What are the ten best board games?\n
The Gaurniad’s list is actually called ten of the best<\/a>, so one might think that they are just claiming that these are among the best. However, the caption is a reference to six of the best<\/i> or more generally n+k of the best<\/i>, a reference to corporal punishment, or more broadly to whipping, the sort of wink at hipness and oh-how-comfortable-we-are-with-the-idea-of-B\/D-sex that I rather like about the newspaper, even while being aware of how intolerably bourgie it all is. Sigh. Anyway, Anna Tims claims that these are, in fact, the ten best, in the caption to the first, so that’s all right.\n Here’s the list, for those of you who can’t be arsed to click through: Backgammon, Pictionary, Cluedo (what we here call Clue<\/i>), Settlers of Catan, Diplomacy, Alhambra, Mouse Trap!, Othello, Acquire and Scrabble.\n First of all, Pictionary is not a good board game<\/i>. I know you can purchase an edition with a board, but seriously. Not. So that’s out.\n Second, I haven’t played Alhambra, so it’s off the list. No, I don’t care. Whatever other criteria there are (influence? popularity? education? long-term playability? The ability to implement House Rules for the MFQ?), one criterion must be that YHB has played it, otherwise what’s the point of having the list at all?\n Third, I’m taking Diplomacy off the list. I just am.\n Now. We have two dice-around-the-board games, neither of which is Parcheesi. My inclination is to replace Backgammon with Trouble, which is<\/i> Parcheesi, only with a Pop-O-Matic, so that takes care of both the inclusion of a Parcheesi-like game and the inclusion of a game with some sort of magnificent-in-the-abstract-but-unfortunate-in-reality mechanism. It’s not as good a game as Sorry (the game of sweet rewengi), but it is Pop-O-Matic, and Sorry, alas, is not.\n About filling the Diplomacy spot, then. The obvious choice is Risk. The problem with Risk as a board game specifically is that the movement of pieces on the board is the main flaw in the game. It’s a better game on the computer than on a table, and that seems to me to knock a game off the list. Perhaps that’s harsh, but I think I’m going to leave Risk off the list even if that’s harsh. Which leaves us without a war-and-strategy kind of game, so I’m going with Chess. Sometimes the easy answer is the right one.\n And the Pictionary parlor-game-with-a-board spot goes to Cranium. Not a hard choice.\n The last empty spot is going to APBA, on my list. APBA, for those who don’t know, is a table top baseball game (the letters theoretically stand for American Professional Baseball Association), and I can’t really defend the choice of APBA over Strat-O-Matic or Pursue the Pennant or any of the other tabletop baseball games<\/a>, except that I like APBA better and still have the boards. And I think the list really needs to have one simulation game; some folk will choose a railroad game, but they will be wrong.\n Before I finish my list, I’m just going to consider: Othello or Blokus? Well, Othello, I guess, although I might go a different way tomorrow. Mouse Trap! or The Game of Life? Life, clearly. Is there any way to put Sequence or Mancala on the list? No, not really. \n I think that’s my list: Trouble, Cranium, Clue, Settlers of Catan, Chess, APBA, The Game of Life, Othello, Acquire and Scrabble.\n Yours?\n Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>, In Which Your Humble Blogger gathers everyone around the kitchen table, which is in the dining room, because the kitchen isn’t big enough to play games in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202,205],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item","category-puff-piece"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18937,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12581\/revisions\/18937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"