I liked go, but it has so much prior art that I would never master it sufficiently to be a serious player. But the fault is not in the game, but in me.
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After the chess month Go review, my partner is back to watching Go videos and I never quite realized before how Go is about area control. So it should be a game I’d love and I’ve previously tried to learn it but never got beyond the beginner tutorials. I still like the idea of knowing the game at some point.
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I was surprised when you didn’t list this one. But then Race is also really great 
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There has been some talk on Discord of an SUSD… league? for playing and learning Go. Maybe it will start on kgs sometime.
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RftG is great, but I realised that for me it had too much overlap with Innovation for the purposes of this thread.
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I’ve never heard of Innovation. Back in San Diego, I played a lot of sessions of RftG with two friends and was always ready for more. This may be as simple as “What did you get exposed to first?”
I started tracking all my game plays at the first SHUX game convention in October 2017. Since then I’ve recorded 127 plays of Legendary: the Marvel Deckbuilding Game. That’s almost double the plays of my second most played game, Gloomhaven, which is at 69 plays. That is a good bit higher but much less than double the 40 plays of number three the Arkham Horror LCG. From there, it’s again basically halved to a few games in the lower 20 some odd plays and a few more in the upper teens.
These numbers are very heavily influenced by most of my gaming being with my husband at two players and our love of challenging, thinky co-op or semi co-op experiences to share with each other. So if I could only have three games that I could play for the rest of my life to just make me happy, I’d be just fine with those (and their expansions!) played with him.
If on the other hand I was going for a well rounded game collection that I could use in different situations, that’s an absolutely terrible selection! I’d probably still have to have Legendary. It’s my baby and I can’t give it up. Deckbuilding is my favorite mechanic and I have to have one. It’s my favorite deckbuilder and as long as I get to keep all the expansions, it is infinitely versatile anyway so it’ll never get old.
Gloomhaven and Arkham would both have to go for other things to open up the collection more. I’d be more sad to see Arkham go than Gloomhaven, I think. I want something to fit the Euro / resource management puzzle kind of space. I’m inclined towards Concordia because I do love it but my husband hates it and will only occasionally play it solely because I love it. Oh well, these are my three. If he wants his own picks, he can make a forum account and in this imaginary scenario I can have other non-pandemic plagued people to play it with me instead of forcing him to play it.
Then I’d want something that works for bigger groups. I’m not really much of a party game person. I think I’m gonna go with Sushi Go Party. Card drafting is a simple enough mechanism and the scoring there is clear enough that if people want to play a game, they can get on board with that one I find. Party ups the player count over the original that it fills the spot I need for a more diverse collection in just three games. I was tempted to give this spot to 7 Wonders because I like it more and my husband and I will play it 2 players where we won’t Sushi Go, but I do want something that’s a little more intro so this is my compromise as it were.
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I flirted pretty heavily with Go back in 2008. I bought a bunch of books, I joined some online communities, I started attending a nearby weekly Go club.
I love the aesthetics of Go. I really love the tactility of Go. The game is beautiful and elegant in so many ways. The ruleset is charmingly simple and lends itself to nearly infinite possibility – as elegant a game I could ever imagine.
However, playing Go is wrought with some many things I cannot stand. First and foremost, the downfall of 2-player games in general for me: a direct 1-on-1 “battle of wits”. I play to win games, but I don’t play to win games.
Secondarily, Go (culture) demands study – I hate studying. There’s a reason I barely graduated high school (psst, spoiler: it was studying). When I would attend the weekly Go club and play a game and do what I thought I was supposed to do: have fun, there would be a number of more experienced players who would sit down after my game and try to lecture me on this and that. Sorry, man: don’t care… I just want to explore this fun little game, not master it. But there are many who think, “if you don’t want to master Go, why are you playing?”. Those people are not who I want to play against. If you rule out those people, you rule out most opportunities to play.
So my Go sets sit idle. Hopefully one day my children will show an interest in it and I’ll casually play with them (until they decide to take it too far, at which point I’ll happily shoo them off to a local Go club).
That said, back then, I had a friend who was playing competitive chess; we spoke about Go a few times, I loaned him a couple of the books I had bought. He no longer plays chess (well, at least competitively), but he has made a number of trips around the world to study from different masters and compete in various tournaments. I believe he’s a 2 dan now. He never returned my books!
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Aren’t you in my area? Maybe when the Covid threat has faded, we might think about having the occasional casual game. I have to say I’m willing to do fairly heavy duty studying for recreation—but the study goes into worldbuilding, not into abstract mechanics, and the “world” of go is as minimal as it could very well get.
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I’d be happy to sit down to a casual game of Go with you, health risks permitting!
For the light sit-down game, Lost Cities. You can introduce it to anyone and they get it instantly. Once you’ve explained the bid cards, just the way that they naturally want some numbers and can see that you need some numbers automatically makes a new player understand all of the strategies in the game. You hit the “Aargh! You took the… wait, no, I’ll get you this way” excitement in seconds.
For the huge multiplayer 6-hour type game, Dune. There’s never been anything like it, not in terms of making your rules wildly asymmetrical in order to stay absolutely faithful to the books, or in sticking around for decades because it’s just so damn good. Maybe Cosmic Encounter qualifies, but that’s some pretty amazing company to be in. I’ve played with people who hated Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones, etc but loved this. (I wanted this to be Eldritch Horror, but it just doesn’t deliver after 3+ hours. And Dune is legendary.)
And finally, for the solo game to please myself, Marvel Champions. It’s great solo, but also (while it can be deep if you want it to be and is full of fun theme) a new person needs literally no knowledge of it to sit down and play successfully. You can tell a newbie “You’re this hero” and hand them the pre-made deck, and they can just make decisions based on the cards in their hand with no hesitation. They’re in and punching bad guys without delay. I haven’t seen another game recently which gets people gleefully happy this fast. (My girlfriend pulled off She-Hulk’s one-two punch and gamma slam on Rhino in her first game, and couldn’t stop grinning).
I know that War of the Ring, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion and Inis will be my favourites of all time once I actually, y’know, buy them.
Also, the recent Chess Month vid on “Go” made me want to explore it just because the equipment can be so beautiful (and expensive). My brother was big into it. But I have exactly the same problem as @pillbox: I want it to be fun, or meditative, or organic, and instead it’s a very intellectual study. The shapes force the strategy so that there’s much less room for personality before you’re simply not playing optimally. But the sets are incredible as items to own.
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Android: Netrunner
Battle for Rokugan
Skull
Netrunner remains some of the best game experiences I have. It has some shockingly high highs, and the lows are more often than not fun to be on the receiving end of. It is complex but once you’ve overcome the initial barrier of figuring out why both player’s decks, hands, and discard piles have different names, the game rewards you time and again. I have very few bad experiences with Netrunner. I’ve played the same decks against each other over and over again, times and times in a row and enjoyed myself the whole way through. I enjoy talking about it, creating it, and building decks. I enjoy looking at the artwork, discussing the themes and the lore. I enjoy being around most of the people who play it, too. There is very little I dislike about Netrunner.
Battle for Rokugan is less complex, but strategically totally impossible for me to figure out as if yet. I’ve only ever played one game at a time, but after each one I usually feel ready to play again. It manages to cram the experience that I want to get when I finally get around to playing Twilight Imperium into one of the smallest and cheapest boxes I own. I love how everything in it is so very basic, but with a minor twist. It makes the game reasonably accessible, but allows the board you’re playing on to feel like a place with people in it instead of just tokens on a map.
These two were easy. They’re my two favourite games I’ve ever played, but neither of them are easy to just put in front of somebody and go “let’s play a game”. I was wracking my brain for a third game. Something I can just play until we decide to stop, for almost any number of people. I considered putting a specific kind of Magic: the Gathering on the list; a variant that fixes most of my major problems with the game. If we were in a world where the stigma of certain games were none existent, then I might choose it, but if you say to somebody “Do you want to play Magic: the Gathering?” they have an idea of what to expect, even if it’s not quite right. If we could remove the distribution model and I just owned everything I wanted to for it, if I had the ability to make up the box sets I need to to get the game off the ground, maybe I would choose it. They managed to make something truly golden during the time I played, even if the core system is fundamentally not very good. I think there’s too many caveats, though. I would just say “A regular deck of cards!” but that’s just cheating. If that’s the case, then what’s my favourite game to play with a deck of cards? Probably something to do with bluffing, like poker.
Maybe I would just play Skull? Skull is easy to teach, easy to learn, easy to play, easy to set up, and easy to put away. You can play one game, you can play one hundred. You just play until you’re all satisfied. I could’ve put Coup in this spot, and on a different day I might’ve done, but Skull was the game I thought of. I would say I prefer Coup, I would say it’s not as easy to teach and learn and play, it is a little more involved, but but that much more. But I didn’t think of it. I thought of Skull.
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That’s why I picked The Resistance over Blood on the Clocktower: after BotC, I’ve enjoyed it, but I want to do something else, while after TR I’ll quite often go again straight away.
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Tigers and Pots is definitely my first pick. It’s so easy to enjoy even if you lose for exactly the reasons SUSD laid out in the review. Every few turns there’s a great “a fine move” moment. I don’t think I’ve played many other games that make you feel like you’re really good but also really crap at it at so many different points during the game. Every moment is engaging, and every choice is weighty and potentially painful. Oh, I love it.
I will play Carcassonne any time, any where, forever. I love tiles. All of the tiles. Carc becomes this really meditative experience for me, and I love seeing how everything plays out. I appreciate the really sneaky way certain players can slink in on your cities and fields, and doing the same is incredibly satisfying to me. It’s another one that is always enjoyable, and while not heavy in any sense, it gives you the opportunity to make a lot of nice little decisions and even push your luck a bit.
The last one is really hard. I think I’m going to have to go with Orleans (with the expansions [Are we including the expansions? Can I do that?]). I considered Spirit Island and Everdell (though SI is by far a better game). As for Spirit Island, well, if you’ve played it, I don’t have to say anything. It’s incredible. But, co-op isn’t something that I find myself in the mood for consistently even when it’s as satisfying as SI. Everdell doesn’t offer anything revolutionary, but it’s a solid and charming tableau-builder/worker-placement that I really think I enjoy more solo. Orleans, though, is just something that offers a lot of satisfaction. The bag-building, the different routes to victory, the great solo, the co-op, it all is just superbly executed and allows you to play it the way you want to play. There’s great variability in the tiles as well. I adore it.
Honorable mentions: Arboretum, Lords of Vegas, Railroad Ink
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Hmmm this depends on whether it is “games I have access to” or “games that I own”… I very rarely play the games that I own.
From my own collection it’d be:
Axis and Allies (1984 version) - this was the game that ‘got me into the hobby’ (I would have ended up in ‘the hobby’ regardless) and has special sentimental value, as my brother and I used to play it twice every year, at my birthday and at christmas. If I got rid of all of my games, this would be the one I kept, because it literally cannot be replaced.
Power Grid - The best game that me and my mom like. She always beats me, though, unless I can get the other players to get in her way…
Either Galaxy Trucker, Dominion, or Settlers of Catan (with 6-player extension). Galaxy Trucker is good to play with anyone, but I find a bit dull; Dominion is my most-played game, but largely because the excellent online implementation; Catan is bloody Catan, and the obvious solution to the ‘play with anyone’ category.
If I were picking “the 3 games to exist”, though, it would be different:
Codenames: favorite game to play with other people.
Mare Nostrum: favorite big/event game (though BSG is a contender, it can get ugly, whereas MN you can always win, even if you’ve been stomped)
Dominion: The only game I’m actually interested in at a high(er) level. Not exactly chess, but I really can’t chess well at all, so this fills that place for me.
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Bringing up Blood on the Clocktower spurs an interesting question for me.
Lots of social deduction games are OG werewolf with a cloak on, or maybe a high tech visor, depending on what you’re after.
Would I be allowed to play werewolf? What about Monikers? I’ve literally never played monikers without just writing things down on paper and putting them in a hat. It’s a game I’ve played many, many times, but I’ve never ‘had it in my collection’?
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The rules I set myself for this sort of question are to avoid the easy choices. “A deck of cards” or “a stack of index cards and a lot of pens” or “a big book of game rules for which I can improvise the components” don’t lead to interesting answers, so I don’t choose them. It’s like the old Desert Island Discs rule: you get to choose a book as well as a complete Shakespeare and the Bible (or other religious work), because otherwise people would just pick those two and it wouldn’t make for an god interview.
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Oooo… this is really difficult 
I haven’t played enough of many games to know how long it would take me to get tired of them 
This is where my waffling is currently at:
Root: because it’s my favourite. I think I’d include the Riverfolk and Underworld expansions as well. You’ve got area control, direct conflict, backstabbing, and cute animals.
Pandemic: with at least the “On the Brink” expansion to add in the bioterrorist. Pandemic is probably still my favourite co-op, and On the Brink lets me have a bit of 1 v all and hidden movement too. It’s also much easier to explain than Root!
Skull: Easily the best value for money game that I own. It’s short, makes people laugh, has bluffing and auctions, and is expandable if you have multiple sets.
I suppose it would be sensible to choose something like Go, for the huge amount of depth. However, my experience of trying to learn Go was incredibly stressful, because people insist that the game is over when you know it’s over.
Edit: I asked my husband this question, and he immediately said Blood Rage, Caverna, and Barony. When asked why, he said “because they’re my favourite, why would you choose anything else?”. I wish I was that decisive!
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This was in my mind a question about a minimal yet versatile collection not “what would you bring to a desert island”. I think paper, dice and decks of cards and our own creativity will always supplement whatever games we have in our collection.
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That made me laugh. I had to think about it for about 24 hours and take notes to come to a decision 
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He also insists that Go doesn’t count, because it is not merely a board game, it’s a way of life 
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Roll for the Galaxy, Brass Birmingham and Great Western Trail. Enough variety there and I could play those games forever.
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