Has it been a consistent hobby since childhood or was there a single game, a mechanism, theme or social situation which hooked you in?
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Sadly, the first board game I played was Monopoly at ~10, and that drove me away. Then I rediscovered them in uni with Settlers of Catan and Risk.
Yeah it’s a shame so many people associate board games with boring roll and moves, or family arguments.
A college buddy introduced me to Settlers of Catan, and the rest was history.
I’ve still not played Catan, but I’ve converted a few friends with Cascadia. Catan is the most controversial game I’ve come across, plenty of lovers and haters in equal measure
I’ve never really encountered anybody that hates the game itself, just… certain people who don’t play it well together…
Catan is the Monopoly of adult board games. The first half is fun, then you figure out who’s going to win, and the second half is just going through motions with no fun.
I honestly haven’t run into that much with the group I play Catan with. Our games are almost always neck and neck, usually with someone stealing the win right out from another person that seemed to be the closest.
Although we have always played with the “house rule” that you can’t play either of your starting settlements on a coast/dock, so maybe that helps with balancing. 🤷🏼♂️
Family always played Scrabble and I did not like it… In college my friends frequently played Dominion but I always opted out because I thought I didn’t like board games. Eventually I tried it and fell down a rabbit hole
I’d always liked board games, but the wife and I never had anything beyond the ‘classics’, which were fun but kind of been there done that sort of vibe. Then one day a couple years ago we went down to our friend’s house and they showed us Unstable Unicorns, Dixit, and Munchkin and our minds were blown. We immediately started buying the games we’d played and a couple more that had cool art and as we played more with friends and by ourselves we kept buying more and more, even being able to show our friends games they hadn’t heard of. And now we have too many 🤣
Tell me about it, they’re so hard to resist, especially when you’ve got a gaming partner. I love the nature themes like Meadow, Wingspan, etc.
I took Cascadia over to a mate’s, who expected something like monopoly, and he was blown away.
Playing Wingspan as we speak!! I was a huge bird nut growing up so that one was an instant pickup when I heard about it. I still even have a box of a ton of bird statues and pictures in storage.
I’ve been meaning to check out Cascadia, and I’ll have to add Meadow to the list of potentials as well. Parks is another pretty fun nature one that we have, really cool art.
I do really enjoy Wingspan now, the artwork and production quality is a huge appeal, I also use the Wingsong app when my son’s around, as he enjoys hearing the birds.
I love Cascadia, it’s not deep and I feel I’ve maxed out my strategy, but it’s such a pleasure to play, especially with non gamers.
I was looking at Parks last week, do you have either expansion? Was hoping for a big box, but there aren’t any plans.
We do have one of the parks expansions (can’t remember which one) but we still haven’t had the chance to try it out.
Been playing board games of one stripe or another since I was 4-5yrs old and my dad taught me how to play chess, backgammon, checkers, Monopoly etc. Early teens brought more complex games like Shogun, Catan and Roborally (I am HORRENDOUSLY bad at games with move programming like Roborally) along with CCG’s and RPG’s into the mix.
Jeez! Now I feel really old realizing I’ve been gaming for nearly 40yrs.
Love it! I hope I’m setting my kids up to enjoy gaming. Been playing chess with one since he was 6, have enjoyed watching him discover strategies and understand how to defend.
Wow, so many Catan inductees here.
For me it was the notoriously shitty Civilization (2002). I was around 11 years old. Any designer board game is incredible if it’s the first one you’ve ever played.
Catan… The “human warrior” of boardgame introductions, but it did its job
It branched from there to Citadels, Villainous, Rummikub and others until reaching my inevitable fate of becoming a Wingspan addict
I’ve been playing board games my whole life, but when I was 9 my cousin busted out catan, that was the first proper longer game with actual mechanics. It was the moment I realized board games could be more than a boring family activity.
As a kid I liked boardgames, but often I would have to play them alone and would play some of them on the PlayStation or similar. This basically started the transition of playing games on video consoles and later PC. Boardgames became a forgotten pastime and I raveled in the complexity of pc games for many years. I even disregarded boardgames because I thought they could not compete with the glory of PC games. Of course I was utterly wrong.
It all changed when I got Slay the Spire Early Access on PC and loved it. My gf also saw the game and liked it as well. We both thought its silly to play what in essence is a card game alone, on our own computers. So we venture to a local boardgame shop and told them that we play Slay the Spire and the lad, in his wisdom, suggested Dominion. What a great start it was! We played Dominion for like 9 months pretty much every evening before we thought it could use an addon. Soon more and more games and expansions entered our collection. Here we are, 5 years later and boardgames have become a very central part of our hobbies.
Ah that’s a great story, I had the same experience early on, got heavily into video games for a long time before wanting something more tactile and social. I enjoy Slay and Monster Train, maybe I should check out Dominion. I’m not very good at them…
If I start dating again, board games will be an essential requirement :D
I think Dominion is super great and has aged well. But if you want to take the deckbuilding to the next level you should check out Clank!
My family always played the standard 80s/90s board and card games, I picked up Carcassonne in 2012 but it didn’t really click, plus my girlfriend wasn’t into it.
It wasn’t until 2021 when I picked up Azul and Sagrada, that I realised how amazing games have become. The pieces, rulebook, simplicity and depth.
First time playing a worker placement Euro was a real eye opener, having been raised on roll-and-move.
I’ve always had the core family bargains around the house; Cluedo, Monopoly, chess, backgammon, as well as slightly older pub games like shove ha’penny, shut the box, devil among the tailors (pub tabletop skittles). But with the young family a couple of years ago we started looking for new things, found Carcassonne & settlers of catan. Pride of the newest games I have is split between ‘The King is Dead’ and a full size Carrom table. And I built my own Mah Jong table to house an automatic mechanism that shuffles the tiles and racks them for you. (We’ve had a traditional set for years and always played a UK version of Hong Kong rules across a couple of generations.) Yeah I clicked with board games as a kid and have always looked forward to a chance to play them with family and friends.
Love the sound of that, I’ve always wanted to try Mah Jong, and those tables look very cool.
They generally still don’t. I’m very picky about my board games and also about the people I play with. If you just grab a random well liked board game and a number of average board game enthusiast and sit me at a table with them. I might have a good time but it’s unlikely.
I feel the same way about the people, in my case anyone who takes it too seriously, takes ages every turn or doesn’t like losing can cause me to lose interest.
Are there specific genres you don’t like, or is it a light/heavy weight thing?
People taking it too seriously are one thing. Another is people not taking games seriously at all. As in they just come to chat and barely engage with the game and won’t learn the rules even after multiple times playing. They will also be super lax with the rules and basically do whatever.
The worst offenders are the ones who are super lax with the rules, taking back turns etc, unless it is against themselves. Maybe I just had some bad luck. My current board games group is super fun though.
As for games I dislike games where the good choices are too obvious. It doesn’t have to be heavy to achieve that imo. But it has to have a minimum of complexity for me to enjoy it.
I’ve not come across that, but I’d probably just stop playing, it’d drive me nuts. My crowd tends to turn up with laminated rule sheets…
On taking back turns, I’m lenient once or twice if done quickly, or if it’s a genuine mistake, but otherwise, no chance.
When my dad did blockades in parcheesi, and also when I found Carcassonne
For me it was either Arkham Horror 2nd edition or Last Night on Earth. Big thematic games with some fun mechanics that we would have stories about playing for months after they were finished.
My friends and I in high school spent a lot of days just hanging out. For one reason or another we started playing monopoly off and on as we chatted. As a few weeks went by we quickly realized there was a lot more to the game than meets the eye and our strategies started to develop. We went from just rolling and going with the flow to buying everything we touched and negotiating some intense trade contracts. We moved from there to Catan and Dominion and saw how much more depth there could be. We have all been hooked ever since.
