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[CortJstr]

I was always more of a Scrabble/Boggle guy, really. Stratego, if you can find a person who'll take it seriously.

Risk is fun but all that dice rolling is fuck*ng tedious.

I like to describe Small World as "like Risk, but fun"

[theinevitable]

LFM, my roommates and I own an XBox, a Wii, and an SNES. One month into our residency, only the SNES is set up. We play it every day.

[jay-ell]

I like to describe Small World as "like Risk, but fun"

Yes, this.

I got Pedro a copy of Risk Legacy for his birthday. Hot damn, that's an expensive game. But it looks awesome.

What makes this game unique is that when powers are chosen, players must choose one of their faction's two powers, affix that power's sticker to their faction card, then destroy the card that has the other rule on it – and by destroy, the rules mean what they say: "If a card is DESTROYED, it is removed from the game permanently. Rip it up. Throw it in the trash." This key concept permeates through the game. Some things you do in a game will affect it temporarily, while others will affect it permanently. These changes may include boosting the resources of a country (for recruiting troops in lieu of the older "match three symbols" style of recruiting), adding bonuses or penalties to defending die rolls to countries, or adding permanent continent troop bonuses that may affect all players.

Also, the Star Trek: The Next Generation deck building card game. We've only played a few deckbuilding games, but they are a neat concept. For those who don't know, you have a bunch of stacks of cards face-up on the table, and you start with a few cards which are essentially money. On each turn, you use those money cards to buy other cards from the faceup stacks and shuffle them into your hand. Some of them give you more money, which you can use to buy even more powerful cards. Some of them give you victory points. Some of them damage your opponents. The game ends when a number of stacks are depleted, and the one with the most victory points is the winner.

The trick is to balance the amount of money you need in your deck to buy good cards with the number of victory points you need to win. It all boils down to resource management, which is my very favorite kind of game to play. (San Juan is another example of a resource-management card-based game.)

The only thing that springs to mind is one of your competitors. The bottom of the Thought Hammer home page lists all the upcoming games by estimated street date. Though games rarely actually come out on their street dates.

We just got our copies of Game Trade Magazine in the store, that should help. We didn't have the September issue 'til yesterday, and I don't even know what happened to August's copies because they were gone before I even got hired.

I know in my board game meetup the biggest challenge is finding space. Maybe things are different there but we have to book library meeting rooms two months in advance and pay $65/day to use them (when they aren't booked solid). Somebody offering us free space would be fantastic.

I took your advice and joined a couple of meetups for our area. The Strategy Gamer's group you found not only approved me promptly, but sent me several invite to private home events and made me an event organizer right off the bat. So that's cool. The other stores in the area (Gamer's Armory and Game Theory) are both heavily involved in Meetup, so it's going to be an interesting balancing act not to step on any toes. We do not want to be overly competitive with the other area stores; we want to support the gaming community because it is definitely big enough to support three shops and we have some things (copious space, better prices) that they don't. Meanwhile, they have some things (Tier 1 relationships with Games Workshop) that we don't want to offer.

And to go back, most people I know can't stand Settlers. I know one guy who will only play if he's trying to use it as a gateway game for somebody who's heard of it but not much else. Of course he also spent 40 minutes telling me how much he hates Cards Against Humanity.

I was going to say that that is not a person whose judgement I would trust, but then I realized I don't actually like CAH that much, either. Which would infuriate my gaming buddies, because last time we played I kicked ass like crazy. They gave up when I had fifteen cards to the next-highest player's seven. (We played for three hours with six players, it was fairly epic.) But it's really...winning is kind of arbitrary. That's not satisfying. But it is funny.