I need a new boardgame!

[Artemis923]

Like the title says, i need a new boardgame for my "boardgames and beer" nights with my friends.. I already own Arkham horror (awesome game if you have the time for it) and The Resistance(fun with a lot of people in the same room).
I am thinking of buying Relic (the warhammer 40k version of talisman), but i never played talisman before and i feel that the setting would be the only thing i'd like. Plus it's pretty expensive. So i have 2 questions:

1) Is relic a good game to lay with some friends and alcohol.

2) If not, does anyone have some other good english boardgames with a horror/sf/action setting with nice materials? The price does not matter.

Relic is an amazing game, with or without alcohol. It's easy to learn, and a total blast.

ANd 60 bucks for a boardgame isn't that expensive.

For a more complex and strategic game, try Twilight Imperium. It's complicated, but a lot of fun.

 

[tardcore]

Heroquest or Advanced Heroquest from Games Workshop, RoboRally from Wizards of the Coast, Hacker, or the card games Munchkin and Illuminati by Steve Jackson Games, spring to mind as great "boardgames and beer" fodder.

 

[Catie Caraco]

Games I can personally recommend because I've played them/own them:

1) Ticket to Ride. A fun game where you build railroad tracks across the United States (or other countries if you get their maps) to complete destinations. If you're a cut-throat bunch there are opportunities to screw over your friends and relations.

2) Gloom. A card game in which you kill your own family members in dark, depressing ways while giving your opponents the times of their lives. Great if you have dark senses of humor, but you need to be willing to tell a story while you play.

3) Pandemic. Save the world from 4 different deadly diseases while working as a team. You can change the difficulty by adding more epidemics to the pile. 6 is officially man-moding.

4) Dixit. A card game with a deck of beautiful and haunting surreal cards. Pick a card, think of a phrase or sound that describes it, play the card face down. Everyone else plays a card they think matches the phrase, then everyone tries to guess who placed the first card. The better you know your friends, the better you'll do.

5) Cards Against Humanity. Apples to apples for terrible people. NSFW and definitely for those with dark humor.

 

[Souplex]

Ticket to Ride. A fun game where you build railroad tracks across the United States (or other countries if you get their maps) to complete destinations. If you're a cut-throat bunch there are opportunities to screw over your friends and relations.

Ticket to ride is the single most aggravating board game I've ever played.
It's fun, but you're gonna want to murder your friends.

 

[The Enquirer]

Axis and Allies is a great game if you like strategy at all I guess its also action. No where near as random as risk.

 

[Catie Caraco]

Ticket to Ride. A fun game where you build railroad tracks across the United States (or other countries if you get their maps) to complete destinations. If you're a cut-throat bunch there are opportunities to screw over your friends and relations.

Ticket to ride is the single most aggravating board game I've ever played.
It's fun, but you're gonna want to murder your friends.

My boyfriend and our roommate use it as an opportunity to try to out-masculine each other so everyone else is left to their own devices. And, just curious, have you played any of the maps other than America? Because more complex maps lead to less getting your route blocked.

 

[Bellvedere]

I have talisman. I'm not sure what the 40k version is like, but I find Talisman to be not such a great game. It's quite long, the using dice to determine the number of spaces to move is a pretty boring and old fashioned sort of mechanic.

Others above have already suggested some of my favourites: Munchkin (both the card game and the board game version are great silly fun), the Battlestar Galactica Board game, and Space Alert so I'm throwing my vote behind those ones.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

I have no idea how good Relic is, but I can recommend Betrayal at House on the Hill. Everybody starts on the same team, exploring a house, collecting items and omens. Once a certain number of omens have been collected, one person becomes the traitor. New rules and objectives are then introduced for both the traitor and everybody else, which are different every time depending on which omen is obtained last and which room it is obtained in. It's a lot of fun, and is often dramatically different each game.

Yup, this is my recommendation as well. I've only played the game twice, but it was a hell of a lot of fun every time. The guy who brought the game also told us that in all the time he'd been playing, he still hadn't seen all of the different scenarios in the game, so the game is hugely re-playable. In fact, the two scenarios we ended up playing were two he'd never seen before.

 

[Requia]

Yet another person with no Talisman/Relic knowledge, but I really really love Arabian Nights. Its a story based thing (modeled off the stories of the same name), more than a rule based thing, so its more about trying to do awesome shit (and often failing miserably). Not everybody's taste, since its *very* luck based, but the story and the fact that its near impossible to be in a situation where the game's already lost make for a lot of fun if you don't need the game to be about making good decisions.

 

[Launcelot111]

Mage Knight is a beastly game. It takes the basic idea of a deck building game and expands it into a huge and involved and brutally hard fantasy game. You can do co-op scenarios or you can kill each other. In my experience, it's best with 3 players, and a game usually takes about 4 hours, so it might not be great for a social gathering, but it's worth trying.

Mansions of Madness is probably the best of the Lovecraft genre of board games. The storytelling element is in the forefront, and gameplay is much more straightforward than Arkham Horror.

Last Night On Earth is solid, but if you can find it, Invasion from Outer Space is better. It's essentially the same game with a funner theme and more interesting scenarios (there's an unstoppable beast that is only weak to the smell of cabbage and a dancing bear that get extra bonuses when riding a unicycle). The same company also makes Touch of Evil, which is about an 18th century town fighting off folktale horrors like werewolves and the headless horseman.

Eclipse is a fun one, all about space exploration and combat with tons of flexibility about how you want to build and equip your fleet. Alien Frontiers is space themed but is essentially a worker placement game with tons of dice rolling (I love dice rolling), and it is probably my favorite game.

If you're trying to get one big group game, Battlestar Galactica is good, but avoid the expansions. They ruin everything.

If you like Resistance, Ultimate Werewolf takes it to the next level with tons of extra roles outside the basic werewolf/villager dichotomy and a much stronger element of bluffing and reading people as opposed to Resistance's more logic-based reasoning.

Sentinels of the Multiverse is a fun superhero themed card game with a few expansions available now, which leads to a ton of replay value between the 20 or so heroes, 10 villains, and 10 venues to have the fight. Between the expansions and the base set, you could get two or three games of this going simultaneously.

Descent and its more family friendly cousin Mice and Mystics offer a sort of campaign with prepared storylines and chapters and level ups and DMs and stuff if your group is up for a long term project. I like Mice and Mystics more just for how fun the theme is.

 

[mrvenom]

I would like to thank everybody for their suggestions! I'll look into it.

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

I really love "Mansions of Madness" from Fantasy Flight Games, it basically feels like a nicely condensed and super tight session of the Call of Cthulhu RPG.

Along a similar vein with less complicated rules (though still really, really fun) is The Betrayal at the House on the Hill.

Lastly Pandemic is really fun to play, it's very nice if you don't want to play "against" people.

 

[Iwata]

Fury of Dracula is a great game to play with friends on a more casual setting.

But the best boardgame I've bought in the past couple of years, without question, was Star Trek: Fleet Captains. That is becoming my favourite boardgame since ye olde Space Crusade.

 

[Gatx]

Zombies!!! Is a great game. It has a modular board, which increases replayability, and rules simple enough to play while drunk.

City of Horror is another zombie game but with emphasis on survivor dynamics rather than fighting zombies and really encourages player interaction.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is a game I've always wanted to try but haven't gotten the chance to but it seems fun enough. Modular board so again, replayability. The idea is that you're exploring a house (phase where you build the board piece by piece) until someone triggers something ala Cabin in the Woods/Evil Dead and causes one of multiple scenarios. That one player now leads an army of slime monsters/zombies/werewolves/whatever scenario ends up playing out against the rest of the players.

And lastly I just have to add Love Letter. It's a really clever game that's played with a deck of only 16 cards. If you're not into the theme then there's another game called Coup with pretty much the same concept but with a bit more depth and set in the Resistance universe.