The Ultimate Board Game List - D

I assembled the "Ultimate Board Games" list, and we are currently working our way through it! So here are the Ds.

(Visit the 0-9, & As, Bs, Cs)

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Dark Tower a Fantasy Adventure Born of Electronic Wizardry

 Dark Tower is a 1981 electronic board game by Milton Bradley Company, for one to four players.

The object of the game is to amass an army, collect the three keys to the Tower, and defeat the evil within. The game came out during the height of the role-playing game craze in the early 1980s.

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Diamant

Diamant is a quick, fun game of push-your-luck. Players venture down mine shafts by turning up cards from a deck, sharing the gems they find on the way down. Before the next card is turned up, you have the chance to leave the mine and stash your finds, including any gems you get on the way out.

Why would you leave? Because the deck also contains hazards, scorpions, snakes, poison gases, explosions and rockfalls. When a duplicate hazard turns up (such as a second scorpion), anyone left in the shaft has to flee for safety and loses all the gems they got this turn. The trick is, the more players that leave, the bigger your share in the next card will be.

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Die Macher International Edition

Die Macher is a strategy board game designed by Karl-Heinz Schmiel of Germany. The game is based on the German electoral system and each player takes the role of one of five political parties. Parties score points based on seats won in seven state (Land) elections, the size of their national party base, the amount to which they control the national media, and how well their party platform aligns with national opinion.

 Each state election is a "mini game" on its own. Each state has its own interests (such as "do we support higher taxes, or not?"), and a party will do better if its platform aligns with the local concerns. Players can deploy a limited number of "party meetings" (groups of grassroots activists) to a state; the more they have there, the more votes they will generate when the election is resolved. "Shadow Cabinet" cards, representing influential party officials, can be used to perform some special actions, and each party tracks its "trend" (favorability rating) in the state using a sliding scale. When the election is held, each party scores votes based on the formula (trend + interest alignment)* (number of meetings). A maximum score is 50, and parliamentary seats (victory points) are awarded based on this score and the state's actual number of seats in parliament. The seven states are chosen at random from the sixteen Länder of Germany, so some elections will be more influential than others. Players can modify their party’s' platform and by controlling the local media can also affect what the state is concerned about.

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Diplomacy

Diplomacy is a strategic board game created by Allan B. Calhamer in 1954 and released commercially in 1959. Its main distinctions from most board wargames are its negotiation phases (players spend much of their time forming and betraying alliances with other players and forming beneficial strategies) and the absence of dice and other game elements that produce random effects. Set in Europe before the beginning of World War I, Diplomacy is played by two to seven players, each controlling the armed forces of a major European power (or, with fewer players, multiple powers). Each player aims to move his or her few starting units and defeat those of others to win possession of a majority of strategic cities and provinces marked as "supply centers" on the map; these supply centers allow players who control them to produce more units.

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Dixit

Dixit is a card game created by Jean-Louis Roubira, and published by Libellud. In 2010, it won the Spiel des Jahres award.

Its title is Latin for "he/she said", a frequent sentence beginning in old narrations.

Designer(s) Jean-Louis Roubira
Publisher(s) Libellud
Players 3 to 6
Age range 8 and up
Playing time 30 minutes

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Djambi

Djambi (also described as "Machiavelli's chessboard") is a board game and a chess variant for four players, invented by Jean Anesto in 1975.

The game is played on a 9×9 board whose central square (called "the maze") is marked with a different color or a sign. Each player has 9 pieces:

1 Chief
1 Assassin
1 Reporter
1 Troublemaker (also called Provocateur, or Diplomat)
1 Necromobile
4 Militants.

The objective of the game is to capture the chiefs of the other players before they capture yours. Although informal alliances can be temporarily agreed upon, there is no team: each player plays against the other players.

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Domaine

The king shall return... But before he does, the realm falls into anarchy and chaos. The lords of the kingdom struggle to improve their place and standing. New borders are drawn, and expanded through strength of arms and subtle maneuver. Each duke seeks to establish a claim over the most valuable parts of the kingdom before the king finally returns.

In the dark of the Middle Ages, control of the land was the key to wealth and power. Can you control enough territory to become the most prestigious duke before the king’s return?

In Domaine, players form domaines by placing walls on the modular board to enclose territory. Completed domaines can then be expanded, even into your opponents'. Protect domaines by placing knights, which resist expansion. Actions are taken by playing cards that have a cost associated with them. Gain money by selling cards and controlling mines. Sold cards can be acquired by other players. Players score points based on the quantity and type of terrain enclosed in their domaines, as well as by controlling many mines of a single type. The winner is the first player to cross a specific point threshold or the player with the most points when the card deck runs out.

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Dominion Deck Building Game

Dominion is a deck-building game created by Donald X. Vaccarino and published by Rio Grande Games. Each player uses a separate deck of cards to which only he or she has access; players draw their hands from their own decks, not others'. During turns, players use their cards to perform various actions and purchase cards from a common pool of card stacks available to all players, including those that give them more actions, coins to purchase cards, and victory cards that are otherwise valueless during the game. At the end of the game, defined when certain common stacks are exhausted, the player with the highest number of victory points wins. The game has a light medieval theme, with card names that reference pre-industrial, monarchical, and feudal social structures.

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Don't Miss The Boat

Don't Miss The Boat is a board game for two to four players, with no dice or cards or element of elimination. The rules are simple enough to be mastered by a five year old, yet there is no element of chance, and experienced players can use sophisticated tactics and strategies to win. The game was first published by Parker Brothers in 1965, later by Waddingtons. The title is currently owned by Hasbro and is no longer manufactured.   

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Don'T Quote Me

Don't Quote Me is a brand developed by Wiggles 3D. The company is a games and entertainment publisher. The company has developed a line of Don't Quote Me board games and also has an online quotations database.

The original Don't Quote Me game features quotes from historical figures and current celebrities. It won GAMES Magazine's GAMES 100 award in 2004. Other versions of the game include a TV edition, a children's edition and a sports edition.

A public Facebook app lets users play the original Don't Quote Me game online.

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Doom: The Boardgame

Doom: The Boardgame is an adventure board game for two to four players designed by Kevin Wilson and published by Fantasy Flight Games in 2004.

The game is a based on the Doom series of first-person shooter computer games, though it resembles Doom 3 more than it does the first two Doom video games. An expansion has been released for the game in 2005, called Doom: The Boardgame Expansion Set, which adds difficulty levels to the game, new game pieces and updates to some of the original rules, as well rules to play on Deathmatch and Capture the Flag. In 2005, Fantasy Flight released Descent: Journeys in the Dark, which is based on the Doom game. Soon after this, the company ceased production of Doom.

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Dorn

Dorn is a diceless tactical fantasy board game developed in Czech Republic and published by Altar in 2006.

One or more players control a group of heroes and one player controls the evil Dornkeeper and his monsters. The heroes need to collect three artifacts from the game board and then they can challenge the Dornkeeper himself. As there is no dice in combat, the game is based on strategy and tactics, when heroes need to cooperate in order to win.

There are nine heroes to choose from, each having unique abilities on three experience levels. The Dornkeeper has eight different types of monsters at his disposal. Treasure cards found on the gameboard as well as random Blessing cards make every game quite different, there is no ultimate winning strategy.

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Downfall

 Downfall is a two-player game for players aged 7 and older, first marketed by the Milton Bradley Company in 1970.

The game consists of a vertical board with five slotted dials on each side. Each player starts with ten numbered tokens or discs at the top of the board. The object of the game is to move the discs to the bottom of the board by turning the dials. Players alternate turns moving the dials and cannot move a dial that their opponent has just moved. The winner is the first player to move all of their discs into the tray at the bottom. An advanced version of the rules dictates that the discs arrive in the tray in numerical order.

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Dune

Dune is a strategy board game set in Frank Herbert's Dune universe, published by Avalon Hill in 1979. The game was designed by Bill Eberle, Jack Kittredge and Peter Olotka.

The game was originally designed with a Roman Empire theme, with the name Tribute. Avalon Hill had acquired the license to produce a Dune game, and contacted Eberle, Kittredge and Olotka when their own design proved unusable. Elements suitable for the Dune universe were added to the game, particularly from their earlier game, Cosmic Encounter.

In 1984, to tie in with the Dune film, Avalon Hill published a second edition of the game as well as two expansions, Spice Harvest and The Duel.

Fantasy Flight Games has released a retheme, Rex: Final Days of An Empire which is based on the celebrated mechanics of the classic Dune board game.

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Dvonn


DVONN is a two-player strategy board game in which the objective is to accumulate pieces in stacks. It was released in 2001 by Kris Burm as the fourth game of the GIPF Project. DVONN won the 2002 International Gamers Award and the Games magazine Game of the Year Award in 2003.

DVONN is played on a board with 49 spaces. The board has a hexagonal layout 5 hexes wide. One player has 23 black pieces to play, the other player has 23 white pieces. There are also 3 neutral red pieces, called DVONN pieces.

The object of the game is to control more pieces than your opponent at the end of the game.

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