Name a truly great board game from before 2008

Games
103

Never feed the trolls, they say, but its a fun thread to have, given how the completely BGG gets dominated by the “cult of the new”, so I’ll bite. Before 2008 is too easy, though, so I’ll bite with four timeless designs from before 2000:

Definitely not perfect, but a unique political game that no one else has ever come close to replicating (and not for a lack of trying). For gamers that enjoys political gameplay, there is really nothing that comes close to this delightful contest of achieving pre-eminence in Rome while the game system tries to crush you under the elephant’s foot.

The only game that I have multiple copies of. Card-driven games have become more or less their own genre, but perfection was achieved already with the second of the CDG - Mark Simonitch’s finest hour. Twilight Struggle isn’t even close. Fight me.

Not the best game I have, but definitely one of the most fun. One of the best beer and pretzels games ever made, IMO - I’ve had it along on company retreats almost every time I’ve been on those, and it has always been a success. Shoving an opposing player’s robot into a pit or seeing the perfect plan go wrong is never not going to be fun.

Biggest problem is that some of the reprints have “improved” the game. So much for progress…

It may not be 100% historical, because the game can be brutally unforgiving, but that is also what makes this Butterfield design an extremely tense experience, where every decision counts and you just have to play “one more turn” just to see what happens when you get that Squadron back. Which is one of the reasons why, IMO, this is one of the best solitaire designs ever.

John H. Butterfield also designed Ambush! (mentioned above) and has a strong claim, IMO, to being one of the greatest solitaire boardgame designers of all time. Anecdote: He also designed a little known 1979 game called “Freedom in the Galaxy: The Star Rebellions”. The game was originally intended to be a licensed Star Wars game, but SPI bungled it and it ended up getting rushed out without the license. The game mechanics were pretty clear inspiration for the later rather unique strategy game Star Wars: Rebellion (aka Star Wars Supremacy in the USA) - the computer game which served as the inspiration for FFG’s more recent Star Wars: Rebellion board game.

104

Candy Land. At first, you assume it’s simply a deterministic outcome based on the position of the cards in the deck and therefore there is no game. But peer deeper, and the true depths of the systems reveals itself.

As I first detailed in my ebook Next Level Candy Land (2011), the variety of fundamental ways the game teaches kids how to lie and cheat puts even the most sophisticated modern aimbots and wallhacks to shame.

I mean, sure, you can stack the deck to make sure you get the special card that puts you closest to the finish, thus ensuring your victory. But do that two or three times in a row, and your opponent will cry foul at your constant two-turn wins. Then you must move on to subtler but more difficult deck-stacking that gives you a beneficial color sequence rather than an outright win. Or you may even “take the L,” as the kids say, and post the occasional loss to throw your opponent off the scent while ensuring an overwhelmingly lopsided record. The more complex the stacking, the more advanced sleight-of-hand is required.

This is all fine and good, but what happens when your opponent has stepped up their game as well? What next, when you are faced with an opponent who also knows how to stack the Candy Land deck? You move on to the next level, of course! This is where the true depth of Candy Land is revealed, as you are no longer playing the game but are instead playing your opponent.

It begins with the simple “Thanks for shuffling, I’ll cut the deck” move, ensuring that you are the last one to touch the deck. This allows you to stack the deck, though it is easy to get caught in a “Deference Loop,” wherein both players endlessly offer to be the last one to touch the deck. Once it is clear that neither player trusts the other to handle the deck, then you graduate to the more advanced techniques, such as the “Oops I dropped my card, let me pick it up, (and replace it with the one in my sleeve)” or the “Sorry I bumped the table, which space were you on?”.

The Candy Land Pro Tour is a sight to behold. Players fly in from all over the world to show off their new tech. In the last tournament before Covid, the champion snuck in thin color e-ink displays instead of cards so that he had total control of the board at all times. In the finals, he narrowly defeated his opponent, who seemed to have devised some sort of quantum piece that automatically advanced when no one was observing it.

Wild stuff, and from the early 20th century! To suggest that good board game design was invented in 2008 suggests a perverse mind and a deeply diseased psyche.

105

Fortress America
Star Fleet Battles
Dominion
War of the Ring
Kings & Things
Puerto Rico
Power Grid

106

I had this when I was a kid and yeah it had a very Star Wars feel - which is why I got it. However I was a bit young, maybe 9 or 10, so it was all quite overwhelming and I don’t think I ever fully finished a game. :P

107

I cannot speak to the design of this one, but goddamn we enjoyed the shit out of this game.

108

Snit’s Revenge
King of the Tabletop

I kid. Or do I?

109

Owned this one too, and it definitely had the Star Wars thing going on. And unfortunately, it tried to do too many things at once and ultimately just dragged the entire game into a spiral of dense rules and mechanics.

110

Looking forward to the 2031 thread “Board games before 2019 were all KRAP!”

111

This is a long thread, but I don’t think anyone’s mentioned Imperial (2006) yet. Its fusion of 18xx stockholding and Diplomacy is fantastic. Nexus Ops obsoleted basically every ‘dudes on a map’ game for me when I first played it, though I expect it too has been improved on. Shadows Over Camelot is still far more elegant than most every subsequent co-op game I’ve played. We can probably add Martin Wallace alongside Knizia—well, maybe a bit below Knizia—for having designed lots of interesting games from Tom’s ‘dark ages’ period.

Also, essentially every Alea game holds up fairly well. Puerto Rico was mentioned upthread as a dead end, which is bizarre given how revered it was (I still think it’s excellent; definitely in my top ten if not higher). I wonder why Caylus’ mechanics took off while Puerto Rico’s didn’t?

But, I do think there’s something to Tom’s general premise. I could pluck a random board game off a store shelf now and I would likely find it palatable. Probably not particularly inspiring, but playable for me and people I game with. I do not think that was the case 15 years ago or (before my time) 30 years ago.

112

Can’t mention Advanced Civ without a nod to @Lorini (who may have her own ideas for this thread)!

I haven’t played that one, but here are a fewer older games that really shine for me. These are all from playing over the past few years, since I wasn’t a boardgamer in olden times.

Bus (1999) - Super tight, super interactive route-building and passenger delivery (with a side of time manipulation). Best of all, if you don’t like long games (Tom), it’s over in 90 minutes. It was recently republished in an edition that leaves the rules untouched, but gives it a much cleaner graphic design.

Santiago (2003) - The Cape Verde irrigation game you’ve always dreamed of. A simple ruleset for making the most of scarce resources, driven by a central bribery mechanic. Each turn, one player is in charge of expanding the island’s irrigation network. The other players desperately try to bribe her so that the network reaches their fields before their crops shrivel to dust. (One caveat is that it really needs a full 5 players to shine.)

Intrigue (1994) - More bribery! This time you’re bribing other players to hire your family members for their businesses. Utterly cutthroat, which will turn off some people, but I loved it.

113

I love RoboRally. It’s not my favorite board game, but it does approach my ideal form of board gaming with its combination of intricate planning and emergent chaos. I wonder what became of the guy who designed it? I heard he made a few card games.

114

I’ve only played RoboRally one time, but dear god it was hilarious.

115

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/WarmheartedOptimalHorsefly-size_restricted.gif

I forgot who it was that used this gif a couple of times, but I figured was appropriate for this thread. Who better to send you guys and your outdated games packing than Humphrey Bogart?

-Tom

116

candyland

117

I can think of a couple games that came out before 2008 that I’d still hold up as unshakably great today, notably Race for the Galaxy and Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (those boxes you can buy today really are just reprints and (I think) retranslations of the 80s French game, for the most part - I’m not clear on if any of them contain new cases as the original game did have 2-3 expansions). But only a couple. Some of the stuff people have listed here like Talisman I’d still play out of nostalgia but were never actually good games. Some were, for the time, but I couldn’t expect someone new to them now wanting to play them (Knizia’s LOTR coop, IMO) over today’s entries in the genre. Some I’d just never play to begin with.

I definitely take issue with the idea that “plays faster” is enough to obsolete a game, though. Long games are often long for a reason and while I know all too well how it can make them harder sells, I just really find a meaty 3+ hour session more compelling and enjoyable than even the most elegant 30 minute game played 6 times. Race for the Galaxy is a relative anomaly for me in being really deep and varied and consistently interesting at its quite short game length…but I’d still rather play a round or two of that and then move on to a nice long evening of something more sprawling than do a bunch of it all night.

118

Man, those are some seriously adult board games you are all talking about - did no-one enjoy the boardgames you played as kids? Or think they don’t hold up, or was well done, design-wise?

This is , Monopoly aside, probably my second most played board game before 2008


I am quite certain its also what prompted Master of Orion, because the similarities are too eerie to be coincidential.

My most played is probably Stratego - Such a great game, easy to learn, fast to play, hard to master.
It was even made in 1946!

Another great game from when I was a kid, was, and this is tranlated so I am unsure whether its the name you guys would know it under, but The Star of Africa. Its rather much a product of its timewise, but that did not prevent me from liking it as a kid.

The last one is more a point in favor o Toms thesis, though - We tried this game once, set up all up and…according to the rules, I had already won by then, because of how the cards ended up being stacked. Fun times in Avalon Hills War of the Roses, or Kingmaker.

119

I think the Tom types would say ‘those games are all right for kids, but…’

I go back to Talisman. I loved that game so much but finished it about 1/4 of the times my family played it, probably. The design is a mess and in a sense you can say that there is hardly any ‘design’ there at all, if by design you mean a coherent ruleset - it’s 90% randomness, expressed either by die rolls or card draws. But in its way it’s one of the seminal fantasy ‘texts’ of my adolescence, along with Tolkien, Ultima, and a few others. The gorgeous artwork (2nd edition). The infinitude of possibilities contained in that card deck of crazily random events/encounters/objects/locations.

Is it a ‘good game’? By the criteria I suspect are being applied here, no. But it was glorious.

120

No mention yet of Clue, dangit.

Also, props to @dwinn for mentioning the weirdly enchanting Stop Thief, which had very novel gameplay for 1979.

121

Oh, I recognize that all right! I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to have grown up in Finland and not played it.

It’s total trash as a game design. Roll and Move mechanics, frustrating turns where you get to do nothing except roll a die and see if you get to do something next turn, incredibly high variance outcomes from the chits (there’s nothing quite like flying to St. Helena and getting robbed), and the alternate win condition randomly obviating most of the game.

Sure, kids will play it if that’s the only game that’s available. They might even get something out of it. At least the rules are simple, and there is at some illusion of agency, which is more than you can say of some games targeted at kids. But if there is a title that doesn’t belong in a thread about great games, it’s Afrikan Tähti :-D

122

One of those games that every kid in Scandinavia has a copy of (at least until recently). If you’re trying to find an example of Tom’s thesis that there existed no designers before a certain time, this is it, though, given that it was designed by a 19-year old, and is objectively terrible. It’s basically a worse Ludo (random race game) except that it takes longer and is potentially unwinnable.

Stellar Conquest is excellent - still have a copy. Not exactly a kid’s game, I’d say.

Kingmaker is not exactly a kid’s game either, I’d say. Fun and a classic, but a rather flawed classic.