What are your favorite board games? Me and my friends love playing board games, but I get the feeling their tired of playing the same things. What do you guys usually play? My favorite board game of all time is HeroQuest. I never get tired of playing it. Also love Catan, Arkham Horror, Betrayal House on the Hill, Spyfall (great at parties)
For a game that’s not on your list, Unfathomable is one I’ve been playing a lot lately. It’s a hidden identity game where you’re on a ship and the ship’s crew and passengers are combating Lovecraftian horrors that keep climbing aboard from the depths while trying not to run out of food and fuel and sanity before you escape. You or one of your companions may turn out to be a cultist who is summoning the dark ones and attempting to sabotage the escape efforts.
I love the Betrayal games: Betrayal at House on the Hill (horror), Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate (fantasy), and Betrayal Legacy (legacy horror) for a campaign style version that is linked over multiple sessions.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with them, the players build out a map by exploring a building or city one tile at a time, collecting items and buffs along the way and triggering events. After a certain point a trigger is reached when the “haunt” stage begins. At that point, one player typically becomes a traitor with unique abilities or monsters to control and gets the traitor’s tome - a book explaining their abilities and win condition. The rest of the group gets a different book explaining what the group must do to survive and what interactions they can do to foil the traitor’s plan. There are a bunch of different haunt scenarios in the books and they are chosen based on the last tile revealed and card drawn, so you never know quite what you’ll be facing in the end.
Me and friends play the early version of Betrayal at House on the Hill a lot (i think they released an updated version recently) and I also have Baldurs Gate since im a big fan of DnD and the Forgotten Realms setting and the Baldurs Gates games. However, we dont really play the Baldurs Gate version anymore, since it doesnt feel very balanced. The Warlock character, with the ability to attack with Sanity AND at range right from the start is always really OP and has won them the game multiple times. We’ve also had the traitor lose really fast AND really quickly.
The Warlock is pretty strong, I can understand that being frustrating at times. My group doesn’t take the game too seriously so it hasn’t been a problem for us having it be a bit unbalanced, but with people who are more strategy focused I can understand preferring the other games. I didn’t know there was an updated version of House in the Hill, I will have to read up on that!
Oh yeah we’re all Pathfinder players lol. Every board game and ttrpg becomes a puzzle that we have to solve with the resources available. So when the game isnt exactly balanced, its not as fun for us.