Heavy, Interactive lunch-hour Euros

I'd go with just eating my lunch.

Mr Skeletor wrote:

I'd go with just eating my lunch.

^^ same

Schweig! wrote:

Mr Skeletor wrote:

I'd go with just eating my lunch.

^^ same

You'd eat Mr Skeletor's lunch?

Juniper wrote:

Schweig! wrote:

Mr Skeletor wrote:

I'd go with just eating my lunch.

^^ same

You'd eat Mr Skeletor's lunch?

Well he is a communist.

I'd let him have my Victory Gin.

Mr Skeletor wrote:

I'd go with just eating my lunch.

Yeah well, you haven't been stuck indoors with a baby every single evening for ten whole months. Right now I'm desperate enough to play something as shit as Samurai if it means I can cram a bit of gaming into my work day.

Thanks for the suggestions. To be clear I meant "heavy" in terms of strategy not rules weight and time.

Anyone played Trias? I recall looking at that a couple of years ago and thinking it looked interesting - lots of opportunity to screw over the other players, apparently.

Trias is a cool game. You get to drown dinosaurs and the board looks really nice as the continents drift, but basically it's an area control game (or whatever it is called when you tried to get more of your dudes in one area than the other players). I haven't played it for years, but I remember having fun with it.

My memory of Trias is that most of the thinking involved is tactical, rather than strategic. You're mainly deciding how to spend your action points. I think I recall that too much happens between turns (assuming you're playing with more than two players) to really control the continental drift in a strategic way. Also, your choice of which tile to move on your turn is constrained a little bit by a card draw. The emphasis is on the tactical movement of your dinosaurs, rather than strategic movement of the hexes.

It's been a long time, though, so I could be completely full of crap. It fits into a lunch hour nicely, at least. And it's the best of the action point games, IMO. Far superior to the Tikal/Torres family or any of its derivatives.

You can play Quebec 1759 in a lunch hour, so I don't know why you'd bother with Memoir '44.

When I had a lunchtime game crew, we used to be able to knock off a three-player session of Tigris & Euphrates in less than an hour. I think the keys to lunchtime gaming are:
1. find people that are committed to learning the game and playing it repeatedly
2. find a game that is worth playing repeatedly
3. accept that you may not finish the game the first couple of tries
4. play the game enough times so that you *can* finish it in an hour

I'll be mocked for saying so, but Knizia is the king of the lunchtime Euro. Even his 90 minute games, like T&E or Stephensons Rocket fit into a lunch hour once you've learned how to play them.

mads b. wrote:

Trias is a cool game. You get to drown dinosaurs and the board looks really nice as the continents drift...

Yeah, you can drop enemy dinosaurs into the deep blue and then use stacking limits to prevent them from jumping back onto the continent. Good fun - but it never really caught on in my neck of the woods.

Juniper wrote:

You can play Quebec 1759 in a lunch hour, so I don't know why you'd bother with Memoir '44.

I second that thought.

And you can belt out Small World in an hour, if that hasn't been suggested already.

Plus, if you replace all of the original pieces with meeples and resources you can probably hoodwink your lunchtime pals into playing almost any AT game. Example: That little-known Betrayal haunt where the nasty merchant under the stairs has been forced to transform all the world's brick into cloth, wool, and chicken hearts. An instant classic.

At my last workplace, we'd managed after a few plays to get a game of Dominion (and sometimes 2 games of Dominion) into a lunch hour.

The others that worked very well were:
San Juan (my personal favorite)
Citadels