The Gaming Den

So I'm preparing for Christmas now, and (in order to fill the hole in my soul) I'm looking into buying a new game that I can play with a group of friends, but I honestly don't know where to start looking. I'm hoping you all could shoot me some suggestions.

I like fantasy and adventure games, but I don't like the thing that Catan, Lifeboat, and Munchkin do to friendships so I'd rather avoid games like those. My current interests are in Arkham Horror, Dominion, and Darkest Night, but I'm trying to aim for something below $40.

I'll be visiting the store soon to browse, but the Black Friday rush will probaby keep me waiting for a week or so. Any suggestions?

If you want a cooperative boardgame, I like Pandemic a lot. Not a huge fan of Shadows over Camelot. One of the LotR games was cooperative and okay. And I think someone here on the gaming den had a nice co-op game that recently got published, but I think you'd have to order it online. It looked good, but I haven't played it.

That would be Darkest Night. It's pretty fun, but the OP seems to have it already.

...You Lost Me wrote:. My current interests are in Arkham Horror, Dominion, and Darkest Night, but I'm trying to aim for something below $40?

Well I have been obsessed with a game that is a descendant from and improvement upon Dominion for the past year and a half....but it's priced at $50 from the manufacturer.

Alternately, Dixit is really neat to play....provided you play it by the spirit of the rules instead of examining the strange collusion strategies the score track actually encourages when you get hyper-competitive about winning.

Sentinels of the Multiverse is a fine, cooperative game that supports 2-5 players. It's entirely card-based (quick setup, few fiddly components) and a normal game takes about 45 minutes to play (which is short enough that most people, even the girl/boyfriends who got dragged along, are willing to play it). Also, you get a LOT of game for a relatively inexpensive price.

The premise of the game is that you are a squad of superheroes fighting a central villain and their various minions to thwart whatever that particular villain's scheme is. To add further variety, each game can take place in a different location (in metropolis, in a dinosaur-filled jungle, in the ruins of Atlantis, or on a Mars base, to name a few examples). Every turn one or more cards are played from the villain deck, introducing stuff that will harm or hinder the heroes, then each hero takes their turn (play a card, use a power, draw a card, done), then the top environment card is revealed. Environment cards tend to be indiscriminate in altering the game; sometimes a T-rex will show up and start snacking on minions, sometimes a meteor shower will force both sides to cower for a turn, and sometimes an innocent bystander will need saving forcing the heroes to deal with that in addition to the villain. Since no one is playing as the villain, all of their actions are scripted (e.g. Baron Blade deals 4 fire damage to the hero with the highest HP).

There are 10 radically different heroes that come with the starting game (each with their own character card and unique, 40-card deck), as well as 4 villains (each with their own character card, rule card, and 25-card deck), and 4 environment decks. The heroes range from the simple (like an Egyptian-themed Thor who mainly blows stuff up) to the complex (like a Mr. Freeze character who can use his various ice-suit enhancements to act as a damage slingshot by receiving fire damage and shooting out multiple, stronger ice beams) with a lot of different types of gameplay and hero concepts included. The art is nice, each card has an entertaining quip at the bottom of it, the rules are simple, the gameplay is quick, and the difficulty is reasonably easy to tailor to the group. On that last point, some villains are explicitly supposed to be harder than others, plus each villain has advanced rules to allow a seasoned group to up the difficulty. Plus, some environments or villains are easier or harder to take down depending on the group composition (e.g. the villain that brings out lots of wimpy minions is easier if you have someone who has lots of area-of-effect attacks). Oh, and one last thing I found elegant was that even when your hero is brought to zero health, you flip their card over to their incapacitated side and you get a list of three actions you can still take (like being a discovered traitor in Shadows over Camelot). That way no one is ever truly out of the game. It makes for a great story for someone to heroically sacrifice themselves, but it gets boring sitting on the sideline; this way you can do the former and avoid the latter.

There are two expansions out in case the game is well received in you group, and there are two more planned to come out next year. It's a great game and all of the gaming groups I've exposed to it have loved it.

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.com/

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1026 ... multiverse

Yeah, Pandemic is a great idea if you want cooperation between players.

Forbidden Island is fun.

You can always download Frank's board game and print it out on card stock.. That's pretty cheap if you just buy the card stock and print it on a personal printer.

I've had a lot of fun with Pandemic since I've bought it. It's relatively easy to learn and teach, plus, with there being more roles available than players and having three difficulty levels, there's a pretty good replay value.

I've played about half a game of Sentinels of the Multiverse and I had a lot of fun. I'd recommend it.

I don't remember the cost, but Seven Wonders is a lot of fun. It takes a bit to teach the game, but once all the players know it, it plays pretty quickly. A game can be done in around 30 minutes. It's a drafting game where you pass your hand around, so you have a bit less control over what you get to play each turn.

As for Dominion, I recently got Dark Ages, which is a lot of fun. It also has more kingdom cards than any other set (30, or so?).