours

Number of Players: 2-8. I’ve never played with just two. I think it wouldn’t be as hard or chaotic (or fun), but I should try it. 4-5 seems ideal to me, but if you really want your head to explode, go for 8!

Suggested age: 10 and up.

Designer: Richard Garfield (The creator of Magic: The Gathering!)

Artist: Phil Foglio of Girl Genius worked on the original Wizards of the Coast version. The latest Avalon Hill version has art by Peter Bergting,  Bob Carasca, Jennifer Lathrop, and Peter Whitley.

Published: 1994, Wizards of the Coast. Avalon Hill is the most recent publisher.

Buy: $35-45 from various sites.

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Wise and Otherwise is the intellectual elite big brother of party game Balderdash. But instead of words, you deal with proverbs. One designated Reader each round reads the first few words of a proverb, along with the country of origin. Everyone else then writes down an ending to the proverb and passes that to the Reader to be read aloud, along with the correct ending. For instance, an example proverb would be “There’s an old Croatian saying: ‘Those who eat porridge…’” So it’s your job to come up with a convincing ending! Once  all the endings have been read aloud, everyone guesses the right one. You get points for being correct, and points if people guess your answer. I really enjoy creative games like this. It can be a little mentally exhausting, and ego bruising if no one ever chooses your proverbs, but it can also be hilarious. There’s always one person in the group who writes the most ridiculous, laughter-inducing phrases. Then there’s always those rounds when the actual proverb is so unbelievably weird and funny that no one votes for it! I recommend the game, especially if you’re looking to trying to spice up your party game repertoire.

My biggest criticism of Wise and Otherwise is that there’s a board included, which is just dumb. It helps with scoring, so the player who reaches the end of the board first wins the game. This just seems wasteful – it’s just as easy to keep score on a piece of paper (or smart phone) and announce when the first player has reached 20. The inclusion of an unnecessary board seems like a ploy to make you think this is a bigger, more expensive game than it should be. Lose the board and shave ten bucks off the price and now we’re talking.

THE BASICS:

Play Time: 45 minutes

Number of Players: 2-6.

Suggested age: 12 and up.

Published: By wiseandotherwise.com, 1997

Buy: I found it on Amazon for $42. Internet pickings seems slim. Board Game Geek doesn’t rate it very highly, so I’m wondering if this game just kind of died out. Don’t forget to check your local friendly board game store.

Image courtesy of Z-Man Games

Pandemic is a cooperative game in which you and your fellow players team up to eradicate the threat of four deadly global diseases. Each teammate plays one of 5 randomly chosen characters, each with their own unique abilities: Dispatcher, Scientist, Medic, Researcher, and Operations Expert. Every round more disease spreads, as you race to discover cures by traveling the world, using a simple system of cards and tokens A lot of luck is involved, but it’s up to you to come up with the best strategy using your team’s given abilities and situation. The game is fun, but HARD. I’m sorry world, but we regularly succumbed to pandemic while playing leisurely over the Thanksgiving holiday last year. Fortunately the game is fast enough that a loss isn’t too discouraging. Instead it would embolden us to try again, until we were victorious. I sometimes dislike co-op games because they don’t feed my competitive hunger, but the ease and quickness of this game make up for that.

THE BASICS:

Play Time: 60 minutes

Number of Players: 2-4. BGG users recommend 4, and I agree, though 3 and even 2 is fun too!

Suggested age: 10 and up.

Designer: Matt Leacock

Artist: Joshua Cappel (graphics and illustration), Régis Moulun (cover painting)

Published: 2008, by Z-Man Games, among others.

Buy: I found it on Amazon for $27.

THE BASICS:

Play Time: 80 minutes

Number of Players: 2-5. BGG users recommend 4. I’ve most often played it with 4, and I agree that seems ideal. Still, the 2-player version isn’t shabby, and it’s great to have to that available for couples.

Suggested age: 8 and up. I played with two different kids – a 10-year-old and 12-year-old, and while they enjoyed it, they needed a little guidance.

Designer: Philippe Keyaerts

Artist: Miguel Coimbra

Published: 2009, by Days of Wonder, Edge Entertainment

Buy: The game retails for $50 on the Days of Wonder website, but I recommend looking on Amazon or Thought Hammer for a better deal. And don’t forget about your local friendly board game store.

Eat poop, you cat! is my new favorite party game. I played it two Saturday nights in a row, the first at a friend’s birthday gathering, and the second at our place for a board game night. It requires only paper, writing utensils, and your own creativity. A stop watch helps too (or in our case, an iPhone). Here are the rules. Everyone gets a sheet of paper and a writing utensil. We happen to have a lot of legal (8.5″ x 14″) size paper laying around, and we found that to be the perfect size, since we wound up using its entire length. But regular letter size paper is fine. A lot of us preferred pencils to pens, and that’s really up to the individuals.

Ok. Once everyone has what they need, each person makes up a sentence and writes it down. A sentence like, say, “Eat poop, you cat!” They pass the sentence to the person on their right, who then proceeds to draw a picture of the sentence. It’s good to set a time limit on this part. We did four minutes. Once everyone is done drawing, fold the sentence back so it can’t be seen, and pass to the next person, who writes a sentence based on what they see in the drawing. They then fold the drawing back so only the new sentence is visible, and pass it on for another drawing. You stop when the you get your own drawing/sentence back, which is probably drastically changed. Then everyone is seized with hysterical laughter as they see what their sentences morphed into. The whole game can be a little mentally exhausting. I haven’t done more than two rounds back to back, because we were all a little pooped afterwards. But it’s so fun to see what crazy sentence or drawing is coming your way, and the ultimate payoff is pouring over every sheet of paper at the end. I recommend switching the direction you pass the papers on the second round so you get a different person’s perspective. Below is one of the results. It morphed from “That rug really tied the room together” (movie quote alert!) to “The sun made me happy until it made me sad and full of zits.”