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Existing board-game threads:

Settlers of Catan

DO: Online Catan (Settlers)

What board games do you play?

good board game ideas for Pesach
^Don't necessarily rely on some of what was said there

Family Party Games

(Bavli (board game) - If you were curious)

DansDeals Amazon link
https://www.amazon.com/dp/[productcode]/?tag=cl03f-20&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER


Author Topic: Board Games master thread  (Read 15930 times)

Offline Randomex

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Board Games master thread
« on: August 12, 2020, 05:34:47 PM »
Eh, why not.

Existing threads:
Settlers of Catan:
https://forums.dansdeals.com/index.php?topic=7056
What board games do you play?:
https://forums.dansdeals.com/index.php?topic=94763
Family Party Games:
https://forums.dansdeals.com/index.php?topic=111667
(Bavli (board game) - If you were curious: )
( https://forums.dansdeals.com/index.php?topic=117739 )
Do you want to play a board game, digitally or in Lakewood NJ? PM me. (Can be asynchronous, i.e. take turns whenever)

Offline Randomex

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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #1 on: October 19, 2020, 07:39:31 PM »
The Royal Game of Ur, also known as the Game of Twenty Squares or simply the Game of Ur, is a two-player strategy race board game that was first played in ancient Mesopotamia during the early third millennium BC. The game was popular across the Middle East among people of all social strata and boards for playing it have been found at locations as far away from Mesopotamia as Crete and Sri Lanka. At the height of its popularity, the game acquired spiritual significance, and events in the game were believed to reflect a player's future and convey messages from deities or other supernatural beings. The Game of Ur remained popular until late antiquity, when it stopped being played, possibly evolving into, or being displaced by, an early form of backgammon. It was eventually forgotten everywhere except among the Jewish population of the Indian city of Kochi, who continued playing a version of it until the 1950s when they began emigrating to Israel.
...
At some point before the game fell out of popularity in the Middle East, it was apparently introduced to the Indian city of Kochi by a group of Jewish merchants. Members of the Jewish population of Kochi were still playing a recognizable form of the Game of Ur, which they called Aasha, by the time they started emigrating to Israel in the 1950s after World War II. The Kochi version of the game had twenty squares, just like the original Mesopotamian version, but each player had twelve pieces rather than seven, and the placement of the twenty squares was slightly different.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Game_of_Ur


In much the same way Irving decoded the instructions of the Royal Game of Ur found in a grave in the 1920 excavations in Iraq. An inscription that found its way to the museum had the rules of the game. “It was a very popular game for two and was played all over West Asia,” This important relic and its decoded knowledge lay with Irving, until something “truly amazing happened.”

In the 90s two anthropologists from the museum made their way to Kochi to collect and codify social and cultural items of the fast dwindling community of Pardesi Jews. They returned with extremely invaluable shared material that included objects of daily use. In that was a wooden board game, which Irving says “is to all intent and purposes the same as the Royal Game of Ur.” It has 20 squares, two wings and a centre aisle. It was played using a dice.”

Irving believes that whatever be the origin of the population of Jews in Kerala they ultimately came to India from Babylonia and that all displaced populations most importantly carry cultural items with them.

This game, he says, has survived into modern times. When he first saw it, Irving remembers being surcharged with an immediacy to find a person to recognise the game. He called up his sister Deborah Lionarons, who lives in Jerusalem, requesting her to go to the northern Kibbutz which has the settlements of the Cochini Jews. “I typed out a questionnaire and asked her to go door to door with a picture of the game and ask anybody and everybody if they could identify the picture and if they knew the rules of the game?”

As luck would have it a 70-year-old woman, Ruby Daniel recognised the game, identified it as Aasha, which she used to play back home with her aunts. Ruby was a school teacher in her early 20s when she left Cochin in 1951. She wrote out the instructions of the game and said it was played on the floor or by drawing it on a piece of paper.

The one sent by Sattoo Koder to the museum, “a lovely object”, is a wooden one with tiny legs, says Irving.

When the matter came to him, he found the rules to be similar to the ones on the 2nd century tablet. Amazed at this rather romantic turnaround of cultural shifting and its curious fallout Irving says, “When the game was found in the excavations in Iraq, I was certain that this was not native but had come from Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus valley. I believe it began there, moved to Iraq and went all over the West Asiatic world.” The game then morphed into other board games that exist today, like Backgammon.
 - https://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/society/tradtional-board-games-from-kochi-to-iraq/article7711918.ece
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Offline srap

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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #2 on: October 19, 2020, 10:57:51 PM »
Wow!  This really brings history to life. 

Offline Randomex

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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #3 on: November 17, 2020, 08:22:40 AM »
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Offline Randomex

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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #4 on: November 17, 2020, 02:20:46 PM »
A bunch of games are on sale on Amazon today:
https://forums.dansdeals.com/index.php?topic=121314.0
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Offline Randomex

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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #5 on: November 29, 2020, 06:26:05 PM »
Found several board-game deals today, see my recent posts.
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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #6 on: November 29, 2020, 07:15:49 PM »
Hey, kid, wanna try the new drug?

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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #7 on: November 29, 2020, 09:12:17 PM »

Offline Randomex

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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #8 on: November 30, 2020, 03:58:25 PM »
It seems unlikely that any more threads will have to be added.

(More deals today.)
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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #9 on: December 01, 2020, 01:12:06 PM »
And then I added one the next day (it had in fact existed at the time,
but I either hadn't seen it yet or forgot it when making the list).
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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #10 on: December 08, 2020, 12:52:44 PM »
This is a good resource, but also one that will deluge you with 20% Amazon discounts on all sorts of nonsense:
https://twitter.com/Tabletop_Deals

Thanks to that, I can tell you that if you want to play through a supernatural WWII action movie, it's cheaper now:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015QFM8NK/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=sl1&tag=thewingamres-20&linkId=890ad07a7bfdd41845dd574bbfc59c33&language=en_US

Also, many games are part of a "$10 off when you spend $50" promotion.
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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #11 on: December 08, 2020, 01:04:43 PM »
A decent reviewer has been recommending this for years, but I've never checked
it out, so I can't give you my opinion. HABA's generally a good company, though.

https://twitter.com/Tabletop_Deals/status/1336362671076220928
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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #12 on: December 08, 2020, 01:18:56 PM »
Recs in the $10 back promotion (some are also discounted):
Skull (very nice little bluffing game)
Arboretum (tense card game)
Lost Cities (tense card game for only 2 players)
Jaipur (another tense 2-player card game)
La Granja - No Siesta! (Roll-and-write, not Shabbos/YT-friendly)
Azul [also 35% off, goes in and out of stock] (tile-drafting, abstract strategy)
^Note: NOT Stained Glass of Sintra. If you're only seeing that, normal Azul is out of stock.
The Mind (cooperate without communicating, somewhat love-it-or-hate-it)
Exit: The Sunken Treasure (escape room in a box, not S/YT-friendly)
Bugs in the Kitchen [33% off] (try to control the physical path of an electronic bug)
Galaxy Trucker - Build spaceships in real time, then watch them get hammered by events
Funkoverse Strategy Game, various sets - Pit pop-culture characters against each other in a light combat game
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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #13 on: December 10, 2020, 04:59:06 AM »
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Offline Randomex

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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #14 on: January 17, 2021, 05:36:17 AM »
There's a decent price for Concept on Amazon now ($28.98):
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IDB6J0S/?tag=cl03f-20&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
(Yes, it's a DD affiliate link.)

Concept is rather like Charades, but instead of acting, you place tokens on a board of symbols that represent ideas.

Here are a few examples from the print-and-play demo version (board states that a player might potentially create):
(Note: The green "?" represents the main objective while other-colored "!"s denote sub-ideas.)










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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #15 on: January 19, 2021, 02:51:37 PM »
You can currently get this for 10 bucks (not incl. shipping)
https://oxeyemedia.com/collections/jansale/products/realm-of-sand
and this for 5 (likewise)
https://oxeyemedia.com/collections/jansale/products/mystery-of-the-temples.

Can Rahdo sell you on the first one in ~9 minutes?



What about these folks for the second one, in ~5?



(That one is more red-shaded than it should be. Pink = white IRL, etc.)



(They're also selling this for $10, but I don't know if I'd recommend it, especially if
you tend toward analysis paralysis, and orders including it won't ship for months -
https://oxeyemedia.com/collections/jansale/products/trial-of-the-temples-preorder)

Also, there's currently a lower-than-average price for this speed/puzzle/stacking game on Amazon:

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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #16 on: January 26, 2021, 07:47:12 PM »
The sale on those Emperor S4 games ends tonight.

For images of what comes in the box, see here:
https://forums.dansdeals.com/index.php?topic=123109
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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #17 on: January 27, 2021, 12:26:39 AM »
Sure, you might have some board games... but can they do this?





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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #18 on: January 28, 2021, 08:18:35 AM »










(The bowl is not included. The square containers and dice tower are.)


Each card is unique.
(These are the base game's cards, featuring North American birds; each expansion's birds are from a different region.)

(I would not recommend this game except to enthusiasts of the theme or as a gift for them... There are some around here.)
« Last Edit: January 28, 2021, 10:49:39 AM by Randomex »
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Offline yoshyosh

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Re: Board Games master thread
« Reply #19 on: January 28, 2021, 08:55:36 AM »
Each card is unique. (These, the base game birds, are from North America; each expansion's birds are from a different region.)

(I would not recommend this game except to enthusiasts of the theme or as a gift for them.)
Is there an expurgated version?