10 Games you can play forever

this video is brought to you by the 3-minute board game patrons keep us Independent by supporting us on [Music] patreon Koto and welcome to the special long format episode of three minute board games the topic for today is 10 games that you can play forever now obviously you won't be able to play these games forever unless there some freaky Immortals or vampires currently watching the channel that I'm unaware of my idea is these are games you can play a lot over and and over and over again hundreds of plays easily is sort of the minimum level I'm talking about here but before we get into the list I want to talk to you about what prompted me to think of this you see there was a thread on Board Game Geek a couple of months ago where someone was lamenting that all board game designs are tired and he's seen everything and there's no new innovation happening in board gaming and I was like hm okay that's a sort of jaded point of view to to have about games and I checked his profile and he got to the Hobby 3 years ago and owned over a th000 games and had played over a th000 games and I sit there thinking that's a game a day since you entered the hobby that is a th000 games in 3 years that is an awful lot of exposure to different games in an incredibly short amount of time now we're in my game shed where I have around 400 games so all behind me this is 400 games this is about what this person was getting through every single year they had been in the hobby this is a lot of stuff I'm just going to pan the camera around the Shelf this is not a flex or a form of humble brag I am a professional board game player and designer I have a big collection not everyone needs this many games in fact I probably don't need this many games but as having a lot of games around as core part of my job it makes a lot more sense for me to have them than others but this person had two or three times as many games and I don't want to bag them directly uh and I said that to them at the time of this thread that I wasn't going to go after them personally because I think what they've done here is a symptom of a wider problem it's the idea that people are treating games like fast food they're treating games as consumables they're treating games as things that you pick up once you open up the box you eat the delicious contents and you play it once or twice and you throw it away uh like a pizza box uh imagine if you would you got pizza every night uh for a year and instead of putting the pizza boxes out in the trash you put them on your shelves permanently to display them that would seem a little weird and to me it got me thinking of course you're going to burn out on games if you learning a new thing each and every week if you're learning tons and tons of games you are going to burn out by them or you're going to have such superficial engagement with them that you're just going to bounce off them you'll be a skimming Stone across an ocean of deeper experiences and again as someone who does this professionally for a job I learn one and a half games a week so about 75 games per year that's how many reviews we do we try to do one and a half reviews every fortnite that's the ballpark and it's really about 60 to 70 games a year that I learn and that takes a considerable amount of work essentially having 3 or 4 days with the game to really get to understand it to learn its rules play with people then to se the game afterwards and then make a video about it I get about a 4-day turnaround how people who have full-time jobs and do way more games than the Stewart is absolutely Beyond me and all I can think is it's the most superficial engagement with board games and at that point you might as well just be hiring from the library you might as well be playing them in a Board Game Cafe there's absolutely no reason to own them but that brings me back to this topic which is 10 games that you can play forever so these are 10 games that you can put in your collection or that you can pick up play and you can just keep playing them without having to do churn and burn these games have enough depth to keep you engaged for an incredibly long time now on to the list straight off the bat I'm not going to recommend chess as the first game on this list I'm not going to recommend Checkers nor back gam nor go nor Scrabble nor Blackjack nor poker nor Bridge nor any other sort of classic game I will say that these classic games have massive fan bases out there and if you really are just looking for a game to play with people those games have huge communities and you can no doubt find a club nearby or definitely find something online where you can meet people and play lots of people they only play chess that is their game but I'm not here to sell you on chess and I'm not here to convince you that you should be off playing it I am going to use it to debunk something that has crept into the board game community in the last decade or so something I found myself doing as well and that's the idea that variability and replayability are the same thing they're not chess has one setup and people millions of people play millions and millions of games with us every single year it doesn't need variable player Powers it doesn't need different boards it doesn't need different layouts a good game doesn't need those things they can help but sometimes they just cover up the fact that the core gameplay just ain't that great and that's something I want to focus on in this list even if I am putting forward games that have tons of content it's always the core gameplay that is good and as I am recommending a game at each of these segments I am going to include here Santorini and the thing with Santorini is it has that core gameplay it has the core no powers version of the game which is really really solid and really fun and comparable to a chess to a go or to Checkers it's a two to four play game which I think is best at two with really simple rules that will leave you puzzling that you can play over and over again but if you need variable player powers or you want variable player powers and things to shake the game up it includes those as well but they're entirely optional you can play the core rules without them and the game is perfectly fine but if you feel the need to shake things up with variable player Powers Santorini is the game for you it takes a lot of the elements you would expect from one of those older classic games and it feels like an old classic game game but with those extra little bits and pieces that the modern board gaming audience has become accustomed to excellent game one that's never leaving my collection and one you can play over and over again just before we get into the next entry I just like to bring up just how big Katan is out there like we know that Katan sold a gazillion copies and stuff but there's a little bit of again Hubris in the board game Community to be quite dismissive of it but there are communities out there massive communities and they play lots and lots of Katan so it's another one of those games that it's bordering on becoming one of those Classics like chess with its own sub communities its own clubs Katan clubs didn't know about these until I started researching this video and they're huge this game is still a really big deal despite many of us in the hobby board game Community myself included kind of looking down on it I'm not sure I'll do that again now but anyway that brings us to the second game on our list and the irony of this is this I believe is the game that introduced the idea of variability equaling replayability and it's Dominion so here we have dominion the original deck building game and one of the quirks of dominion is it has this variable setup system so each game of it you play you'll pick different cards out of here in different combinations and there'll be Stacks that every player has equal access to for that duration of the game those are the only cards you're playing with and the rest of them stay within the box and because you can mix and match what cards are on the table uh in one game and then change that out for another game it makes each game of dominion feel slightly different and this is where I think the idea that variability equals replayability entered modern board gaming it's through dominion and that's because dominions core gameplay is really really good and the ability to change the setup that that's just icing on the cake that stops the game from being solved because if you played the game with the same 10 Kingdom cards every time it might get a little stale it might get a little solvable there might be certain strategies that are always the best to play but because there are these shakeups at the start of every game you have to weigh what each card is worth you have to decide oh what's a good combination of powers here what am I going to go after and it just adds an extra level to this game cuz of course gameplay is so good now as I mentioned earlier core gameplay is the key and the core gameplay of dominion is so good that it spawned hundreds of successor games and many of them are great games in their own right but what staggered me when Dominion came out was seeing the monthly stats that popped up on Board Game Geek about number of players it was crushing every other game in terms of monthly plays for years um it might even still be one of the top played games on there I didn't actually check just before this video but it had so many plays like to a factor of 10 above the next game when it was brand new and really hot and I still think it's one of those games that people play tons and tons and tons and you could be one of them because Dominion it's got a gazilion expansions as well so the idea of resetting the game or fiddling around with these and coming up with different combinations to play with that experimental part of the game does appeal to you there are like I think eight boxes each with extra cards like this you could not probably play every possible combination of dominion before the heat extinction of the universe in fact I'm going to try to see if I can get someone to run those numbers and see what they look like so that is a long time much longer than your lifetime uh Dominion it's a great game it's a popular game it has a huge Community it has a variability which is part of the secret SCE that has made it an evergreen classic the third game on this list is one I'm love to recommend and that's mostly because of the business model and business practices of the parent company and that is Magic the Gathering but there's no arguing that magic is a forever game it's a lifestyle game it's a game that has been around for ages and it's going to be around for a little bit longer still and it's a game that you can dip into and dip out of and you can play and play and play I am the most casual of Magic the Gathering players I have spent probably less than $100 on magic cards in my lifetime this here this is a box of cheapy Commons that I got a filler box um along with some lands it's it's enough for me to play around with and experiment with with the game and I've managed to play hundreds of games over the years without spending huge amount of money but that's by being at The Fringe Of The Hobby uh it's playing with other people's cards uh and it's playing a bit of the online games as well so I know enough about magic to know how the game works how it plays and the sort of the core ideas of it without being a magic player I couldn't tell you a single thing about the current meta I couldn't tell you what even the current set is but I can tell you the people are playing hundreds of games of that right now all over the place and it is a game that you can play over and over again with a big Community you can join so on top of magic there's new games like like Disney loana or Star Wars unlimited that you could try there's also the older games like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh that have been around for ages and New Zealand's very own flesh and blood not that I've played that one personally I don't like the collectible card game model I have a slightly addictive personality and I imagine a lot of people watching this video also do and it's not good for that because once you get into it you can start buying a bunch of cards and you know trading and doing things and all of a sudden you're the kind of person who buys 40 boxes see I was always a fan of the living card game model cuz I felt that was a lot fairer uh you didn't chase after reare cards everyone got the same packs of cards with the same distribution and I thought that was a really good way of doing it you could have all of the gameplay experience of a collectible card game without the bubble gum trading cards aspect of it and the Pay to Win aspect of it and to that end my favorite living card game was nitr Runner and nitr Runner was the second game designed by Richard Garfield uh who designed the original Magic Gathering it's a second attempt at a card game and I think his greatest work now thankfully uh there is a community that has brought Netrunner back and this is a starter box for the new set it comes with everything you need to play Netrunner uh and I think that might be the best option cuz that fan Community has been around as soon as Netrunner got cancelled they started working on things and they're still doing it so I think this will be a game that you'll be able to play a lot not Magic the Gathering magic is a cash Sy try Netrunner instead if you are having the urge to play Magic the Gathering or loana or unlimited and sink all that money in maybe try to check out Netrunner see if there's a community nearby cuz in the long run you likely to spend a lot less money on this and maybe get just as many plays out of it now in the previous entry I talked about how collectible cars games and collectible card game models are kind of annoying and if you can find a living card game that's great you should probably go with that and in this case I'm going to talk about my current favorite game which is Arkham Horror the card game a living card game check it out here now I've mentioned the reasons why like Arkham the card game in the past it combines great storytelling with cooperative play plus the dick construction element you get from games like magic the Gathering all of that stuff really engages my brain on multiple levels and the last year or so I've played through in person four full campaigns and on tabletop simulator probably another eight by myself give me around about 80 to 100 plays of this game in that time and this makes me think of one of the great misconceptions I think there is going on around Arkham Horror the card game and that's the idea that oh each of these campaigns has got eight missions in it and once you've done the missions well you've seen the story there's not much else to see and that is completely not the case your first place through a campaign is different it is a unique feeling because you're discovering the campaign you're discovering how it works but these games are very very replayable you just need to look at a YouTube channel like playing board games who do a hell of a lot of Arkham Horror the card game content and these guys have been through the campaigns countless times playing them with different characters using different rules on Deck construction and just shaking things up to keep the game fresh cuz at the bare minimum you should be able to get 10 or more players days out of each campaign before you get really bored of it and there are now nine published campaigns and about a dozen extra scenarios and these add up to well over a 100 different scenarios if you played one three-hour session of Arkham horor the card game every week it'll take you roughly 2 years to get through the current content and by the time you did that well the campaign you played 2 years ago would seem reasonably fresh when you got back to it and that's ignoring all of the amazing fan content that's out there a lot of that's available on tabletop simulator but I've also printed out a bunch of the cards as well so here's where it's at for Arkham horor the card game being able to play around with this massive card pull you can build all these different characters so even if you are playing through the same story multiple times you're playing through it with different characters trying out different concepts that inherently keeps the game very fresh and on top of that the core gameplay of Arkham horor the card game and how well the scenarios are designed just keep be coming back for more as I say I've absolutely thrashed this game in the last year and a half and I can't wait to play my next session next week and that's because this is a game I think I could keep playing forever and ever uh number five on this list is uh Sentinels of the Multiverse this is another game that has an awful lot going for it in terms of how much content it has in this case it is preconstructed decks of superhero characters and you're fighting cooperatively against different masterminds with very different win conditions in many respects Sentinels is a little like Arkham hor the card game but it has some very noteworthy differences the first thing is you can just set it up and play you don't have to worry about building your own decks and if you're not into deck construction you can get into Sentinels a lot easier than you can Arkham hor the C game another big difference is Arkham relies on campaigns where your character develops over time Sentinels is all one-offs and Sentinels even more so than Arkham Horror the card game is really mechanics driven and really mechanics focused each of the unique characters within Cals of the Multiverse has its own way of playing the game they have their own fores and quirks and and strengths and weaknesses and one of the cool things in this game is figuring out how the best teams work against certain masterminds because each Mastermind has its own way of being defeated each Mastermind has its strengths and its weaknesses and figuring out combinations that work well against those different masterminds is really rewarding but what's even more rewarding is beating a mastermind with character combinations that aren't particularly good against it and Sentinels offers this wide ranging experience from relatively easy masterminds that a new player can beat through the ones that are brutally brutally hard and it has so many different combinations of masterminds and characters for you to play I have played this a lot and I primarily don't play this one physically I primarily play this one on the app just cuz it does a lot of the bookkeeping and also cuz I don't have the definitive edition that has all of the expansions and stuff but I have played enough to defeat all of the masterminds on Advanced difficulty and at some point I will try them on the even harder difficulties but so yeah Sentinels is just one of those games that can become a lifestyle game you can just set this up and you can play it and you can play it week on week on week you can have a group that gets into it or you can just play it solo anyway Sentinels is a game with a really high skill ceiling and so much to learn so much to do you can spend hours and hours and hours playing this game and still have more to discover I know I started off this list by saying that replayability and variability are not the same thing but a game needs great core gameplay first and foremost and in having variability on top of that makes a difference and spirit island is a game like that so here are all the spirits I have for Spirit Island and I don't even have the most recent expansion I'm still waiting on a review copy of that and it's really hard to overstate just how different each of these Spirits is it's not like some games where you have different characters and there's only a slight difference between them each of these Spirits plays fundamentally differently but more importantly each of these Spirit combinations plays differently so if you play a two- player with two different Spirits you're going to get a different experience based on what those Spirits are take that up to three or four players or hick even up to six players and you have a very different experience solely based on which of these Spirits you've picked and then at on top of that there are scenarios and there are adversaries and adversaries can be dialed up in difficulty and you have so many different levers that you can pull to change the game to make the experience what you want it to be but again coming back to what I said at the start of the video the core mechanics of spirit Island are great and I think the three things that stand out are of course the variable player Powers the different spirits and how just how different they are the second one is fast and slow actions uh you plan your actions your fast and slow actions the fast ones take effect first but tend to be either more expensive or less efficient than your slow Powers which could be a lot lot stronger or or more energy efficient but then the bad guys act so you have to figure out okay how are the bad guys going to move and behave and how will that affect the powers that I've planned that particular uh puzzle is a really fun one to solve each and every time you play Spirit Island and the third one is how you manage your growth so every Spirit starts off weak and you develop cards and get new powers as you go through the game so in the early part of the game it's very difficult to put any kind of control on the Invaders In the midpoint of the game you're getting up your power and the Invaders are starting to take off but then the end game hopefully you get strong enough that you can knock them back down and it's that Cadence it's very rewarding and satisfying experience so yeah Spirit Island fantastic Cooperative game incredibly deep so many combinations and powers to explore but it's the core game game play that is super rewarding and super fun and super engaging and that's why I think it's a game you can play Forever the next three list items are more about Concepts than they are specific games each one of them is an idea of how a game can become a forever game I use some specific examples for each one but it really is more about the concept than the actual game recommendation here and I'm pointing at four games here right now that's shores of tripol Twilight Struggle pths of glory and votes for woman but I could just as easily be talking about Star Wars deck building game or dice Throne the idea here is a jewel a game between two players but specifically a game that you love and that someone else who play games with a lot loves this game could be anything to player I've had an ongoing series of War of the ring and Rebellion with one of my friends Fraser to me that is a jeweling game and that is a forever game for us we will always play play those two games and have a really good time playing them but if you have a significant person in your gaming life whether that's your partner or maybe it's one of your parents or maybe it's one of your kids and there is a two-play game that you both adore and you can play over and over again that is a great thing because there's something about a two-player shared experience over multiple games that is really rewarding it becomes a shared part of your life and especially if the games are quite even if you have a series of games that goes back and forth there's a real struggle a history so instead of being in that churn that we talked about earlier where games are coming in and you're throwing them out you're playing the same game with someone you care about over and over and over again and it just makes that game into something special so again it's less about the game and it's more about how you're playing it and if I am going to recommend one game in the space uh little it big Twilight Struggle uh it's a great two-player game it is on the heavy side so so if you want something a little bit lighter uh I actually do recommend Dion this is a dinky like combat yachi game with two players um fantastic game like if you've got a a kid or a teenager um and you want just something to play with them D fantastic but the important thing is the shared Story the shared experience and the shared love of a single game the second sort of Niche I want to talk about here is is your group's filler games like what games do you play when you've only got a few minutes remaining uh in my group we have three and we play them quite a bit the first one is the crew uh then we have lanterns and a new one that's just popped on the scene for us uh six N I think that's you said six n uh anyway the idea here is that a game can be a forever game just because it's something you can always reach to because it's reliable it doesn't need to be something big epic and sweeping in fact being a short concise simple game like six N means that it's just that more likely to hit the table and it also means on evenings where your friends are a little bit tired or the games ended a bit early and you just want something to do you just put on the table everyone's like we know how to play this let's just get into it and again it's about building that metas story and that shared experience of having a game that is your group's go-to game of having something that you reliably know you can put on the table any given night and people will be into it I mean six has like three rules it's really really easy to teach people um and yet you can easily play like four five 10 hands of this in an evening and it won't overstay it's welcome and then you might not pay it for another 6 months and it comes back out and boom everyone knows how to play it and you can just keep cycling in and staying in your groups orbit for absolutely for forever now sort of final experience I want to talk about really revolves around a game I don't own and that game is diplomacy and the closest game I really have to that is June up here and the point I'm trying to get out here is games that develop their own metag game and their own Heritage within a group June itself came out in the' 70s and there are groups out there that have been playing June ever since and they have very specific patterns of play over that time and they have shared experiences that go back many many years if you have a group that meets routinely and can get into a game like June it is a very special experience I briefly had this for a couple of years with a Game of Thrones I had a group that would play it over and over again we played dozens of games and it meant that we could explore the game we developed like patterns of play people knew when barathan was going to go out of control and we would take the actions to keep that player in check in many of these sort of strategic games like June like diplomacy Like A Game of Thrones it takes a while to figure out how it works but because there's so much diplomacy and there's so much player interaction and there's so much self balancing within the game each group develops its own foibles its own language its own culture around the game and it's no coincidence that I've put June on top of chaos order here so kadan's chaos order this I think has the potential to be one of those games one of those games that a group plays is like every second week forever and as they're doing this they have memories of previous games that of previous Maneuvers and how other players reacted so there becomes more expertise it becomes more self-balancing self- policing within the game it becomes a shared story and a shared experience of the whole gaming group people talk about the time someone pulled a maneuver that no one was expecting cadians chaos order has that depth it has a lot in common with June but it's more modern and it has so much depth and yet it's a game that came out during the height of board game churn where people are playing games a couple of times and then discarding them this just isn't a game you can do that with your group has to play this half a dozen time to really even understand how the factions work each it's not really until your 10th play that you start going oh I think I really get how this works and just trust me on this there is an incredibly rewarding feeling of having a game that is your groups that does have that shared history that does have that extra depth of play you're playing a deeper ocean of the game rather than just experiencing the surface of it and that's because a lot of games are quite deep there's a lot to them but they become deeper the more they played so my recommendation for a group game that you can develop a met on that you can develop a history you can develop a Heritage on is Cadian chaos order now the final entry on this list was going to be terraforming Mars but I thought that's actually quite a boring entry for this final spot because what I wanted to talk about here was engine building games and specifically engine building games with unique cards but I always talk about terraforming Mars when I talk about these things uh because this is one of my favorite niches in board gaming so instead I'm going to talk about Arc NOA which Shear has a lot in common uh with terraforming Mars but it is a different and distinct game in its own right and the thing that makes this for me is each of these cards and this giant stack of cards is unique what that means is you never see the same combination of cards come out they never come out in the same order you always have to think of a different way of managing things each and every time you play the game you'll have a different hand of cards they'll come out in different order and you will have to make different decisions about what to pick up what to discard and what order to play them in and for me that is so satisfying this is why I played over a th000 hours of toring Mars on the PC solo uh because you know just before I go to bed just about every night I'll play a game just to settle my brain same thing happens with ar noova every time a card comes up I look at it I'm like okay how does that fit with my current situation how does that fit with my current puzzle because this giant stack of cards is unique and you never see the same thing twice you never face with exactly the same puzzle now the same cool thing is happening over and over again that you are trying to you know Advance these tracks and get these Technologies but it's never in exactly the same way and it means because the core gameplay here uh the core principles of the game are fundamentally sound this change in order this changing cards this unique things that you're seeing every time makes it a game that you can return to over and over again I I say this was going to be terraforming Mars but the same is true for arova and it's true for a bunch of other engine building games if the problem you presented each time is different then it feels like a different game each and every time you play it and that keeps it fresh and that makes AR noova and terraforming Mars for that matter a game that I feel like I could play Forever that concludes the list but I think the main reason I wanted to talk about this is that I do as I say one and a half games a week on average learning new games and that's entirely for the channel personally I'm the kind of person who prefers playing games over and over again I would gladly just play Arkham Horror terraforming Mars spirit isand and those kind of games over and over again more than necessarily getting brand new games in each and every week and as actually getting really burned out reviewing games because new games were coming in I was playing them and it was just so much of my gaming time was just spent with new games reading the rules going through that RI moral it's part of the job I I get that but what I wasn't doing back then was playing my core games playing the games I love as much and really this last year of having a regular Arham hor of the card game night where that's all I do and also my Tuesday group we don't play new games with that group anymore that's really all for old games so I've got like two nights where I go back and I play old games predominantly that has made a huge difference to my um I don't want to say mental health because it's not quite a mental health issue but my morale around making content because I'm just that much Keener to try a new game for work uh because I know I've got time that I can spend on my favorites on games that I want to play Forever on my spirit Islands on my terraforming Mars on castles of burgundy Arkham horor the card game those are the kind of games that I want to set up and I want to play over and over again I do like discovering new games and I do like playing new games otherwise I wouldn't be in this line of work but if that's all you're doing it feels Hollow in the end you're not getting the deep rich board gaming experience and I just feel that so much of board game marketing board game culture board game influencing is in this got to buy it you've got to buy it get the new thing it's brand new and then like no one talks about it two weeks later games are meant to be appreciated they meant to be experienced I have the occupational hazard of having to turn through games and again I only go through 75 or so a year there are people out there doing hundreds a year and I guess if that works for you that's fine it doesn't really work for me and I'm suspecting B Bas on some of the comments I've seen out there a lot of people have Bor into the idea of chasing new games and that's what the hobby is the hobby is playing more games that somehow having played a th000 games makes you a better gamer than someone who's played 100 it's complete bubus anyway if you are feeling a little burned out in the hobby because you've bought so many games on Kickstarter you backed so many things you've brought so many games and you've just played so many things um that it feels like you just you burned through the hobby start picking some games and playing them over and over again drilling into them playing them deeper instead of game night being oh what did you buy this week game night can be oh let's play that again try playing the same game at least for like a month cuz ultimately board games are not pizza you should not order a box numb up its content and then throw it away board games are art they should be savored and appreciated and shared with friends and if there are any games in your Forever game list let me know and a reminder three m board games does not do paid content we do not accept money from Publishers if you enjoyed this video please back us on patreon and until next time take care and if you enjoyed this video like share subscribe 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Channel: 3 Minute Board Games

Views: 106,082

Keywords: Games of the year 2023, games of the year, best board game of the year, best board game of 2023, best board game of 2024, best board game ever, board game awards, award winning board games, board game of the year 2023, board game of the year 2024, Board games, Board game, Three minute Board Games, 3 Minute Board games, netrunner, dominion, best board games, best board games of all time, top board games, bgg top 100, bgg top 10

Id: 8ojNlh8MJdQ

Length: 34min 50sec (2090 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2024