4 ms·

Inis - Clever Celtic-themed area control game, with tight drafting of cards for actions, but the ability to gain some crazy special one-time actions unique from

Inis - Clever Celtic-themed area control game, with tight drafting of cards for actions, but the ability to gain some crazy special one-time actions unique from anyone else as well. Beautiful artwork on the cards as well. Spirit Island - Clever cooperative game about building up spirits to protect native tribes and expel colonist invaders. Tons of variety, soloable. Troyes - Love the puzzle of using dice to take actions, and you're not limited to your own dice, because you can buy the dice that other players drew (and pay them so they can buy dice off you in later rounds). There's no time wasted with negotiation either, you can buy them before they've gotten a chance to spend them. Lots of euro goodness surrounding that central mechanism as well. Arkham Horror The Card Game - Story based campaigns where it's okay to lose a mission, the story will accomodate for it. Each campaign is very different from the others. Also great solo. Bohnanza - My favorite light card and negotiation game Kahuna - Super tight 2 player area control where you can build up conditions to start a cascade of destruction to go from losing big to winning big. YINSH - favorite 2 player abstract, where you use rings to place tokens, jump other tokens to flip them (like Othello), and once you get a 5 in a row, you remove one of your rings, which makes you weaker but is also how you win the game. Cribbage - 2 player. For such an old game, it's got a surprisingly modern point salad combo feel to it. Only annoying bit is how often you have to reshuffle, which isn't a problem if you play some of the excellent apps available. Can't Stop - My go-to push your luck game. I enjoy rolling the four dice and making a decision of how to combine them into two pairs for numbers, advancing down those tracks, and deciding how long I think I can stay in without busting. It's possible to win the game in one turn if you get lucky enough, but odds are you will bust if you keep going too far, so at what point do you lock it in?

floren 4y ago
> Only annoying bit is how often you have to reshuffle, which isn't a problem if you play some of the excellent apps available. If you spend an hour learning how to shuffle properly, the reshuffling becomes just another enjoyable part of the process! edit: not implying that you, personally, shuffle badly now, just that I find the act of shuffling pleasing in its own right But speaking of cribbage "apps", the bsdgames package on Linux distros will generally include a pretty good command-line cribbage implementation.
- cableshaft 4y ago
  I get paranoid about bending my cards, so I tend to shuffle in a less swift way to avoid bending them (I don't care as much about it for traditional playing cards but kind of a habit from my hobby board games where everything is a lot more expensive to replace and often out of print). Command-line Cribbage is interesting, might check that out sometime. I'm partial to the Cribbage Classic iOS/Android app, as it can analyze your decisions if you enable it, and let you know how optimal your choices are and even can provide a full ranked list of each 4-card hand you can make out of the 6 cards, with minimum possible score and average score. It can also remind you when you're about to miss a scoring opportunity (like you place a card down to get to 15 and score 2 points, but it goes "yo dummy, you've got a card that can make that a run and score 3 points, you sure you want to do that?). I don't really need that now, but when I was learning it was useful to enable. I think it helped me get better at the game a lot faster by seeing "Oh damn, my choice is like the fifth best? What's the best one....oh, okay, yeah that makes sense" Although sometimes it's like "Hey, that hand is only going to score on average 6.16 points. You should pick this hand which will score on average 6.18 points!"

floren 4y ago

> Only annoying bit is how often you have to reshuffle, which isn't a problem if you play some of the excellent apps available. If you spend an hour learning how to shuffle properly, the reshuffling becomes just another enjoyable part of the process! edit: not implying that you, personally, shuffle badly now, just that I find the act of shuffling pleasing in its own right But speaking of cribbage "apps", the bsdgames package on Linux distros will generally include a pretty good command-line cribbage implementation.

cableshaft 4y ago
I get paranoid about bending my cards, so I tend to shuffle in a less swift way to avoid bending them (I don't care as much about it for traditional playing cards but kind of a habit from my hobby board games where everything is a lot more expensive to replace and often out of print). Command-line Cribbage is interesting, might check that out sometime. I'm partial to the Cribbage Classic iOS/Android app, as it can analyze your decisions if you enable it, and let you know how optimal your choices are and even can provide a full ranked list of each 4-card hand you can make out of the 6 cards, with minimum possible score and average score. It can also remind you when you're about to miss a scoring opportunity (like you place a card down to get to 15 and score 2 points, but it goes "yo dummy, you've got a card that can make that a run and score 3 points, you sure you want to do that?). I don't really need that now, but when I was learning it was useful to enable. I think it helped me get better at the game a lot faster by seeing "Oh damn, my choice is like the fifth best? What's the best one....oh, okay, yeah that makes sense" Although sometimes it's like "Hey, that hand is only going to score on average 6.16 points. You should pick this hand which will score on average 6.18 points!"