I've been running a gamers club at my local library for almost 5 years, and the one thing I get to do every year is write up a wish-list of games I'd like for the club and present it to our 'liason' who uses our club budget to buy what they can off said list. We can get anything from a 1 lb. bag of dice to a new Munchkin expansion. We can even get rpg books like D&D and whatnot. The only two limits we have are 1) the budget for that year 2) what we buy has to still be in 'print' or still produced.
This year I'm a bit low on ideas, so I need you guys to give me some stuff I can put down on the wish-list. What are some of your favorite games(Aside from SotM and ST, I bring my own personal copies to every meeting ;) )? I've got the start of a list, but anything else you guys can suggest would be helpful. We're an 18 and up club as well, so games like Cards Against Humanity and the like are just fine.
My favorite games besides SotM are Space Alert and Hanabi, two excellent coops. Dead of Winter has in interesting take on semi-coops. I really enjoyed demoing Compounded at GenCon, and just ordered a copy for myself.
Out of Board and Card games, I totally recommend BattleCon, Smash Up, Zombicide, and Mice and Mystics. Those are at least the games I tend to play the most (aside from GtG games prior to their merger with Dice Hate Me Games) whenever I have a group to play with.
As for a Roleplaying System, my group pretty much exclusively plays Anima: Beyond Fantasy at this point. I enjoy it, the only downside to it is the company incharge of translating it is taking their sweet time bringing in the second edition and the next book that contains more setting details. Fortunately, the first is easily remedied thanks to the fans, which have created a document that details the changes. The spell system being the thing that changed the most.
I recently acquired Eight Minute Empire. It’s a pretty simple game of board control combined with item matching. It has some good possibilities for strategic depth while still remaining very simple. As the name implies, it is also very short - which means it fills a nice niche at game nights when you need something to fill just ten or fifteen minutes while you wait for that group next to you to finish agonizing over their last auction in Power Grid.
Edit: some other ones that haven’t been mentioned and are in my friends’ games cabinets: Stone Age, Zooloretto, and Alhambra.
Let's be clear, what I mean is you HAVE to oppose one another, and inconvenience the other actively. Games like Tsuro allow you to largely, if you want, act without intent to interfere.
Honestly, I despise outright hostile antagonistic games along the lines of Risk, where the ONLY goal is destruction. Those games do not appeal. I'm happier when the game requires working at odds, but not violently – which is what this category is. Fierce might not be the right term, but it is nonetheless inarguable dispute occurring rather than just letting circumstances benefit you more.
I recently made a list of our current board games before the Boonshoft Museum Geekfest, to which I brought nearly everything). Here's our list!
Owned Games:
Cash and Guns 2.0
Ninja Burger Arkham Horror (with King in Yellow and Innsmouth Horror expansions) Apples to Apples (Party box version) Era of the Ninja Red Dragon Inn (1 & 2) Estimated Time to Invasion Zombicide Fortress America Betrayal at House on the Hill Ghost Stories Revolution (with Asylum expansion ) Sentinels of the multiverse (with all expansions) Sentinel Tactics (with Uprising expansion) Snake Oil Innsmouth Escape Hex Hex (with Hex Hex Next ) Pittsburgh 68 Toboggans of Doom Three Cheers for Master Unspeakable Words Pirates vs. Dinosaurs Munchkin (Cthulhu, Super, Impossible, and Axe Cop varieties) Risk: Godstorm Castle Ravenloft D&D Adventure Game Zombie Dice Innsmouth Escape Legends and Lies
Compounded (with expansions) (as soon as I give it to my wife as her birthday present)
Fiercely Oppositional: Ticket to Ride, Carcassone, Formula D, King of Tokyo
I've got to say, you don't have a very fierce group there, with Ticket to Ride and Carcassone.
Let's be clear, what I mean is you HAVE to oppose one another, and inconvenience the other actively. Games like Tsuro allow you to largely, if you want, act without intent to interfere. Honestly, I despise outright hostile antagonistic games along the lines of Risk, where the ONLY goal is destruction. Those games do not appeal. I'm happier when the game requires working at odds, but not violently -- which is what this category is. Fierce might not be the right term, but it is nonetheless inarguable dispute occurring rather than just letting circumstances benefit you more.
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In my experience, you don't have to oppose each other in Ticket to Ride or Carcassone. In both games you can act purely in your own self interest and still create an engaging game. Now, sometime you will take actions that will interfere with your oponents, but you're still doing so in order primarily to benefit yourself rather than specifically to hurt your opponents. Compare say,Settlers of Catan, where moving the robber has only minor benefits for yourself, and is mostly a tool used to deny your opponents of resources. That is a fiercely oppositional aspect, which neither Carcasssone or Ticket to Ride possesses.
Now I do think that this depends on your gaming group. In my family we tend to have more friendly playstyles, and everyone can play to their own self-interest rather than trying to deny each other. In other groups a more aggressive playstyle might be called for.
Incidentally, this is partially why I like Dungeon Lords so much. In Dungeon Lords you pretty much never play to hurt your opponents (because balancing your own resources is too tricky to devote attention elsewhere), but collecting resources requires you to constantly play around them, meaning that you get a great deal of interaction with very little hostile intent.
I'm a big fan of Glory to Rome. Sadly, it is out of print and so doesn't meet your criteria; but, you might try Mottainai, which is a very similar game (by the same designer) and was just released at GenCon.
My go-to games (other than SotM) are The Resistance & Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards. Others in my group have other games (we may have one or two Kickstarter addicts), such as Small World and Munchkin. Of course, this assumes we're not playing our role-playing campaign. Right now we're doing Only War, the WH40K Imperial Guard RPG. We might actually try to run a game of Battletech at some point, too.
There’s a whole class of resource management or worker placement games that meet these criteria. I like Puerto Rico and Stone Age as examples - you are trying to build the best thing for yourself, and sometimes that means blocking somebody else out, but it doesn’t have to involve conflict. Seven Wonders can be played similarly, though the military option exists.
There's actually some theory behind why so many multi-player games eschew direct conflict. If players can directly hurt each other, then all games become more-or-less isomorphic to "pound on the leader", and you lose the interesting dynamics that make a game unique. So either you'll have attacks that hurt all players equally (Dominion) or "attacks" limited to resource competition (Ticket to Ride, etc) or otherwise restricted (Titan, where you have to roll right) so that early-game choices matter. (That is, so that an early leader may face some headwind but isn't automatically dragged down.)
There's still the occassional game that's all about politics and trading and where you can make direct attacks (Diplomacy, Game of Thrones?), but they're clearly marked as such.