Hey people im new to chess.com, i just thought id ask what everyones favourite startegy board game is excluding chess!!!

I like Go and checkers the most and i also want to learn backgammon and chinese chess sometime.

Go especially has heaps of strategy, checkers on my opinion is boring as all the pieces are the same.

Any thoughts?

I like backgammon.  Go is fascinating, but takes a very serious commitment to get halfway decent at it.

Checkers is anything but boring against someone who really knows the game, but that was never me.

Parcheesi is pretty cool, too - it, chess, and backgammon probably all come from the same ancient game - and kids can get it right away, yet there is a lot of strategy in it.

Shogi is a great game, when you capture a piece it becomes yours and you can drop it on the board on your side as a move, but it's not easy to find opponents.

Risk, by far

How about "Game of the Generals"?

Other than Chess? you must be mad!

I have been playing Go on and off for a number of years, I find the strategy harder to get to grips with than chess. More recently I have started to learn Shogi and Xiangqi.

For front to front play it may be difficult, depending on where you live. But, online, there are plenty of places you will find a game, like Shogi24 and 81squareuniverse (http://www.81squareuniverse.com/). The game is growing a lot on some western clubs also.

I think that Shogi is by far the best "Chess game" of all (western chess included), for reasons I have exposed in this thread:

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/chess-players-mentality?quote_id=7928681&page=2#last_comment

You can find a very enlightening comparison (with chess) text here:

http://shogipro.com/article2_e.html

And for those who may be interested in Shogi, you need nothing more than Hidetchi's videos to get going (from beginner to intermediate level). He even discussed Shogi softwares and playing sites in his videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkz0LVBg0W4

Don't get scared with japanese characters. After 2 or 3 games, they become second nature. Just threat them as the abstraction they are, after all, before learning chess, nothing suggested that the pointed long pieces should be moving in diagonals.

I am a huge fan of Axis & Allies!! It takes a long time to play a game, and requires a boatload of room, but those are it's only negatives. It is fun and challenging.

Backgammon is my favorite game, and I like chess a lot (was captain of chess team in High School, bought chess computer in 1979 etc) 

Twister.

Scrabble.

I really like Scrabble

like backgammon and scrabble also like to try out Lines of Action is interesting.

Stratego. Old, I know, but so am I.

By far and away Axis & Allies is the next best board game!  -  The expansion sets have spiced the game up even more over the years as well!

Right now it's Havannah.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havannah
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2759/havannah

The next time you ask I might say backgammon.  Those two game often hover between #2 and #3 spots.

Arimaa

arimaa.com

It is much less tactical than chess for the most part and guess what? The best humans can still whup the best engines. There is a $11,000 prize for programmers if they can program a bot to convincingly win matches against three picked humans. Even I have beaten the 2012 challenge bot, and I've been playing just over 3 months.

Once you learn the secrets of strategy - and there aren't very many - if you are playing with others who also "get it" it just boils down to pure chance on the dice.

Thanks!

I used to major in Naked Drunk Twister, back in the day.  I can still spin a mean dial, IYKWIMAITTYD.