libkitty, would you like to start a game with me? I enjoy all versions of scrabble I run across. I'm a huge literati fiend on Yahoo.

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I also play Scrabulous.

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I also play Scrabulous.

Somehow, after your hardware litany, this is... unsurprising.

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I know we have Set. I have played Bohnanza but am not sure if we own it. I know it has been on the list so if we don't have it then we might need to get it. We also have fluxx and Zombie Fluxx.

You played Bohnanza when I was over! I love that game. Wallybee goes through this great transformation when she plays it.

I miss DMing--hell, I miss D&D, but the only games around here are Living Greyhawk, which I hate.

I've always quite enjoyed LG myself, though that's got a lot to do with my gaming group in Philly, and the relative ease with which I can get a game here in Melbourne. Just started a home game (Eberron setting), though, which is entertaining me at the moment.

I wasn't all that whelmed with Settlers of Catan, but thought it was decent enough. I really like Starfarers of Catan, although the nifty spaceships are breaking.

SoC is a mixed bag for me. I've had some excellent games, but also some rather bad experiences. I own but haven't played Cities and Knights, which I believe improves matters; I also find Elasund to be a fairly elegant reworking of the basic mechanisms. (And it has pirates, which improved its appeal to Emmett when I was staying with Hec and JZ.)

Have you Catan fans played Carcassone or Caylus?

I own all of them. Caylus is easily my favourite of the three. It's also the most complex. The turn process becomes fairly intuitive after a couple of plays, but I'm led to believe it can get pretty cutthroat with the right bunch of people.

I just got Ticket to Ride Europe for Christmas and enjoyed that quite a bit. I think I still might prefer Acquire or Bohanza to all of them, but those are both different sorts of games.

Wallybee and I have been playing a lot of the original TtR lately. (I thoroughly recommend picking up the 1910 expansion if you're going to do that. It makes the route deck better balanced, and it has proper sized train cards! Oh, and if you play the 15-point bonus for most routes, that also opens up winning strategies a bit.)

If you don't have the 1910 expansion, then I find another way to deal with the route deck imbalance is to split the deck into the routes worth 13+ (10 cards) and the routes worth 12- (20 cards). Then, every time you take new routes (inc. game start), you grab one ticket from the long routes pile and two from the short routes pile. (You'll note that this is similar to the TtR Europe initial cards strategy.)

I'm toying with the idea of maybe trying to get a D&D 4th Ed game going once it comes out. As much as a lot of the changes bother my nitpicky, modifiers-for-everything, encumberance-tracking, staying-up-until-the-wee-hours-of-the-morning-designing-bad-guys DMing ways, the plug-and-play, streamlined mechanics look like they might make it possible for me to actually run a game in between work, family time and getting things done around the house. We'll have to see.

I'm quite looking forward to 4E by now. I do enjoy 3.5, and it was a great improvement in elegance over 1E, but there's plenty of clunky, ambiguous or poorly balanced bits. I am also looking forward to the online play capacity, simply because so many people I'd like to play D&D with are on an entirely different continent.

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I'm getting so many Scrabulous games going. Whoot!

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I've always quite enjoyed LG myself,

The way my DM played it, there was minimal interaction with NPCs such as barkeeps and such. I'm used to spending at least a little time negotiating the lodging fees and things, but my DM said, "We don't do that stuff, it's a standard fee. And our horses and supplies are pre-defined for the trip into the woods, too." Anything that wasn't geared specifically towards progressing the storyline was extraneous. I don't like pre-programmed gaming to that extent.

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aw shucks I missed the ribbon cutting ceremony. Woot 80! (ya, doesn't have the same ring as "Top 10!").

... played the Catan games ...

I've played a few times up at ND/KT palce, and a few times with former employee, who introduced me to the game. For whatever reason, I totally dig this game. The Xbox360 has a version you can buy in the marketplace. It's a download. Although I've had mixed results with playing online with others. It could have been symptons of my wanky router (see tech thread the other day). I just find it funny, the game I play most on the 360 is a board game.

Any of you played SET?

Yes! Everytime I buy the game, I bring it to someones place and get them hooked, and end up giving it to them. Like 3 times now. Greatest was introducing it to my sister and her family. My 7 yo niece took to it instantly. My sister was reluctant, but the more we played, the more she was like "set? but I'm not playing... is this a set?"

We really need to sort through the game cabinet at some point. It's such a huge mess that I don't even know what's in there, and we have some great games.

:: senses something to do as we chat on sunday ::

I play Scrabulous too! Lately I've been getting my ass kicked all around.

No worries KT. Our game, You'll be kicking my butt anytime now. I'm really no good at word games. Scrabble, boggle, etc. Nope. Not good.

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I've got a Wii, Xbox360, PS2, PSP, DS, and an Xbox.

I've got one of those joysticks with the classic Atari games.

I also play Scrabulous.

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Ooo, I've also got a Colecovision with the Atari 2600 adapter, but that's out in the garage.

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The way my DM played it, there was minimal interaction with NPCs such as barkeeps and such. I'm used to spending at least a little time negotiating the lodging fees and things, but my DM said, "We don't do that stuff, it's a standard fee. And our horses and supplies are pre-defined for the trip into the woods, too." Anything that wasn't geared specifically towards progressing the storyline was extraneous. I don't like pre-programmed gaming to that extent.

Yeah, you still needed a GM that was willing to roleplay. And many mods were railroads stopping frequently at the combat station. And, playing at a Con, especially at high level, meant you were pushing it to get done in time. Conversely, there were a number of mods that came up with an excellent storyline or some great role-playing opportunities.

Ultimately, I found it was still basically about the other people at the table. A good group made a good game, a bad group made a bad game.

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