The Boardgames of Fitz

Last updated: 2021-05-13

• 7 Wonders — 2-7 players. My copy is from China, and the rules are in Chinese. Fortunately I have access to the internet, so I've downloaded the rules in English and printed them.
• Alhambra — 2-6 players. Somehow I have never, ever, won this game.
• Arkham Horror — 2-8 players, 2-4 hours. Now including the Dunwich Horror expansion, which adds a bunch of stuff.
• Attack! — 2-6 players. A fairly simple game of WWII-ish territorial expansion and control. Definitely NOT a simulation game; the wargamy aspect is more for flavour than anything. It has a couple of expansions available; one that adds another game board and some advanced rules, and another that adds another couple of armies (for a maximum of 8 players).
• Betrayal At House On The Hill — 2nd Edition, with fewer mistakes in the rulebooks. Up to 6 players. Probably need at least four for Best Fun. There's finally an expansion out, which I don't (yet) have.
• Carcassonne — 2-5 players — a particularly good 2-player game. Includes mega-meeple pieces, no other expansions.
  • Carcassonne Discovery — 2-5 players. Not as good for 2 players as regular Carcassonne, but OK for 3 or more.
  • Carcassonne Hunters & Gatherers — 2-5 players. Not quite just "Carcassonne With Cavemen", you also have to contend with sabre-toothed tigers eating up all your deer and magic mushrooms in your forests.
• Cartagena — simple, fun. 2-5 players, two play modes: luck-dominant or tactical.
• Citadels — 2-7 players. Best with 3-5.
• Colosseum — 2-5 players. Best with 3-4, and is more fun if the players really get into the spirit of being a Roman impresario.
• Dogfight — 2-4 players. WW1 aerial combat game. It's not a game for hardcore wargamers, but it does require a little (a very little) player skill.
• Dungeons & Dragons Board Game — I haven't really figured out how this game is supposed to be played. The rulebook is kind of ambiguous, to say the least.
• Endeavor — 3-5 players. Alas, according to the warnings on the box, you're not allowed to play this game if you're 3 years old or younger.
• Family Business — 2-6 players. You play an organised crime family, and have to be the last man standing.
• Fearsome Floors — 2-7 players. Escape the dungeon before it falls down on you.
• Firefly — Shiny Dice — 1-5 players, 30 minutes. It's Firefly: do jobs, get paid.
• Fluxx : Pirates — Card game with mutating rules and victory conditions. This version is all Piraty, arrrr!
• Get Lucky — 2-6 players. The card game version of Kill Dr Lucky.
• Gloom — A card game of misery and despair. The worse you do, the better you do.
• Guillotine — 2-5 players (though adding more players doesn't seem to affect things very much). A Revolutionary Terror-themed card game in which you get points by cutting the heads off aristos (and others) of varying values.
• Hey, That's My Fish — 2-4 players. Very quick game of territorial control and bastardry. Just about takes longer to set up than to play.
• Infernal Contraption — 2-4 players. Best with 4. An excellent card-based game of bastardliness, gloating and despair. It would be even better if it supported more than four players; maybe it would be possible to add more players by combining multiple game sets.
• Jaipur — 2 players. Easy and quick to learn, easy and quick to play.
• Kill Dr. Lucky — 2-7 players. Kind of like Cluedo, except you're all trying to be the murderer.
• Kingdomino — 2-4 players. A tile-matching game, a bit like dominos. Simple and fun.
• Kittens In A Blender — Supposedly, according to the box, 2-8 players. However, there are only four colours of kittens included, so either they're intending to include some as-yet-unpublished expansion, or they mean teams of two. It's a quickie, just twenty minutes or so per game. (Note: I've since got an expansion that adds a couple more colours, plus some more action cards.)
• Love Letter: Batman "Arkham Asylum" edition — 2-4 players. Love Letter is a very quick and simple game, an ideal filler, and this edition pretty much just replaces dukes and princesses and what-not with Batman and various crazed super-villains, and you collect Bat-tokens instead of love-hearts.
• Manifest — 2-5 players. Shipping, piracy, plague and storms at sea.
• Munchkin — plus expansions: Half Horse - Will Travel, The Need For Steed, Unnatural Axe, and some more that I've forgotten the name of, like monster enhancers and what-not. Many, many expansions.
• Pandemic — up to 4 players, cooperative beat-the-game game. It's good.
  • Pandemic Expansion: On The Brink — increases to 5 players, adds PvP element (the BioTerrorist) and generally makes things harder.
  • Pandemic: Contagion — 1-5 players. Quick, easy to learn card game. You try to be the disease that kills off the most cities of the world in the face of interference by those meddling kids, the World Health Organisation.
• Power Grid — 2-6 players. Pollute your way to ultimate victory! Endlessly re-playable; no game is quite like another. Also with the India/Australia and Scandinavia/Britain expansion boards, both of which add interesting tweaks to game play.
• RoboRally — a silly game that I'm completely useless at but nevertheless enjoy enormously.
• Risk — a classic. Not without its flaws, but I enjoy it nevertheless.
  • Risk: Godstorm — Risk in the Ancient World, with gods and miracles and the Underworld and what-not. More fun, in my opinion, than classic Risk.
• Scythe — 2-7 players (with Invaders From Afar expansion). Territorial expansion, resource building, and combat game. But if you fight too much, you make the peasants afraid of you, which will (probably) reduce your final score.
• Settlers of Catan — 2-6 players (with expansion set). A real classic.
  • Settlers of Catan — Traders and Barbarians — a bunch of variant rules and expansion pieces for Catan, including a "campaign play" system.
  • Settlers of Catan — Seafarers — Another expansion, this time with islands, ships and a pirate.
  • Settlers of Catan — Star Trek — 2-4 players. Pretty much the same as normal Settlers, but with a new "support card" mechanic and with starships and starbases instead of roads and towns/cities.
  • Struggle For Catan — a card game version of Settlers, for 1-4 players. Can be expanded to 5-6 with the use of another deck.
• Smallworld: Underground — 2-5 players. Yet another version of Vinci with different maps and races.
• Stonewall — 2-4 players. Fun maze-building game. (Could possibly be expanded to 6 players by using a hex-grid board? Might be worth investigation).
• Thurn und Taxis — 2-4 players. A route-building game, not dissimilar to Ticket to Ride, in which one builds a postal network around 17th century Germany.
• Ticket to Ride — Europe — 2-5 players. Railway route-building game.
• TransAmerica — 2-6 players.
• Wings of War — Famous Aces — the WW1 version of the game. Plus a bunch of aircraft expansions. Just the card-based game, which I actually prefer to to model-based layouts as being easier to manage on the table (although the models are innately more cool).
• Zombie Dice — Not a board game as such, but a dice game. It's pretty simple and quick; players collect brains while trying to avoid getting their heads blown off with a shotgun. (Note: not an actual shotgun).
• Zombies!!! — 2-6 players. Get to da choppah! Your basic run-and-fight-and-get-your-brain-eaten game of Zombie Apocalypse Survival. The graphics on the board could do with some substantial revision; they're ambiguous and confusing, and a slightly more stylized version would work a lot better.