Choosing
Board games for adults
A game for four adults after dinner has a different job from a game for experienced players on a games night. The questions are not the same.
The situation
Four adults, one evening, perhaps a glass of wine, nobody who has read the rules in advance and nobody who wants to lose twenty minutes learning them. That is the most common gaming situation in a home and the one least material is written for. Under those conditions, six things decide the evening.
1. How long before you are actually doing something?
The rules explanation is the most expensive minute a game has. Anything that can be moved from explanation to discovery should be.
2. Does everyone have something to do at all times?
The most common way to ruin an evening is for one person to become the engine and three to become the audience. Ask: can the material be physically divided? Are there always at least as many things to work on as there are people?
3. What happens when you get stuck?
Every table gets stuck. The question is what the box does about it. A graded, free hint system saves the evening. A hint system that costs points does not get used, because nobody wants to be the one who suggests it.
4. Does it require anyone to act a part?
Some groups love it, others freeze. There is no right answer, but it is a question to settle before buying rather than discover inside the envelope.
5. Is it a competition or a collaboration?
After dinner with friends, collaboration is usually the safer route. A cooperative game has no loser at the table and leaves nobody behind after twenty minutes.
6. Can the evening be finished?
A three-hour game for four people who have work in the morning does not get finished, and a game that does not get finished leaves a worse aftertaste than one never opened. Seventy-five to a hundred minutes fits inside a real evening.
If your group likes to talk
There is a category where the discussion is the game: everyone looks at the same material, disagrees about what it means, and has to reach agreement. Those games work best in exactly the situation above. Operation Alfa is built for that category.
Common questions
How many games does one need to own?
Fewer than you would think. One good cooperative game that works for four adults in about an hour gets used more than five large boxes that require planning. What decides whether a game gets played is rarely how good it is, but how low the threshold is to take it off the shelf.
What works when half the group never plays games?
Something where the material itself explains what to do. Document-based investigation games often have a low threshold for exactly that reason: everyone knows how to read a sheet of paper and put it next to another one.