Thursday, November 30, 2006

Significant Other

The best board & card games to play with your spouse and/or S.O...

Also nominated:

For comparison, the top five games from 2002:

The Apple Pickers stated a number of preferences - but remember that these preferences are for playing with spouses/s.o.'s and not other gamers:

  • Mystery Rummy #1 (Jack the Ripper) was the most popular, though #3 (Jekyll & Hyde) wasn't far behind. Interestingly, all 4 games were mentioned.
  • The ONLY version of Ticket To Ride to receive votes was the original game.
  • "Vanilla" Carcassonne was the popular choice, with the Inns & Cathedrals expansion and the stand-alone Castle game tied for second.
  • The ONLY version of Settlers of Catan to receive votes was the original game.
Not surprising that the most stripped down versions of these games were chosen to play with non-gamer s.o.'s...

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Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Negotiation (trading)

The best negotiation games that are trading games...
Also nominated:
For comparison, the top five games from 2002:
The Apples Pickers were asked about a couple of preferences:
  • They overwhelmingly preferred playing "vanilla" Settlers over any other version (both Seafarers & the Historical Boxes received votes).
  • There is a very slight preference for Edel, Stein & Reich over the original Basari... the games are not identical but are very similar.

And, yes, this time around (2006) The Traders of Genoa ended up on this list... and still managed to make it into the top 6. Impressive.

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Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Negotiation (non-trading)

The best negotiation games that are not trading games...
Also nominated:
For comparison, the top five games from 2002:
You may well wonder why Traders of Genoa shows up on the Negotiation (trading) list (to be published tomorrow) in 2006 - but not in 2002. Frankly, I'm not sure. :-)

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Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Sports

The best sports games... Note: This does NOT include racing games, as there will be three racing games categories (car, animal, other), nor does it include "fantasy" sports such as BloodBowl.
Just missed the cut:
Also nominated:

This category did not appear in 2002, so there are no comparison results.

The Apple Pickers (including yours truly) prefer the original En Garde to the "dumbed-down" newest version, Duell. (However, it's easy to retrofit the older/better rules to the nice new pieces & board... you should do that!)

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Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Long

The best board & card games that take 3 or more hours to play...
also nominated:
For comparison, the top five games from 2002:
The Pickers indicated a slight preference for the newest version of History of the World and the American edition of crayon rails (Empire Builder). There was a dead heat between Civilization & Advanced Civilization, with one participant so turned off by Advanced Civ that he refused to vote for the combination.

There was also a lot of griping from the Pickers about how games made it onto the nominations list - "It NEVER takes us 3 hours to play [blank]." Remember, the nominations were compiled from lists of seven games chosen by the Pickers based on their personal experience with these games.

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Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Don't Panic!

Hey, I may have listed the folks who make up the Apples Picking crew - but that does NOT mean that we're finished yet! There's lots more Apple-y goodness to come: sports, racing, politics, economics, gateway games, and much much more!

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Ladies & Gentlemen... The Apple Pickers!

Not all of them have been able to participate in all of the nominating and/or voting, but all of them have had some part in making this project come to life.

BTW, I (Mark "Fluff Daddy" Jackson) picked the links for each Picker... blame me, not them.

If you want to meet the Apple Picker crew from 2002, check out The Participants from the original Apples Project site. Apple Pickers who've participated both times are denoted by their names in bold.

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Friday, November 03, 2006

City Building

The best games about building cities...

Also nominated:

For comparison, the results from 2002:

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