boardgames

I am an old curmudgeonly man who declares all games that end when you reach an arbitrary number of points are bleh. Give me simple rules with simple win conditions, and emergent complexity. Like, if the rules can't fit on one or two pages, I'm checking out something else.

No, I do not want to play Twilight Imperium this weekend. Thx ;)

I make an exception for D&D, or similar, because the presence of a rules arbitrator keeps the game moving.

A secondary rant, related to the above. Any game where you are doing nothing while the other players take their turns in succession, sucks. All games need interrupt rules once there is more than three players. At least with Catan, you're collecting resources, and with enough players you can declare a "special building project" out of turn.

I LOVE that netrunner is being maintained by a community organization and I love most aspects of netrunner but when I actually tried to play it I bounced off pretty hard.

I think the thing that broke it for me was the fact that you just have to memorize which Icebreakers goes to which Ice (a fracter to break a..code gate?). Every time I would bring this up with players they would just assure me it takes a bit to memorize but I threw multiple of my games just from confusing this. I suggested to the local netrunner group I was trying the game at that the ice and icebreakers should be color coded, or have symbols or at least something on the starter set to help new players and everyone kind of reacted like “yeah I guess but honesty why?” and in that moment I realized netrunner is for a very specific kind of person and I am not it.

Honestly, there are too many good board games to sit there trying to memorize fiddly bits like what icebreakers go to which ice. Yes it is pretty simple but you have to hold that in your head and I can’t do that very well and the fact that the game designers just couldn’t empathize with that or care about it (the likely retort being “if you can’t remember those rules this game is probably too complicated for you”) didn’t make me feel welcome as a player.

I’ll stick with complex board games that give me every tool possible to remember their rules easily.

Frosthaven ended up being really complex. My partner and I got through Gloomhaven just fine. Maybe I forgot how much of a struggle it is in the beginning or it was trying to keep track of everything after an exhausting scenario, but we petered out after a handful of scenarios. Using apps has helped, especially with tracking combat, but we ended up fudging a bunch of stuff so we didn't have to re setup and replay whole scenarios that came down to a single card draw.

Plus organizing everything meant it doesn't fit in just one box. It is a home-only game.

I have no people to play Scythe with :(

I would put up expansions, in general, as being the bane of my collection. Specifically, I'd pick out the Factions expansion to Alien Frontiers as being a particularly good (bad?) example of this. The base game plays very well and feels well enough balanced. The extra rules, cards and ports added in the expansion just seem to over-complicate the game, and picking the right faction card seems to play heavily into winning.

Some games have so much setup required that it cuts too deep into the game time.

Imo Gloomhaven is only worth playing if you can leave everything on the table in the basement until the next session.

Spirit Island. It seems good, but I can't collect enough people who want to sit down and learn it.

I know, there's a solo mode, but I'm not getting all that out when I can play something quick and easy.

I'm sure it's great, just not for my situation.

Nemesis! I have heard how amazingly good the game is, but I have yet to play because by the time I have set up everything i am spent and no longer feel like playing.

Before I tell you the games I regret let me tell you: I recently got into Netrunner. I am 100% overwhelmed (never really played MtG). But I am so grateful for Jinteki. Through some luck I met a very experienced player who takes my hand and shows me all the things one doesn’t know if they have never played living card games/tcg. I also infected some friends of a friend and we only play online due to distance. I am in my 30s and feel so excited for every game. Maybe go on netrunnerdb take a prebuilt get a couple of runs and get excited by playing. My preach is over, now to you question: Most times I was lucky with my blind buys. Oath, CloudAge etc. Games I don’t really like such as Celestia many of my friends enjoy so I keep them. Games I hated first but initially did not buy like Root and Bora Bora I gave a second try years later. Then I started to enjoy them. Maybe because I got more experience and for Root I embraced the chaos. Now I am a proud owner of all but the Clockwork expansions. It sucks spending money on something you looked forward to. The good thing is you can always revisit, resell and regift.

Not a purchase, but I once spent hours making a "corrected" Risk board with an updated and complete map of all 190-something countries and their borders. We tried it once, found it tedious to play, and haven't used it since. Making it was kind of fun though, so I'm not sure I have any regrets.

Final Girl. Seems perfect for me: solo, dice chucker, horror theme. Yes, yes, and hells yes. But after a dozen plays of multiple features, I just didn't connect with it and I really wanted to. Such a disappointing experience.

I've only played it once but: Frostpunk. It is absolutely gorgeous, thematically well done, but damn it felt like we played wrong because we just failed so hard. I think ultimately I walked away saying, "was that supposed to be fun?" -- and Robinson Crusoe is one of my favorites so I don't mind difficulty.

Honestly, if I'm seeing more than say two or three currencies or kinds of bits to keep track of, it's a no for me. I don't care how much I'm in love with the concept.

Mainly because I don't have the available real estate at my place to break out every other War & Peace- worth of board game, but especially if it looks like the setup time is will take longer than playing an actual game.

Still got to sell it

So you still have it all?

I am lucky if I can organize 2 TI4 games in one year but I love it when it happens. I think Mansions of Madness is the answer for me personally. The app runs like shit and either crashes or audio doesn’t work, then we end up frustrated when the scenario ended up requiring you to pull some hidden lever first and you didn’t do it soon enough and now it’s a hard fail state. I bought all the expansions and have shit tons of content for it and don’t want to play it :(

Some time ago Dark Souls, later Bloodborne, recently Borderlands. I like playing video games, played all of these titles and was very much disappointed playing the board game versions. It's just they cannot reach the completeness and scratch the same itch I got when playing the video games. Most of these titles just carry the name, implement some half hearted mechanic slightly like their video game counter part and call it a day. An example of a better video game-board game I recently played was The Witcher. It's complex, sometimes complicated, but everyone at the table agreed that this game gave a closer example of playing the actual game than the majority of any other video game themed board game. The quest system in particular is of course more shallow than the hour long quests from the video game, but just reading and hearing these tiny stories kicked us back to when we played the video game. That was pretty nice. It felt very nice. Havent seen such a mix of competitive game with so much freedom in what to actual do on the board with such a cool IP like Witcher before and doubt I'll see something with so much care in a while. And back to topic, there where a lot of big kickstarter games I just couldnt get anyone to play with me to the table, e.g. Tainted Grail, Solomone Kane, ... and with board games, I'm really not much of a solo player, it's the getting together what drives me there, so I was stuck with a bunch of nice looking plastic but nothing to do with it. That's one of the main factors buying and selling games nowerdays for me, thinking about if can get folks to sit down and play or not. Bought, never played and sold so many cool looking games I'll probably never experience because of that. One of the bigger titles that comes to mind here was Axis and Allies. I'm still stuck with Root but I like the style of that so much that I wont stop bringing that one up even if we only played it once in about 5(?) years that this is waiting amongst so many other rarely played games. Damn.

I was really disappointed with Maglev Metro. One of my favorite games of all time is Bus, and I was hoping for something a bit more modern and the transparent tiles in Maglev Metro were the perfect amount of gimmicky for me.

But after playing it with my board game group, it felt like it was only 75% of a game. There was almost zero player interaction and I was not expecting it to be multiplayer solitaire.