I frequently read that people at the time said the plastic minis in Nemesis can detract as much as they can add to the atmosphere, hiding important parts of the board space owing to their sheer size.
TI is often lambasted for taking an entire weekend.
Rosenberg’s euro games are the bane of many a player trying to keep all possible actions in their mind.
Modern kickstarters can arrive in shipping crates worth of stuff, making you rent a lorry just to get your 25 minute party game to a meet-up.
What’s your biggest regret purchase you can readily recall where a game was just “too much”. No matter what specifically it was too much of.
For me personally, my big one was Android: Netrunner. I was excited to jump back into 2-player competitive deckbuilding after I quit Magic The Gathering early in the fourth edition. And it seemed so perfect. No luck involved, known spaces of cards, multiple factions, asymmetry which I nearly always love, it’s all perfect!
On paper…
In reality I found out, yes, for me this is a strictly superior MtG. No downsides. Except that I’m no longer 16, and I no longer want to spend forever creating decks, collecting cards even if they’re not random, or engage with sifting through hundreds or thousands of cards when working on decks. The exact things that made me excited to play MtG-but-better and brought me to buy Netrunner were the very things turning me away from it now.
Still got to sell it, oddly attached to my first-run box + all expansions now that it’s no longer available. But played it like 6 times and that was it. 0 enjoyment. Gave actual MtG a try, even less enjoyment. Tried Keyforge, also even worse. I feel that the entire genre is just a goner for me, and I regret investing so much money into Netrunner. A lot.
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.
Weirdly I find Catan suffers exactly from this, and you have the added problem of if you fall behind you’re just waiting for your turn so you can offer a trade nobody wants and then do nothing. Hour after hour, doing nothing. But you can’t leave the game because that would throw everybody else off.
I won’t play Catan any longer.
if you fall behind you’re just waiting for your turn so you can offer a trade nobody wants and then do nothing.
easy fix: don’t fall behind, then.
Jokes aside, I don’t like Catan for the exact same reason. It often feels very unbalanced, it’s very common for at least one player to have such bad luck, that it’s not fun for them any more, but they have to hold out for the end of the game.
Whenever we play board games and someone suggests we could play Catan, i’ll tell them i’d rather not, we have so many other good games to play.
I’ll almost rather play UNO, even.I’m rarely in that position in Catan, so perhaps I have a biased view of the game. That said, the snowball effect is a feature of many many games. Once you’re winning, you’re rewarded with feature or abilities that help you win even faster. Monopoly is a good example, where once a strong position is established, it’s just waiting out a foregone conclusion. Risk is a great example, where owning whole continents reinforces your armies faster. Hell, even poker, where having a large stack allows you to use your position to bet aggressively…
Catan really did remind me of Monopoly in this regard. Once you pull ahead you stay ahead and move further ahead faster and faster. And if you’re trailing, you trail further and further. With all the tedium that involves since you can’t leave.
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.
Man, I bounced off Gloomhaven hard, which was disappointing because the rest of my friend group really enjoys it. The whole mechanic around burning cards each time you shuffle / when you use powerful ones really turned me off. It’s set up like a tactical game, and that makes me want to take my time and approach it strategically, but the time pressure of running out of cards and losing made me feel like I had to rush all the time. After the second or so time we lost a lengthy run due to running out of cards, I was about done with it.
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.
I’ve had a similar experience with expansions, but feel it heavily depends on the game / on the expansion.
On the topic of over-complicating the game, oftentimes expansions expect you to have a good understanding of the base game and its core mechanics. The idea seems to then be “for all those people who loved the base game and played it for a long time, here’s a new layer of complexity to keep you entertained for the next couple weeks/months/years”. In other words, you’d only buy them if you are already very familiar and want more depth, more content, more mechanics.
However, sometimes expansions seem to significantly alter the core mechanics of a game that you’ve gotten used to and that you loved. Occasionally that can lead to a loss of mechanics that some players loved. If an expansion destroys the things I loved about a game, then of course I wouldn’t like it.
Uh yeah I probably trailed off topic a bit, just wanted to share some thoughts on expansions.
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.
This is why I rarely use plastic baggies anymore and give every more complex game a good sorting box for all the stuff. Organizers for screws are great for this. If a player has starting stuff in their own color, I use separate small boxes so you can easily give a player all their stuff.
Also, Gloomhaven without the app is madness to me.
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.
It’s such an extremely popular game considering its weight, it’s the first game I began writing a list of people who want to play it for. I now know at least 15 people who want to play it and around half of them consider it one of their favourite games. I brought it once to work, played with two colleagues and then one of them thought about buying it. It’s surprisingly easy to find people who love it.
If you live in a city try to find some public board game groups or events and poke around a bit, it really shouldn’t be too hard to find players for this particular game. I’d say at least 10% of regular boardgamers want to play it. So if you visit some events with 10-30 attendees each then chances are you’ll find a handful of people who’re interested.
I suggest you play at least 3-4 of the simple spirits at least once then you will have an easier time explaining their powers effects to beginners, should any questions arise. Also, don’t play a new spirit yourself. You will need some time to help out people who ask questions during the game so try to play a spirit you’re already familiar with, that way you don’t get distracted so much while analyzing your own options.
My brain melts playing Spirit Island, it’s a tough game to min max and I imagine everyone at the table feels the pressure of paying the right card.
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.
Star Fleet Battles. On paper it was a gateway game for me to get into wargames (a genre of game I’d always found tedious and lacking any fun of any sort) because it was a subject matter I was interested in. My SO introduced me to it because I liked old school Star Trek and he was a fanatic player of the game.
Four hours later and we were on, like, turn three. The game systems were inconsistent and incoherent. Planning out your moves made the game into a career bureaucrat’s wet dream of paperwork. And when, finally, the two ships actually REACHED each other, there was about two minutes of dice rolling and … while the game wasn’t formally over, it was clear that there was no point in continuing; the victor was a foregone conclusion.
But we still played another two hours before the game ended.
So not only did I hate the game, I also had my hatred of wargames in general hardened.
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.
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 played Void and Camp and excitedly went out and got Creech and Station one (sorry, can’t remember names). Looking forward to trying those two then mix and matching but definitely concerned it’ll disappoint as well.
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.
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.
Yeah that still sounds quite fun as a craft project, if I’m honest. Is it really big? As in, if you do another pass over the design would it be a cool world map for your wall?
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.
Yeah I only accept something like resource or currency type overload if there’s a specific reason the game needs that - Sidereal Confluence would be an example of this.
Shit. I just looked up that game because I’d never heard of it before and realized that it sounds a lot like a concept for a board game that I had come up with and was excited about making. Oh well, I guess I should play it first, but damn, that’s disappointing. I almost thought I was creative lol.
Heh, well in that case, congrats on having the idea for a great game, I really enjoy Sidereal Confluence. And sorry you didn’t get to make it before someone else did. >.<
Haha true, silver linings. I’m sure they did the concept a lot better, so now I need to buy it and try it out 😂
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 :(
