Need "GeekCon" suggestions

[Graham]

A friend of mine holds something that he calls "GeekCon" once a year.  Basically a group of eight guys or so gets together and we have a huge gaming and junk food session.  One year they did Magic, and last year we did Settlers of Catan.  While I have plenty of video games, we need another game to play, like some type of card or board game.  He suggested Diplomacy, but from what he told me about it, I don't know if guys would care for it that much.  He says he's never completed a game of it ever.  Here is what we'd need to look for:

Relatively cheap.  Wouldn't want to spend a lot of money on this.

Can handle multiple play throughs.  (Although Settlers is a fun game, two games was enough...but we ended up playing three or four, and people weren't having fun with it.)

Simple enough to get a hang of in one evening.

Not too time-consuming.  If we have multiple games going on, we don't want to have one group finish and another group have to wait for another hour for the other group to finish.

HeroScape looks like a fun game for something like this, but the game is pretty expensive.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[Dreamshadow]

I'd have to suggest heroscape....two or three sets of it and you can include all eight people.  Get the expansions and the army choices really branch out.  Heroscape retails for 40-45 in Toys'R'Us...I've seen it as cheap as 35 sometimes.

Even better, the tiles make great mapboards for other games, such as BattleTech.   I like Heroscape.  It's simple, but flexable. Can't beat a game where this is a proper map board:

[Turtle]

Your first stop should be:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/

It's a site that catalogues board, card, and some miniature games.  Each entry holds player reviews of the game and every game is rated.  They also list player count and other things.  Very useful.

I would recommend Shadows over Camelot.  You can read about the game in another recent thread in this forum.

It's basically a cooperative game, players fight against time and the board game itself to complete quests as the knights of the round.  However, there is a chance that one of the players is a traitor to the group and the knights are tasked with unmasking him as well as completing quests.

It's very easy to learn since doing quests is very straightforward in placing cards.  No pages of rules to read just to learn to do one thing.

Since it's coop, it's perfect if your group doesn't feel like backstabbing each other tonight.

[Nth Power]

Carcassone is always fun.  Games can be played "nice", but more often than not, ours always become cutthroat.  I like how the game can accomodate different play styles depending on your group.  Easy to learn and it's different every time.

[Chaz]

I'd go for Great Dalmuti.  It's a card game that's essentially Asshole, but with a totally different deck that really changes things.  Instead of four of each number, there's one 1, two 2s, up to twelve 12s.  It's incredibly simple to learn, there's a good deal of strategy, come from behinds are possible, if not easy, and games can go on for as long or short as you like.  It can function as a filler if needed, or you can spend the whole night playing it, as I have on many occasions.

[the Nightbreeze]

I'd go for Great Dalmuti.  It's a card game that's essentially Asshole, but with a totally different deck that really changes things.  Instead of four of each number, there's one 1, two 2s, up to twelve 12s.  It's incredibly simple to learn, there's a good deal of strategy, come from behinds are possible, if not easy, and games can go on for as long or short as you like.  It can function as a filler if needed, or you can spend the whole night playing it, as I have on many occasions.

I think this game, and Dilbert, both have the same basic card mechanics and deck construction, are both products of Wizards of the Coast, and are both out of print.  Might have to look around the net a bit for them.  It's not the types of games you can grab at Toys R Us.

But dead on in the description, and hours of fun while killing time in undergrad between classes.

[gilgamex]

How about Twister?  :lol:

[th'FOOL]

Diplomacy is one of the greatest boardgames ever.

[Graham]

Talk about coming back from the dead.

We did one last fall with a card game called Nuclear War.  A lot of fun.

A few weeks ago we did a HeroScape game.  Had a lot of fun with that and I learned how to play the game a lot better then.

[stiffler]

Nuclear War is a hell of a game.  I had a lot of fun with that in the past.  Between my friends and myself we had the basic game along with Nuclear Escalation and Nuclear Proliferation.  Fun, fun, fun!