@Draugnar
Sure you can bluff at Scrabble, if you play with challenges.

Maybe that would make it more fun to me. How does Scrabble with challenges work?

"Why do you call Ticket to Ride an abomination?"

I find it rather monotonous. There's very little you can do in the game, and there's not enough conflict, competition, or suspense.

The luck doesn't have much to do with it. I mean, any dice rolling game is all luck. For example - Settlers. But Settlers is great because you can be one point away from winning and somebody out of nowhere comes and steals the victory.

Ticket to Ride is good when you want to play against casual gamers who would find something like Carcassone to confusing.

I've been enjoying nightmare chess and four person chess (and the combination of the two) quite a bit lately.

All the other games you list are top notch. I especially like RFTG, Memoir 44 and Puerto Rico - though Puerto Rico's set-up of having brown men (settlers) working your plantations is, uh, a little....strange.

I don't much like tile games, except Al Hambra, that game is fantastic.

Heh, what do the last 30+ posts have to do with who is going to Origins? Good posts on a variety of good games, though...

@Putin: If you want a monotonous game, play Power Grid. There is almost no variation from game to game.

@mal

Draug can attest to this better than I, but I think you'll find that poker becomes much less fun when you're actually playing it as a source of income.

I love RISK!, but I tend to make people cry and quit, so I can only play with a select group of people. A&A and Settlers are also fun.

Rail Barons is fun for the first 6 hours, but after about 12 hours it gets pretty monotonous. By about 16 hours we usually quit; we've never finished a game.

For card games I like Bridge, Poker (specifically Texas Hold'Em, but 7 Card Stud is also fun, and Black Jack).

Oh, and then there are games like Panzer Blitz and Feudel, which are just disasters.

I've been meaning to play Power Grid. And I enjoy Panzer Blitz :(

@Draugnar
Challenges are where, if your opponent plays a word that you don't think is legit, you can challenge it. If the word is in whatever word list you're using, the challenger loses his next turn. If it isn't, then the play that was challenged comes off and whoever played it loses that turn.

Settlers is the same way . . . the luck evens out if you play a lot.

Fjords is a fun two player game. Quick and simple, but different every time.

i havn't heard of/played most of the games everyone is talking about lol, abge i agree it wouldnt be as much fun playing poker for a source of income but i still enjoy playing it as much as possible.

@abgemacht - Feudal is a great game. It's like chess but with pieces set up in secret and terrain effecting moves. And the fact that you can easily play 4-player if you like...

And I enjoy Panzer Blitz with another player who knows how to play. It's only a pain witrh a n00b cause they can't read the pieces and quickly resolve movements and attacks. It's like playing Star Fleet Battles. If you know what your doing, you can get into it and the numbers sort of fade away. If not, you spend way too much time trying to resolve movement and turn rates along with tracking torpedo positions.

And yes, poker is now about the money and not as much fun. Although there is still a thrill in taking a fish to the cleaners with a perfect slow play and a solid read.

@Draug

When you explain it like that, Feudal sounds awesome, but I've played many times and have never been particularly impressed. It is nice that you can play 2-6 players, but other than that...

I'll admit that I could be playing it wrong (or perhaps I have an old version with outdated rules) but Panzer Blitz seems seriously broken to me. I've played a couple times and my friends and I studied the rules very carefully. It just seemed like things could happen that made no sense.

@abge

Do you like chess? If not, you won't like Feudal.

I do like Chess

i love chess because its fast paced and you have to think a few turns ahead and then when the opponent makes a move your not expecting you have to evaluate your new position and try to determine why they made the move they did, its kinda like playing a live 5min phase game on this haha

Hmm... Then I don't know how you couldn't like Feudal. I mean, the pieces work in a similar manner but you also have archers who can perform ranged attacks and the terrain can stop things like cavalry from trouncing everything in site and you get to decide your initial piece layout, including where your "king" (the castle) is located.

idk if anybody on this site plays runescape or not but i play it occasionally and when i was a member on that there was a game called pest control conquest that was a strategy game that sounds very similar to feudal, i loved it and played it until my membership ran out and ever since them i was wishing they would make it into an actual boardgame....maybe fuedal is the same and i just never knew about it.

I think the structure of chess is one of the things I like about it. There are just too many variables in Feudal to come up with decent strategies. Especially since pretty much every game I've played has been with different numbers of people, I only get to try a strategy once. So, maybe if I played it a lot more, but, there are enough games I do enjoy, and it's not like Feudal is a hit a parties, so it's not really worth it.

just realized you asked abge specifically if he liked chess, sorry i kinda hijacked your question abge lol

If I can find my game in the basement, I might try creating "webFeudal". There doesn't seem to be one out there, just an old HP Fortran version. And, while it may not have the following of Diplomacy, I think it could catch on. Hmmm...

Of classic card games, there's bridge - and then there's everything else.

Feudal sounds interesting, have to try that out.

if you create webfuedal and put a link on here i'd come try it out and see if i like it or not

Really, the coolest thing about Feudal is that it was made by 3M.

I'll try it, too. Maybe it will be more fun to play with someone who likes it.