Daily Dose of English 212
Board Games
Daily Dose of English 212
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every single day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about board games. One of my favorite pastimes with people is to play board games. Board games are not board as in B-O-R-E-D, like somebody is bored. Oh, this is so boring. But board as in like a physical board. That's not very descriptive. You know, like a board. How do you describe a board? It's like a thing that you put on a table to like put other stuff on top of. But also like in the ground you have like boards that are planks of wood. That's a hard word to describe. Anyways, a board game actually refers to sort of any game that is played with physical objects, usually on a table. They're also called tabletop games sometimes, although that usually refers to something else. And yeah, that's what a board game is. Think about like Monopoly or Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride. Those are some big, famous games. Going back a little further, well, actually, yeah, let me get to this. So, in the US, everybody knows Monopoly, Sorry, Chess, games like that, Candyland, Snakes and Ladders, everybody knows those games. Those are very famous board games. However, in the last, what, like 20 years, like the last two decades, real board games, like really good board games, have exploded. Because Monopoly is not a good game. It is very slow, it is not very interesting, and the person that gets ahead early is going to win. Risk also is not a very interesting game. It is, again, very slow, not very well designed. There's lots of issues. Same with pretty much all those other games that I listed out. There are plenty of things that make them not good games. The best one that I've mentioned is chess, but chess actually has plenty of problems. It's just really, really popular. It's just not a very good casual game because you have to just basically know how to be good. That's a whole other thing we could talk about. Actually, why don't I put chess on the list? S. Here we go. We'll talk about chess later on this month or next month actually. But there are so many really good well-designed board games that anybody can play. There's board games for young people, for old people, for everybody in between, whole families, competitive board games. There's so many great board games out there. And I've been playing board games, especially with my family, pretty much my whole life. Because, yeah, we started playing things like, I mean, we definitely played things like Monopoly and whatever. But we also played things like Settlers of Catan, like I mentioned, which has gotten really popular in the last couple decades. When did that come out? Settlers of Catan, Settlers of Catan, Catan. When did it come out? Published in, oh, 1995. Wow, that's way older than I thought. The first edition came out in 1995. And I don't know, I don't know when, yeah, I mean, so I definitely started playing somewhere in the 2000s, maybe 2010-ish, somewhere around there. But it is very popular because it's been around a long time. It's also a good game. It's a really good game. It is about strategy and negotiation and control and like making good decisions and things. It is not too difficult to understand. Pretty much everybody that I've played with has been able to understand it and get it, but it is not super easy either. There's a lot of depth in it. And I think that's a great example of a modern board game. It is not the best modern board game, but it's definitely a really good one because of how popular it is. Another great one that I played a lot growing up is Ticket to Ride, which is also relatively easy, but also really fun and engaging. And with that one, you have to build like train lines between cities to connect them together and gain points that way by having your secret tickets that you have that like, okay, you have to connect these two cities. And so your goal is to secretly do that without losing that good connection and yada, yada, yada. It's a very fun game, definitely recommend it. But there are plenty more. Another one that I played a lot growing up is Dominion, which doesn't have a board, it's more of a deck building game, deck building was what it was called, but we still call them board games. Dominion is fantastic because you basically, you start with a little deck, and then you buy some cards, and over the course of the game, you buy more cards to put in your deck, which helps you buy more cards, which helps you buy points, and the points help you win the game. And it's really fun. That one I played a lot with my family, and they would play it with their friends. It's a very good game. I actually want to play it more again now, because it is a lot of fun. It's, again, pretty easy to learn and understand, but also very difficult to get good at. There are just, yeah, there's lots and lots of games out there. If you are at all interested in, like, strategy or anything like that where you, like, find a good way to do something, board games, you should definitely try to get into. Recently, I haven't been playing as many physical board games because I don't have as many people to play with in the real world. But there is a really cool website called Board Game Arena, where they basically just build real life board games in the digital world, online, that you can play with your friends. And so I've been playing a couple of different games with friends of mine just online like that. but you're still playing like a physical board game. And so like what I wanna do is also get those games. I found a couple of awesome ones that recently I played. Oh, what's it called? It's like kind of making a habitat, but it's like habitation. Oh no, what's it called? Harmonies. Harmonies is what it's called. Harmonies, this is actually one of the reasons I wanted to record this episode because it's so fun. It's a really, really cool game where you get these little, there's these little tiles, these little tokens that are colored and they represent water, leaves, bark, like wood, building, just like a plains or rocks or whatever it is, like things in the real world. And you have to build, in a very small area, you have to build basically a little habitat, like a little place for animals to live. And you get these cards for different animals that you're trying to build for, right? So if you grab a specific card, right, you go, okay, I want to build a habitat for these frogs or whatever it is. And the really cool part of the game is that to build the habitat for the frog, you have to make a specific pattern of some of those little thingies, little tokens that you grab. And so a frog, for example, lives on a single water and a single leaves to represent like lily pads, right? And they have to be in a specific order, right? So you have one here, one here. But the really cool thing is that you can combine them together and stack them, right? So frogs can share lily pads, but they can't share the water. And so you have to have a bunch of water around like lily pads, a bunch of the green, which creates enough space to put like five or six frogs or whatever it is. But then you also wanna have habitat space for your peacock, which uses water, two waters and a building, because it needs a place to live, right? It's really, really cool. I'm probably not explaining it very well, but it makes this really neat like pattern matching game where you're trying to build out these simple little patterns that also go 3D, right? It's not just in, like you can make stacks of things. And then it's, yeah, I don't know. It's really fun. And it's also got really cool art and it's yeah it's it's I definitely recommend looking at that game. Another fun one that I played is called the Sky Team where you and you're it's you and you're working with a friend and you have to try to land of an airplane is the idea but you can't communicate with what dice you rolled. But the dice that you rolled matter because you have to put them on how fast you're going or how much you're turning and all these things. And so since you can't talk about your numbers, you have to be like, OK, I really hope that this person isn't going to make us just crash because I have a six here. We're going to go really, really fast. Things like that, you have to plan ahead and that was a really fun one. It's sort of hard. It took me and my friend like seven tries to get the first one because we were still learning how it worked and all these things. But we definitely crashed lots of times. but very fun. There's also tons of different scenarios, so depending on, you can keep playing with the same person, because, I pulled up the thing, but there's a bunch of really hard ones, some that are a little bit easier, there's a bunch of easy ones, a bunch of medium ones. It looks like there's 20 different ones in here, which is really cool, different scenarios, different airports that are slightly different. But there's so many great games out there. Let's see if I can name a couple more that I really like as board games. Sushi Go, fantastic drafting game. Skull is a very simple bluffing game. Skull is really fun. Splendor is a nice little like resource management game that I play with my parents fairly often. Love Letter is a fantastic quick game. It's basically where everybody has a secret identity and you're trying to guess others while not get gotten, but also like find who, yeah, that's really simple and fun. Seven Wonders is really cool. That one I enjoy. I haven't played a ton of it. I've played more Seven Wonders Duel, which is 1v1, but that's also really fun. I mentioned Catan already. Let's see, is there any more that I can name quickly? I mentioned Ticket to Ride. Oh, Patchwork is another fun two-player game. Again, very simple, where you're just trying to match tiles and cool shapes to make the most points. Very simple. I like to play this game when I'm hanging out with somebody and we're just having a drink or something, because it doesn't take very much brain power, but it is fun. I also played one relatively recently, sort of called the Euro Game, which is, oh, it's like brute. No, that's not right. Industry, something like that. That was a really fun one where you have to build up your factories to make more stuff. But yeah, terrible description, but you know, here we are. Oh, Lost Cities is also really fun. Lost Cities is another 1v1 game where you have to, you're like, you're trying to go on like an expedition and uncover the ruins of some ancient city, whatever, a lost city, right? But your opponent is also looking for the exact same ones. And so you're sort of competing for different, the same cards, but in different colors. And it's like, as soon as you lay down a card, you can't go back, right? You can't go to a lower number. And you have to reach a certain number of points to get the score, or else you lose a bunch of points. There's a lot of, it's really fun. That's a great one for playing 1v1 several times in a day. I remember a year that I went on vacation with my parents to Mexico. They brought that game and they played every day, like four or five games together just by the pool, just hanging out. But there are, yeah, there's just lots of really good games to play. I'm going long on this episode, but I really do like board games, there's just so much creativity as well nowadays that there's a game for everybody. Even if you don't think that you're like a gamer or anything, try to go like play some games and see what you like. There's things, there's games that take five hours to play. I played a game with a couple of friends who are really big gamers, really big like hardcore gamers, like board gamers, not like video gamers, called like Eclipse. I don't know, I don't remember, but it's humongous. You lay out this massive board, they have to get a huge table for it, but you lay out all of these spaceships and aliens, and everybody has their entire race to control, and you're trying to race for control here, or war. There's all these cool things, it's like this huge... a tactical simulator sort of thing. I feel like it's called Eclipse. Eclipse board game, maybe. Let me see. Eclipse board game. Yeah, this looks like it's it. Yeah, that's it. This looks like a slightly older version than the one that I played. Yeah, I think I played the second edition. Yeah, that's what it is. Eclipse second edition. Yeah, here's a picture of it. If you google Eclipse second dawn, you should see a thumbnail of a video of a guy holding the game and it's massive. You can see it's on his entire table. He's like spreading out his arms to even reach the both sides of it. But that's definitely a fun, big time gamer game. I would definitely play it again. It's really complicated. It's really fun. But then there's also really simple ones that you can play in five minutes. I have some board games that are, not even board games, it is like tiny little card games that fit into a pocket. But yeah, anyways, I'm going off script, there's no script here. I'm going off on tangents, but I really like board games and especially if you go to a new city that's English speaking and you wanna practice speaking with people, going to play board games is a great way to just meet people without having to be social because you have to talk to them in order to play the game. But yeah, that is everything for me today. I'm going to let you go. Thank you so much for being here and listening. I hope that you enjoyed. If you like board games, leave me a comment below with what your favorite game is and I'll check it out. But that's everything for today. Have a fantastic rest of it. Bye.
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