I like board games a lot and own quite a few now. Amongst my favorites are Puerto Rico, Power Grid, and Settlers of Catan with the Cities & Knights expansion, but there's a lot of them that I enjoy. The new ones I've played recently are La Strada, Keythedral, and Pirate's Cove. Playing Pirate's Cove was enlightening because of what it turned out that I didn't like, which was the highly random nature of fighting between pirate ships that could leave you devastated and take you several turns to recover from. In a game that only has 12 turns, that's very bad.
Not surprisingly, it seems my favorite games and the subject I'm talking about a lot in this blog right now intersect with one another. I like the economic games. Puerto Rico, Power Grid, and Cities & Knights are all games about economics with carefully balanced trade-offs regarding what you can do with your scarce resources, which Thomas Sowell would quickly point have alternative uses.
For example, in a recent game of Puerto Rico, I had a choice between waiting another round to acquire a couple more doubloons and buying a guild hall that would give me at least eight victory points or buying a university that would give me three victory points and free colonists with buildlings. Since I picked the university, then was unable to buy more than one relatively useless building that only gave me one more victory point. So I missed proper evaluation of opportunity costs and lost out on four to six victory points. Since I only lost the game by four victory points and had made one other mistake of which I'm aware that cost me two victory points with respect to the winner, I basically killed my game in that one move.
While that's very sad for me, it was still one of the more exciting games I've played, ever, and it's all because it's about managing your economy.
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