Board Games

[red.hexapus]

#11724

How about an episode on board games translated to digital format (in a similar way as the episodes on pool/snooker, golf or pinball games).

Beside all the chess and backgammon clones, there are a few unique games e.g. 1830: Railways & Robber Barons or Advanced Civilization.

[DJ_HiP]

#11725

Neat idea, I mean even the mundane ‘Monopoly’ had quite a number of variations on DOS, from text based to full graphical.

Biggest challenge I found with any digital adaption was the interpretation of the rules, often learning more rules that I previously knew of, or finding out a ‘rule’ may have been a ‘house rule’ and not an official one!

[Evil Taco]

#11727

That’s a fantastic idea for this episode series (Skiing, Golf, Pool, …) !!

[Hedgehog]

#11796

Advanced Civilization
5th Fleet

[butterburp]

#11820

Some DOS versions of commercial board games:
Virgin/Leisure: Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, Clue (Master detective)
Domark: Trivia Pursuit, Pictionary
Gametek: Candyland, Chutes y Ladders, plus a zillion adaptations of game shows

On the more ancient side, there’s Chessmaster 2000 which kicked off my favorite chess series of all time. Fun fact: I once played against the lowest-ranked CPU player in CM 9000: a chimpanzee named Stanley who just makes random moves. His rating was 1 (the strongest grandmaster in the world, Magnus Carlsen, is rated about 2850). I lost.

[Evil Taco]

#11830

Oof yeah, I’m pretty sure I’ve never beaten a CPU chess player. There was a chess on the games floppy, which my dad brought from work alongside the 286 that he brought home for summer holidays a couple of times. I also remember fondly playing one of those electronic chess games at a library (in Kajaani, Finland, in the late 80s or early 90s!)

Incidentally, I’m playing Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate obsessively right now … not a DOS game, but you _could_ make it in DOS I’m pretty sure!

[Petiantone]

#12353

I’ve been using https://dice.onl to test out dice probabilities for those tricky DOS board game rule interpretations, especially when Monopoly house rules get wild. It’s handy for quickly simulating rolls without physical dice, and it helps me tweak gameplay balance before jumping into older digital adaptations.

[Tijn]

#12354

I love this idea. I’ll have to think a bit on how to do it exactly, I don’t think we can capture the wide variety of board games in a single episode, so we might have to choose a specific subject and/or revisit the topic more than once.

We could easily fill a single episode with chess alone, but perhaps getting more games in there is more interesting.

The first thing that comes to mind is the Hoyle games by Sierra. I played those a ton as a kid, pretty sure it’s where I learned how to play Backgammon.