Help populate my Christmas wishlist!

So despite me being a proper adult person with a mortgage and everything, my parents insist on buying me (and my brother) a million Christmas presents every year, and for the last 5 years or so they've asked me to put together an Amazon wishlist for ease of buying said presents.

Of course, a large section of my recent lists have been dedicated to board/card games, but as there's getting on for 150 games in my house right now I'm slowing down with ideas. I'm sure you lovely forum people have suggestions for me, right? I'd love to hear them!

General things I like:

• Animals
• Evolution
• Music
• Eurogames
• Cubes and meeples
• Screwage
• Weird themes
• Pretty colours/art

Games I like but already own/have access to:

• Sentinels (obviously)
• Dominion
• Dixit
• Agricola
• Flash Point: Fire Rescue
• Glen More
• Carcassonne
• RoboRally
• American Megafauna

General things I don't like:

• Space
• Crunchy wargames
• CCGs/LCGs
• Theme over mechanics
• Religion
• Too much luck
• Trading/auctions
• Traitor mechanics/bluffing (don't really mind this as such, but I'm totally over it)
• Roll-and-move, or anything where the decisions are all made for me

Games I don't care for:

• Settlers of Catan
• Fluxx
• Tsuro
• Cosmic Encounter

Games that are already on my wishlist:

• Dominant Species
• Castles of Burgandy
• Takenoko
• Seasons
• Bohnanza
• Get Bit!

No-one will ever play Dominant Species with me. But honestly, I don't care. I need that game.

I wanted to play dominant species at a convention with my friends, but got outvoted.  I read up on it later, it sounds brutal.  I want to play it.  I will admit I have a crushing need to prove to everyone that insects are the pinnacle of evolution.

Except for flying insects. Those are just wrong.  We need a hero in SotM that is a cockroach.

I'll assume you have Power Grid, since it seems like it would fit your style, if not you should add it.  It is one of few games I would vote for over Sentinels.

If you like long tense games there is always the great classic Diplomacy.  So much greatness, and all the orgainc backstabbing you can get.  If we have all day to play (E-mail games are also fantastic) it is my favorite.  But then I'm a Poly-sci Economics guy.

A lighter, more story oriented game that is a heck of a lot of fun is Gloom.  It isn't long, and it isn't deep, but it reminds me of Touring (Mille Bornes is another name for it) with storytelling.

I am not a huge game collector, sadly I am saddled with a casual gamer heavy friend base.

I'm a fan of Kill Doctor Lucky; each player is someone desperate to bump off Doctor Lucky, but he is, as the name implies, rather fortunate, and no-one wants to be seen killing him. There's also a print-and-play version on Cheapass Games if you want to inspect it or try it out beforehand.

I haven't actually played it, but Escape From The Temple Curse looks like wicked fun. It's a dicey running-about trying to get out of a temple, in real time.

Ascension is a fun card game - it was our favourite before I got hold of Sentinels. Basically it's a deckbuilding game where you start with a deck of ten cards, eight of which are "resource" cards (worth one Rune, the resource you use to buy new cards), while the other two are "attack" cards (worth one Power each, the resource you use to defeat monsters). You draw a hand of five cards from your own deck, while six cards are dealt out from the main deck in the middle of the board - when it's your turn you can choose to buy any cards you can afford from that central row (there are also two permenantly accessible decks off to one side, one which contains a two-Rune character and costs three Runes to buy, while the other is a two-Powr character and costs two Runes to buy).

Alternatively you can defeat any monsters if you have the Power to do so (again, there is a permenantly-accessible monster off to one side, the Cultist, who needs two Power to kill but is considered an unlimited quantity so the card is never removed when defeated). You can spend as much of your available Runes/Power from your hand as you like - you don't have to use every card in your hand and can just choose not to spend them. Any new cards you "buy" from the central row go into your discard pile.

Your turn ends when you're done with your hand (having chosen to spend or not spend all your cards). Next turn you draw another five cards and repeat. Next turn your deck will be empty so you reshuffle your trash and now start drawing cards which will contain the ones you bought previously.

Defeating monsters earns you Honour (in the form of small token thingys), as well as (usually) some other bonus, like being able to draw another card, or forcing another player to discard one/all-but-one their Constructs (cards you put into play and which stay there, granting you some kind of bonus or extra ability). When the Honour total between all players reaches a certain number (60 for two players, and I think 75 for three and 90 for four), the game ends when the last player in the turn order has had their turn (so everyone's had the same number of turns). Then everyone counts up their Honour totals, which includes the values on the cards they've bought (a number shown in a star in the bottom - every card except the ones you start with gives at least one Honour point, up to a maximum of eight, of which only one card has this value). The person with the highest total wins.

In general, the game doesn't involve directly attacking the other players or anything, but you might destroy a monster which (as mentioned previously) forces them to lose some of their Constructs currently in play. There's another monster (of whom there is only one copy in the deck) who, on death, lets the player who killed him take one card at random from the hands of every other player. You might also choose to try and buy or destroy a certain card from the central row just so someone else can't get it.

There are also some expansions to the game too (we saw them at Leisure Games on Sunday) but I have no idea whether they add in any new mechanics or just extra cards, as we currently only own the base game.

Dominant Species: Played it once, loved it. It's really a wargame, but I don't mind that so much, and I do love the evolution theme. Definitely try it if you get the chance.

Power Grid: No, I don't have it. A friend of mine does who I see occasionally, so I'm definitely planning to try it even though it hasn't "hooked" me yet (but then neither did Sentinels until i played it, so an open mind is definitely in order). I'm expecting to like it, anyway.

Diplomacy: I used to play this a bit back in the day, and really enjoyed all the messing with people and breaking alliances and funny accents that ensued. I liked it until one particular game when I was ganged up on and taken out in like the third turn or something (very early anyway) and then had to sit around for 3 hours until someone else was defeated so we could play another game.

Kill Doctor Lucky: Looks interesting, probably the kind of thing that would work with my group too.

Escape: We have this, and it is really good for a quick tense "oh my god we're all going to die if we don't get out NOW!" experience. Not one to over-play, but it's fun and I like it.

Ascension: I played that a lot on my phone and definitely enjoyed it, but my interest has waned recently. There are a few reasons for not owning it in cardboard form:

• If I buy Ascension, I fear my group won't want to play Dominion anymore, and I think Dominion's a better game. My group goes for theme more than I do, and Ascension has by far the better theme. I know they aren't that similar, but they're close enough that some might see Dominion as a boring verion of Ascension.
• Ascension seems rather random with 4 players, with much fewer strategic choices because the board is likely to be completely different by the time it gets round to your turn again.
• Since I've played a lot and my group hasn't, I'd probably win a lot. And it'll end up being one of thse games that "Anna always wins" (even if I don't) so people will be less likely to want to play.

Oh, and thank you very much for the recommendations, people. :)

I would always recommend Cosmic Encounter, but space is something you don't like.

Twilight Struggle - Great design and the themes fits perfectly. The biggest issue is that it is only 2 players, and every time you play, you learn the cards, and get significanlty better. So, unless you play with the same person every time, your levels will quickly get out of whack (unless they are playing with someone else).

Tobago - Light game where you move your jeep around an island to find lost treasure. You find the treasure by placing cards to narrow the location. This plays exaclty like a logic problem. The cards can say: it's next to a forest, it is not next to the shore, it is within 2 spaces of a hut, etc. Once the space is narrowed down, someone can pick it up (but oyu also get points for playing cards).

For a twist on an RPG, you could try Dread. A horror themed rpg with no stats. Instead, each person fill out a questionaire before the game that defines the character. Instead of dice, you use  Jenga tower. Each time you need to do something, you have to pull one or more blocks. If you cause the tower to fall, you are out of the game.

Kingsburg - Light dice-placement game, but it really needs the expansion. There are other games that fit this mechaninc like Alien Frontiers and troyes.

Survive - Try to get your meeples off the island while using sharks, whales and, sea monsters to kill your opponents. Lot's of screwage, so don;t play this with people who will get angry easily.*

Cash N Guns - Your team just robbed something, and you are divinding up the loot. Point your gun at someone at see if they call your bluff.

*This reminded me of a great list put out by the Dice Tower: Top ten Game NOT to play with an Angry Person

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFex4FGzKjA

Cosmic Encounter: I've played this twice. I HATED it. I know prety much everyone loves it, but it felt like Munchkin in Space to me.

"I win!"

"Oh no you don't! I have the high number card that no-one can possibly beat!"

"But wait, now I do, because I want to lose!"

"But I have an ability from the millions of possible powers that you didn't know I had because you haven't memorised every single race, and that means that I win!"

Sorry. But no.

Twilight Struggle: Does look awesome. If only it was more than two players…

Tobago: I need to check this one out. I like logic.

Dread: My friend has this. Played once, and it was okay. My group spent the whole time making dick jokes which kind of ruined the atmosphere, but I'd like to play with sensible people.

Survive: Another one I need to check out. My group especially likes screwing each other over!

Cash & Guns: Similarly. Never really looked at it, but it sounds like I should.

I like 7 Wonders a lot and it is almost universally enjoyed by my gamer and non-gamer friends alike. It can also be played rather quickly and it's depth is really up to the player as you can play it really lightly or get all heavy into strategy and still have a good time with it. It is also a pretty quick game (scoring and putting away the game can take longer than playing it). 7 wonders really only shines for me at the 5-7 player range though. 

I'm also a big fan of DnD's Lords of Waterdeep... it pulled me in with theme since I used to play DnD when I was a wee lad... but it's really a worker placement euro with a DnD theme.

 Its light and easy to teach and relatively quick depending on the player's knowledge of the game and propensity for analysis paralysis. I also like that players can control their level of interaction as well. You can just make it a blind race to the most points or you can try to affect other people's games by blocking spots or playing mandatory quests on them. 

The real selling point for me was that my girlfriend likes it and she isn't at all into DnD stuff and before it she wasn't much into boardgames... now she plays a few with me (still can't handle Sentinels though...).  Waterdeep is good with 2-5... but really shines at 4-5 I feel.

I was also gonna suggest Seasons, but I see it is on your list already. That one, I feel, is best for 2 players as 3 or 4 can take a very long time. 

I have only ever seen two responses to Cosmics Encounter: 1) I love it or 2) I hate it. There never seems to be anything inbetween.

If you are interested in the card drafting mechanic of 7 Wonders, but not the recommended players, you can try Fairy Tale.

Hey, someone else knows Mille Bornes!  That takes me back…

I have a different one.  I want to like it, but can't get over a few things that bug me; it's one of the games I would readily play if a few adjustments were made, but am unwilling to touch without them.  The Avalon Hill version was the least objectionable to me, compared to both the original and the later FFG version.

My group tends to prefer cooperative games or light competition, with occasional forays into everyone for themselves.

Small world- light competition (unless your group prefers to really go after one another), and enough complexity for some good replay value.

Puerto rico- Its a good blend of competition and individual strategy.  Also, you get to rule an island.

Citadels- you're trying to build a city, and so is everyone else.  I routinely get beaten because I overthink it, but enjoy it throughly!

Got a few more games that we play...

Chrononauts - Card game in which you are a time traveller. There is a timeline (of actual historical events...most of them American but presumably that's where the maker of the game is from, so...) represented by cards laid out in four rows of...eight, I think, and spans various years with the earliest being something like 1829 (assassination of Abraham Lincoln, whatever year that was) to erm...1999 I think (some kind of shoot-out at a school). Events between these two years include stuff like World War II, the sinking of the Titanic, and the shootings of various people including JFK and John Lennon. As a player, you can win the game one of three ways. Firstly, by changing the timeline so that events match up to the version of the future that you came from (certain events along the timeline are called "lynchpins" - flipping these causes "ripples" which flip other cards, their events becoming paradoxes since the event that caused them suddenly never happened/turned out differently). Note that if ever there are thirteen paradoxes existing at once, the universe basically implodes and it's game over for everyone. The second way you can win is by completing your mission, gathering certain artifacts from across time and playing them (laying them out in front of you on your turn - you get to play one card per turn). The third way is to fix the timeline by playing Patch cards on paradoxes - every time you play a Patch you get to draw an extra card (ordinarily your turn consists of playing a card and drawing a card, so your hand size never changes), and if you end your turn on ten cards, you win. You can mess with other people a bit by stealing artifacts from them or forcing them to swap their ID or Mission cards for a new one (ID card is the one that tells you the year you're from and thus which years you need to change in the timeline in order to win that way).

Braggart - Another card game, fairly quick to play, Basically you are a bunch of adventurers in a tavern boasting about your various heroic deeds. You play cards representing a Scene (optional), Foe, Deed, and Result (also optional), reading them out as epically as you like whilst doing so ;). Other players may choose to play Liar or Outrageous Liar cards (if they have them) when you've boasted, letting them swap your boast cards for others from their hands - the boast cards are worth points so if someone plays, say, a Foe worth seven points and you have one in-hand that's worth just two as well as a Liar card, you could play said Liar card and swap that seven-pointer for your crappy two one. And then the person has to re-read out the newly-altered boast ;). The winner of the round is the one who played the higest-scoring boast, and gets to keep all those cards in a separate pile while everyone else only gets to keep one (of their choice) from their own boasts (if they boasted - doing so is optional). The game ends when you've gone through the entire deck, at which point everyone adds up the score from the boast cards they "won" and the person with the highest total wins.

Forbidden Island - Not a card game, though it has cards in it. You're on an island formed from lots of squares, each one representing a different location (place names include Breaker's Bridge, Cave of Embers, and Silver Gate). The aim of the game is for the group to gather (co-operatively) four treasures from across the island, which is slowly sinking into the sea. You have to get four matching cards in your hand (max hand size of four) representing one of the treasures, then make it to one of the two locations from which that particular treasure can be obtained and use an action (you get three actions per turn) to swap your four cards for that treasure. Once you've gathered all four treasures between you (it doesn't matter who gets what, or how many each person has, if any, as long as all four have been collected), you need to go to the location called Fool's Landing, at which point someone with a Helicopter Lift card (assuming someone managed to get one) plays it and you all escape and win the game. The problem is that the island is, as mentioned, sinking into the sea so locations will become flooded and possibly disappear altogether (it's possible to use an action to "shore up" a location, un-flooding it). Since each treasure can be obtained from one of two locations, it's okay if one disappears but if both go, you can't win the game (if a square is flooded you can still do stuff there, it's only if it actually disappears that you can't go there or do anything because at that point it's removed from the game entirely). You can also lose if you get cut off by missing squares, though some characters have ways around this (for example, the Diver can use an action to swim across any number of spaces in a straight line from one square to another). You can also play a Helicopter Lift card to move yourself and anyone on the same square as you to any location you like :). This game tends not to last too long.

7 Wonders: I played that once and enjoyed it even if the icons did overload me somewhat at the beginning. A few player handouts would help there though, and it definitely should be on my consideration list.

Lords of Waterdeep: We have this one, but I've only played it once. I really should play it more, because it's the kind of game I should like. I hear good things about the expansion too. Have you seen the laser-cut meeples that you can get for it which look like wizards and thieves and clerics and fighters, to replace the cubes? They look fantastic!

Small World: My friend has Underground, so I have access to that occasionally. I'll have to get him to bring that around more, becasue it is fun.

Puerto Rico: Another one to look at - is that the one that's like San Juan?

Citadels: A friend owns it, but I haven't played yet. It sounded fun from what I heard so I hope I get to try it soon.

The expansion is very good, particularly the corruption module… it changes the game a lot without making it a whole new game. 

And yes, I got the DnDeeples when I first got the game. Can't imagine playing without them. I'm actually working with the guy that made them to make custom agents for each of the factions as well. 

Puerto Rico came out first, then two people independently took the basic mechanic and turned it into a card game. San Juan is the lighter one that kept the same theme, while Race for the Galaxy is a bit heavier, is in space, and is infamous for its iconography.

Chrononauts: We own this and while I enjoyed it a lot when we first got it, for some reason it got old for me fairly quickly (if you'll excuse the time-related pun). I'll still play it, but I'd rather play something else. Shame, because the theme's very interesting.

Braggart: Cool! I hadn't heard of that one, so I need to check it out. Might work well for my RPG club.

Forbidden Island: We have this one too, and it's a nice little game. Basically Pandemic Lite (same designer) and it's great for when you want a co-op that doesn't make you think too much. I'm considering its baby sister Forbidden Desert, if I can convince myself we need another co-op.

I have intense WANT for those meeples, but international shipping makes them cost the same as a whole new game so I haven't been able to justify them as yet.

It gives me intense WANT for a laser cutter too, but that's a whole 'nother story.

I'm a bit obsessed with interestingly-shaped meeples. I recently bought a game called Ice Flow partially because it looked like a decent game for the paltry price of £5, but mostly because it has polar bear meeples.

Braggart is nice and simple, doesn't take too long to get the hang of. There are cards which are literally just a rules summary - you can give one to each player for their own reference when playing the game, so consulting the rules leaflet thingy shouldn't be necessary once you've had a quick look through it at the start :). Meanwhile you can have fun in the game pretending to actually be people boasting about your achievements, until someone else goes "Hmm, nah I think that's a load of..." and plays a Liar card ;). You can play a full game of it in maybe half an hour, maybe less if you really zoom through it quickly. It's a deliberately silly game, with Foes ranging from mighty dragons, demons, undead lords and stuff, all the way down to the Vicious Village Cat, an Angry-Looking Chicken, and an Unfortunate Trout ;).

If I ever get to meet up with you again Ameena, I'm so bringing Dixit.

Hmmmm. I imagine sending a small package of meeples within Europe is probably cheaper, right?

my brother is going to the Nerherlands on November 9 I am sure I can have him mail them to you from there. 

PM me if interested. 

Dixit with a good group is a friggin' riot. With the wrong group… It's pulling teeth

I do like the sound of that Dixit game, from what you told me about it on Sunday - I'll look forward to playing it with you if we ever do meet up again :).

Dixit's one of my favourites. And it's brilliant for non-gamers too - my dad loves it and he's not interested in anything that isn't an easy traditional card game like Brag or Sevens or Queenie or similar.

I introduced my parents to it a few Christmases ago expecting my mum to like it and my dad to tolerate it just because I asked him to play. But he immediately wanted to play again, and now he asks me to bring "that game wi' t'funny pictures" (Derbyshire accent) every year.

I strongly recommend K2. Mountain Climbing and making your opponent's meeples die in high altitudes.

Dixit is wonderful, but I am so very bad at it...

You might want to look at Snake Oil. You have a hand of cards, and each player is trying to sell one two card combination to the current player who has a character who's buying. How can you not love a game where there's a possibility of trying to sell a self-cleaning hat to a cowboy?

Also, Kingsburg: This is a resource game with dice, so may alienate the hardcore stretgist in you. You have 5 'years' where you're gathering resources based on the die rolls, building up your little province and the nat the end of each year having to fight an invading horde (no wargame elements, though). Several cubes, though.

Colossal Arena: a betting game where you're playing cards to make sure the creatures you've bet on survive to the end. Very fantasy. Fairly quick.

Rattus: A fun, friendly game about the black death. Moving a plague piece around a map of Europe (in very hard to read stupid faux medieval font). The more character cards youi've got to make yourself more awesome, the more likely you are to get hammered by the plague. Lots of cubes.

If you make it back to London and are interested, let me know and I'll try to pull you into the boardgames club to play some of them.

EDIT: And +1 to BlueHairedMeerkat

Snake Oil: Looks very much like The big Idea, which my friend has and which I enjoy a lot. It's ridiculous and fun and my friend likes to refer it is as "Dragon's Den: The Card Game".

Kingsburg: I don't mind dice as long as they don't have the ability to completely screw you and stop you from playing, like Settlers can do sometimes despite your good initial placements. I'll check this one out.

Colossal Arena: We actually own this one, but have never played it. I really should try it out, especially as I've previously enjoyed some other Knizia games.

Rattus: That sounds pretty cool too! Will look up that one as well.

And we might well get back to London at some point in the not-too-distant-future, so playing with you guys would definitely be fun!

If your dice consistently hate you, Kingsburg is not the game for you. A few bad rolls you can compensate for, but it you're rolling low a lot and no one else is, you are very likely to lose. I still enjoy the game, but the randomness is a significant factor you may not enjoy.

I'm not sure exactly which days we can get to London - at the moment I think Sundays are okay for us, because Ja'Ph' is working on Saturdays and Mondays so I'll go to his house from Saturday evening till Monday morning. That's easier than him going to my house because he goes to work on Monday morning so we'll both go to the station and get our trains going in opposite directions (I live in the Medway area). Chances are he's gonna be working the same days from now till after Christmas so we're probably not gonna be available on Saturdays. Well, I suppose I would be, since I don't work weekends, but I live further from London than he does and I don't know if I fancy going up there all by myself :P.

Here's a good one: currently the only 2 games that trump Sentinels for me and my friends. the 2 games based off of the BattleCon system, War of Indines and Devastation of Indines. It's a pretty unique game, so it doesn't have a WHOLE bunch of the things you explicitly DO like, but it has absolutely NONE of the things you DON'T like.

The premise is that of a 2D fighter -- picture King of Fighters, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, etc. -- put in a card/board game form. you have a 7-space, 2D plane on which you move your characters back and forth, and each turn you pick 2 cards from your 8-card hand to make your attack for that turn. You'll pick 1 base and 1 style out of a total of 5 unique, character-specific styles and 7 bases (1 character-specific Unique Base and 6 Generic Bases that everyone has), meaning that each character can turn their 12 cards into one of 35 unique attacks. There are also 2 discard piles that your attacks cycle through after each turn (called "beats," since they happen simultaneously), so you can't use a given style and base until 3 turns later.

As for your preferences: It's not a CCG -- all the characters are fixed-deck, like Sentinels.

No decisions are made for you, except for the fact that each move you make has a 2-turn cooldown, forcing you to vary your decisions rather than spam a single move. That still leaves you with 15 options each turn; plenty of choices to make yourself.

No space theme; it's a fighter.

Not a "war" game, despite its name. (I assume you mean area-control, like Risk or Axis and Allies? Yeah, they aren't even in the same GENRE)

The theme is there, and very well-implemented, but the mechanics are ROCK SOLID.

The only luck involved is guessing what your opponent will do; it's entirely skill-based.

No trading, no auctions, no religion (no IRL religion at least. One character is an angel, but so is Fanatic, and you like Sentinels, right? It's kind of like that. He's like a male Fanatic.)

All movement is limited to what is written on the cards you play. If your card says "Start of Beat: Advance one space." What do you do? Wait until the Start of Beat triggers happen (immediately after determining whose attack goes first by comparing priority), and then move your character forward one space.

Traitor mechanics? PSSH! It's a FIGHTING GAME. You were never on the same side to begin with! There is a TINY bit of bluffing sometimes, when it comes to anteing tokens that grant special abilities, but it's not nearly on the same level as things like Battlestar Galactica or Shadows over Camelot.

What it does have:

There's plenty of screwage. Lots of the character abilities allow you to mess with the opponent in various fun and creative ways, like flipping their movement around, making them discard cards, infecting their attacks with bees, copying their attacks, canceling their effects, etc.

No Meeples, per se, but there are cardboard standups that represent your characters.

The theme is strongly implemented, well-balanced with the gameplay, and pretty immersive. The art is also fantastic.

Other cool stuff:

There is a LOT of gameplay in the box. Speaking specifically of Devastation here, since War is in between reprints and the 1st edition doesn't contain a lot of the extra content that Devastation has.

The cast of characters is immense and fantastic! There are 18 characters in War and 30 in Devastation (not counting promos, one of which is Legacy and the Freedom Five!), each with their own unique special abilities, cards, tokens, strategies, etc. From Cadenza, a mechanical soldier that is extremely slow but can tank every hit you throw at it and hit you back twice as hard, to Rukyuk, a sniper who uses custom ammo to enhance his attacks, leading to even MORE variety; the only problem is, he has to stop and reload every now and then, leaving himself wide open for a counterattack. Aria has mechanical drones she places that give passive negative effects to any enemies foolish enough to stand near them. Oriana has a pool of MP she can use to power her spells, but it can run out, leaving her weak if she can't hit you to get them back. Kallistar turns into a flame elemental, making herself faster and stronger, at the expense of draining her health each turn she keeps it active. King Alexian is so POWERFUL his Unique ability is actually a benefit to his opponents; whenever he hits them, he gives them tokens they can use to make themselves faster and stronger just to keep up. Gaspar makes clones of himself to execute multiple, weaker attacks per turn, which can lead to some wicked combos if planned properly.

Devastation also includes several boss characters that require 3 or more players to team up together to take down, as well as 5 co-op dungeons (think Double Dragon, Turtles in Time, or Battletoads), that you can take on with friends or even solo.

There are also multiple alternate rules and game modes, like 2- or 3- on-1, 2-on-2, tag-team matchups, and arenas that give everyone extra rules and conditions to pay attention to; they flip like Sentinels villains, leading to 2-phase fights.

Also, Tom Vassel from the Dice Tower listed it as #8 on his top 100 games of all time, and went on record saying it was one of the best games he has ever played. Ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NLv2lOdbuE

You can put in a preorder or buy the print-and-play edition off the website, lvl99games.com.

As is the standard for lvl99 games, they also have a FREE PRINT-AND-PLAY DEMO OF THE GAME AVAILABLE ON THE WEBSITE, so please, at LEAST do me a favor and check THAT out. I went to all the trouble of writing this out, you could at least do that for me, couldn't you? Pretty please?

So, I recommend getting Devastation FIRST, then waiting until the reprint of War comes out and getting that. It also takes a little bit of getting used to, but the instructions do a great job of introducing you to how to play.

Also, FOLLOW THE UNBOXING INSTRUCTIONS. There is a lot to unbox, and it is all organized in flights by relative complexity. So open the first flight of 6 characters, play with them, get used to it, and then move on to the next one. Don't just open it all up at once.

Dice don't hate me, but I just don't enjoy that feeling of helplessness that comes with having no real control over whether you win a dice-heavy game or not. Some random is good, just not a lot of it.

I hate it in Settlers because when you hit a streak of bad rolls (which happens to everyone at some point) you literally can't do anything. The dice didn't give you resources so you can't build anything and you don't have anything to trade so you sit there being completely unable to play the game.

I don't mind games with a lot of luck as long as I can still make decisions and in the long run the better player wins more than the worse one.

Never a problem in BattleCon. If you ever can't do something, it's always either your fault for playing poorly or the opponent's fault for out-playing you.

Cool! I'm actually technically a playtester for L99, I just haven't gotten round to actually playtesting anything yet. I'll absolutely check out the demo (yay, love PnP) and look into these games a bit more because they do sound fun. Thanks1

I playtested Devastation and the rebalanced War.  It's an enjoyable game, but I've found the rulebook to be cumbersome and the forum to be nowhere near as helpful as the Sentinels forum for clarifications.  I've been told that the BGG Indines forum is much more helpful, but I find some details in Indines to be a little frustrating.

That being said, I'm quite excited for my games to be sent to me in a few days!  On top of that I've not ever been an avid 2D fighter fan (I'm just not very good at them…) and have too much love for Co-Op games.  The fact that Sentinels is a Co-Op card game blew my mind, as I'm not a terribly seasoned board gamer, either.

There is one fairly major mark against BattleCON in this particular instance, and that's that it cannot be found on Amazon UK, on which Silverleaf is constructing her wishlist :P

I know this because it looks awesome, and I wanted to see how much a copy was... Maybe it's time to find out exactly where my FLGS is.

That's because it's not... strictly... out yet?

You'll have to go through their main website. lvl99games.com

War of Indines is out, is it not? It's not specifically Devastation I can't find, it's any of them.

Something else I'd like to suggest, moving back toward the original request, is Evil Hat Production's board game Race to Adventure. It's a fantastically pulpy scavenger-hunt game that plays really quickly, and can have its difficulty scaled to work just with grown-ups or to accommodate kids as young as 7. (I say this last part from experience.) I wrote about it for a local parenting blog a few months back.

I'm going to strongly second this one. It almost seems too simple at first, but it can get really deep really quickly. Wish I could convince my friends to play this one more often. Unfortunately, through no fault of the game, my friends are a hard sell for pulp themes.

War is in-between printings. Kind of like Rook City. Devastation will be coming into stock by December, though; after we finish the kickstarter for the next World of Indines game (Argent: The Consortium, a worker-placement/resource management game based around an election for the role of Chancellor of Argent, the magic university from the world of Indines.) I believe they'll start on the reprint of War.

In the meantime, you can get the print and play version for a lot cheaper from the website (I got it for free for backing the kickstarter; that's how I know so much about the game), so you can print off the pages and sleve them in playing cards and play the game that way. Granted, it doesn't come with the physical components, but it's still a cheap and perfectly doable way to play the game.

A nice 2p game is Mr. Jack.