7 Wonders probably wins for best average popularity among our mixed-interest gaming group, when there are over four people who want to play. It has an intimidating rules explanation compared to some, but plays way easier than it sounds. Would second the recommendation.

Sushi Go! is another good "getting people into not-awful board games" game.

7 Wonders is played to death here. Catan and Ticket didn't spark that much fanatism, people wanted to play but they wouldn't be planning and calling a week ahead. The thing about 7 Wonders is that you keep learning new stuff about the game, every game is different and new players still can win their first game with a bit of help, luck and wits. But if I lose (and I lose plenty of games) I'm always intrigued why I'm lost and what I could do next time, it never really feels bad. Also people that cannot deal with setbacks, somebody else doing something that thwarts their strategy or losing (I shall refrain from naming them ;) ) never get angry with this game.

Looking into buying a dungeon crawler now (cool map and miniatures preferred) and another game like 7 Wonders, perhaps Puerto Rico.

I think the complexity in 7 Wonders is, how should I say, "cheaply" generated. That is, the complexity is right there in the details, and there are so many details. I far, far prefer emergent complexity than that kind of explicitly designed complexity. It's a kind of complexity that rewards nerding out and learning combos and chains.

This is a valid criticism of these types of games, and in worker placement games in general. Most try to get around this by releasing expansions that add more random elements that encourage strategic play more so then just action optimization. Then the complaint is that luck plays too great a role. It really just comes down to how much gambling you want in a game, which usually adds a lot of dynamic play. Some hate that kind of thing in board games for some reason.

> I far, far prefer emergent complexity than that kind of explicitly designed complexity.

Can you recommend any games?

(not the OP, but I feel similarly)

Dominion. The strategy arises from observing how the specific cards that are part of any given game interact with each other.

Agricola. There's a lot of "designed" complexity here too, but a good deal more arises, particularly when you look at planning the critical eight first actions, and the path to the first additional family member.

"Codenames" is a clever word game. It has a downside that it requires at least 4 players. There is a board of words (each word is on a double-sided card and there are a few hudreds). One person on each team has a diagram with certain words (array indices) he must communicate to another team members. He does that by saying a word (word association) and a number, which means how many words he's communicating. For example, if there's a ring, a journey, and a monster you could say "Hobbit 3". Unlike a similar game, Dixit, this one has better longevity as it doesn't promote saying very obscure things only one person in group will know.

Neuroshima Hex! is a bit nerdy looking, but it's simple without expansions. Retro apocalyptic setting with mutants and evil robots. A knife fight in a telephone booth, plays well up to 4 players. You fill up the hexagonal board with your troops (they mostly don't move) rotating them so that they will hit the most enemies. Then it either fills up completely or one of players plays Battle token, and everything goes off like a chain reaction. Units hit in melee or shoot in order of their initiative. High interaction, tight mechanics. Most people prefer it as a duel game though. You can play it online too.

Carcassonne is one of the best examples of this imo.

Lords of Scotland is a fiendishly tricky game that appears simple at first. It's very quick to teach, but there is both strategic and tactical aspect to it and many non-obvious paths to victory. Beware of high player interaction (some people like it, some are hurt). It's rather chaotic in higher player kinds, you need to appear relatively harmless to win.

Tigris and Euphrates is an old classic that has very few tile types to place, but they result in complex outcomes. I can't say very much about it because I only played it once on a game show, but it's on my to-buy list.

I cannot recommend Tigris and Euphrates enough. It used to be at the top of BoardGameGeek in the old days. Some of my friends likes to sell it to newbies as 'its like chess, but for four person'. By the way, author of this game (Knizia) is a master Board game builder and has created many more games worth looking into.

Ticket To Ride does that well IMO. Really simple rules yet I still can't work out any sort of optimal strategy to play.

Blood Rage is great, and unlike many games of its kind player interaction and combat actually works.

Blood Rage is wonderful. The combat is so great since losing can be a winning strategy.

I guess the GP is a fan of abstracts.

Dungeon crawler wise, gloomhaven and Imperial Assault are my favs.

Yeah Gloomhaven is massive...very tempting!

I don't have first-hand experience, but I've heard Mice and Mystics is pretty good introduction to dungeon crawlers.

I play 7 Wonders pretty often, but counting scores at the end is a rather awful procedure. I jokingly say that if I ever design a board game, the rules will grant a score bonus to whoever explains the rules.

(There is no "beginner's luck" in boardgames. There's "rule explainer's curse". The player doing the explaining is distracted, not just by explaining but also watching over anyone and often plays badly).

We have found Sushi No is even a more fun experience for us. Basically Sushi Go! but whoever gets the lower points total wins. It's a bit tense but more fun.

Sushi Go is one of my favorite of the small and easy games. I'd also add Love Letter and Saboteur (no expansion) as great quick intro games.

Great suggestion with Sushi go, basically functions as a smaller game space version of Dominion/7 wonders/MtG draft.

Also not surprised to hear that our group isn't the only ones playing a "Razz" (poker variant where you try for the weakest hand) variant of Sushi Go.

I found reversing points to make the game chaotic and more casual.

Isn't it fairly easy to get lower total points? Just mainly getting chopsticks and 1 pudding (assuming other get 1+ puddings) can give you negative points.

But everyone else is trying to do that too, and players are trying to trick others into taking points.

I'm probably coloured by just not really enjoying drafting games in general, but I have trouble imagining trying to get a bunch of newbies going in 7 Wonders— between the glyphs, the complicated upgrade/borrow/payment scheme, and point salad path to victory, it seems like a lot to talk about.

I'd counter the recommendation with something like

I used to somewhat enjoy Settlers but I now consider it a terrible game. Exponential Growth Cascade Failure games are generally bad, but they are even worse when the aren't over quickly Using die rolls as the mechanic for who gets to make the key play makes it especially terrible because you don't even get to figure out what you could have done better a lot of the time it's just losing a 55-45 situation on whom gets the resources first.

You refer to "Exponential Growth Cascade Failure" games. Is there a TVTropes for board game mechanics?

I don't know if there's a good resource such as TV tropes, but board games absolutely have tropes, usually in terms of mechanics. For example there is worker placement, card drafting, "coints" (coins are points), hidden victory point cards, etc.

There's probably a more comprehensive list somewhere on BGG (Board Game Geek), but the website is so hard to use I can't find it...

Catan has made me very wary of "open trade" games, because they always seem to devolve to "that one player surely knows how to manipulate his friends into handing him the win real good..." It'd be easier to enjoy if trades were regulated somehow.

There are more accessible and more strategically meaningful ways to introduce player interaction into a game.

Dominion is so great for newbies. Unless you're playing online or the game is a blowout, it's difficult to know who's winning. It's also easy to pick up since the cards are basically the instructions. I'd recommend pretty much any deck building game since they're usually very easy to learn as you go.

I found the large number of cards available at once to be overwhelming when playing dominion the first (and only) time. In that regard, Star Realms is better since it only offers a rotating selection of cards to purchase. It also gives you obvious basic strategies where you just take cards of a chosen color or two.

Star realms is good. Hero realms is a titch better. Had a lot of hero realms fun over Thanksgiving.

Dominion actually turned me off of deck builders for awhile. I found the DC and Marvel games to be great introductions. DC one is definitely easier, as there is less going on, but it is still really fun.

I like to teach Splendor to new people. Most people seem to understand game flow by the end of the first game they play (figuring out strategy comes later).

The most promising sign is that most people want to play it again.

Splendor has a high initial spike, but the appeal wears off surprisingly rapidly. I've had a lot more longevity out of something like Carcassonne (measured in years) than Splendor (measured in months), when played every day. Splendor also requires a lot of concentration, which can be fatiguing.

Splendor requires focus? It plays pretty algorithmically in my opinion.

1. Is someone else about to win the game? Reserve their card if possible. 2. Can you buy a card? Buy the highest point value card you can. 3. Will taking two chips win the game? If no, take 3.

Splendor is all about efficiency (Which is why taking 2 chips is baaaad. Reserving is situationally good, but usually bad.) At higher player counts, the most efficient player almost always wins. At 2 players, reserving becomes much more strategic and isn't such a generally terrible action.

Side strategic note: Aim for the nobles with the most overlap with each other.

I agree, it's not very replayable. There is basically one strategy to win - go for the most expensive cards. They have the best action efficiency. You can get something like 5 points for 8 chips this way, or would you rather get 4 for a card that costs 14 ? Good luck accumulating those discounts. Not that it's not possible and you can't luck out with nobles, but it takes too much time.

I got bored of Carcassonne within 6 plays. Build big cities sneak in farmers. Zzzz.

In 2-up games, Carcassonne closely resembles a kind of grappling or wrestling, where you try to tie up your opponent's meeples, usually by making cities incompletable with the set of tiles in the box. Once you have a numerical advantage in meeples, you have an edge on the probability distribution of tiles that come out of the box - you can make more speculative bets. Whereas in 3 or more player games, it's much more rewarding to be more cooperative if you can be, because specific attacking actions are to the benefit of the player(s) that aren't involved.

Then there's the management of liquidity of meeples through the lifecycle of the game. You want to invest a lot, early; but you need to try and get them back towards the endgame, so you can steal fields and place in micro-fields.

There's a surprising amount of subtlety that emerges from the gameplay. In particular, learning how different growth patterns make your resources easier or harder to steal, or worse, block from completion.

The relative straightforwardness is exactly the appeal to me. There are nights when nothing works better. I had people over to play games last week, for example, and turns out it had been a long day for all of us and we didn't really feel like anything too involved. Carcassonne was perfect. Same with playing with extended family at Christmas. You can explain the main rules in a few sentences and everyone enjoys it.

All that said, I almost always use an expansion or two (or three) to keep things varied and add depth.

I tired of it when I realised the obvious way to get better was to learn all the tiles, so I'd know exactly when what patterns I left were blocking or not.

Learning all the tiles, and tile counting, both just seemed too dull and annoying to actually do.

It is a fun game if nobody learns the tiles :)

Randomly remove some tiles each game, without revealing which were removed?

I have a collection of 20 or so games, all well rated and popular on BGG, but for us Carcassonne is the most popular and enjoyable to play. It's beautiful, not too heavy, keeps everyone involved until the end. We just love it. We use three expansions: river, traders and architects, and inns. What a beautiful game!

It's the most "play it again" game I've seen in many years (maybe Till Dawn being another) and usually I can always get 3-4 games in with the same people.

Nice depth of strategy as well. Probably my favorite game in years.

One of my game designer friends recommended it to me. I don't play it as a board game but it's one of my go-tos on both a tablet and smartphone.

Oh but the beautiful pieces are half the fun! The "gems" are high-quality custom poker chips... so much fun to just play with them!

Splendor and Lanterns are the 2 games that everyone I've introduced them to immediately go out and buy them. Most other games... not so much.

From the Splendor editors you have Black Fleet which takes a little more time but is really fun playing with 4 people.

Despite having obsessed with it for a while, for casual players I wouldn't use Dominion. Its main downside is that serious play requires too much strategy, resulting in too much heads-down thinking about your hand and not enough interaction. I'd rather start people off with Carcassonne.

Dominion’s problem as a beginners’ game is that an even somewhat experienced player has a huge edge over a complete novice: even a passing familiarity with the cards will open up strategic combinations. In addition, they’ll have a hunch for when in the game they need to start accumulating victory points rather than expanding their monetary assets. That said, I love the game, and I think that it’s fairly easy to get into it.

How is that ever avoided though? I can not imagine a game where any amount of experience is not an advantage, where the game also has sufficient depth to be interesting.

Good point: unless it’s completely random it’s never entirely avoidable — there’s an element of skill. And I still think that Dominion can be very fun with beginners (that’s my experience at least).

That said, there are games that level the playing field without yielding entirely to chance; such as Dixit, where advantages are rather gained from knowing the other players.

Games can have strategic depth that is only mildly helpful in improving the odds of winning. Arguably Carcassonne is like this.

In games with higher interaction newbies can effectively gang up on the experienced leader. It has its issues, but it works.

I find Tanto Cuore makes a nice sweet spot - it's mostly as parallel as Dominion, but adds just enough interaction. Normally I'll get about 3/4 of the way through a game with newbies and then they'll go a couple of rounds of all buying me bad habits, and I'll smile because they've got it, and end up on a negative score.

Casual players don't see that Dominion requires strategy. Probability calculations blow right past them and they dismiss it as a simple, boring game.

Board Game Geek's gift guide is great for newcomers. The 2017 one is just out:

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Board_Game_Gift_Guid...

I found it particularly useful to start with games that are good for two players. That way, you need to find only one other person who can be bothered to learn the rules.

This is what makes Settlers such a balanced game IMHO. You can have a new beginner or experienced players and everyone has a good chance at winning - so long as the newbies are given fair introduction into the different strategies to winning. The scenario you mentioned is one example that makes the game turn into a political one. I have no chance at winning and you weren't nice to me, well then I'm going to fuck with you the whole game and hope someone else wins. If there are 2 people against 1 then that makes it even more fun. On that note, the game is likely an average or median length of 40 minutes, so if you're playing with good people it's always been a tolerable length of time. Seeing and experiencing the dynamics of Settlers is the best way to learn, like anything generally..

>everyone has a good chance at winning - so long as the newbies are given fair introduction into the different strategies to winning

Telling someone how to play a game and then going through the motions of playing isn't really fun. Most of the fun is trying things for yourself and figuring stuff out. If a game (like Catan) doesn't allow players to do this, then where is the fun?

Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. I think once you level the playing field knowledge wise as much as you can with a new beginner, then everyone has more fun - because everyone can pick a strategy based on the randomness that went along with their decision making process for their initial placements (for Catan in this example). Perhaps it's my preference as I don't like having an unfair advantage, it makes it boring for me then because I know that without a clear explanation then my chances of winning are far higher; sometimes not because of the randomness with how resources may end up getting distributed. If a new person is getting tons of resources then they'll have aa good time from the sheer excitement of being able to do actions, especially if other people aren't getting many to be able to progress.

> Most of the fun is trying things for yourself and figuring stuff out.

Games have a lot of things that are fun.

If I'm a rookie playing chess against someone who knows the game, I don't stand a chance without some pointers along the way -- no fun, for me. I'd much prefer to be taught basic strategy (common forks, "walking the king" to end a game, traditional openings) than struggle through it on my own. That's because the interesting/fun part of chess, for me, is the execution. Of course, I wouldn't want to be told every move, especially once I learned the basics.

Catan (C&K expansion) has only 3 strategies I can think of off the top of my head: Expansion, Development, and Resource Monopolization (typically Sheep Empire, since if another player gets gets enough yellow cards, your wheat or ore monopoly is suddenly an oligopoly instead). Even with the randomness of the starting board, it's not hard to figure out what the best strategy would be, so I don't mind if someone teaches me. The interesting/fun parts are the politics and improvisation that happen when you add other players and it's no longer possible to execute the perfect strategy.

Dominion has much less PvP (your interaction is limited to attack cards and competition over a limited supply of cards) but a wide variety of strategies[1]. With an expansion or two, you probably won't play with the same exact set of action cards more than once, unless you choose to. So while I'd appreciate a veteran giving me some pointers in general ("Don't forget about coins, even if they're less exciting than action cards", "Don't buy VPs early; they'll just clog up your deck"), I'd prefer to figure out my card combination strategy for that game on my own.

Spider Solitaire is strategic like chess (it's fun to try to spot good moves). However, you're fighting incomplete information instead of an opponent -- there's fun in deciding when to deal and how to arrange the board beforehand. Lost Cities is fun for similar reasons, but includes a bit of PvP, mostly competition like Dominion; Stratego takes the PvP up another notch, putting it somewhere between chess and Dominion.

Risk, like chess, is PvP with static starting conditions. However, like Catan, it has a very limited set of strategies. There's variance in rolls of the dice, but it's mostly luck and adds little strategy, so it's only fun for the politics (ever tried 1v1 Risk? Boring). Lux Delux (Risk computer game) is more fun because it allows you to choose from a wide variety of maps, giving it a similar appeal to Dominion (trying to figure out which countries are best, where to stockpile troops and how many, etc).

Or maybe the simplest example: some people want to figure out how to solve a Rubik's cube on their own; others prefer improving their speed.

[1]: You might nitpick that Dominion actually has similarly few strategies but much more varied starting conditions; either way, the main attraction is figuring out which strategy to use this time around.

I haven't worked out the math (or seen others do the same), but I'm pretty certain that while the resources are basically balanced across the board, wheat has a slight edge and sheep a slight disadvantage. Some initial board states can really skew this as well. This theory has won me probably like 75% o f all my Catan games.

You can usually tell by the initial board state whether the winner will be an expansion player (wood, brick) or a development player (ore, grain, wool).

I have never won a game using expansion alone, but once I did win without ever building a third settlement. I ignored wood and brick altogether, and got largest army and longest road (to nowhere). Everyone else was expanding, and thought I was no threat.

Sheep empire works a lot, especially if you can get a port. It really only works because people really undervalue the commodity. As soon as your opponent considers it as a valuable resource the strategy falls apart. Frequently this happens too late though, and you have to be prepared to build roads and cities out of sheep.

Never played it, so that last sentence got my head full of xkcd style imagery of brick-tiled sheep to drive on... stacked bundles of wool as wall and floor material in multi-story wobbly pillow buildings... thanks for a good laugh this morning!

Another example of a winning strategy, I've seen a purely development card strategy win many times - including myself a few times.

If you like kingsmaking as a core part of a game, then sure.

King of Tokyo is another good game that's pretty simple.

Also it can be over in 15-30 min, so it's easy to play a couple sessions.

In my opinion, stars earned by taking and holding Tokyo should scale with the number of players. Otherwise, the strategy is to stay the heck out of Tokyo, buy cards, and then roll for your stars once you acquire enough power-advantages.

With 4 players, you have to weather 3 rounds of potential attacks to get the 2 stars for endurance, whereas in a 2 player game, you only need to survive one round of potential attacks to get the bonus. Furthermore, as you are yielding more often in order to not-die, other players are getting a star for it, so the advantage is less.

The expansion balances this a little better because of powerups. Though I think it more depends on who you play with.

for a starter, forbidden island is cheap and relatively easy 4 player coop boardgame. I always use it to break in board game newbies.

Pandemic is another co-op game that's easy to pick up for new players. The one bad thing about co-op games is if there are mostly experienced players and one new person then the experience people will usually influence the new person a lot and cause them to not learn much.

That's true with "total information" co-op games like Forbidden Island and Pandemic (or Flash Point, which is another great one).

"Codenames Duet" though is an example of a co-operative game where the two teams are working together but have to make their own decisions - it's also very easy to pick up for new players, I highly recommend it.

Carcassonne is an excellent 'gateway' game for introducing people to the boardgame phenomenon. Simple enough that you can explain the rules to an eight year old and start playing in five minutes. Also, it has just the right amount of luck and strategy to be fun for casual settings. I highly recommend it. You can keep making it more interesting by adding expansions later too.

Co-operative games are a tonne of fun but they tend to have complex mechanics and a bit of a set-up time in the beginning. This may be a discouraging factor but they are a lot of fun because everyone comes out of it with a sense of accomplishment after having done something together (if you win of course).

Our niece and nephew picked up Zombicide: Black Plague, and we love it. Just enough D&D style equipment and effects to feel good, fully cooperative mechanics so everyone is a team vs the spawns, and a chance of getting eliminated individually / team losing if things go awry or there's horrible card draws.

All the good aspects in one.

Umm, dice rolling is in serial order in Settlers, but everyone has to pay attention in each turn.

And any one can get a come back at any time. Hasn't this ever happened to you? You get a lot of sheep/wool, you build a 2:1 sheep port, and exchange all the sheep for stone, etc to upgrade to cities, and so on?

Settlers with more than four is not the greatest.

Ever play Dominion with a kid? Their slow shuffling kills.

I think no matter what, you need a small group to really pique the interest of newcomers. Dominion was definitely what pulled me in, I played it back in 2010, when I believe it was still kind of new on the scene, and though I didn't touch it much afterwards, it really made me want to explore more games.