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Hi, all. I'm looking for suggestions for boardgames that include a good portion of strategy rather than (but perhaps not excluding) luck. However, I'm hoping to find one that doesn't require much in the way of attacking or screwing over other players in some way.
For example, I've played things like Diplomacy, Risk, Illuminati, and Settlers of Catan. I like them (especially Diplomacy), but they generally rely on attacking other players, for resources or fun or whatever. True, that element is probably what makes the games fun, but some groups don't handle it well.
So, I'm hoping to find some game that requires similar (or greater) levels of strategy and such -- but which don't involve a lot of attacking or taking from other players.
I don't know if such games exist, or if they would even be fun, but I figured some of you would know. Thanks in advance for any help.
(Alternatively, perhaps I need to look at other boardgame genres? RPG, adventure, etc.? I haven't really investigated any of those yet.)
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Carl Johan Ragnarsson
Sweden
Lund
Unspecified
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In many Euro games you are indirectly competing for something. If you are not competing for anything at all, the game is probably not fun.
Alhambra was one game that came to my mind. You are each building something and trying to get the majority, but it does feel very "nice". All in all I would say that there are quite a lot of these games.
There are also puzzly games like Factory Fun or Galaxy Trucker where you do your own thing and compare.
Or Dominion without any attack cards 
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Anthony Simons
United Kingdom
Royal Wootton Bassett
Wiltshire
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Well there are quite a few games which are often described as "multi-player solitaire", some of which actually are, as in no player can affect another player's position.
The classic example would be Take It Easy, which is rather straightforward. This has been made in a more complex version, called Take It To The Limit.
Games similar in the core mechanism include Don Quixote and Cities; both rather good fun to play; I prefer Don Quixote of the two.
There are also games such as Wuerfel Bingo and Mosaix, in which players have to work with the same dice roll to fill their card.
More interactive games technically involve some sort of conflict or competition, however indirect. The milder ones include Ingenious (or Mensa Connections), Goa, Nefertiti, Factory Fun, Stone Age and most race games such as Mississippi Queen and Ave Caesar. A recent game I have played which would fit here is Shipyard. Goldland would work here too; where players are all competing with the system in order to compete with each other.
If you're willing to take things a stage further, Power Grid, Puerto Rico, Caylus, Amun-Re, Agricola, Le Havre and St Petersburg have stronger elements of indirect conflict (well, Amun-Re is slightly direct with the auction and the offering, but very low on indirect screwage). A more recent one I would recommend is Age of Industry, where players will be in direct competition to build industry and infrastructure, but primarily indirect insofar as they are trying to gain the most points for what they build.
Games you should undoubtedly avoid if you don't want direct conflict or screwage are, despite being good games, Santiago and Intrigue - definitely out!
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Stuart Ekin
United Kingdom
Bangor
County Down
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Take a look at Twilight Struggle. Fantastic game, but only for 2 players. Luck comes into it only in the form of when and what cards you get dealt and a small amount of dice rolling. The rest is down to the choices you make.
Tigris & Euphrates is another good choice, games can be quite aggressive, although they don't need to be - just depends on the players. Up to 4 players, relatively quick and easy but deep to play.
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Jimmy D
United States
Bucks County
Pennsylvania
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My friends told me a story of a Diplomacy game that ended with the table getting flipped. True story. What an evil game.
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Was George Orwell an Optimist?
United States
Corvallis
Oregon
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jimicapone wrote: My friends told me a story of a Diplomacy game that ended with the table getting flipped. True story. What an evil game.
Not an evil game, just an immature player.
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Thanks all for the help so far. I will check out your suggestions.
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z morgan
United States
Fort Huachuca
Arizona
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how about co-op games like Pandemic? some of the people i game with don't like confrontation either and end up turtling or just shutting down. it's obvious they're not having fun as soon as anyone attacks them - Pandemic was a good panacea.
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u_2_guy wrote: how about co-op games like Pandemic? some of the people i game with don't like confrontation either and end up turtling or just shutting down. it's obvious they're not having fun as soon as anyone attacks them - Pandemic was a good panacea.
Oh, that might be a good way to go. Thanks for the suggestion.
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I suggest 'Race for the Galaxy'. In this game you don't directly harm your opponents, but you try to figure out their strategies somewhat and try to use their actions to your advantage.
It's a card game where you try to build a tableau that both provides you with a viable economy (so you can keep playing cards!), while also trying to score as many victory points as possible.
Other than the condition for ending the game (once the VP chips are gone, or if one player reaches 12 cards on his tableau) there is really no other interaction between players, but that's not necessary either. The game is brilliant.
Battlestar Galactica has a very nice traitor mechanic, where the game starts out as a co-op game, yet quickly turns into a "find the traitor" game.
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Bill Stivers
United States
Indiana
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Good suggestions so far from everyone. One game left out is Kingsburg from Fantasy Flight. This game has no back stabbing at all, with deep strategy.
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Phil McDonald
England
Staffordshire
UK
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Shipyard
Power Grid
Manifest Destiny
Origins: How we became Human
Through the Ages
A castle for all Seasons
Agricola
Pillars of the Earth
Lord of the Rings (the only co-op game I enjoy), Played with all 3 expansions.
Stone Age
Arkham Horror
Starfarers of Catan (the only version of Catan that doesn't bore me to tears)
On the Underground
The World Cup game
I love Kingsburg to death, it's one of my favourite games, but I wouldn't call it a deep strategy game 
These are all games which will never be traded from my own collection, and I'd never turn down a game of any of them.
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Ron Glass
United States
Tampa
Florida
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I am not sure on your desire for something historical, but there is a 50 year track record in this hobby of WARGAMES, the original games where this hobby started, that is clean and simple. 2 sides are at war and will fight. This can be from 2-player games up to 7-player games depending on your era and scale, from simple to grandly strategic, from a few hours to a few months, from a handful of counters to...lots.
Team play is fun and throws in a bit of the historical nuances of player skill since not all generals are you, nor will they all do exactly what you want. Subjects such as the Civil War, Napoleonics, the World Wars, centuries of European conflicts, ancients, and modern era offer a multitide of choices.
And many of these same subjects also have books and movies on them that gives them a bit more details if its a subject you like. Multi-faceted and multi-player teams...doesn't get better than that.
Ron
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Darrell Hanning
United States
Jacksonville
Florida
Love women in action movies and shows. It all started with Diana Rigg, in the Avengers.
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It's startling to me how many people are suggesting that Power Grid lacks "screwage".
I think none of you want to play it with my group. We always try to find a way to block the expansion of other players on the map, drive the prices up on power plants, and deprive others of the fuel they want (or at least jack the price on them). PG has quite a bit of potential for screwage.
And Twilight Struggle? Are you serious? No interfering with the plans of the other player? (Are there maybe two games with this title, and the other is by Ravensburger?)
Of course, it depends on just how sensitive your group is to interference by others. Does it extend to the point where bidding for resources, for example, is taken too personally by some? If not, then there is an abundance of economic strategy games available to you. If so, then you're really whittled down to cooperative games, and the occasional "parallel-processing" game most call "multi-player solitaire".
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Phil McDonald
England
Staffordshire
UK
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DarrellKH wrote: It's startling to me how many people are suggesting that Power Grid lacks "screwage".
I think none of you want to play it with my group. We always try to find a way to block the expansion of other players on the map, drive the prices up on power plants, and deprive others of the fuel they want (or at least jack the price on them). PG has quite a bit of potential for screwage.
And Twilight Struggle? Are you serious? No interfering with the plans of the other player? (Are there maybe two games with this title, and the other is by Ravensburger?)
Of course, it depends on just how sensitive your group is to interference by others. Does it extend to the point where bidding for resources, for example, is taken too personally by some? If not, then there is an abundance of economic strategy games available to you. If so, then you're really whittled down to cooperative games, and the occasional "parallel-processing" game most call "multi-player solitaire".
There is hardly a game available that can't be played in a backstabbing way. I took thee OP's post to infer games where backstabbing wasn't an integral part of the game mechanics.
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jeff miller
United States
West Jefferson
North Carolina
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Imperial is all strategy and zero luck. It may be just what you're looking for.
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Shane Larsen
United States
Salt Lake City
Utah
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I agree with a statement above that any "good" game has to involve some sort of interaction/competition for the same resources/goods/tactics. So a search for a game with zero conflict between players is going to ultimately lead you to something like Chutes and Ladders. I'm going to assume you want something better than that. Enter the following:
Puerto Rico
The core mechanic of Puerto Rico is action selection and with every action a player chooses, EVERYBODY gets the reward, but the player who chose the role, gets a small advantage for choosing it. So the very nature of the game is to give to all players alike. Thus, when all players at the table are at similar levels of understanding, even if there is a moment in PR where someone says, "Crap, why did you choose that role now?! It totally screwed me!" That same player can usually look back a turn or two and say to themselves, "Crap, why didn't I prepare for that then? It would have totally protected me!" That is what makes Puerto Rico so absolutely brilliant.
I strongly recommend Puerto Rico based on your criteria.
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Was George Orwell an Optimist?
United States
Corvallis
Oregon
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jeff miller wrote: Imperial is all strategy and zero luck. It may be just what you're looking for.
Haven't played it much, but I'd say it has a ton of backstabbing.
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Dan Owsen
United States
Redmond
Washington
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Twilight Struggle doesn't have back-stabbing. In fact, you MUST play cards that help your opponent. That's love-stabbing.
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Sphere wrote: jeff miller wrote: Imperial is all strategy and zero luck. It may be just what you're looking for. Haven't played it much, but I'd say it has a ton of backstabbing.
This is factually correct, I would, however, want to make the point that nowadays we call this investment-banking properly.
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I have a 7 year old son, who absolutely hates getting screwed by another player. That makes competition games rather difficult to handle. My 9 year old at his age just got sad. Miles (the 7 year old) goes ballistic).
So I've been slowly building up a collection of co-ops. They work great! Now he just gets mad at his dice rolling, card drawing. There are lots of really fun co-ops out there right now, so search for a geeklist or the co-op mechanic.
snorq wrote: u_2_guy wrote: how about co-op games like Pandemic? some of the people i game with don't like confrontation either and end up turtling or just shutting down. it's obvious they're not having fun as soon as anyone attacks them - Pandemic was a good panacea. Oh, that might be a good way to go. Thanks for the suggestion.
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Russ Williams
Poland
Wrocław
Dolny Śląsk
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It's confusing since the OP seems to equate "back-stabbing" (breaking an agreement) with "attacking"/hurting other players (outside the context of agreements).
In any non-multiplayer-solitaire game, you can hurt other players, including games like Ingenious, Mississippi Queen, Power Grid, etc. (The idea of Ingenious and Power Grid not involving hurting other players boggles my mind.) If you want to avoid the possibility of hurting/attacking other players, then indeed you need to stick to cooperative games (Pandemic, etc) and multiplayer-solitaire games (e.g. Take It Easy, Ricochet Robots). There are some good borderline cases like Dominion to check out also.
Only in games with deal-making and agreements and promises (e.g. Diplomacy) can you "back-stab"/betray/lie to other players. It's much easier to avoid that kind of game and still have strategy/competition, unless your group is prone to making deals even in games that aren't explicitly about deal-making.
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John Cataldo
United States
Somerville
Massachusetts
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russ wrote: It's confusing since the OP seems to equate "back-stabbing" (breaking an agreement) with "attacking"/hurting other players (outside the context of agreements).
I agree the definition is a bit weird, but OP was quite clear in what he was looking for, at least. Settlers of Catan as an explicit example of too much competition makes it pretty obvious that co-op or multi-player solitaire really is best.
Some responses zoomed in on the 'no-luck' element to the exclusion of the 'no-competition' element.
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Ryan Janus
United States
Colorado
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I'll answer both questions. First, the strategy part.
I get the feeling like "screwing over," by your definition, means ganging up on one player. My dad was so good at Risk, for example, that my mom and her sisters would only attack him and not each other, even if it wasn't the best strategic move. Once he was out of the game, they would then play each other. Needless to say, this didn't make him happy, and even caused him (in his 40's at the time) to flip the board. Sounds silly, but it actually created some marital tension. My parents don't play Risk anymore. With 2-player strategy games, this is not an issue. It's 1-on-1, so no player feels like he's being picked on. Here's my list of the best high-strategy, zero-luck, 2-player games. Besides this list, the majority of high-strategy games are still fun with just two people.
Chess
Go
Checkers
Chinese Checkers
Mancala
Othello
Scrabble (tiny bit of luck when you draw new letters)
Abalone
Project Gipf games: Gipf, Zertz, Dvonn, Punct, Tzaar and Yinsh (if you've never heard of these, look into them - they're all awesome!)
Arimaa
Blokus, plus all its spinoffs (4-player, but with 2-player variations)
Hive
Caylus
Pente
Khet
Terrace
Okay, on to the second question. There's a whole category of games out there called "Cooperative" board games. In these games, everyone wins together or loses together. Many of these have already been discussed, but here's my list, which might include some not yet mentioned:
- Arkham Horror (which now has many spinoffs and expansions)
- The Fury of Dracula (this one is not strictly cooperative, as one person plays the role of Dracula and gets ganged up on by the other players. But if you have a bunch of kids like I do, this would still be great fun for them, as long as you're playing Dracula )
- Scotland Yard (like Dracula, where one person plays "Mr. X")
- Save the Whales
- Lord of the Rings
- Shadows Over Camelot (careful with this one, though - while it falls under the category of cooperative, there's a chance that one player is secretly a traitor, which sometimes creates confusion and paranoia. But you can always simply remove that element.)
- Battlestar Gallactica (like Camelot, where one or more people are secretly Cylon enemies)
- Pandemic (probably the most popular one right now)
- Forbidden Island (by the creator of Pandemic, and our current favorite)
- Red November
- Castle Panic
- Defenders of the Realm
- Ghost Stories
- Doom (also like Dracula, where one person gets ganged up on)
- Descent (again like Dracula)
- There are a whole slew of them at familypastimes.com, though I've never played any of them
I've found that even all those games where one person is the proverbial "monkey in the middle" are lots of fun, especially when the "monkey" is the strongest gamer, like my aforementioned dad who used to teach chess to local high schoolers. This is different than ganging up on someone in Risk or Catan, because the odd man out is a categorically different type of player. It was interesting to see if I and my other pre-teen friends could conquer my dad's mind ... kind of like seeing if you and your weekend-athlete buddies could beat Michael Jordan if you played him 4-on-1.
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Liviu Semacovschi
Romania
Bucharest
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I'd suggest, for the lack of back-stabbing interaction, the following:
Co-op games:
Ghost Stories
Pandemic
Forbidden Island
Space Alert
Non co-ops, but with very little interaction:
Agricola (if you play the easy decks version, it's like everybody playing solitaire)
Dominion (same as above)
Party games:
Dixit
Apples to Apples
Gambit 7/Wits & Wagers
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An just in case you change your mind, here are some games that will ruin your friendships. I call them "Backstabber Heaven  ":
MWAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!
Cosmic Encounter
The Werewolves of Miller's Hollow
Saboteur
Bang! The Bullet!
Battlestar Galactica
Samurai
A Game of Thrones
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