Scrabulizer lets you enter the current state of your game in Scrabble and shows you all possible moves. They've also discovered a move worth 2044 Points
posted by minifigs on Sep 29, 2009 - 57 comments

A huge collection of vintage cycling board games. The main site also has resources for rolling your own cycling game.
posted by OmieWise on Sep 18, 2009 - 14 comments

World Wars 2, sequel to the hex-wargame-inspired World Wars, has been released. [more inside]
posted by XMLicious on Aug 9, 2009 - 24 comments

At the recent Games for Change conference, Brenda Brathwaite debuted her game Train. The WSJ blog Speakeasy interviews her: Players load boxcars with tiny yellow figurines and are asked to move the trains from one end of the course to the other. They pull cards that either impede their progress or free some of the characters. Once a train reaches the "finish line," the game is completed and it is revealed [more inside]
posted by j.edwards on Jun 25, 2009 - 49 comments

Even among "monster games", it stands alone. A 7-foot mapsheet. 1,800 counters. 1,500 hours to play. It is SPI's The Campaign for North Africa.
posted by Joe Beese on May 11, 2009 - 89 comments

Geeky? Crafty? Got some time on your hands? Make your own boardgame pieces! Tutorials for making custom 3-d Settlers of Catan tiles (and gorgeous custom sets here, and here, although with no instructions,alas). Agricola more your style? Grab some polymer clay and get making resources, more resources, food, sheep, more sheep, boars, cattle, and (of course) farmers, farmers, farmers, farmers, farmers, and farmers. Don't forget fences, tiles, and a starting player piece. Lots more in the image gallery at BoardGameGeek.
posted by arcticwoman on Mar 2, 2009 - 15 comments

SoftBoard Games: Free, Commercial, and Abandoned Computer Versions of Board and Card Games with Computer AI (Artificial Intelligence) Opponents.
posted by jbickers on Nov 10, 2008 - 10 comments

"A Solitaire Civization game that's compact enough to play on a plane ... Using only a pad of paper, a pencil, and a specialized deck of cards, lead your civilization through the ages to become ... civilized." A free "print-and-play" board game. [more inside]
posted by jbickers on Sep 25, 2008 - 20 comments

Chess Problems has hundreds of problems in six difficulty classes from novice to fiendish [java]
posted by Kattullus on Feb 16, 2008 - 10 comments

A Field Guide to Chess Tactics. Chess tactics explained in plain English, with hundreds of examples. A great site for beginning to mid-level players. Includes a large library of positional problems, organized thematically, with the solutions explained and discussed. For example, learn about knight forks, then quiz yourself on the same topic.
posted by Rumple on Jun 19, 2007 - 76 comments

"The definitive list of single-player games." Here's another. And if your Paypal account balance means eBay isn't an option, here's a whole mess of stuff to do by yourself with a basic deck of cards.
posted by jbickers on Jun 17, 2007 - 3 comments

Virus is a very simple, addictive flash game; using the colors available to you at the bottom of the screen, convert all the tiles on the board into a single color. Similar colored connecting tiles become part of the viral mass. Via.
posted by jonson on Feb 21, 2007 - 75 comments

Chess has a long, if somewhat shrouded, history, with beautiful chess pieces found dating from the 5th century. It has spawned hundreds of fascinating stories, and many interesting names for moves. For the last five decades, the history of chess and computers have been intertwined in many ways. Chess continues to adapt to a new age, with controversies around computer-assisted cheating, attempts to sex-up chess books, thousands of variants, and an amazing online database that can search through recorded games for the last 200 years.
posted by blahblahblah on Dec 4, 2006 - 5 comments

Free Computer Version of Board and Card Games with Artificial Intelligence Computer Opponents and with Screen Shots is exactly what is says. Now those of you who've had their interest piqued by such games as Settlers of Catan or others mentioned in the Top 100 Boardgames thread can try games such as these without ponying up the thirty bucks for a big box of boards and pieces.
posted by jtron on Jul 26, 2006 - 10 comments

Posit: Settlers of Catan is the greatest board game of all time. (Read the rules and see for yourself, just don't go too crazy with changing them.) Why not spend Saturday playing online? There are several java versions available for those leery of installing things.
posted by absalom on Jul 8, 2006 - 28 comments

Hnefatafl is an anglo-norse boardgame whose many variants are mentioned in the sagas (wearing a helmet during play is entirely optional) . Chess superseded it during the rennaisance, but Scholarly work has allowed the rules to be deduced in modern times, mainly on the basis of a 1732 diary account written by Linnaeus (he of the botanical naming system).

And now, thanks to the magic of the internet, you can play online.
posted by apodo on Mar 28, 2006 - 17 comments

The 100 best board games ... (at least according to this guy).
posted by crunchland on Dec 8, 2005 - 112 comments

Roman ball games and Roman board games. Complete with literary references, ancient artwork, and instructions for playing the games yourself. So let's all sing: Aufer me ad arenam (to the tune of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame").
posted by stopgap on Jan 19, 2005 - 2 comments

90+ Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap buys 100 copies of "Vallee De La Morte", a board game recreation of the battle of Dien Bien Phu There actually are 2 competing board game recreations of the epic 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu which was (by the French):

""....an attempt to interdict the enemy's rear area, to stop the flow of supplies and reinforcements, to establish a redoubt in the enemy's rear and disrupt his lines," says Douglas Johnson, research professor at the U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute. "The enemy could then be lured into a killing ground."....Hoping to draw Ho Chi Minh's guerrillas into a classic battle, the French began to build up their garrison at Dien Bien Phu..." General Giap - who led the Vietcong forces in that battle, prefers "Vallee De La Morte". Such games are played with large multicolored paper maps broken up into hexagonal grids, with cardboard pieces representing military units. The rules can be quite complex and some wargames ( such as Drang Nach Osten) have thousands of pieces and take thousands of hours to play (sometimes longer than the actual wars they simulate). More on wargaming.
posted by troutfishing on Apr 26, 2004 - 26 comments

If you're bored with the kind of chess grandpappy taught you, know there are well over 1,000 other ways to do it. Play chess on a Moebius strip, with hexagons, or like Monopoly. Or play Chaturanga, chess's earliest ancestor. And if you don't have the time to, say, build your own 3-D Star Trek chessboard, there are also variations playable with a standard chess set.
posted by tepidmonkey on Apr 7, 2004 - 13 comments

Perhaps it says something about the intellectual sophistication of ancient cultures that some of the most entertaining games in existence are thousands of years old: backgammon, Go, mancala... The now-ubiquitous chess is a relative newcomer, dating back merely 1400 years. One wonders whether Boggle or Monopoly will withstand the test of time so well.
posted by letourneau on Feb 18, 2004 - 17 comments

Japanese Prints and the World of Go. Classic Japanese art meets classic Japanese boardgame.
'The purpose of this catalogue is twofold: to enlarge the understanding of print collectors who may be unaware of the long historical and legendary background of a game that has for centuries engaged the interest of many artists in Japan; and to enrich the experience of go players by presenting works that reveal some of the large body of traditions and associations connected with the game in Japan's cultural life. Although artists were inspired by the game of go to work the theme in several media--wood, ivory, metal, textiles, and clay, and while the motif appears on numerous scroll and screen paintings--it is in woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) that its image is most frequently found.'
'. . . there is a text that likens the world to a go-board. For those who see with their minds, it is the centre of the universe.'
Warning: Each sub-link in the article opens a new window.
posted by plep on Nov 19, 2003 - 10 comments

Monopoly Stats. Now you can play the odds [via boingboing.net]
posted by srboisvert on Sep 19, 2003 - 11 comments

If life's a game, how do you win? We've been mapping our paths through life for centuries, but it took an American Civil War-era publisher to turn it into a boardgame (after Lincoln's new beard killed demand for his line of clean-shaven presidential portraits). In the age of the PC we can find the answer to life in games, live parallel lives in games, simulate the evolution of life in games, and search for everlasting life in games - but can they beat the dusty old box and dice? And what life lessons are all these games teaching us?
posted by rory on Mar 26, 2003 - 14 comments

Create your own Monopoly Game Surely the perfect customised gift? You can change the name of the game, the theme, the name of the properties/stations, and also the rules. Apparently it uses a 'What You See Is What You Get Realtime Interface', which allows users to personalise the game completely to their requirements, and then print out and proof the new design. What I find most interesting about this product offering is that the whole process is completely automated. Once you've designed and ordered your customised game, it goes straight to print/production, and is then sent out to you. No human intervention is required. This appears to me to be pretty ground breaking stuff (well in the Toy World anyway), or am I just way behind the times? (via the Ecademy discussion list)
posted by RobertLoch on Jun 28, 2002 - 28 comments

Take It Easy An online version of the award-winning board game Take It Easy. The highest possible score is 307 -- what can you get?
posted by Shadowkeeper on Feb 19, 2002 - 26 comments

The most popular board game in Argentina now is called "Deuda Eterna", Eternal Debt. It's been flying off the shelves. It has the players trying to operate South American countries which are rich in natural resources while trying to outfox the IMF. (The name is a play on "Deuda Externa", Foreign Debt, on which Argentina just stopped paying interest.)
posted by Steven Den Beste on Dec 24, 2001 - 12 comments

Go is better than Chess. (This discussion started in MetaTalk through topic drift, and it really belongs here.)
posted by Steven Den Beste on May 9, 2001 - 23 comments

Wizards of the Coast was quite a strange place to work for in the early days. A gamer paradise of freebies, fun, and sex. A game or Truth of Swill changes everything. Now WOTC is owned by Hasbro and the February closing of the Seattle Gamecenter is the final nail in the coffin of gamer paradise.
posted by john on Mar 27, 2001 - 8 comments

Wow! Non-election related news. Courtesy of Linux Weekly News (which came out this morning), a picture of the new ".com" version of Monopoly. Did they get the companies in the order of priority you would have expected?
posted by baylink on Nov 10, 2000 - 8 comments

oh.
my.
god.
hasbro made a dr. laura boardgame. (unironically, i might add.) parody, anyone?
posted by patricking on Jun 17, 2000 - 8 comments

The good guys can win, but it's not cheap. If Clue.com can beat Hasbro, surely Mattl has a case against Mattel. As if we didn't already know that.
posted by luke on May 11, 2000 - 0 comments