Similar to last week. Social Games. What is a social game? You may have to draw your own line. We’d all probably agree that Taboo or Wavelength are yes, social games. Zoo Vadis? Ra? Love Letter? I think so. Libertalia? Maaaaybe. Yeah, just draw your line. You do you.
Two subcategories:
2-5 players
6+ players
Within each category:
What have you included in your collection (or highlights) in these categories?
What would your pantheon be? The best/permanent entries for you?
How important are these categories to your gaming life? General thoughts?
Over the years I have come to value social games quite a bit.
I would make the cut slightly different than you did. You put player count as the primary divider. I would probably go by complexity and time commitment:
super-casual social games that allow players to drift in and out between rounds as the conversation shifts. I put these out in a stack or take them along for parties. Most of them have almost no rules to explain.
games I bring to the table when I want to specifically invite people over to games and get more than I expected.
between those two is a category that has the “party game / mayhem” aspect but takes a little longer to teach and play than the super casual games while not being quite the main course for a game-night.
So first the casual social games that come to mind. Primary requirements being: short rounds, low on rules explanations.
Just One (our most played social game in ever. gets played at every winter party–summer parties don’t get games)
So Clover (loses out to Just One as a fave, but still so very funny)
Dixit (a personal favorite)
Concept (pure abstraction, a favorite among software devs)
Codenames (the game that saved us in the pandemic)
Top Ten (got old at some point)
Fake Artist in New York
That’s not a hat
The Gang (recent addition, captures the essence of non-verbal communication in a way no other game has managed for us)
Link City
Kakerlakensalat
Higher playercount games that take a bit more commitment (aka rounds last longer than 5 minutes) and you may need to concentrate a little more to play:
Bohnanza (an old old favorite, so many memories)
Detective Club (I wish this got more table time, I love this more gamer version of Dixit)
Deception Murder in Hong Kong (so good with large groups)
Scapegoat (the best low playercount social deduction)
6 nimmt (the most fun mean game that exists)
Escape from Aliens in Outer Space
Resistance
No Thanks
Krazy Pics / Krazy Wordz
Decrypto
Landmarks
Games for the gamenight got too big occasion. OMG I have 6 players over what do I serve as a main course? This seems to unsurprisingly include quite a few drafting and racing games:
7 Wonders (simultaneous play, so many plays this has seen, local Hall of Fame game)
Spectacular (simultaneous play)
Iwari
Heat (racing)
Pictomania (sim. play, so many rules for a drawing game)
Rallyman GT (racing)
Cubitos (racing, with the expansion)
Space Base (with expansion, just the best and most accessible dice game and Catan replacement in one box)
Blood on the Clocktower
Robo Rally (racing, the one and only true best racing game ever, nothing beats robot mayhem)
Zoo Vadis
Zombicide (best casual coop any group goes mini mayhem plus zombies!)
edit: Planet Unknown (sim. play, already Hall of Fame game, plays 6 and is one of my faves to serve for that player count)
I have highlighted the best games from each category. Which usually means the one I have either played the most or am most likely to bring to the table on the next occasion.
I’m the cliché of someone who haaaaates social or social deduction games.
I don’t want to ever play Werewolf again. Cards Against Humanity is awful. Wavelength seems fine for two minutes, but not what I’d rush to play. Give me a board and dice / workers please.
(Deception: Murder in HK and Bohnanza do actually appeal though. Also Detective - City of Angels etc).
I’m just tired of “best liar wins” or “Guess the answer the ref will choose by knowing them better” games. It’s not that I’m non-confrontational, I can do ruthless two-player boards, but social manipulation / deception / defeat seems much harsher than army moves on a map.
(I know this is 100% a personal preference because Werewolf / CaH etc sold TONS of copies).
It’s on my list above. but we played it last game event with 6 and it didn’t really hit it off with my friends. it might on 2nd play but it wasn’t an instant success.
I consider a game social when it is the focus of the game. So, the Mind would be a social game even when you are all silent. In the same vein, I would even call Diplomacy a social game as you cannot win by yourself.
I really prefer these games with above-the-table talking. Escape: Curse of the Temple remains a thrill. Intrigue, Zoo Vadis, Goodcritters, is still one of my fave social games ever. the Resistance Avalon and Tempel des Schreckens/Time Bomb/Don’t Mess With Cthulhu is still my fave social deduction. And Pit is still great - a game that came from olden times.
Everyone I play with frequently is at least a bit chatty; we’re not super-competitive and we like to talk about what we’re doing.
I like some social deduction (particularly the Resistance family) but increasingly I know people who really don’t like them, so fair enough. I always liked that approach more than the Werewolf family, including Clocktower.
Zoo Vadis leaves me cold and I don’t know why. I’ve had two games, with people I liked, but somehow it just feels dreary. (As usual, this is a problem with the combination of me + game, and you may feel entirely differently about it.)
I’d consider myself a social gamer. One of the big appeals of Board Game Barrage as a podcast is that they’d put Times Up/ Monikers/ Hat in their all time top 10s.
I love table talk, or just talk in general.
Light rules, lots of interaction? Let’s go.
I have more to say later, but any game that has me in stitches is a good game
I have this slightly warm take that many euros which look like heads down point salad games are secretly potential negotiation games.
I think it’s entirely possible to play, say, a worker placement and be sad because Martin got to “your”space before you. But what if you had a chat with Martin first? Maybe you could help Martin out or whatever or be less aggressive around their potential moves? There’s a kind of texture that gets added but kind of from nowhere!
I agree above with diplomacy though. That game is entirely about both togetherness and its breakdown. It’s got the ebbs and flows of relationships baked into a game format. And those cuts and betrayals stay for ages afterwards. I think a sort of “turn of the day” version kind of loses a chunk of the experience.
I’ll also jump in with a warm take which is there’s two levels of meanness to social games. Auctions like High Society might be attacks in every direction (and others could have bluffing or negotiation) but they feel very different to the “picked last for the sports team” social betrayal mechanics games.
I played Diplomacy when I was about 15, was given Germany, and discovered that in order for two other players to back each other up they need to make you believe they’re in the space intending to back YOUR attack as agreed, and then betray you.
Obviously playing as Germany in the UK back then I was the one people wanted to lose (also Germany has too many borders to defend on the board) but there’s a big difference between a less personal multi-way auction, or “you’ve been assigned the traitor role and that’s why you’re lying” roles and these more ruthless social elimination games.
And the difference is as Mistercrayon said above, whether those betrayals stay afterwards. I LOVE a social game that makes the whole table laugh loudly, as long as it’s the whole table.
I tend to dislike social games and will admit that’s the fault of various social games with people I’d no longer spend time with. I also think my disabilities which impact a bit on emotions and interpreting body language make those situations more difficult.
Negotiation games for me have been tainted by 2 types of behaviour. One is it being along the road to bullying where it’s all about laying bare the social standing of the participants and picking on people bringing in things from life in general. The second is someone whose view is so negative that they can’t value things cleanly so will only trade if it’s massively in their favour. So one is just an odious popularity contest and the other grinds to a halt and loses the interesting aspect.
I have had a lot of fun with things like Codenames. I think part of why this broke out was it did something clever where people get to take advantage of the magic circle of games and can be socialy clever and bounce off each other while cutting down the pressure on some potential for some negative behaviours. Maybe not universally so but it’s very broad. Maybe 6 Nimmt! Would go in this category. Accessible goes up in numbers, leads to laughter but isn’t personal as easily.
I also really like Charades, have had much fun doing that. Monikers same bucket. Are these in to the realm of parlour game? I think charades is the best very old one.
I have often felt a bit jealous of enthusiasms shown by SUSD people over the years for games like Cosmic Encounter as they seem to play with people who get the magic circle on these kind of games and get on with the roleplaying aspects. Maybe that’s what normal people do more often. It maybe I’m just unlucky in the groups in my area at the times I got to try them. For me playing things like Resistance, Insider and so on are just an exercise in being reminded how much an outsider I am or not and don’t seem to end up with much of the game playing involved.
And…
… what is the problem with “just parlor games”?
I love those games and I don’t care if they are derided as activities or if they are called something not-boardgames. I think they are fun to play with my friends
However, calling these games boardgames and treating them as equals can help pull people into my gamenights because once I’ve hooked them on Just One other games can follow that path already trodden.
Thanks for this. We actually do that sometimes. A little. Not with all players at our table. Some of them are just too ruthless… but still as situations allow. I agree there can be an element of negotiation.
But then sometimes this doesn’t work out and we still quote “I just wanted to help!” with laughter when such an attempt at negotiation backfires–spectacularly in case of the quote.
In my case it is that some people don’t realize they have to initiate negotiations and think they can play some kind of clever tactic that forces people to work with them. Recently seen playing Zoo Vadis. People who aren’t used to have to negotiate in games… are very difficult to introduce to the concept.
Other issue I have is people being just plain better at mathing out things and taking advantage of others–seen playing Bohnanza.
And yes the other people who have trouble evaluating what they have properly like a certain business person who wrote a book on negotiations (sorry way too applicable to resist) and wanting to make only deals that are in their favor by too large a margin.
Same. Same. Cosmic fell flatter than flat on my attempt. I’ll try again one day.
But if I want to sit around a table while someone says “Okay, guess what I’m thinking of…” that’s a very different evening to playing a boardgame. Or even the definition of a boardgame.
I find this interesting. I think a lot of growing in board games is understanding economy. Like, learning Puerto Rico required me realizing that $1 dubloon was significantly valuable within its economy.
I had a similar experience with Monopoly growing up, where people would refuse even trades and view it as a loss. Much of these games were just people arguing and saying no, someone eventually making a terrible trade due to emotional fatigue, and the rest of us losing the game because of it. Settlers, with its lower stakes, changed this dynamic and eventually I learned the economy - how two people making an even trade gain value over everyone else not trading. If you can trade more (as long as you are getting what you need) you’ll get incremental value over the entire table.
Similarly with auctions, I had a bad time for a long time. I thought winning was winning the auction. I’d overbid in Poker, overpay in Modern Art, give up all my high suns in Ra, and invariably end up stuck and sad. Business school here hammered into me that walking away from a bad deal is winning, and letting your opponent win a bad deal would let you win the game. I enjoy them much more now as the game isn’t winning the auction, which is out of your control, but estimating the value right, which you can always keep working at no matter who actually walks away with the goods.
Alright, here’s my collection. This was harder than I expected, I’m pretty dense on the low player count games and have actually gotten most to the table due to their accessibility.
Social: 2-5 Pantheon
Love Letter
Anomia (lightning in a box)
Rotation
Pictomania
Mysterium / Park
Bohnanza
Tales of the Arabian Nights
Harvest ハーベスト
Flipships
And the reservoir, unranked
Cabo
Champion of the Wild (one play, wasn’t as fun as watching SUSD play it but I hope to do this again)
Charty Part
Chinatown (maybe I just need to put this in another category. It’s good.)
Fairy (love this, too)
Gladius
Hanabi
Hey That’s My Fish
Hot Lead
Sheriff of Nottingham
Wits and Wagers (this is a classic, too…)
Timeline
The Crew (there’s always one person who doesn’t like it, so we haven’t gotten a campaign going)
Social: 6+ Pantheon
One Night Ultimate Werewolf (Never played Mafia or pure werewolf. This one just works. There’s enough information to go on that it didn’t devolve, and the quick cycles mean no one is meaningfully eliminated and you get to ride the meta)
Telestrations - this is my go to when I want to laugh so hard I cry
Rotation
Skull
Codenames
Diamant
Just One
Spyfall
Taboo
And the reservoir, unranked
Catacombs & Castles 2e (played 1e a few times, haven’t gotten the big boi out yet)
Jungle Speed (this is out of favor due to my daughter’s physical disability)
Monikers (I think I prefer pen and paper to their categories, though)
No Thanks
The Great Dalmuti
As mentioned, not too many unplayed for me here. Highlights would be Zoo Vadis and That’s not a hat. I got Mascarade and it’s expansion many moons ago and want to play it once before I move it on.
WAIT. Where’s Coup? Somehow that eluded my filters. Coup is Pantheon. I don’t want to re-sort all this though : )
I’m not going to say you are wrong about this but I would never have thought of this as a social game. I still don’t think I do. Too quiet and intense and I think more about deduction. Then again I’ve never built up much by way of meta communication about it so we always sit around deducing, I don’t think this is the normal way to play.
This was the game I was thinking of tbh. No amount of learning the economy can defeat an over developed and over applied feeling of loss aversion. Your later point about a good trade giving you a delta over the rest of the table can also crumble against a defensive emotional wall. I think you articulated well though that positive trade and negotiation benefit. From what I have heard Sidereal Confluence seems very much designed to lean in to that and minimise the benefits of a negative blocking strategy. Not in this category maybe but I’d lioe to try that one day.
A lot of you have a much wider range of what you call social games than I do!
For me it’s only a social game if the social aspect is the entire point.
Telestrations - yes, no question.
Dixit - yes, but it’s closer to not being.
Love Letter - absolutely not. That’s a game, not a social game. Of course it has a social element, but unless you’re playing solo, don’t they all?
And yes, a lot of social games are just traditional parlour games dressed up and given a clever name so someone can make money out of them.
