Hamster's top 20 board games

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

15: Dice Town

2-5 players (definitely best with 4 or 5)

Boardgamegeek blurb: "Each player gets a cup with five poker dice and eight dollars. Each turn a player will put together a poker hand and depending on the roll, take control of various key places in Dice Town that will allow him to perform the corresponding action of the location."

Dice Town is poker dice mixed with a cowboy theme. There's some bluffing involved (a bit like Liar's Dice) as you shake the dice and build your poker hand. Then depending on whether you have the most 9s, 10s, Jacks, Queens or Kings you get to do something different in the "Town". The best poker hand also gets a bonus action and then anyone who didn't win anything visits Doc Badluck to get a lesser "sympathy" action. Considering it's just poker dice with a Wild West board and graphics, it becomes surprisingly fun and with an entertaining theme. Cool little gold nuggets too. Nice amount of "screw you over" edge to it too.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

14: Agricola

1-5 players (yes, solo....)

Boardgamegeek blurb: "In Agricola, you're a farmer in a wooden shack with your spouse and little else. On a turn, you get to take only two actions, one for you and one for the spouse, from all the possibilities you'll find on a farm: collecting clay, wood, or stone; building fences; and so on. You might think about having kids in order to get more work accomplished, but first you need to expand your house. And what are you going to feed all the little rugrats?

The game supports many levels of complexity, mainly through the use (or non-use) of two of its main types of cards, Minor Improvements and Occupations. In the beginner's version (called the Family Variant in the U.S. release), these cards are not used at all. For advanced play, the U.S. release includes three levels of both types of cards; Basic (E-deck), Interactive (I-deck), and Complex (K-deck), and the rulebook encourages players to experiment with the various decks and mixtures thereof. Aftermarket decks such as the Z-Deck and the L-Deck also exist.

Agricola is a turn-based game. There are 14 game turns plus 6 harvest phases (after turn 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 14).

Each player starts with two playing tokens (farmer and wife) and thus can take two actions per turn. There are multiple options, and while the game progresses, you'll have more and more: first thing in a turn, a new action card is flipped over.

Problem: Each action can be taken just once per turn, so it's important to do some things with high preference.

Each player also starts with a hand of 7 job cards (of more than 160 total) and 7 item cards (of more than 140 total) that he/she may use during the game if they fit in his/her strategy. Speaking of which, there are countless strategies, some depending on your card hand. Sometimes it's a good choice to stay on course, and sometimes it is better to react to your opponents' actions."

It's a game about farming! In the middle ages! WAHHHHEEEEEEEYYYYYYYY! My old man was a head foreman on a fruit farm for years. He used to get home in the evening, shattered and weather beaten and would spend an hour falling asleep in the bath while listening to the Shipping Forecast on Radio 4. Glamorous it ain't.

Still, the game is highly rated amongst "game fans" because it's actually really good. Your little farm builds up on your board depending on whether you want to focus more on vegetables, wheat or different animals - you make your house bigger and have babies so you can do more options each season.

It also came out before that bloody Farmville.

Yes, there's a LOT of junk in this game.

[Ruki]

I heard a lot of good things about Agricola...but my main problem with it is: Not a lot of player interaction (or so I've been lead to believe).

[stokeriño]

That looks like one of those games where just rifling through the contents of the box would make me want to kill myself.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

13: Civilization

2-7 players

Boardgamegeek blurb: "CIVILIZATION is a game of skill for 2 to 7 players. It covers the development of ancient civilizations from the invention of agriculture c. 8000 B.C. to the emergence of Rome around the middle of the third century B.C. Each player leads a nation of peoples over a mapboard of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East as they attempt to carve a niche for themselves and their culture.

Although battles and territorial strategy are important, this is not a war game because it is not won by battle or conquest. Instead, the object of play is to gain a level of overall advancement involving cultural, economic, and political factors so that such conflicts that do arise are a result of rivalry and land shortage rather than a desire to eliminate other players. Nomad and farmer, warrior and merchant, artisan and citizen all have an essential part to play in the development of civilization. It is the player who most effectively changes emphasis between these various outlooks who will achieve the best balance - and win.

(from the Introduction to the Avalon Hill edition rulebook)

This game has a huge following and is widely regarded as one of the best games about ancient civilizations. Each player takes on the role of leader of an ancient civilization, such as the Illyrians or Babylonians. Your task is to guide your people through the ages by expanding your empire and using its proceeds to finance new technological advances, such as Literacy, Metalworking, or Law. The advancements help your civilization better cope with its problems as well as help bring new advancements"

It's the game that Sid Meier based his kind of famous computer game on. It was made in the same year that I was born, which makes it old. It also takes hours and hours to play. It's great though.

Now there's also a new board game based on the computer game based on the old board game. It's just like The Producers.

With the "Western Expansion" to the left.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

I heard a lot of good things about Agricola...but my main problem with it is: Not a lot of player interaction (or so I've been lead to believe).

The interaction basically comes from that each available action can only be done by one person each "season" so if you want stone and your opponent wants stone then you need to take the stone on your action before he does. However you ARE creating a farm on your own board and no-one can affect that so interaction is relatively low.

[LUKIE]

I have a version of the Civ. Boardgame, and it's awful.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

Yeah, I think two games have come from the computer game. The newest one is supposed to be pretty good but the other one (with the map of the entire world) is terrible.

[OctoberRaven]

So the pitchcar game is essentially paper football where you can intentionally screw over other players, and on a race track?

Awesome.

I doubt any games I'm actually familiar with, save maybe Risk, will be on this, but still interesting stuff.

[KevinStorm]

I hope to see Stratego make an appearance. ^_^

If Stratego isn't in this list, Hamster is dead to me.

[Mr. X]

Hammy, you better have HeroQuest on this or you're dead to me.

[LUKIE]

Hammie, one of your own personal games better be number one, or you're dead to me.

[Plubby]

I tried to play Hamster's Footy Manager game. I had to create my own Balance Sheets just to wrap my head around startup. I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't been studying accounting that semester, I'd have been fucked. A smarter person than me might have been able to handle it better. Might hit up some other Hamster games and see how I go there.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

Running a football club ain't easy darlin'.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

12: Space Alert

1-5 players

Boardgamegeek blurb: "It's a cooperative team survival game. Players become crew members of a small spaceship scanning dangerous sectors of galaxy. The missions last just 10 real-time minutes (hyperspace jump, sector scan, hyperspace jump back) and the only task the players have is to protect their ship.

On 2 CDs (or Scenario cards if you don't have a CD player available) are ten minute long soundtracks that represent central computer announcements about the presence of various threats. These vary from space battleships and interceptors to different interstellar monsters and abominations, asteroids or even intruders and malfunctions on the spaceship. Players have to agree who will take care of which task and coordinate their actions (moving around the ship, firing weapons, distributing energy, using battlebots to deal with intruders, launching guided missiles, etc.) in real time to defend the ship. Only a well-working team can survive 10 minutes and make the jump back to safety.

The game offers several difficulty levels, huge variability and a unique experience for one to five player teams. One mission lasts only about 30 minutes, including setup and evaluation."

Space Alert's a co-op game, which is cool. It also has CDs for the missions which every now and then give you a heart attack by blaring out an emergency that you have to react to, which is cool. The game is also stacked against you, which is cool. You have ten minutes in which to plan everything you're going to do to survive the attacks from ships and sinister beings (both attacking inside and outside the ship). Thing is, you're doing it against time and you might not have the right cards to go where you want to, so you're all talking at each other trying to make sure that everyone is going to the right place at the right time to do the right thing.

Then after the ten minutes you take a breather and, in your own time, work through what happened - usually someone screwed up and there was no energy being sent to the weapon that someone else was firing. It's stressful and frenetic but it's great fun. They've also released an add-on (which I don't have) which includes the rules for a group of you playing a continuing mission against all different 10 minute attacks with your characters levelling up and learning new skills, meaning you'll be even more attached to your guys when your ship gets destroyed.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

11: Through the Desert

2-5 players

Boardgamegeek blurb: "Each player attempts to score the most points by snaking caravan routes through the desert, trying to reach oases and blocking off sections of the desert. Many people feel that it is reminiscent of Go.

Publisher's Description

From the award-winning game designer Reiner Knizia comes a game of strategy, patience, and cool plastic camels! The desert is still treacherous, mysterious, and without mercy. But for those willing to risk the dangers of the shifting, sun-baked sands, the desert holds riches beyond compare.

In Through the Desert, two to five players each control a tribe of nomads vying for control of the desert. By establishing caravans and taking over oases, the players gain points as their tribes increase in power.

Strategy is essential in deciding how and where to build your tribe's caravans. There are multiple ways to gain points and several ways to win. Should you try to build the longest caravan? Or should you dominate the desert's oases? Don't forget to keep an eye on your opponents' caravans, or you may find your own tribe cut off from valuable water holes."

Through the Desert is another game (like Carcassonne) that is available on iPhone store and Android. It's a simple game but allows for plenty of strategy. Each player gets different coloured camels and lays them in the desert before in turn adding two camels to the front or end of any of their lines (making sure each line remains unbroken). You can pick up point tiles for quick points, build the line up to the oases for more points, get the longest line in that colour for even more points, or try and totally encircle an area for even more points. There's not much theme to it and it feels more like an abstract (like the ancient Chinese/Japanese game Go) but the level of thinking is pretty good and it looks great when it's being played.

[KevinStorm]

Reading about Space Alert made me nerd out a little bit.

[Toe]

Yeah, I want to try Space Alert.

[OctoberRaven]

Space Alert sounds awesome. I also find the box art unintentionally funny as apparently in the future we'll all look like we're cosplaying as Cyclops from the X-Men movies.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

10: Crokinole

2-4 players

Boardgamegeek blurb: "This game is like shuffleboard in the round. Players take turns flicking disks on a board, trying to score points by attaining central regions. The main stipulation being that contact with the other teams' pieces must be made in order for the disk to remain on the board afterward. Although the game uses quite a bit of skill to flick the disks, there's a very significant strategy element to the game. There are many different variants and rules, as this game is very old and has had many different incarnations over the years."

Another flicky game but this one's traditional and apparently relatively popular in Canada. It's the ultimate "one more time" game. Played solo or in teams, take it in turns to flick a disc towards the central hole. If it goes in you get points, if not then your opponent flicks their disc and has to hit yours. It keeps going until all discs have been flicked and points are added up. There's just the right level of skill in the game that rewards repeat play and there's plenty of enjoyment from smacking your disc into your opponent's and sending theirs off the board.