Board games by scott

Ticket to Ride! Oh my god! I love that game. So my boardgamefriends and I are a bunch of extreme train nerds who all decided to go to grad school to get our MCPs in transportation planning. Hence, this game was made for us. There was a period in which we all got together and played it maybe 10 times a week. We'd text each other and say "TTR? I usually lose, but I got the highest score we ever recorded, too so I think of myself as sort of a TTR situation-specific idiot savant.

Another time, someone blocked my friend from going to Portland, and he threw a chair across my apartment. This game! I'm so glad it replaced Settlers as the game we played.

For some reason, I could never get into Settlers. Despite my best friend loving it and playing it many times with him and compatriots, it remained a game that just flat out would not click for me. What in the how did the what happen? I would say. Even when I won! I'm not just a dabbler in boardgames, either. Then, this Christmas, for absolutely no good reason I finally understood it. Maybe because I'd been reading a bunch of ancient Andre Norton pulp scifi, I don't know.

It finally clicked and now I actually understand how it works and it is, in fact, super fun. So, do not despair! Get a couple friends and play around with it, and it will make sense to at least one of you. I love these games. I love Dominion even more. This is awesome. I will have to use it to explain things to neophytes. Ticket to Ride is my least favourite board game, and I have no idea why so many people are fond of it. Carcassonne App players: please invite me to play with you.

I'm not very good at the game, but I do enjoy having board games ongoing. My email is in my profile. Trade for wheat? Come on! These are great and the new social cachet of boardgames is great.

I can now play boardgames with people I don't know at all who have no real claim on being nerds. Here you go, griphus! I shall trade nothing for wheat. I will build my island paradise on the backs of sheep!

Roads paved with mutton! Cathedrals of lamb! The mint jelly will pour down upon the ram-thatched roofs and the yogurty dressing will caress the shores of my fluffy ewe beaches. That guy was my reference professor in library school. Because it uses a simple set collection mechanic to allow people to form strategic chains which can cut other players off.

It's still got the territorial aspect of a game like Monopoly, which a lot of people like, but it's gentler and also doesn't suck as a game. It's a good introduction to train gaming in that regard. There's an iPad version of Medici that is also good. I like that board games are getting iPad treatments. Well, I obviously disagree with the last part of that statement. But in any case, I am rarely called upon to play it. I was asking rhetorically -- I can actually see how it's a well-developed game, I just dislike it.

That surely beats the inevitable mid-game "wait, what exactly do you mean by "trade for"? Hint: don't play with people who all speak a different first language, and who have 3 or 4 or 12 slang terms for every single item in the game except sheep.

You will never figure out what the trades are fast enough to make them. One day I will get a few people together to play Catan where you get to choose the next number to roll, but either based on a deck of dice with cards face up or based on filling out the probability table, so the first 36 rolls have exactly one roll of 2, etc. I generally say things like "I have wood for sheep. I'm eternally grateful for Scott's Agricola video. It is a far better explanation of the game's play sequence and strategies than the convoluted rulebook.

Also, because of his video it's become an unwritten rule in my house that once the boar action card is flipped someone has to shout, "Piggies!

Oink oink oink. If you have the chance, try it out. It really is a fantastic game. I, too, learned to play Agricola by watching Scott's video. Had my first non-solo game just the other night, in fact. Ticket To Ride kicks my ass every time. I was ready to strangle my girlfriend for completing six six! The rules are simple: you play Catan normally, while drinking the alcoholic beverage of your choice.

Whenever you finish one standard drink, you receive a free resource, also of your choosing. Drink fast, drink slow, use a mixer, it's entirely up to you. The trick here is balancing your intake so as to provide needed resources to advance in the game, while retaining enough wits to play strategically. Notes: Do not play more than one game. Hurling results in immediate disqualification. Your mileage may vary. Damn, I was hoping he'd done Dust , which I really want to play but just can't justify shelling out 60 bucks for, especially when I don't actually know if I'll be able to convince any of my friends to play with me.

A video explaining it ahead of time would have made the purchasing decision a lot easier. Last year at DragonCon I went down to the unspeakably awesome board gaming room and asked at the desk to check out a game that they thought was interesting to try to learn and play.

They handed me Agricola, and I went over to sit down with it to try to make sense of it. This I utterly failed to do.

Those rules are a mess. Watching Scott's video caused the game to "click" with me, and that was what made me realize that, you know, Board Games With Scott just might be FPP-worthy. In my experience, this is the One True Way to play Ticket to Ride: - First, you should understand that the game is limited by the number of train cars the players have, and these cards have a roughly one-to-one relationship with cards drawn.

Every car placed comes directly from a card drawn, see? This means that games tend to have a constant length. You only have so many turns to use. In practice, due to ticket draws, route-claiming turns and unused cards, you can add some turns to this, but still, the end of the game is sight from the very first turn.

This means that trying to block your opponent is usually a bad strategy; you don't know what tickets he's trying to make, since there are so many tickets that share routes, and every route you claim that doesn't factor into your own web is a wasted scoring opportunity. Since you only have so many trains, you only have so many points you can get out of them. So, it's by far best to claim six-space routes whenever you can, since they get you the best number of points for every car you play.

This also helps to keep your ticket-building flexible, allowing you to work around opponent route claims by taking easier, shorter routes if need be. You only have so many trains to place at best; if it takes more than 45 cars to make all your tickets then you couldn't complete them all even if no one else was playing!

During the game, we find it's best to draw tickets only when all your current tickets are either complete or hopeless, or are drawing out of desperation towards the end of the game which is a risky but potential very valuable option , and only keep tickets that you can make quickly. Six-car routes are worth maximum points, and by doing this you can claim it at the earliest possible opportunity. If another player blocks your ticket, you can then usually work around it pretty easily with the cards in your hand.

Drawing face-up wilds means you end up with one fewer card of income compared with the other players, meaning they will each be able to play roughly one more car by the end of the game. Not to mention that wild cards are quite common in Ticket to Ride: all the colors have 12 cards in the deck, but there are 14 wilds, so you have a good chance of drawing "free" wilds from the face-down deck anyway.

Damn, I was hoping he'd done Dust It's Risk, but with better rules. If you like Risk but wish it made more sense and had more options, you will probably like Dust. Because it's like Risk, it's usually relatively easy to get nongamers to play it, too. Thanks for the link. Sorry, borked the link.

I was once at a party at this house where about eight girls, fellow university students, lived together. They were all very drunk, but they managed to teach me how to play Catan.

They'd all tag out and swap places throughout the game as more people arrived and more booze was poured. One friend of mine would dash back and forth between doing shots with the Bethany sisters and collecting her resource cards. Another girl was so stoned she couldn't even open her eyes, but she still managed to dick me out of some Wood and end up winning the game. Then everybody smoked raspberry tobacco out of a hookah.

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