Ahem, “Compleat”.
True, true. I’m old. Corrected.
Mine was The Fantasy Shop in St. Charles. Then known as FBN - The Fantasy Shop. (FBN stood for “Fly by night”; they weren’t sure how long they’d last when they opened in…1980 or so.) The family who owns it went to our church and were really great people. Within a few month span of time just as the store was opening, my stepfather had died, and the mother of the family that owned it also passed, and I think the shared empathy made it feel like a 2nd home.
Dream Wizards, somewhere near Bethesda, for my family, though I was so young I don’t know if I went in it myself.
It’s amazing how magical the non franchised game stores used to be, computer and otherwise.
Yes indeed. Like the little computer shops that had shelves of games in the back. Where I watched the C-64 section shrink away. :)
Yes, the Star Wars game! Way better than Twilight Imperium, which takes two hours to teach and eight hours to play. Give or take. Also, way better than theming. Two-player only, though.
-Tom
Now that’s damn optimistic.
God, I loved Car Wars, too. What modern game obsoletes that, I wonder? I mean, besides all of them. But what modern game would satisfy a Car Wars craving? Is there even one?
Avalanche’s sweetchrome Mad Max videogame is the definitive videogame implementation, but is there a modern boardgame that would re-create the Car Wars experience? Would I have to play some boring ancient Rome stuff with chariots, as @triggercut suggested? There’s that new game that uses Hot Wheels, I think. Maybe Car Wars hasn’t been replaced yet. :(
-Tom
Played hours and hours of Stop Thief
Well. There is this.
It was an Ogre kickstarter stretch goal.
Does this count as a boardgame?
I think I had this as a kid. Or maybe one of my friends did. Even though I’ve never known the first thing about football, I was fascinated by it. It might count as a videogame since it requires power.
-Tom
Does that even count as a game? I could never figure it out.
I loved the Boston store.
There’s one here in Fairfax County. It smells of crotch sweat.
But…you can occasionally find a game there that’s gone impossible to find, and always worth a stop in those cases. Have found all sorts of currently out of pint Arkham LCG card packs there, for instance.
This is even worse than the debate about should your GOTY be the one you liked best even if it has issues.
Ignoring wargames because they are such a different beast I’d say that San Juan (I don’t really like Puerto Rico but it’s little sister is cool), Saint Petersburg, and Race for the Galaxy hold up as games I would pull out to teach to someone who had never played them but was interested in the idea. There might be better games using similar mechanics but we’re talking about great games not GOAT games.
Illuminati and Cosmic Encounter fall into a weird category. Objectively they are nothing great as games. But they are terrific at creating silly fun. I’d say they are truly great board games but I’m open to other opinions.
This is certainly a danger. Especially if the gaming room isn’t in a separate area.
I’ve fallen in love with a lot of the older Knizia games: Tigris and Euphrates (1997), Samurai (1998), Ra (1999) and especially Blue Moon (2004) . I discovered these games in the last two years, introduced them to friends and we always had a great time with them.
And I second Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective.
I forgot a favorite. It’s maybe a controversial favorite, because it eschews complexity. I played a game over zoom back in the spring though, and had a blast with it.
It’s a space game called Starfire. It’s from Task Force Games.
The game itself was deceptively simple. Spaceship combat on a hexagonal grid in space.
What really made it special was the personalized ship design, combat, and damage systems. Which were an absurdly easy, yet awesome design thing.
Every ship design in the game could be written out as a series of letters in a line. G stood for guns. M for missile launcher. A for armor. S for shields, I for Ion engines. Simple. For every Ion engine in your ship, you got one movement point. You’d indicate that in parentheses after your ship build.
So a little escort ship with one shield, two armor, two guins, a missile launcher and five engines might look like this on your piece of paper (Escort hulls can only hold ten “things”):
SAAIGIMGII (5).
If you got hit for 1 damage, you’d mark off the S. Shields are down.
If you got hit for two more damage, you’d mark off the two armor spots. You might keep taking damage in a big fight. You could lose an engine, or your weapons, etc.
The great thing was the fun of designing your own ships. a 5 movement point escort is speedy. Maybe you want one that’s more heavily armored though, and less fast. Or one with more guns. Or maybe you don’t care if you lose your escorts, so instead of putting the ion engines at the end, you put your guns and missile launcher at the end.
And then you get to things like freighters with holds, tractor beams, ECM, etc. The simplicity of everything lent itself beautifully to designing big fleet battles with massive dreadnaughts and frigates and carriers with fighters.
I dunno. Maybe it’s too much bookkeeping for today. But I can tell you that many a study hall was spent designing frigates and escort corvettes and suchlike according to these very simple parameters. (Typically game – you get $500 space bucks to build a fleet, I get $500 space bucks to build a fleet. Then we match 'em up and fight it out.)
Definitely Gaslands. All you need to get started with are just the rulebook, Hotwheels, and distance templates. A crude map setup decorated by household items as makeshift buildings or traffic obstructions is good enough to make the game as evocative as a fusion of Wreckfest and Mad Max.