Hobby Board Games

Eh, I play every so often, but I find it hard to get others interested frequently. My wife only wants to play Scrabble, and most of my friends who want to game want to play a tabletop RPG of some variety when we gather.

If anyone's looking for a quicker game that still has a fair amount of strategy but is great for both board game fanatics and casuals alike, I recommend Kingdomino. Basically, it's dominos, but instead of just laying down numbers, you build a kingdom in a 5x5 square. Sounds very easy in concept, but has a surprising amount of thinking involved. My dad, who is not as hardcore a gamer as the rest of my family really enjoyed it and proceeded to kick our butt on his first game.

I recently got a chance to try Lords of Waterdeep. I liked it enough to buy the digital edition off of steam. I admit the fact that I managed to pull a win by aggressively playing to my lord's quest and taking a win despite being behind almost from pole to pole certainly endeared me to it.

TLDR Tabletop RPG The Sassoon Files, set in 1920s China, which, even though was printed by a Chinese Printer Company but was meant for overseas Kickstarter backers, the company was ordered by the Chinese Government to destroy all copies of the game as they didn't like what was printed.

I played Game of Thrones Catan - Brotherhood of the Watch last night. A very good variant of the game, where the main mechanical differences are hero cards that let you perform some kind of special action (like exchange one resource on a 1:1 ratio this turn for Bowen Marsh) and the fact that there is a second win condition based around wildling incursions. You can build guards to go on the wall and protect the land from Wildlings (who block resource production of the tile if they get onto them). If the Wall is breached three times, the game is over and the player with most soldiers remaining on the wall wins, regardless of victory points. What this means is that you have to balance economic expansion and point-scoring with investing in military defence.