Board Game Confessional

I have a confession to make. I have become addicted to board games.

Correction.

I have developed a board game-related addiction.

And it's called TableTop.

I'm not entirely sure when this happened, but at some point within the past two years I began researching a new Christmas gift purchase for my lovely wife. She had expressed a desire to spend more time together that wasn't around the television (which can be really difficult in this day and age).

TableTop is a web series hosted by Wil Wheaton. Each episode features one board game (usually), where Wheaton briefly explains the play and mechanics of the game and then proceeds to play the game with his three guests for the duration of the episode.

But back to my new found quest for a new board game...

I hunted high and low for new and/or interesting titles at the local stores. I scoured the internet for board game reviews. The results were often overwhelming. Additionally, the fact that the sticker price for most of these games started at fifty bucks and often went up from there didn't help either. Dropping that kind of cash on a board game without ever playing it just seems like too much of a risk.

However, I was determined not to let sticker prices scare me away. And I wanted to find something that was vastly different from what I had grown up playing as a child. Not that Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit (especially the Totally 80s edition), or Risk and the likes were no longer allowed in my house. These games felt overplayed and I became disinterested in them.

Board Game Quest Side Note: Lisa despises Monopoly. And while I feel that despise may be too harsh a word for a silly board game, I don't blame her position. I have witnessed friendly games quickly turned into horrible fights, as I'm sure most have. She dislikes the game enough that not only do we not have a copy of the game in the house, but I have yet to successfully convince her to play a single game with me since we've been together. (Not that playing Monopoly is all that fun with just 2 players anyway, but that's beside the point, and an entirely different conversation altogether.)

Back to my quest...

I had searched for the "best modern board games" or the "best board games for two players" among several other variations and one game kept popping up in my search results called Pandemic.

Pandemic is a cooperative board game based on the premise where four deadly diseases have broken out over the world, each threatening a specific region. Unlike most traditional board games where each player is automatically pitted against one another, the playing style here is cooperative -- where all players work together in an attempts to achieve a singular goal: discover all four cures and win before any of the several game-ending scenarios are reached.

To understand the basic game mechanics in under 30 minutes, please feel free to watch the TableTop episode below.

"...I have had more fun losing this game than I have had winning a lot of others." -- Wil Wheaton

While this is a great first glance at the game if you are intrigued, please understand that these four are playing the "Legendary" version of the game -- which also happens to be the highest difficultly level available. I would never recommend this to anyone playing for the first time, or the hundredth time. (It's hard enough to win the game with just 2 Epidemic cards in the stack, let alone all 6.)

This show has resulted in at least two new additions to our ever-growing board game collection within the past 18 months as well as an ever-increasing Amazon wishlist.

So, if my new venture in board games has intrigued you, my recommendation for you is this:

• Try to locate a local retailer that specializes in games.
• Worst-case scenario, there's always Barnes & Noble or Amazon.
• Try to find a title that isn't published by likes of Milton Bradley or Hasbro, since they pretty much own the market.
• Research the game(s) that interest you. Try to find reviews that will quickly tell you if the game has a good replay value. I also recommend starting with Board Game Geek and going from there.
• Lastly, see if Wil Wheaton has played the game with is friends on TableTop.
• If all signs point to yes, then you've just found your new board game.

Go buy a board game and have some fun!

Board games are a great way to socialize without using modern technology that already plagues our lives most of the time already. Disconnect. Unplug.

Leave your iPhone in the other room and really get to know the person sitting across the table that might just be able to help you save the world.

Trust me, you'll thank me later. I promise.