| ▲ | r-johnv 5 hours ago | |
This is the kind of positivity that I love finding find once going down the rabbit hole of board games today. So make amazing suggestions in this list, including two of my favorites: Terraforming Mars and Brass Birmingham. Just chiming an opinion that Brass Birmingham is high on the complexity scale for beginner board gamers. Or more specifically, high on a frustration scale because there are so many placement restrictions that there are often only 1-2 legal moves to play and figuring out what they are is quite a challenge for people playing the first time. (From experience that we as well as several others we know had on their respective first times) That said, I absolutely love the game! | ||
| ▲ | shoo 5 hours ago | parent [-] | |
> Brass Birmingham [...] there are often only 1-2 legal moves to play and figuring out what they are is quite a challenge for people playing the first time. Also, some of those legal moves will set up a board state that the player taking a turn immediately after you can exploit for a lot more benefit than you got, so not only are the legal builds hard to identify for new players, half of those legal moves are also traps! If new players aren't comfortable learning the hard way, the player who is teaching the game can always call these out, explain what is going to happen & give people the opportunity to redo their move. An alternative strategy game that is less complex than Brass is Friedemann Friese's classic Power Grid (2004) [1]. It has some of the same elements (network expansion, building stuff to make money) and parts of it are highly interactive (auctions!) but it is less complex and doesn't feature so many negative player interactions. The main down side of Power Grid is that some of the "admin" rules are pretty fiddly, but provided there is an experienced player to teach the game & be responsible for the admin, players who are learning don't need to care about the details. | ||