my mom said i learned how to read really young because i wanted to play clue with my brother and his friend and they wouldn't let me (tho they were just using "you can't read" as an excuse to not have to play with a little kiddo and they were really upset when they couldn't do that anymore)

also i wanna play pokemon rpg prolly

my favorite board games are clue and candyland unless micro machines counts as a board game

I know my parents played board games with my sister and I when we were young, but I never heard of catan or like anything else mentioned here besides monopoly. I bought risk when I was like 9 but no one wanted to learn the rules and I was pretty happy just to make up battles myself

edit I also had a goosebumps board game

actually now I remember we had two goosebumps games, I can't remember how they were played but I found some pics. they were the cardboard and plastic pop-up style
graveyard
http://boardgamegeek.com/image/277753/goosebumps-terror-in-the-graveyard-game
http://boardgamegeek.com/image/309109/goosebumps-terror-in-the-graveyard-game?size=large
terror tower
http://boardgamegeek.com/image/142639/goosebumps-a-night-in-terror-tower-game

i'm showing up pretty late on this but i co-designed a rp system if that qualifies as "tabletop". https://sites.google.com/site/locusrpg/ the core rules are super short, and it's designed with extension/hacking in mind, but if anyone wants to playtest, i can help decypher the rules / provide modelling advice for different scenarios. initial readers had trouble with some bits of it (probably because when i wrote the first draft i was trying to be too succinct), but it seems to have worked for the people we've taught to play firsthand. atm we're playing a weekly fantasy game. it's been cool because we got to explore a lot of themes that don't usually pop up in fantasy games (so far: "colonialism & the cultural other", "heroism, power, and great-man history"). not that that has much to do with our system, but i tend to find fantasy really irksome so it's been a cool nerd thing to be able to enjoy it again. oh also online dice i hacked up in like ten minutes, it has some known interface defects though http://locus-roll.heroku.com/index.html. apparently our aussie playtesters have recorded a whole heap of audio of them playing (i think it's a lovecraftian horror game) so i'm gonna be going through that with some interest. i am now recording wounding/damage using something that looks a good bit like a vodoo doll of my character (i done sewed the other day it while i watched a doco about Bougainville independence).

that was pretty disorganised. what i am saying is need more playtesters, try my fuckin game system.

edit: also, Apocalypse World is the current in-thing with the indie RP people. some of you who haven't played a roleplaying game before might find it interesting. it's a fairly clean design, and has fairly well-written rules text compared to most rpgs / my writing. i am certainly much less opposed to it than i am to D&D.

general board games: i like abalone a lot. cascarone is fun. i don't like settlers b/c the randomness makes me twitchy and i don't like having to maintain good-faith play past the point i know i've lost.

cool! if you need advice about using or extending it, let me know. i am very interested to hear how it goes.

What I've been using for games online is maptools http://www.rptools.net/

Anyway Biggles your program looks interesting I think I'll play around with it

This is actually what I use as well. Decent system if you just use it for the basic stuff, potential for being amazing if you going deep into it though(though this can cause problems for people on slower computers if you go to far...).

I've been hearing things about 13th Age recently. Some former D&D developers decided to make a system based on 4th edition's basic design.