7 Wonders and Go

Right now Dominion is my favorite game.

7 Wonders is very very close to beating it out though.

7 Wonders is, like, the perfect game. 

Simultaneous play so that there's no downtime. 

Player interaction each turn without it being a fight. This is because you can buy your neighbor's resources to use. Plus, the purple cards give you points based on neighbors, and of course the red military. And some yellow cards too even! If I could make a simultaneous play game that had player interaction, I'd be in heaven.

Multiple paths to victory. Do you go green cards? Red? Blue? How many brown and grey cards do you get? How many yellow?

Engine building-ish. See above. Plus, the free construction chains.

Variable player powers-kind of. Each board is different, and each side is different. Each gives you a different starting resource and different stages you can build.

And the game is epic in scope. You start with nearly nothing and at the end you've built an entire grand civilization. To me, it's one of those vast epic sprawling civilization games, but can be played in under a half hour.

It scales well up to 7 players, 8 with the expansion. 

The only flaw is it is terrible for 2 players. So much so that the brand new reprinting of the game is now labeled 3-7 players instead of 2-7. That and it might be a bit fiddly to set up and put away with the different cards depending on the number of players you're playing with.

Let's now talk about Go.

I've been playing Go with Ryan online. Just on a 9x9 board, not the full 19x19.

It's crazy that with such simply rules it can be so deep and have so much strategy to it. And every game somehow turns out completely different, even though the board itself is just a 9x9 grid and your pieces are all identical. Somehow your placements make every game have a unique feel all its own.

Ryan's still better than I am. But I'm getting better.

I often fins myself thinking, "okay, I'll do that, then he'll do that, then I'll do that, then he'll do that..." Which I can do a lot better at Go than I can in Chess.

But there are still surprises and your opponent can make a move that you did not see coming. If you've never played Go before and want a hint, here's mine: Get an area with 2 eyes and you'll be golden. At least, that's my basic strategy.

Don't tell Ryan.