The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

My friends and I all have Magic: The Gathering decks that we're ready to pull out at any moment.
We love it because it's so portable and easy to carry around. It requires no real set-up, just a clean flat surface.

I play a Blue/Black Rogue deck with lots of Prowl Effects (If a Rogue dealt damage this turn, cast this card for free [OR] cast this card for its Prowl cost.) It depends on card but yeah, it's pretty awesome.

Honestly, I never got into CCGs. The only cards I collected were basketball trading cards. Which is astonishing because right now basketball is probably 5th or 6th on the list of sports I'd voluntarily watch.

The idea of having an easy to carry game that you can pull out with friends must be great though.

Here's a fun game to play with a group, and all you need is paper and pencils. The game "What If". How it works. Everyone writes a question:
Person #1: What if I made ribs that taste so good it made you slap yo mamma?
Person #2: What if the next president isn't who you vote for?
Person #3: What if you had something better to do than play this lousy game?

Now pass your paper to the person next to you, and he will write an answer.

Person #2: Then your sanity is in question.
Person #3: Then we all bite the dust.
Person #1: Then I'll jump for joy.

Pass it again. Someone will read a question and the person next to them will answer it with the answer on his paper. Then he will read his question, and so on.

What if the next president isn't who you vote for? Then I'll jump for joy.
What if you had something better to do than play this lousy game? Then your sanity is in question.
What if I made ribs that taste so good it made you slap yo mamma? Then we all bite the dust.

With a large group this game can be quite fun.

I've played Cards Against Humanity twice, and I hope to never play again. Too much offensive cards, if it wasn't obvious enough. Scattegories and Apples to Apples are fun whenever I did play. Balderdash is another similar good one. One good battle/war simulation is Risk, which involves building up armies to take control of all countries in the world using dice when attacking another player's armies.

Cards Against Humanity is a little too offensive at times for my tastes. My friends like it so we play sometime. I much prefer Apples to Apples. You can still get politically incorrect answers if you try... but that's the thing, you have to try.

Like when I called this green card: http://i.imgur.com/XX6R5ee.png
And my buddy answered with: http://i.imgur.com/PTsfXLR.png

Much more satisfying than just playing the grossest card in your hand every time.

Cards Against Humanity is fun but I've always enjoyed Apples to Apples more because answers require a bit more thought as opposed to just picking the raunchiest option available. McStab's example above is precisely what I mean.

I used to love playing Monopoly but I can hardly find anybody that has the time to play a full game anymore. I'm not sure if a Monopoly app exists but I think this would greatly combat the game's playing time issue by allowing players to play indefinitely in digital space. One of the points in my life when I realized I was finally an adult was when I would actually calculate the amount I owed when landing on Income Tax instead of just paying $200 like every kid playing the game does.

I played Monopoly a lot as a kid. The other game we had growing up that I played a lot was called Go For Broke. I affectionately called it "reverse Monopoly." You started with $1000000 or whatever and the first one to go broke won! http://www.amazon.com/Broke-Spend-Million-Game-Vintage/dp/B000W2X7G0

i don't think i've ever actually played a Monopoly game to the end. if there even is an end

Monopoly ends when everybody goes bankrupt except one player, who is then proclaimed the winner. I had a hard time playing Monopoly because it's sad: either you go broke or watch everybody else go broke. People didn't like to play against me because I'd treat the play money as real money and get emotionally invested.

My favorite board games are chess and Yahtzee. I solve one chess puzzle every day and compete in Grandmaster versus The World (as a voting member of the world team) correspondence chess games. When sitting down with my family, Yahtzee is our go-to game. It's one of the few games where you can cheer for your opponents to do well and offer them advice on strategy.

I've considered making videos on playing "Optimal Yahtzee", where optimal is defined as making choices that maximize your average score. A computer scientist has figured all this out and written a program to play optimal Yahtzee (or watch you play and tell you how non-optimal your game is). They claim that it's too complicated for humans to do but I can play an optimal game on a regular basis. It could be instructive to record and narrate my decision making process.

@Stabguy, that would be really cool. I only recently learned about Optimization in the mathematical sense through an author who writes about Fighting Games frequently. His name's David Sirlin, and he wrote this article;

http://www.sirlin.net/articles/solvability

I don't watch a lot of random things on the internet, but I would watch a game of Optimal Yahtzee!

I don't generally play games like Monopoly much these days for two reasons:
1 - A lot of luck based. It's all on the rolls, really
2 - a bigger reason, poor catch up mechanics. once someone is leading, they tend to pull away in monopoly (unless other players collude/broker crazy deals to catch up). even being in jail for 3 turns isn't long enough in the late game to let people catch up to the leader.

Therefore, I'm with ROB... I don't know the last time i finished a game of Monopoly.

that's kind of the point of the game though.

i don't have any real sources for this except "i read it somewhere" so you shouldn't take it as absolute fact, but in my understanding, the creator made the game to be a commentary on how capitalism is flawed. the rich get richer while the poor get poorer, etc.

Chess is really interesting in the sense that from the type of game it is (both players have access to all available information and alternate moves), we can conclude that there exists an optimal strategy for getting the other play to draw or lose. This is known as Zermelo's Theorem. However, knowing this strategy exists and actually having it in your hands are two different things. Chess is so complex we have the first, but not the second. No computer has that kind of horsepower yet.

FTFY

Well, hot damn!

I just found out that Assassin's Creed has an official board game.

http://www.cryptozoic.com/games/assassins-creed-arena

I'll have to look into this a little further....

Did you really not know? I read about it a while ago. It looks pretty fun and the rules I read don't seem over-complicated.