History Main / BoardGames

* TabletopGame/{{Backgammon}}: Not as popular a game anymore, but the rules involve moving your pieces across the boards to your "safe zone" while doing everything possible to stop or outrun your opponent. Often seen masked as a briefcase for long train trips.

* TabletopGame/ArkhamHorror: A story based game based on the TabletopGame/CallOfCthulhu

[[index]]

* TabletopGame/{{Checkers}} (also known as Draughts): The archetypical game of casual minds; e.g., young children and leisurely seniors. While definitely a simpler game than chess, checkers may be treated as if it were barely above the level of tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses). Extra bathos points for a character using a chess set and board to play checkers. Almost invariably, one character will be looking supremely confident until the other player reaches out and ''click-click-click-click-click'' takes most of their pieces in a single move, often with a smug "King me!" at the end when they make it to the last row (even though they made backwards jumps that would be illegal if the piece were not ''already'' a king.

* {{Hangman}}: Guess the word or phrase letter by letter. Each time you guess wrong adds a new piece to the gibbet, noose, and hanged man. This game, of course is the spiritual ancestor of ''WheelOfFortune''.
* {{Hnefatafl}} (King's Table): Scandinavian chess known at least from IV century A.D. -- that is, Vikings played this. Mentioned in the Literature/{{Edda}}s and [[Literature/TheIcelandicSagas sagas]] both as a noteworthy skill and used for ChessMotifs: in Fridthjof's saga the King's man came with a war-related request to Fridthof and Bjorn who played the game, and they answered in game strategy terms, looking at the board.

* FormulaD: A tabletop game about vehicular racing with many complicated rules, thankfully, the game is divided into basic and advanced.

* Reversi (including the commercialized ''Othello''): A vaguely Go-like game where surrounded pieces change color instead of being captured. Reversi can be very difficult to keep track of, since one piece placement can drastically alter the entire board, at least on traditional boards - computer-based versions take care of this on their own.

* TabletopGame/{{Scrabble}}: A game for people who know lots of words [[SpellingNazi and how to spell them]]. Having a big vocabulary is a plus, but [[YouKeepUsingThatWord actually knowing the definition isn't important to the game so long as it is an actual word]]. TheMagicPokerEquation applies here. The winner always has just the right letters for a long, high-scoring, but recognisable word, and there's somewhere on the board that it'll fit. They rarely resort to kind of obscure words common in professional Scrabble: ''aa'', ''cwm'', ''etui''. (Although one can occasionally expect ''CalvinAndHobbes''-esque arguments over the legitimacy of such words as "[[TheSimpsons kwyjibo]]," "xrbtt", "jozxyqk" or "zqfmgb.") Further, even though short words are common in professional Scrabble, anyone who plays a word less than four letters will be seen as a dummy. Another common Scrabble trope is when people playing the game all have and play words relating to the situation.

** Maybe it's Russian Draughts (men attacks both forward and back, kings move much like chess bishops)?

* ''TabletopGames/LupinIII'' is a semi-cooperative game based on the adult cartoon of Lupin the 3rd and his gang, {{Gentleman Thie|f}}ves, attempting to steal a treasure protected by Zenigata, an ImplacableMan with an army of policemen to support him. Fujiko, the lone woman on the team, makes the game more interesting as she may betray her fellow thieves at any point.

Recently, Wil Wheaton has promoted the board game hobby with his [[WebVideo/{{Tabletop}} web series]], [[http://tabletop.geekandsundry.com/ Tabletop]], where he and several 'geek celebrities' play a variety of board games. Additionally, webcomics like [[http://www.dorktower.com/ Dork Tower]] and [[http://overboard-comic.com/ Going OverBoard]] detail the adventures of your average Board Game Geeks.

Recently, Wil Wheaton has promoted the board game hobby with his web series, [[http://tabletop.geekandsundry.com/ Tabletop]], where he and several 'geek celebrities' play a variety of board games. Additionally, webcomics like [[http://www.dorktower.com/ Dork Tower]] and [[http://overboard-comic.com/ Going OverBoard]] detail the adventures of your average Board Game Geeks.

* RedDragonInn : A board/card game where adventurers cheat each other out of loot.

* Twister: Well, yes, there's a board, and yes, it's a game, although the players are the pieces. The aim of the game is to contort the players into shapes that don't collapse into a people pile. Or at least that's the ostensible aim; in practice the point is more to create embarrassing juxtapositions of body parts.

* Reversi (including the commercialized ''Othello''): A vaguely Go-like game where surrounded pieces change color instead of being captured. Reversi can be very difficult to keep track of, since one piece placement can drastically alter the entire board.

* TabletopGame/{{Icehouse}}: A boardless board game played with pyramidal pieces pointing at each other. Something like a cross between Go and vector arithmetic; more than four hundred games using the pyramidal pieces are listed on one site alone [[http://www.icehousegames.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page here]]. [[hottip:*:And created by Andrew Looney, inventor of TabletopGame/{{Fluxx}}.]]

* TabletopGame/{{Icehouse}}: A boardless board game played with pyramidal pieces pointing at each other. Something like a cross between Go and vector arithmetic; more than four hundred games using the pyramidal pieces are listed on one site alone http://www.icehousegames.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page. [[hottip:*:And created by Andrew Looney, inventor of TabletopGame/{{Fluxx}}.]]

* TabletopGame/{{Icehouse}}: A boardless board game played with pyramidal pieces pointing at each other. Something like a cross between Go and vector arithmetic. [[hottip:*:And created by Andrew Looney, inventor of TabletopGame/{{Fluxx}}.]]