Favorite Board Game

[Britin Hale]

Monopoly and Sorry! are my favourite board games. =)

[Jennifer Kusakabe]

Monopoly, Life, and Scrabble are my favorite board games. I also got into Go for a little while.

[Shiloh Adlar]

My favorite board game would have to be Monopoly. My family has a family game night every weekend, and that game always gets picked because it lasts a while. Another game that gets picked a lot is Scrabble. My dad and I go at it all the time with that one, but I've still yet to beat him. I also like Life, Clue (with enough people), Chess and Candy Land. I don't really play Candy Land anymore, but my mom used to play it with me nearly every night when I was still little. It has good memories.

[Lilac Summerset]

Settlers of Catan is fun to play. Also, anagrams is really fun.

[Prof. Amy Lupin]

In the last few months or so, I’ve been introduced to a wide variety of board games, so much so that my favourite board game constantly changes.

Some of the contenders include:

• 7 Wonders
• Carcassonne
• Dominion
• Munchkin
• Takenoko
• Wiz-War

Mostly, I really enjoy the variety of board games out there and I am always keen to try something new. Chances are I'll be back with some more names sometime soon.

[Prof. Kendra Givens]

I have to be in the right mood for Monopoly or it gets boring. I love themed Monopoy, like my Chicago Monopoly.

The game I've gotten into recently is Rummikub. I also enjoy strategy games and got Pandemic for a gift recently. It's a strategy working together game and it can be REALLY hard to beat. I like the challenge.

[Prof. Arielle Lemoyne]

Amy, I haven't heard of any of the games you've mentioned, but I might see if the library has them. I've been super into trying new board games too, lately!

Kendra, I totally agree with you about Monopoly - sometimes I'm in the mood for it and it's tons of fun, and other times I get bored quickly. I also have certain properties that I'm emotionally attached to, but unfortunately they're not the best ones to have strategy wise. But I always buy them anyways and then end up losing. I can't say I've played too many themed monopolies, but I always love looking at what they made the board like.

I just got Pandemic from the library and learned how to play. It took us 3 tries on the "introductory mode" to win, but it was a lot of fun. As Kendra mentioned, it's a collaborative game, meaning you and the other players are working together to beat the game, rather than competing against each other. I don't think I've played a collaborative game before and I liked that aspect of it a lot. The premise of the game is you're trying to cure four diseases before they get out of control. The game board is a map of the world, and you move around treating outbreaks, creating research facilities, and developing cures. I feel like it's going to take awhile to really figure out strategy, but it completely held my interest for all three rounds we played.

I also tried a ton of new games when I was home on break. The first few that are coming to mind are
-Colt Express - The game board is a 3-D train with 4-6 cars (depending on number of players) and two floors. You're playing as bandits robbing the train, and the object is to be the richest bandit at the end of the game. It's super complicated, but I've never played anything like it, and it's a ton of fun once you get the hang of the rules and start to come up with strategies.
-Codenames - The object of the game is getting your teammate(s) to guess your team's 8-9 words out of the 25 words on the table, but each turn you can only give one word as a clue. It's challenging to think of ways to link several of your team's words with a single clue, and to try to imagine how your teammates will be thinking of it.
-One Night Ultimate Werewolf - So if you know of the werewolf game, it's that, except there's only one night. You draw cards to tell you what your role is, then during the night, almost everyone has an action, such as switching someone's card or looking at someone else's card, and then everyone "wakes up" and tries to figure out who did what, and who is the wolf. All you have to go off of is that one night. You either kill the wolf/wolves, or you lose. It's pretty fast paced and exciting! The most contentious round we had, we spent like 10 minutes with everyone yelling at each other and accusing everyone else of lying because nothing made sense and we could not figure out who the wolves were... and it turned out nobody had picked the wolf card that round.
-The Voting Game - In this game, you read a card like "Who would you trust with a secret?" "Who is most likely to have a book written about them?" and random stuff like that, and then everyone votes for one of the players in the game, and if you get the most votes you "win." This one is kind of meh in my opinion... I feel like you have to be playing in a group where everyone knows each other extremely well, and it's definitely more of a party having fun game rather than anything that lets you get competitive.

[Prof. Scarlet Leslie-Lewis]

I enjoyed the murder mystery type games growing up, like Clue and 13 Dead End Drive. It's possible that Miss Scarlet influenced my HOL name choice, though I typically played Mrs. Peacock because... blue!

Mahjong was the staple game at my house. My dad is really good at it and taught all of my siblings and me when we were young. A full game with all the rounds can take days, so the mahjong table was a familiar sight during the summer.

My cousins introduced me to the German-style board game, Settlers of Catan, which I played a ton with my friends in high school. The same cousins also gave us another game called Puerto Rico. I like Puerto Rico because all rounds are slightly different. Each player has to choose a role every time.

I was searching for a 2-player game to play with Cody. He likes card games, so I decided to get Dominion. The first time we got to play, however, Amy was also in Texas, so we all learned how to play Dominion together! Since then, Cody and I have gotten two of the expansions and would play a best-of-5 series online almost every day.

There is a local hobby store that hosts board games nights. I've really wanted to go and was hesitant to go by myself, but now Cody can come with me. On Tuesday, we learned how to play 7 Wonders from a regular. He described it as a card drafting game. Then two other players joined us and we tried out a relatively new cooperative card game called The Big Book of Madness. Both were quite fun/challenging and I'm looking forward to learning how to play more games.

[Prof. Alexander Brighton]

I really like board games. my favorite board game is Sorry. I also like Checkers.

[Prof. Amy Lupin]

I really enjoy cooperative boardgames, and Pandemic currently tops that list. I even managed to get my non-boardgaming friend hooked on it. I just received a copy of the expansion ‘In the Lab’, and I’m keen to try it out. There’s a 1-player variant which will help me get my boardgame fix in between boardgame meetups. I also find those cooperative games with a traitor element adds an interesting dynamic. Everyone works together to beat the game, but one person has a different mission, which typically involves derailing the others’ efforts. Some of these that I’ve tried out are Fury of Dracula, Dead of Winter and Shadows over Camelot. The first two were 3+ hour games though, so unfortunately I didn’t get to play them out in full.

Last night I got to play Istanbul, which I really enjoyed and can’t wait to play again. The game sees players as merchants (and their assistants) as they cart their wheelbarrows across various locations in Istanbul. These locations allow you to expand your wares, gain more gold, exchange goods or gold for rubies (which are akin to victory points), and so on.

Another game I recently played and enjoyed is Broom Service, which sees players delivering potions throughout the realm in exchange for victory points. There is a fair amount of strategy involved, but it isn’t always that easy to plan ahead so one has to rely on luck as well.

[Prof. Amy Lupin]

My current favourite boardgame to play is Viticulture, a worker-placement game that sees players manage various aspects relating to owning a wine farm. What first drew me to the game was that it had a one-player component, which was a fairly novel concept to me at the time. The game has a mechanic that simulates an opponent quite well, as various possible moves get blocked, just as they would in a 2-player game. The other appeal for me, is that the game can be played by up to 6 players, which is quite useful for my boardgame group as we're a fairly large crowd.

[Prof. Gustavo Flores]

Boardgames! I love board games! When I was little all I wanted for Christmas were board games and I got a good collection of them! My favorites will always be Monopoly, Clue, and Life.

Some of you have mentioned cooperative games, and that one that Professors Arielle and Amy mention, Pandemic, sounds pretty interesting and I would definitely like to play it!

I was introduced to cooperative games last year when my sister got me for Christmas the “Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle”, which is a cooperative deck building game. I don’t know if you have ever played it but I LOVED it, and right now it has become my favorite board game. Even my sister, who is not a super fan of the series, was hooked with this game.

You can play as Harry, Ron, Hermione or Neville. All players have to work together to defeat the enemies and avoid that they take different locations from the Harry Potter universe. What I liked the most of this game is that it is divided in seven levels (that represent the seven Hogwarts years of course). In each new level the complexity of the game increases and with every new level we are introduced new locations and enemies, and new allies and items for us to use and play with. All of these are related with books so for example, until level 5 we find Dolores Umbridge as an enemy and we can use Luna and Cho as allies because we were introduced to these characters until the fifth book, so it was very exciting to be discovering all of these characters and items.

I started playing with Hermione because she is my favorite character from the series. Later I regretted my choice because her ability wasn’t that good…Anyway, I played with my sister, and we were doing pretty well in the first three levels. This is a piece of cake!, we thought, but later we reached level four and we lost for the first time. In these seven months we have continued playing. We got stuck for quite a long time in levels 5 and 6, so it is indeed a challenging game. One of the reasons why I think we kept losing was because were only two playing and we needed the strength of the other two characters because the enemies were getting very strong. I even wanted to cheat (LOL) and tried to convince my sister to use another character so we could play with two characters each, but she wouldn’t allow it! That’s fine; it’s no good to break the rules! And just a month ago we finally passed level 6! We haven’t tried level 7 yet, but it’s going to be an exciting level because now it involves the Horcruxes Quest! Can’t wait to play it.

Like the Harry Potter fans we are, I think you will enjoy this game quite a lot! It is magical and extremely fun to play!

[Prof. Scarlet Leslie-Lewis]

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is a lot of fun! I definitely like the cooperative aspect. Cody and I are both very competitive, so when we play games like Dominion, Carcassonne, or Settlers of Catan, it can get very tense. It's much better when we have to work together.

We were able to beat the game with 2 players - Ron and Hermione. So then we played as 2 players each (all 4 characters), which was more difficult for us. Ron is my favorite character, both in the series and in the game. I love that dice are introduced in Game 4 of Hogwarts Battle. The Horcrux quest is an exciting element to the game, hope you enjoy it!

I wish Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle was a little easier to set-up and clean up because I just want to play! Our table had the game on it for weeks because it was easier to leave it there than to put everything away and take all the pieces out everyday. However, recently, we've been playing Legendary, a Marvel cooperative deck builder, which is even more of a hassle to set-up.

The Monster Box of Monsters expansion for Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is going to be released next month or so! I'm looking forward to getting that.

[Marie Dark]

Trivia pursuit ..... Scrabble. ... monopoly. .... and Clue..... these are the board games my family play during holidays or camping..... but I guess card games like "Cards Against Humanity" doesn't count.... but it sure does get a gathering to go in some wild directions...

[Austin Ollivander Black]

Number one is Trivia Pursuit. Followed by Monopoly. Third would be Chess. Lastly would be Risk.