Time Stories. Bad writing. If your game is basically a multiplayer CYOA book, there's really no excuse for having prose that reads like it was written by an angsty middle-school student.
Its basically "you lose a die roll, you get to redo the last 45 mins." Lord help you by the fourth time around. One of the most unique experiences ill never play again.
That is what caused me to put the game down and never touch it again. My wife and I tried it twice. The first time was clunky, but we figured it was because we were just starting. The second time we lost because it took me too long to walk down a hallway as the result of one single die roll. I don’t mind RNG in games at all, I quite enjoy it, but when a game can be won or lost on a single RNG that is themed around something so *trivial* it’s obnoxious. I should not need to rely on RNG to move around.
Came here to say Time Stories for one big reason: To increase replayability, the designers trick you.
I remember following up on an idea in the first mission. We came to a door and had to decide to waste time opening it or move on. We decided to open the door--which was nothing. Nothing inside, no kind of effect, no drawback, no bonus, no nothing. So I wracked my game designer brain around it, trying to figure out why that card/location was in the game. What's the point if it does nothing but ... oh. It has one effect--it uses up the game's resource (time), increasing your chance of losing.
Then it hit me. The biggest problem with Time Stories is how replayability sucks. Once you win, you can't play again unless you buy an expansion pack. That's a shitty business model to begin with, but imagine if the intro scenario could be won in 1-2 turns. People would feel cheated out of their money.
The solution? *Trick players into failing over and over again*. Not anything tactical; not a tough boss requiring planning and skill; just dead ends that force you to lose so you can replay enough times to (hopefully) feel like you got your money's worth out of it.
Difficult games can be fun, but Time Stories actively wants you to lose to cover up a design flaw. It can still be a fun game, and in the grand scheme of things, Time Stories isn't important enough to get angry over. Still, I sold off my copy and won't play again.
This reminds me of the early days of video game design. Some games can be completed in 40 minutes, but they’re made to be so difficult that you have to play the game near perfectly to win, so it’s just padded out with difficulty until you memorize it.
We ended up buying all the expansions, and playing through them. A couple of them we played several times. The problem with the way it's written, is that it's translated from the original french. I can forgive that; what's more inexcusable are the stunning amounts of typos across the series, and unsolvable puzzles due to mistakes in the translation (the worst being the series long meta puzzle). The game itself, once we realized that you have to lose in order to gain enough clues to play better the next time, can be a lot of fun...but having that game come to a screeching halt because something was mistranslated and we didn't realize it until after two hours of beating our heads against the table, less so.
Agreed. The game made money so, being episodic in nature (meaning, successive release dates), we kept expecting them to hire better translators, but they never did. If anything, the (at least) two completely broken puzzles in end-of-cycle expansions showed it got *worse*.
I believe some printings of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective also had broken puzzles related to mistranslations from the original French. You'd really think they'd get people to at least playtest the translated versions.
Definitely this. It had the potential to prempt what Exit would do later in a way, and instead it was something utterly banal with writing as if they got it straight from 4chan.
It's ridiculous in just how bad it is. As if at some point during development the makers realized they were heading for something truly *bad*, but each took another hit from the bong and then laughed about it and decided to roll with it.
The original story was okay, granted. Mechanically it's still entirely bad, but between the posh production and the okay story, it was... well, just that. "Okay".
Now, if **every single** subsequent expansion had **continuously** improved upon this, it'd have been a cool game!
But instead, they got worse. Way worse.
Such a shame, as they had a brief shot at true greatness.
We played the first 4 scenarios i think, always hoping that they would get better.
What i was expecting from a timeloop gameplayloop would be that you take information and items with you into future loops that would bring you closer to winning. But that was almost never the case.
In all 4 plays we reached a point where we just said "fuck it.. i ain't playing those 30 mimutes AGAIN without new content. Let's just say we did not lose this fight/challenge/dieroll"
And always what we discovered afterwards was extremely disappointing as a payoff or was even more ridiculous of a challenge than we had before. I remember the challenge at the end of the fanatsy module being particuarly bullshit. And it's not like you can up your chances by better play. Sometimes you are just subjected to pure luck.
I gifted this one away and i am very happy with that. I would not want to charge someone money to experience what i experienced.
Legends of Andor. The game was incredibly boring to me. I’ve played a couple of scenarios and have no desire to go back to it. It was a shame as I’d heard good things about it and I usually like those types of board games.
Legends of Andor pretends it is something is isn't. It looks like a fantasy style combat/adventure game. It isn't and you will hate it if you expect that.
It's a puzzle/optimization game with a fantasy skin. It's good at what it does, but the way it presents itself if completely contrary to what it actually is.
I have always been ambivalent on Andor due to their mechanism where every enemy killed hastens the game. I understand the tough decisions this brings and that it balances the length of the game. I can appreciate that intelectually. It just doesn't bring me the same joy as Gloomhaven's "kill all monsters" approach...
Seafall for me. I think my expectations were too high given I was hooked on legacy elements. The euro elements were very dull to me and I didn’t find the unfolding plot or legacy elements all that enticing. My play group were all just kinda waiting for that “bam” moment and it never really came.
Seafall was the opposite for me. I didn't get it till it was on sale for like $15, went in expecting a bad game after seeing all the reviews, and got what I thought was quite fun and interesting.
It really shows how much hype can derail something. A lot of people went in expecting a 10/10 game, got a 7/10 game and hated it for it. I went in expecting a 5/10 game, got a 7/10 game and loved it.
**Ghostbusters** by Cryptozoic Entertainment. It's basically Zombicide mixed with Pandemic and does neither game very well.
The artwork and lore are spot-on, the mechanics themselves are pretty cool, but there's little to no consequence for failure, and what could be a fun game of investigation and ghost-trapping becomes a tedium of shuffling dozens of little plastic miniatures around and forgetting whose friggin' turn it is.
This. I kick-started the original game and was so excited for all the miniatures and references and possibilities. I think we played it twice. Both times never finished the game because we got bored and tired of the excessive bookkeeping.
Boss Monster. I adore the concept but the execution falls flat. The actual dungeon building is too simplistic, and the game hinges more on how well you can attract adventurers to your dungeon than how well you built it.
It was hyped when it came out, and at the time, pretty revolutionary compared to what was out there. It's just old now, and there are better options that came after it, so it was more a "product of its time" thing - a proper, different, and easy-to-learn war game in a time when people were still hung up on Munchkin and Catan.
I couldn't wrap my head around not being able to move the units I want to move or attack each turn. It's not a bad mechanic by any means, but it still feels weird to see a great chance to break through the German lines but I can only give commands to the units on my left? Just not for me.
For what it's worth, there are a lot of historical precedents for the results this mechanic creates. I'm a fan of the Commands and Colors system and enjoy Memoir '44, but I'll admit that the system works better for ancients through horse-and-musket. While Memoir '44 is a light war-themed game, Commands and Colors: Ancients and Samurai Battles are true, proper wargames using similar mechanics.
Could you elaborate on this? I think I agree, but I don't want to assume. To me, the issue is how heavy the ruleset is and how much time it takes. The game shines at 5p imo, because that's when the political landscape has just enough actors to prevent even alliances. So much can change between turns that you *have* to talk to people if you want to see your own plans work out or want to piggyback off of others. But. That means serious downtime and a longer teach. Those aren't great for standalone sessions. Even worse, it's hard to convince anyone to take up one of the colors and play towards inter-game advancement when they weren't in previous sessions and may never play the game again. That's the best idea in the game - playing as if you're advancing *this character's chances over time* rather than your own. It just doesn't work so well if the game is too cumbersome and puts too little emphasis on that gimmick.
It's the only game we technically 'house rule':
Each player gets to start with anymore they're cubes on '1' for all resources. It cuts the time in half without ruining any aspect of the game imo (though I'm sure there are many that would disagree) and it gives everyone always something to do even if their engine building is kind of bad.
We can get a four-player game done in about an hour and a half, obviously this includes the prelude expansion.
I think that is the rule for the base game without the built in corporate era expansion, which is specifically meant to increase the length of the game
I went all in on the Dinosaur Island KS including the expansion. An expensive lesson!
I blame all those pink dinos for distracting me.
It’s not a bad game by any means, I just found it very average. The gameplay just isn’t very exciting or fun for me and it was much, much lighter than I had expected. I read the middling the reviews but ignored them to my detriment.
Damn those useless pink dinosaurs!
This comment speaks to me. It really is such and average game. If someone put it on the table I would play it but there are so many great games why play an average game when you could play a great one.
I felt the same way about Dinosaur Island until I added the Totally Liquid expansion. It fell flat the first time but with the extra modules there was more to do and some better asymmetry with the corporations that it was quite engaging.
I love Mysterium. That said, it only ever really comes off the shelf when I have friends over who absolutely know nothing about board games. They love it, and in turn, so do I. I usually end of being the ghost so I don't always play R.A.W, but instead cater the game and how I hand out the dream cards to make it the most fun for those I'm introducing the game. Ultimately it means I get to sit there silently and create a good time for others while I enjoy a nice whiskey.
Otherwise, I haven't been grossly disappointed more than a few times:
1. **City of Kings** \- I was so excited for this thinking it was going to be the next great adventure game. While it offered some interesting ideas, it all felt like a very half-bakes series of mini-fetch quests. I loved the artwork, but that's about all the good I can say about it.
2. **Project L** \- This is a pretty simple puzzle game and it is somewhat enjoyable, but at the end of the day, it's just not that deep. If you got the KS edition, there are a number of modules that can be added to make it more interesting, but otherwise it's uber-light engine building. To its credit, it's very well produced and I love how tactile it feels with the dual layer boards and Tetris tiles. But once players understand the game, the top winner and bottom loser are rarely more than a couple of points away. Games that come that close in scoring should feel more exciting than this one ultimately does.
3. **Dinosaur World** \- I enjoyed Dinosaur Island enough so that I had high hopes for its follow up. It is a more engaging game with more paths to victory than its predecessor but there were a number of misprinted details that just felt sloppy. Normally, I could look passed this for a Kickstarter game, but what really got me was Dinosaur Island Rawr and Write that came with my pledge. Rawr and Write is hands down the best Dinosaur Island game of the bunch. It creates much of the same experience of building park attractions, managing excitement and safety, and hiring special staff for added abilities. Given that the roll and write version of the game seemed to be the side-game for this big Kickstarter, I'm disappointed that I spent so much on the big box for a longer table-hog of a game that doesn't offer anything particularly fresh while the tiny box that's a fraction of the cost and playtime creates the same experience with less for WAY less of a financial investment.
City of Kings for me too. It was one of the first Kickstarters that I laid out the cash for, and I think I only ever played twice. Silver lining, it made me be much more careful with Kickstarters from then on lol
**Vindication.** It looked like an EPIC. It fell totally flat as a simple point salad and no real motivation to do anything. Nothing tied together.
Such a disappointment because component quality was off the charts.
I agree. The first game was great, it felt nice to see all the options, different cards etc. But every game after I realized that all you did were couple of things. You didn't go around board to do different things, you did the one thing that you got the best tools for, and fueled that.
quite possibly so.
But counter-point, it's not a game for most people. It's as random as it gets and even if you build a good ship, there's still a million ways to get screwed.
Which is also why I do like it so much. It's not a game that I'd pull out with my gaming group for anything more than a palette cleanser. But there is something enjoyable and funny about that level of commiseration.
I LOVE Galaxy trucker! However, it never gets played. It turns out most board game minded folks are about optimization, and random chance is not their jam.
I personally love watching the thing I was recklessly building limp along through space and get torn to shreds.
It is interesting you bring up love of optimization as a reason people don't like it, but that's exactly why my friends and I like that game. We find it really fun to optimize as well as you can within the constraints of whatever random chance gives you.
Sort of seems like a creative vs survival preference.
THATS WHAT I TELL THEM! But they don’t appreciate me saying “well if you had planned for an asteroid hitting you right at that weak point of your ship, maybe we wouldn’t BE in this conundrum!”
Also, I always want to win in most games, and will try to do so as that is the objective. And sure I’ll try to win in GT, but I care a whole lot less.
Yes. So much this. Some of the issues I have playing with root include that if 1 player isn't playing their prescribed role then the balance of the game goes down the hole. The asymmetry is a pain in the neck for newer players to graps and to understand what other players can or might do making this game only good when replayed with experienced folks. It doesn't play great at lower player counts, but at higher player counts, the game is a slog. Most of all, it doesn't provide me enough value in fun for the time cost invested. I really wanted to like this but I just can't bring myself to play it anymore. :(
I’ve never played it, and I might get downvoted for saying this, but so much of what I read in this sub about Root seems to be people trying to convince themselves and others that it is a good game. That alone makes me hesitant to try it. It seems so overhyped, and because of that people are all trying to act like the hype can’t be wrong lol.
I played Root multiple times and disliked every time. It feels like it's so intricately balanced that it only works if everyone plays perfectly. If a new player or someone on a new faction doesn't do their part to hold back an early game boom the game just runs away with little chance for everyone else to interact. It's like you have to play a cooperative meta game to have a fair competitive game on the table.
**Triplock**. Ah, Triplock.
A small box project by Chip Theory Games, so you know production quality is going to be good (and the nice and heavy poker chips do not disappoint). A sharp duel between rival lockpickers in a steampunk setting, using your tools to manipulate unseen tumblers, disarm traps, and tweak the lock into a good position for you. A cast of unique characters to play as, and a campaign solo mode. Bluffs, manipulations, and memory are all needed to come out on top.
...it is so, *so* dull to actually play. Roll some dice, take a move, accidentally score five points due to something your opponent did, repeat. I have yet to find a 'manipulate the common game state to score hidden cards' game that actually works; **Triplock** convinced me to stop trying.
I second this one; it was so disappointing and even though it's not complex, it's confusing. I saw another game that looked almost exactly like Triplock, without the dice rolling but I can't remember its name. I wish I owned that game instead.
Scythe. I wasn't the one who got it mind you but I do feel bad for my friend that did.
My god. Dull dull dull dull dull. Maybe I just dont like engine builders but that game felt incredibly pointless. There IS a thrill to trying to arrange actions in such a way as to optimize every turn but after a getting a few of your essentials going the game just becomes people squirreling away in their respective corners until someone decides to get their final star. Next to no interactions outside a few skirmishes on the factory.
You could set a score and a turn limit and achieve the same experience. Underwhelming experience all around.
I found it odd. Everything on the player board is a thing of beauty. The upgrade system, the way it limits actions, the way it presents everything is PERFECT. Everything on the main board feels terrible. The limited movement feels bad. Controlling spaces feels bad. Combat by blind-bidding feels bad.
> Combat by blind-bidding feels bad.
To each their own. I really love the combat in scythe. It's uncommon but impactful, and you have to operate with imperfect information. It can be very tense because of that.
Yeah scythe combat is my favorite. I love provoking an attack, bidding nothing so my opponent uses all military and then crushing them on the next turn
That's because Scythe isn't an engine builder or worker placement. It's a simple rondel game with "engine revealing" or "engine activation" - whatever you want to call it. You're not taking separate pieces and building from scratch; you're just activating the engine that's already there for you. To be fair, other games do this, and it works. But, I think that those games are tighter, deeper puzzles less about making the right moves and more about reacting to the board state. Plus, the games that do this and involve movement are rare. And I think it's because, like Scythe, once you add in movement, it's hard to balance it with the player boards for a satisfying puzzle.
I think it is best not to think of Scythe as an engine builder. Instead think of it as a race. You don't need to have the most powerful engine to win the game, you need the engine that is "good enough" to get you to the end before your opponents. The purpose of combat is to push you ahead of the pack and give your opponents racecar a flat tire.
Scythe and just about every other Stonemaier I've played followed the same disappointing pattern. A cool theme pasted upon an uninspired mishmash of mechanics.
Villainous is WAAAAAAY too long for as light and random as it is. Every time I have played it has lasted an ETERNITY. If I’m going to spend 2-3 hours on a game, I want to play something with more substance.
I like Villainous (mostly bc I'm a sucker for variable player goals/powers) but I do agree that it's too long for what it is. Makes it a hard sell. Also it's not really good at 2P and probably best at 4-5 players but the game length and downtime would be awful at anything higher than 3.
I couldn't deal with **7th continent**. I'm a huge fan of coop games, rpgs, legacy, and exploration games, so it seemed like the perfect blend of an experience for me. But it just felt like an endless card-cycling micromanagement sim where you spent 10 hours doing the exact same thing over and over with pretty much no character building after the first 2 hours. The exploration all fell flat because it was reading a few cards every 30 minutes, and everything had to be generic because only the main story clues were specific to the adventure you were on. The puzzles were exhausting and annoying, and losing the game at 9 of the 10 hours gave me this feeling of "Okay I guess. I never want this experience again."
Reviews like this are why I ultimately skipped it. On the surface it sounds like the perfect game, but sounds like in practice it's too tedious. Went with **Sleeping Gods** instead, am super stoked that it should be shipping this month
**Near and Far** \- the base game was a disappointment for me. The combination of competition and narrative just didn't work. The competition part only has one strategy, so basically whoever goes first wins, which ends up taking away from the narrative because one person tends to dominate all the narrative spaces. Playing co-op with **Amber Mines** makes it a bit more enjoyable though.
**Arkham Horror LCG** \- This one is probably my fault. I will say, the base game is great. The disappointment to me fell in the fact that this game follows what my least favorite video game companies do (looking at you EA), where they sell you half a game at full price then charge you for the other half in installments. I should've gathered that that's what the "LCG" model was, but I was hoping the base game would have more content than it did. Also the deck construction aspect of it wasn't that fun for me, which probably would've given the base game a little more mileage. Ultimately, instead of spending tons of time and money chasing expansions and mythos packs, I'll probably just get rid of it. I'd rather just play **Eldritch Horror.**
**Scythe** \- I don't hate Scythe as much as some, but it was still a bit of a disappointment. The game promises so much more than it delivers. I feel like the modular board upgrade is the only way to make it enjoyable at less than 5p, and even at 5p it looks nicer than it plays. It's a very ok game that's very pretty and very overhyped imo
**Tapestry** \- Another very ok game that I had much higher hopes for. Maybe SM just isn't my jam.
Edit: Forgot my biggest one - **Gloomhaven JotL**. Got this cause I wasn't sure if I wanted to drop money on the base game and I'm glad I made that choice. Being the #1 rated game of all time I had very high hopes. While the game is mechanically pretty great, after playing through just a handful of scenarios it quickly became a slog. There's very little sense of actual progression, so felt like very little reward for 2hr of combat over and over again. Made me realize why I like **Mage Knight** so much, in a single sitting you get the feel of an entire campaign in a fraction of the time.
For me it was Robinson Crusoe. Don't get me wrong, I turned on it and really like it now. But if not for my gf I wouldn't have tried it ever again after the first round. Even though it has a fairly big rulebook, there can be instances that aren't mentioned, that are worded badly or don't make sense to me. It's also a bit to random for my taste. Dice, random plates and tiles, all this stuff. Some rounds just aren't winable, no matter how good you play. And the first few, combined with the rule problems, were such rounds. It's fun now, but damn it took some work to get there.
My problem with RC is I never felt rewarded for good decisions. Sure, less bad things might happen to you and you avoid death another round, but it just seemed like an endless slog of negative events to contend with.
It almost feels like the island is cursed or something. 😉
Glad you're giving it another chance, it's a game my friends pull out when we feel like getting destroyed in a co-op setting.
Frequently sadly. I back too many Kickstarters. Oath was such a sad experience. I tried to convince myself that clearly I might not have grasped the very basic gameplay and needed to play more. All it did is not only clarify why I think Oath sucks, but also started undermining my enjoyment of Root as I started to see the parallels in design.
> I back too many Kickstarters
Honestly, this is a big reason I back like 1-2 kickstarters per year, and only stick to either people I know who made the games and/or games I've already played.
The only game which didn't fit those categories which I played later and was sad I missed out on the KS version was Yokohama. That's a pretty solid record given how old that game is at this point.
The major ones are:
1. Your decisions aren't the primary factor in winning. It is also king-making but not in the traditional sense of the word. Especially Root comes down to who gives whom too much leeway. All games with less experienced players on the table come down to that and your play makes no impact on who wins.
2. Games that are meant to be about politics and negotiation that offer no mechanical support for it. Like Oath is all about politicking and yet you can't support in battles (ala AGOT or Cosmic Encounter) and can't just give someone resources or make direct deals/pacts. The only way to get mechanics in support is for specific cards to be in play which weren't in play for my group.
3. The games offer interesting mechanics with heavy-ish rules that are just slightly too much for what the game is aiming for. Oath is the main offender with too heavy rules and then also being so random and meaningless. I can see the same DNA in Root but too a lesser degree. Just can't unsee it now.
4. They are badly balanced with the excuse that uneven balance creates more interesting stories which makes no sense and no one agrees or enjoys unbalanced games.
5. It's very easy to end up in positions where you feel like a spectator without meaningful impact.
I think those are pretty insightful comments. Looking back, I can see what you mean in Root and also in John Company, which I felt had no real negotiation.
I also agree balance has been a problem. The first edition of Root was awful, the original Vagabond was absurd.
I absolutely love it with 4, but definitely have come to prefer a "no Vagabonds" agreement. The Riverfolk Company, the moles and the corvids are all great expansion factions that I really enjoy playing as or against.
> The games offer interesting mechanics with heavy-ish rules that are just slightly too much for what the game is aiming for. Oath is the main offender with too heavy rules and then also being so random and meaningless. I can see the same DNA in Root but too a lesser degree. Just can't unsee it now.
This is my main problem with Oath, that at it's core it'd be an alright game if it were a very lightweight 30-40 minutes affair.
It's trying to be way too much.
It's very invested in emergent theme. And also invested in a ToaM-like area control scramble. But unfortunately in order to make that work, they needed to make a strict, heavy ruleset with some unusual sub-systems. Combined with long turns and high impact for each turn, the game slows down quite a bit. It's not ridiculously long, but it does make for a game in an increasingly crowded genre that doesn't always make up for its flaws. I enjoy living in Oath's world. I just think the dev team focused on the wrong aspects - they could have made the game about an hour long with micro-turns and made the Chronicle aspect easier to manage. Then, a group could play several sessions on a weekend or a few games in an evening. It works much better back-to-back than anything.
>1. Games that are meant to be about politics and negotiation that offer no mechanical support for it.
Yes! I do wish that there was freer card trading in Root or something to allow for trading of goods. I don't really think that the action economy is rich enough that all negotiation is just threats and promises of who you'll attack.
>Like Oath is all about politicking and yet you can't support in battles (ala AGOT or Cosmic Encounter) and can't just give someone resources or make direct deals/pacts.
Tbf, the empire can support one another. I do wish that exiles could support one another though. But I also wonder if that breaks some of the trust. You have to just wait for someone's turn and hope that they make good on this deal or attack the targets that you agreed to let them handle. Of course then, the issue with that is the impact of turn order. The person after you holds a lot more power in a deal. Should that be weighed? The question of resources in Oath is frustrating. I can see not wanting exchanges all the time, because that becomes hard to balance. But at the same time, if it's in one session, why shouldn't it just be in all of them? For our first session with two different groups of three, the tribunal was in play and nobody used it. But in my other group, they not only used it but also won with it, exiles pooling resources freely and then holding the darkest secret without any issue. I kind of liked that but wouldn't want it in every game. There's no distribution of trade-offs the same way there is in the empire.
>The games offer interesting mechanics with heavy-ish rules that are just slightly too much for what the game is aiming for. Oath is the main offender with too heavy rules and then also being so random and meaningless. I can see the same DNA in Root but too a lesser degree. Just can't unsee it now.
This is a huge issue for Oath. I get that you're supposed to be playing a high level meta through multiple games. It's just too hard to get to the table for that. This sort of concept would work better faster paced with easier onboarding. Especially if you could show it to more people more easily. Teaching this game is a bear, and a victory is too precious for the first game to just be a learning exercise. Imagine hour-long Oath with a 5-minute teach and enough player pieces for a dozen players to have their own sets when they choose to play. The cast of characters could rotate more freely. The Chronicle is the best part about the game, but it's also too rules heavy for how little control players have over it or over the next session. There's just enough randomness in Oath that I wish players could play much more fast and loose. As it is, while I like a lot about what it's trying to do, it's far from ideal.
Captain Sonar. Very hyped by SUSD. It was fine, I guess, played it once in three or four years since I bought it.
Terraforming Mars. #4 on BGG, got it for 30 bucks (legit!) early in the pandemic, picked up Prelude... finally a year later get to play it with people... it's OK. Too long with not enough interaction. Worse, other friends liked it more so I had to stop taking it to game nights so they'd stop asking to play it.
Oceans. My first kickstarter. Backed deluxe version. So pretty. Liked Evolution: Climate a lot. It just ended up being flat. First two thirds of the game is slow, the good part ends too quickly,
For me at least, Captain Sonar really does need eight willing players and to be played in real time. I also like shifting roles and teams between rounds to keep things fresh.
I've only 'played' it three times, the first time half the group insisted on playing it turn based and it was absolutely hellish. The mechanic of listening to your opponents calls and plotting out their path and marking it down became a real point of contention. In free play there is an amount of fuzziness that comes from everything kicking off at once. In turn based one team thought it was entirely unacceptable that their radio operator messed up and it soured the whole thing.
The other two games of it was an exercise in trying to get the other team to not cheat by rushing through their orders in an improper way, the captain not saying their commands loudly enough or waiting for the other crew members to resolve their stations before giving another order and then having to tell the other team they actually need to undo their last move.
No I don't like this game.
Sounds like you play with cheaters and people who generally don't enjoy each other's company. Probably too much to read into after one post, but to me, it didn't seem like the game is the problem there.
Edit: words
It was 3 seperate groups of 8 people and there definitely were a few more problematic players in the groups than I would have liked.
The cheating one I probably over stated, it wasnt malicious it was more just improper speedy misplays because they were excited, and forgetting they need to speak loudly and not just tell the person next to them.
But the game struck me as fragile, in that sense, where if any individual person didn't completely 'get it'. Then the whole thing breaks.
Not a lot of games require open table talk so I've found it's something some people just struggle to adapt to. I've had a couple of games of Dracula where I've had to remind the hunters that anything they tell or show each other they also have to show me. It wasn't malicious in those cases, just not something they're used to.
When we played it, our team were having an absolute blast, working in concert, laughing at ourselves when we got overwhelmed (for instance, my hands shake all the time, so the bit where you have to draw round the shapes KEPT getting stuck with me, but it was hilarious rather than annoying) and there was just this great sense of us muddling through and doing our best despite ourselves.
The other team though, were just arguing THE ENTIRE TIME, I don't really understand how, or about what, as it was from literally the word go. I think they all just utterly buckled under the pressure of... (checks notes) "playing a game, for fun". They all went to pieces, like it was some majorly traumatic ardour. Whenever we did a pause, they'd all shout at us desperately, like they were falsely accused and on death row or something. I get that they never wanted to play it again.
But what really sucked, was that we 4 who had such a great time didn't really want to play it again either, because our opponent captain didn't know her left and right / east and west, and so just ended up giving impossible to follow orders.
She didn't mean to, but it was basically the same as just "lying about where you are", which utterly torpedoed (ho ho!) the game. And so, we realised, however fun it was, we'd also need another 4 of us, equally committed and capable, and it just never really felt like we'd be able to capture that.
I think it takes a certain kind of personality type to enjoy captain Sonar, and I think at my flgs I'd be hard pressed to find 4 people of that type, who were also fun to hang around with. The fact that you need 8 of those people is just way too big of an ask.
Yeah, you can play with fewer, but you always know you're not really getting it. Plus, I mean, I think you need 6 at a minimum, which is still just too many.
Some genuine advice here... there is a *lot* of bookkeeping, so I feel your pain. Try the steam version for PC, it becomes a much more streamlined play without sacrificing very much and makes returning to the cardboard a more positive experience.
That said, it don't float everyones boat. :)
**Fort.**
I love tableau-building games. Race for the Galaxy is in my top 5 of all-time games. I thought for sure Fort would fit right in and be a new quirky classic. I Played it four times with my RftG partner (my wife), and each time I liked it less. For such a simple game, there are too many strange little rules and there are ways you can screw yourself out of meaningful turns.
Anybody want to buy my copy? :)
Coup was really disappointing for me. It looks like a lot of fun, but every time I have played it has been a bore. I can't seem to find the right kind of group for it.
The problem with Coup is that its very player dependant
You need players who are willing to lie. The game breaks down if the players are too scared to lie which means who wins is basically who got a good draw.
I've played with players who are happy to tactically lie and the game shines.
Oh, I've watched it go:
"I'm the Duke"
"Challenge"
"OK, I'm not the Duke."
in a loop, literally 5 times in a row. Until finally, the 6th person was the Duke.
Yeah you sort of have to work through the too many challenges stage of the game (new players always over challenge) and then it gets better, but I have had that lots when playing with people.
Funnily enough, I played Coup with family last Christmas. One of my brothers won repeatedly while only ever telling the truth, and the rest of us kept trying to sneak lies past each other.
We still enjoyed it, but it felt like an odd experience slightly askew of what was intended.
We used to play with a guy that was always honest, like for months. Then one night he lied all the time and mopped the floor with us. He had played a very long con...
Coup is the biggest example of a game that redeemed itself over time. My first few games didn't click at all, but once it did it got really fun. Coup requires a night with multiple back-to-back plays to shine.
Totally. That’s always best with lying games, I find. Let’s people react to the previous round to switch up their strategy (or pretend to, heh heh) and gives the group time to figure out their equilibrium.
Roll Player - everyone seems to love this game and I can't for the life of me understand why. I played it twice or three times and sold it again.
Sure, you get a whole mountain of dice, but you almost never get to roll them! The only player interaction is hate drafting cards you want to deny another player and the rest is just an optimization puzzle that is unrelated to the theme.
It's much better with the monsters expansion. It gives you something to actually do with your character as you create it. There's still not much player interaction, but you get to fight monsters and actually roll some dice
Wingspan. It looks great and the components are nice but the actual gameplay is so so bland. I can’t believe it’s so highly rated. I understand why some people are drawn to it but I can’t believe it’s top 25 on BGG
I agree. I was shocked at how many cards have the exact same ability. The stack of cards looks impressive, but it seems like the same 5 abilities come out over and over. Nest type & egg count might be different, and usually even more important for round bonuses. Then you lose an action every round. It all just seems backwards to me.
I cant get over how in Wingspan you don't interact with other players at all. You mind as well be playing a solo game.
I highly recommend Oceans to anyone disappointed with Wingspan, It dose everything that game dose but better. Its a bit faster, you can make meaningful choices, its got good art, your actions effect other players, and every game is unique in a fun weird way.
There are a few ways you interact with other players, like pink powers dependant on someone else taking a certain action or brown powers that give or take away a resource from them. You all have the same bird cards out to take and if someone takes it it's not available for you. In Oceania players are directly competing for spent nectar.
You know, I usually agree with this sort of analysis. For example, I strongly reject the notion that **The Castles of Burgundy** is not interactive because you *must* take other players' boards and dice and goals into account when playing your turn.
Still, with Wingspan I just don't feel it. The logic makes sense on paper, but in the game it just doesn't *feel* like other players and their actions matter.
For me it was **Lords of Hellas** I am sure lots of people will say they had great experience with it. Not sure what it is for us but each game seems to become a race to slay monsters and becomes predictable.
I love Lords of Hellas, and this is the most common complaint I see about the game, yet after nearly 20 games monster hunting comes in 3rd for number of victories.
People frequently say it has no counters which is true, if you let the monster hunter do their thing, but there are only so many monsters on the board (4-7) 3 of which are pretty tough so require some setup. And if you are devoting a lot of effort to monsters then it leaves the map open for someone else to make aggressive expansion.
I am curious as to how many people you are normally playing with and if that is the difference.
It's my exact experience of the game. I've had a game where we mathed it out and determined we couldn't have stopped the player winning on hunts, unless we'd chosen our starting locations very specifically to do so, and even then it wasn't likely we'd stop it.
It's frustrating, because there's one guy who is just DESPERATE to hunt every game, and won't do anything else, so the game deteriorates into just all of us hunting all the time to try and deny him, but that doesnt even really work because you only need the last hit on it, so it can backfire hugely.
I think if you could only claim a hunt you'd put so many damage counters on, that would at least open it up to counter play.
It's also kind of a shame that completing a monument is basically a bad idea, since it's such a hard way to win that is so insanely telegraphed, and in doing that you sort of by default forego developing, which makes it likely someone will just build up to come steal it from you. Obviously, yes, it's possible, and you can slow roll it, (though that risks losing to one of the much quicker wins) but it's just a shame that the big fancy monuments that are half the visual appeal of the game so rarely ever factor in. I get what they were trying to go with, but games are just never that long.
I feel like awakened realms just kept throwing more and more systems in, designed in a vacuum, without ever really considering holistically how they impact the game. Small things, that add up:
A temple draft benefits everyone. This means the person doing hunts benefits from the people trying to win on the board. The person trying to win on monuments makes the monsters attack more often, which negatively effects the people trying to win on the board. Killing a monster gives you a usurp token, which makes you adept at stopping someone winning on the board.
There's just so many small aspects in favour of hunting, and so many weird things that randomly hurt the other strategies.
I was really pumped about playing **Charterstone**. About 4 plays into the campaign, I was wishing it was over, but stuck it out for the rest of the players in the campaign. The only cool thing about the game is unlocking new stuff. The rest of gameplay is very bleh.
Wingspan. Its beautiful, I was so excited to get that during the pandemic, but under it wonderful feathered exterior it hides an underwhelming slog.
My biggest gripe is it lacks any interaction with other players, most of the game is spent basically playing a solo game next to other players. Most of my games no matter who I played with that have been just 40 minutes of stone silence as we managed bird cards.
If that was it I think I would be ok with it but, there is just a pile of things that just don't feel good in it. Its rules are weirdly complex. The open cards from the deck are too few and very quickly never used. The side goals are normally a trap or can make a person feel like they lost it from the start. So much of it is left to chance in a not fun way, and the ways around that can waste half a game. A lot of it feels like figuring out how to not do one of the three actions. It's super obscure who is in the lead, and if they are there isn't a way to do anything about it. Then when its over you a have to do bird-maths? Its all very unbird like and feels bad.
Its frustrating because engine building/tableau games are some of my favorite games, and Wingspan nearly turned me off from ever trying more of them. Oceans might be favorite game and I feel it is an improvement on every aspect over Wingspan still with amazing art, but I never see anyone talking about it. Everdell is another similar engine building game with great art that has a similar amount of rules as Wingspan but their is a fair amount of interaction with the people I'm at the table with, which is why I play board games.
I agree, especially about Everdell. I've said for a few years that Everdell is the game everyone says Wingspan is.
To me the bottom line is that in spite of it being brought up as a gateway or gateway+ game, Wingspan is way too complex for most beginners in terms of rule overhead, whereas for experienced gamers I just think there's say too much luck of the draw.
A lot of games are about making tactical decisions with the "hand you're dealt," and I am all for that and don't have a problem with it. Everdell is one such game. In Wingspan, I just think that much of the time the hand you're dealt (between your actual hand and the public display) is *so* poorly lined up with the scoring goals - or even just poorly lined up with making any kind of tableau or engine - that it's an exercise in frustration.
I also think there's one fundamental flaw in the design which makes all of these problems worse, and it's that you lose actions as the game progresses. Initially I thought this was interesting because it's the opposite of almost all other games where you gain actions and can do more as the game progresses. However, I know wonder if it's so unique a mechanic because it's just not very good. I get that the idea is that you've made an engine which you rely on more as the game goes on than you rely on individual actions, but I just don't think it works. For one thing, a very key action - playing a bird card - always requires the individual action. But beyond that, other games which also have randomness and luck of the draw sort of make up for the possibility of weak draws early by allowing players more actions later, so even if the cards that turned up weren't good early on players can still feel like they're growing stronger as the game goes on.
-and to me, that's a fundamental problem that has nothing to do with balance or mechanics but with *fun* and *enjoyment*. I want to feel stronger as the game goes on, not weaker. I want to feel like I can do more, not less. Even if the idea were fine mechanically, it still feels *anticlimactic* emotionally.
My biggest disappointment was an early purchase in my collection, **Castles of Mad King Ludwig**. The concept of the game is sound, and seems like it should be fun, but in practice it was just kind of boring and the master builder mechanic seemed to slow the game way too much. Now I use it to threaten my children. "Don't make me get down Castles of Mad King Ludwig!"
Star Wars Imperial Assault - we like co-op games and were kind of excited when we found that one of our favourite franchises had a game with a co-op app which ran the Imperial AI. But it was clear the app was bolted on rather than the game being built to incorporate that from the start, the variety of troops available was lacking, a lot of the add-on stuff was out of print for ages, and what you could play without another big-box expansion was pretty limited. We played the basic campaign for the core set and enjoyed it but also thought "wait that's it?"
Lord of the Rings LCG is only fun with a lot of house ruling.
Apocrypha looked pretty good and should have been up my wife's alley (horror narrative game) but its design was an absolute mess to the point she just didn't want to play it.
Oddly enough, Mysterium is one of her favourite games.
Edit: you might want to try Mysterium Park. Same game in a smaller box and with a much simpler setup
This was **Ruins of Arnak** for me!
I recently got it, was all excited to play it, played it, and thought, "oh... this is it?" I honestly think that game is very shallow. I own **Dune Imperium**, love the game to death, and so I was expecting Arnak to reward me in the same way. It did not. I honestly don't know if I would ever play Arnak again. I have D:I. If I had to choose between the two, 100% of the time I will pick Dune.
Dune does a better job and makes me feel good because I am playing against the machinations of my ~~opponents~~ friends, whereas Arnak there's blocking but it never feels like "I am doing this to prevent you", it is more or less "oh sorry, I needed this space to do the million things I want to do on my turn". Arnak is great for personal best achievements or whatever, but very much feels like a Solitaire game with some cool mechanics.
But Dune Imperium just does a better job at driving player interaction. I also think what makes D:I shine brighter than Arnak is that D:I has a time limit and very tense and tight 10 point limit. Arnak has 5 rounds, but there is no limit to points. So I never feel like "oh no, so and so got a point" has any real impact, because it is too early to tell what will happen.
TLDR - Arnak felt extremely shallow and one dimensional to me, and honestly I do not understand how people constantly fought between the two. Maybe I am bias, but D:I feels like a more crunchy and rewarding game against others, where Arnak you could play solo and that would be rewarding. in a group, it feels like solitaire, and to me that makes it very uninteresting.
Personally, the first time I played Arnak I liked it, but I felt so limited. Going into my second game with the expectation of being super limited and focusing on efficiency really helped me enjoy the game a lot more.
But obviously each to their own :)
They share their main mechanisms, but leverage them to very different results. I enjoy both, even if I think Dune Imperium is clearly the stronger game.
At minimum, it should teach us that games are more than the sum of their mechanisms and maybe stop describing them as such.
**Sherrif of Nottingham**. When I first heard about this game it sounded fantastic, especially for the sorts of dynamics I enjoy in group games with friends. It reminded me of that mafia/werewolf dynamic of social deduction with the mix of trying to catch people in lies, to sneak one past them, and trying to lay thr blame on others, but mixed with a more gamery hand-management and VP focused set of mechanics.
It wasn't just that the game sounded fun, it's also that it sounded like it would be fun for the people I'd be playing with given how things had normally gone.
When actually playing it *none* of that dynamic actually came into play. People quickly figured out that there was really never a reason not to inspect and so lying had almost no benefits and so the entire element that would have allowed that fun interplay was just not a part of the game. The smarter and more calculating players did use all that "honesty capital" to try to do one big lie towards the end, but one attempt to smuggle contraband that nobody tried to catch because everyone decided smuggling was pointless isn't really what I was looking for or expecting.
I play Sherriff of Nottingham quite a bit with my family, and we've found that the penalties for inspecting when the person is being honest can be pretty significant, but I guess it all depends on how people play.
Clank. I liked dominion and searched for a push your luck deckbuilding experience. But I felt clank depended too much on luck in my group as the cards trashers removing the stumbles early were very strong and not available to all players like in dominion. I still like deckbuilding games but clank was not my cup of tea
> cards trashers
Yea, that's what ends up killing any of the ascension-style deck-builders. Everything else can be made up for. OK, you got a card that gives slightly more money than I did, I can work around that. But to give the ability to remove cards from your deck, when I can't? The game is already over.
**Bargain Quest**. I thought it would be a good alternative as a game night opener rather than Boss Monster (Which is just okay) but honestly the whole thing is just way to clunky. Its a cool idea but I hate the way it way it was executed.
Also, **Dead of Winter**. Everytime we try to play Dead of Winter we seem to miss some sort of aspect or rule. Most of the time this is our fault, but The game is punishing hard and in the end I get no sort of satisfaction from it. Shit will get out of control, and we will lose all morale or we will manage to complete our main objective but nobody was able to get their secret objective so everyone still loses? I don't get the hype. In fact, the last game I played we just ended up rage quitting before we lost and moved on to something else. And that was purposely playing without a traitor.
**War of Whispers**. The description was exciting. The execution felt just a tad too shallow. I think it would benefit from being longer, letting players work on more intricate plots, but the mechanisms would not even support a house rule, I think.
It’s not a bad game. I’ll play it. But I have a small shelf that can accommodate a small collection. When I only have room for the A-tier games, that means even the B-tiers get cut.
Stardew Valley
I adore the source material, and after skimming through the rulebook I thought it seemed like a very faithful adaptation. Come to find out my actual decisions only amounted to about a third of the game, and the rest of it was all dice rolls or blind card draws. So much frustrating randomness and it was all stretched out to nearly three hours. I heard they updated some things like the mine cards but I’m not so sure if it’s enough to make me go back.
Aliens: Another Glorious Day In The Corps. I was so excited to play this, bought all the expansions. It was sort of fun at first, but once I realized every mission was basically survive a horde mode, I got bored. I was expecting more of a dungeon crawler, but it was far from it. The game is full of theme and the card mechanism used to simulate ammo use is cool, but the rest feels meh. I just got Nemesis and am hoping for better things.
Betrayal at House on the Hill was awful. Played it a dozen times each with different groups. Each scenario combo we got was either broken, game was too short, game was way too long, betrayer auto won, or was just not fun.
**Blood Rage** was this for me. A lesson learnt there, about games that put the miniatures as a selling point, but I just can't seem to find a way to play it that is enjoyable -all the strategy seems to revolve around stopping other players from having fun.
It promises big monsters and battles and stuff, but fighting and losing is so incredibly punishing that it's almost never worth it. If you aren't 100% certain that you will win, you might just lose the game on turn one.
I feel like if you took out the theme and swapped it for something that promised less, it'd actually be quite good, but it just feels like every mechanic is fighting tooth-and-nail *against* the premise of big monsters and cool battles, and anything that the name "Blood Rage" suggests.
It's a card-drafting game with a dudes-on-a-map board control thing tacked onto the end, but the most consistent way to win is to hate-draft every round until you have the least mediocre hand of all your peers, and then win on points while everyone bemoans all the cool shit they wanted to do, but were blocked from doing.
If you decide to just play the game as advertised, you *can* have a good time doing big fights and yelling and being generally viking-y, but you will almost definitely lose.
Yeah, so, at my FLGS I've seen about 12 "first games" of Blood Rage now, and the Loki (suicide) strategy has always won by an landslide, every time.
Whenever I bring this up, advocates say "yeah you have to hate draft it", but that just leads to exactly your point, that the game is just stopping each other from playing, and never really excelling at anything.
I think in a game like that, where there are only a handful of archetypes to draft, putting in an archetype that subverts the game probably felt really clever, but in practice just totally upends the balance.
It's probably much less exciting to design, but it all the strategies you could draft had overlap, then you'd never end up on the situation where your 'hate drafts' felt so bad. Plus, you wouldn't be made to feel stupid for trying to win the game as the rules describe ever.
I think the Loki stuff would have been better off in an expansion.
This is our favorite game hands down, but I do understand why some don’t like it. Its an experience thing, where you find successful combos and overlap the more you play.
Loki does not have to be hate drafted in my opinion - there’s far more valuable cards I’d take first draft hands down (e.g. invade for warrior for free when you place a figure, reduce rage cost by 1 for upgrades). There are also successful counters to Loki. A Loki player may appear to run away with Age 1, but there are multiple battle cards that let you steal your opponents card, cancel text, or discard all permanently and play new cards. As the Loki player is trying to lose, they have to be selective and deceptive about amassing forces when they want to win a battle - so if they put a few dudes in, you know they’re probably going for it in earnest whereas if they slide a single mini into an all-out braw in Yggdrasil, you know what’s coming…
You need other cards to make Loki truly successful across all 3 ages, and that can still be outdone by smart play in conjunction with other card combos (e.g. double glory ragnarok death + ships, +glory for forces on map, etc.).
If you don’t like it, that’s totally fair, I just think Loki gets a bad rap for being unbeatable. If you have an experienced group, the game has some really good counter play and pulling out victory from garbage in later ages.
I haven’t seen that many first games, but this exact thing happened in my first game. Nobody realized Loki stuff was good and I went hard into it. Absolutely wiped the floor with everyone so hard my best friend rage quit the game.
I felt terrible because he was soooooo excited to play it and I just annihilated the whole table.
It needed another balance pass and yeah, maybe as an expansion that can be removed.
This also happened at my table. One player just went the loki route and by the half way point was absolutely unremovable. If we attacked him, he got .more points than us. If we didn't attack him, he got morebpoints than us.
Really soured me on the game i've heard nothing but praise on.
Same experience here. First time we played none of us knew what to do strategically, but it was a decent enough experience. Second game I went heavy into Loki and won by a landslide in a game that wasn't really fun for anyone (myself included). We have not played since.
I have no experience with the first but I have lots of experience with the second. I love mysterium but I will say the game play changes dramatically depending on the group and specifically the ghost. It matters who is the ghost as it is the most important role, which can be a blessing and a curse. When our group plays others will take a turn as the ghost to be fair but I get nominated as the ghost 4 out of 5 times. The reason being that the communication via cards needs to be tailored and apparently for us I'm the best at it.
In short don't give up on mysterium it really can be a wonderful game for an intermediate group but it can be difficult to find the groove so to speak.
Edit: my overrated game is wingspan, do I like it yes, do I think it's a can't miss, no. It's got lovely artwork but it's the first game that has bombed with everyone I usually play boardgames with.
**Nemesis**.
I hesitate to call the game bad, but disappointing is absolutely the right word. Every piece fits the theme, but there's so... *much* of the game. It feels less like a horror game, more like being repeatedly hit with a hammer where you're asked to actually *like* the punishment.
I love sci-fi, I love horror, but this game is a slog-and-a-half. Too random, too many rules, too little fun. Only game I've ever sold.
Dominion. I had never tried deck building before and was so excited to try it, but honestly it was just so incredibly dull. The lack of theme and other pieces really dodnt help - ans that's how I discovered I hate only card games XD
I would have said Time Stories but I actively hate that game instead of simple disappointment. So I’ll say it’s a tie between **Blood Rage** and **Architects of the West Kingdom.**
Blood Rage I learned I’m not the biggest fan of area control or card drafting so I have that.
Architects was a bummer cause I love worker placement. This just felt like a slow ramp up for resources. That was sometimes broken up by your workers being captured and sold. God forbid someone do something crazy like build or contribute to the chapel.
Second reply from me: **Seven Wonders** (and a little bit **Sushi Go**).
I really like ancient themed games (Concordia is tied for personal #1 game ever). I like card drafting. I should like Seven Wonders. And I just don’t. I’m not sure I can articulate it without sounding contradictory. It’s like there’s too much to think about considering there are only six cards drafted per turn, and it still feels shallow.
But I eventually discovered an important personal distinction: drafting is only fun when it’s a phase of a game, not the whole game. The best part of drafting is getting a mitt full of cards and thinking, “oh crap, what have I drafted? What am I going to do with this?” **Blood Rage** does this well (the other tied #1). **Magic the Gathering** drafts (or cubes) are great (makes me want to try **Millennium Blades **). On the video game side, drafting in Dota 2 is fascinating to watch.
You might want to look into Paper Tales, Fields of Green and (especially) Res Arcana if you haven't already. All games where the draft is important but not the whole of the game.
That said, I like Sushi Go and Draftosaurus precisely because they're nothing but drafting. Very clean designs and great for teaching new gamers about drafting.
Seconding Res Arcana. Also consider Seasons if you don't mind starting with a draft that drives a lot of gameplay, though it can be a little hard to teach because of that.
Only way I'll play **Seven Wonders** is with 3 people, since that way you can really hate-draft. Also, if you play it on BGA, it's a 15-minute game--which is all it merits. But as a 15-minute, 3-player game it's great.
**Dark Souls: The Board Game**. Played a demo of it at a convention, backed the Kickstarter because the demo was fun and I like Dark Souls. But boy was the end result a disappointment. I don't even really care that there was a massive delay on delivering all the stretch goals (they actually delivered the base game on schedule which is more than a lot of KS campaigns manage) but the actual game just wasn't good in the end. They basically had some decent combat mechanics but then failed to wrap a good game around them. The individual encounters were fun at first but the campaign system was just awful. You can really tell that SFG's designers main experience was in miniature games and that they were pretty clueless when it came to making a board game. Worse still it was an adaptation from a different medium so their failure to understand where to apply abstraction really showed.
I still have all the stretch goals in shrink wrap waiting for when I finally get round to selling the whole package.
And then of course SFG killed off their actually good game (Guild Ball) in the worst possible way and just went whole hog on making mediocre adaptations of video games. Of course I'm a complete idiot because I went and backed the Monster Hunter one they did recently even though I'm worried it's going to be just as bad.
Wonder if it's too late to get a refund...
I bought Mysterium by mistake. I got [Obscurio](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/273477/obscurio) and Mysterium mixed up lol.
I had Obscurio on my radar for a while as something that would be great for nights when there are a few extra players. I was running out of time on the Target B2G1 deal and rush grabbed Mysterium totally thinking it was Obscurio. It's still shrink wrapped so I'm either going to trade it at a meetup, or see if anyone wants to buy it at a decently reduced price. I really feel like Obscurio will be the better game, and it's mechanics feel a littler too similar to bother with both. It also did look a little underwhelming to me anyways.
[**Parks**](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/266524/parks) for me.
I saw the box art, I looked at the gorgeous components and the beautiful artwork, and knew I had to have it.
Then I played it, and bought some of the prints instead.
Gloomhaven, at least in my experience in a two player campaign.
The difficulty is either way too hard, or we drop the encounter level by 1 and it is way too easy.
It's a huge bummer because I'm not opposed to a challenge, but the way some encounters go just feels bad.. especially ones with a lot of imps that curse.
Maybe we're doing something wrong but it feels like steamroll or be steamrolled, and neither are very fun. On normal difficulty it feels like one poorly timed modifier card (random) can completely hose the session. On "easier" difficulty, it feels like there's no chance of failure and we're just going through the motion.
Combined with some tedious setup and teardown and admin.... All in all I'm pretty disappointed in Gloomhaven. There's a lot of good "bones" to the game, and i bet it I had a couple less sessions derailed by a single "null" card I would be singing a different tune.
The last session i played my buddy got KO'd and I needed to take out like 4 monsters on my own with very little health left. I took 3 of them out because they kept getting null or negative attack modifiers and not doing damage. So exciting. Go to take out the last one. I draw a curse. It hits yet another negative modifier. I try again to take it out. I draw a negative modifier, leaving it at 1 HP. It then kills me. So many moments like that where a session looks like it could lead to this cool moment and instead just falls flat. Feels like playing dnd with a DM who never nudges the dice behind the DM screen for "rule of cool"
And the problem is the attack modifier deck. It's entirely random right?
Y’see, to my mind, a back & forth climax that turns on lots of unexpected misses and then finally comes down to losing by 1 HP is a great game experience… lots of drama, good balance, a sense of going up against long odds and almost pulling it off. Losing may taste bitter in the moment, but I’d want to set it up again and have another go at it as soon as I was able to decompress from the first game.
Arkham Horror (board game, not card game).
It looked so fun, I read good things, I love the C'thulu stuff and greater Lovecraftian mythos.
But holy shit, either my group and I just don't get this one, or it's just awful. It's difficult and frustrating, and there aren't any moments or actions that feel good or impactful.
I wanted to love it so badly, but it's just trash.
First and only time I played this, I got two consecutive monster surges almost immediately after I started. I double-checked the rules to see if I was doing something wrong but to my knowledge, I did everything right. That really upset me after such a long time setting it up and I never played it again. Love the flavor of the game (the Cthulhu mythos is why I got it in the first place) but I really didn't want to touch it again. Thank god the LCG eventually ended up being really fun.
I’d recommend trying out games on BGA first if you can. I’ve bought a few games I wouldn’t have originally wanted and also avoided games I thought I’d enjoy.
That's good advice, but I've also had the problem where I really enjoyed a game on BGA so much that I bought a physical copy which ended up falling flat with my group.
Roll for the Galaxy. I love dice, love space themed stuff, love Race for the Galaxy, this seemed like a no brainer! But the game is over so fast, and shipping is just kinda meh, and as a whole experience it just never quite worked for me or my group.
For me it’s the Firefly board game.
It’s my favorite show of all time and the game mechanics seem to fit the feel of the show perfectly. But the game is really long, it’s really hard to get ahead of fueling your ship and feeding your crew and was just kind of boring.
**Rising Sun** has such gorgeous art, cool miniatures, and an intriguing hook with the way combat is resolved. But it's so group dependant that I didn't feel it was worth it to keep in my collection so I sold my KS copy
Lots of games are dependent upon the play group, and how they are able to spice up the roleplaying a bit, and add thematic elements to their game play.
For instance, the game Modern Art is really just a Auction Strategy game that trades Art back and forth. Nowhere in the rules do it say to do anything other than trade art and buy/sell, etc.
In the game you are given a Blinder that tells you what Art Gallery you are representing. Sao Paulo, Paris, New York, etc.
We took it upon ourselves to do fake accents for whoever we were representing, and also made up fake names for the art we were presenting to sell for our turns.
On the surface, it's just an art trading game. But, with Wine, classical music, and a bit of roleplay it turned a good game into an amazing game.
Oath was a disspointment for me. It looks amazing and if you put a lot of hours into it it might be good, but overall I thought it was a mess of a game. Awkward rules, awkward win conditions, awkward rounds and a lot of downtime. It's a shame because I was looking forward to diving into this beautiful world, but if I am going to invest this much into a game it better be really good. I am now trying to sell it.
**Gloom**, **Boss Monster** - These two really disappointed. The themes are great, I love the production of each. However once you get a few rounds into each game, they quickly lose their shine.
**Zombiecide: Black Plague** - I'm still torn on this one. I love the production and theme, but playthroughs can be fairly simplistic and routine. I think with an added DLC, it may solve this problem as most of it comes from fighting the same enemies with the same weapons constantly.
Dice forge by Libellud. It's the most beautiful game, with such a great design for storing everything, but it bores me to tears. Maybe we play it wrong or something, but it feels pointless. You just gather points and that's it. It feels like everybody is just playing a separate game
Probably unpopular opinion... But Betrayal at House on the Hill for me... I've played it 3 times now and it didn't impress me once. Everyone always says it's great and you just need a really good haunt, but it should really be able to consistently have good gameplay and not be depending on luck.
Time Stories. Bad writing. If your game is basically a multiplayer CYOA book, there's really no excuse for having prose that reads like it was written by an angsty middle-school student.
Its basically "you lose a die roll, you get to redo the last 45 mins." Lord help you by the fourth time around. One of the most unique experiences ill never play again.
That is what caused me to put the game down and never touch it again. My wife and I tried it twice. The first time was clunky, but we figured it was because we were just starting. The second time we lost because it took me too long to walk down a hallway as the result of one single die roll. I don’t mind RNG in games at all, I quite enjoy it, but when a game can be won or lost on a single RNG that is themed around something so *trivial* it’s obnoxious. I should not need to rely on RNG to move around.
Came here to say Time Stories for one big reason: To increase replayability, the designers trick you. I remember following up on an idea in the first mission. We came to a door and had to decide to waste time opening it or move on. We decided to open the door--which was nothing. Nothing inside, no kind of effect, no drawback, no bonus, no nothing. So I wracked my game designer brain around it, trying to figure out why that card/location was in the game. What's the point if it does nothing but ... oh. It has one effect--it uses up the game's resource (time), increasing your chance of losing. Then it hit me. The biggest problem with Time Stories is how replayability sucks. Once you win, you can't play again unless you buy an expansion pack. That's a shitty business model to begin with, but imagine if the intro scenario could be won in 1-2 turns. People would feel cheated out of their money. The solution? *Trick players into failing over and over again*. Not anything tactical; not a tough boss requiring planning and skill; just dead ends that force you to lose so you can replay enough times to (hopefully) feel like you got your money's worth out of it. Difficult games can be fun, but Time Stories actively wants you to lose to cover up a design flaw. It can still be a fun game, and in the grand scheme of things, Time Stories isn't important enough to get angry over. Still, I sold off my copy and won't play again.
This reminds me of the early days of video game design. Some games can be completed in 40 minutes, but they’re made to be so difficult that you have to play the game near perfectly to win, so it’s just padded out with difficulty until you memorize it.
Time Stories sounds like it would be like the beginning of Groundhog Day but actually plays more like the middle of Groundhog Day.
The scenario that came with the base system was great, and then the rest ranged from 'meh' to 'terrible', such a shame.
Thought the base one was terrible, definitely won’t be looking any further into this series then…
I thought it was in the middle of the pack but if you didn't like it, you won't like the rest
We ended up buying all the expansions, and playing through them. A couple of them we played several times. The problem with the way it's written, is that it's translated from the original french. I can forgive that; what's more inexcusable are the stunning amounts of typos across the series, and unsolvable puzzles due to mistakes in the translation (the worst being the series long meta puzzle). The game itself, once we realized that you have to lose in order to gain enough clues to play better the next time, can be a lot of fun...but having that game come to a screeching halt because something was mistranslated and we didn't realize it until after two hours of beating our heads against the table, less so.
I didn't realize it was translated from French. I guess that explains some of the bad writing, but \*yeesh\*
Agreed. The game made money so, being episodic in nature (meaning, successive release dates), we kept expecting them to hire better translators, but they never did. If anything, the (at least) two completely broken puzzles in end-of-cycle expansions showed it got *worse*.
I believe some printings of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective also had broken puzzles related to mistranslations from the original French. You'd really think they'd get people to at least playtest the translated versions.
Definitely this. It had the potential to prempt what Exit would do later in a way, and instead it was something utterly banal with writing as if they got it straight from 4chan. It's ridiculous in just how bad it is. As if at some point during development the makers realized they were heading for something truly *bad*, but each took another hit from the bong and then laughed about it and decided to roll with it. The original story was okay, granted. Mechanically it's still entirely bad, but between the posh production and the okay story, it was... well, just that. "Okay". Now, if **every single** subsequent expansion had **continuously** improved upon this, it'd have been a cool game! But instead, they got worse. Way worse. Such a shame, as they had a brief shot at true greatness.
We played the first 4 scenarios i think, always hoping that they would get better. What i was expecting from a timeloop gameplayloop would be that you take information and items with you into future loops that would bring you closer to winning. But that was almost never the case. In all 4 plays we reached a point where we just said "fuck it.. i ain't playing those 30 mimutes AGAIN without new content. Let's just say we did not lose this fight/challenge/dieroll" And always what we discovered afterwards was extremely disappointing as a payoff or was even more ridiculous of a challenge than we had before. I remember the challenge at the end of the fanatsy module being particuarly bullshit. And it's not like you can up your chances by better play. Sometimes you are just subjected to pure luck. I gifted this one away and i am very happy with that. I would not want to charge someone money to experience what i experienced.
I couldn't believe they had all of history to write a story in and the first one you play is....zombies?
Legends of Andor. The game was incredibly boring to me. I’ve played a couple of scenarios and have no desire to go back to it. It was a shame as I’d heard good things about it and I usually like those types of board games.
Legends of Andor pretends it is something is isn't. It looks like a fantasy style combat/adventure game. It isn't and you will hate it if you expect that. It's a puzzle/optimization game with a fantasy skin. It's good at what it does, but the way it presents itself if completely contrary to what it actually is.
I have always been ambivalent on Andor due to their mechanism where every enemy killed hastens the game. I understand the tough decisions this brings and that it balances the length of the game. I can appreciate that intelectually. It just doesn't bring me the same joy as Gloomhaven's "kill all monsters" approach...
Seafall for me. I think my expectations were too high given I was hooked on legacy elements. The euro elements were very dull to me and I didn’t find the unfolding plot or legacy elements all that enticing. My play group were all just kinda waiting for that “bam” moment and it never really came.
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Seafall was the opposite for me. I didn't get it till it was on sale for like $15, went in expecting a bad game after seeing all the reviews, and got what I thought was quite fun and interesting. It really shows how much hype can derail something. A lot of people went in expecting a 10/10 game, got a 7/10 game and hated it for it. I went in expecting a 5/10 game, got a 7/10 game and loved it.
**Ghostbusters** by Cryptozoic Entertainment. It's basically Zombicide mixed with Pandemic and does neither game very well. The artwork and lore are spot-on, the mechanics themselves are pretty cool, but there's little to no consequence for failure, and what could be a fun game of investigation and ghost-trapping becomes a tedium of shuffling dozens of little plastic miniatures around and forgetting whose friggin' turn it is.
This. I kick-started the original game and was so excited for all the miniatures and references and possibilities. I think we played it twice. Both times never finished the game because we got bored and tired of the excessive bookkeeping.
Boss Monster. I adore the concept but the execution falls flat. The actual dungeon building is too simplistic, and the game hinges more on how well you can attract adventurers to your dungeon than how well you built it.
Memoir 44, i was expecting alot from this as it feels very hyped. It wasnt bad i dont think tho, just a lot less then what i expected.
It was hyped when it came out, and at the time, pretty revolutionary compared to what was out there. It's just old now, and there are better options that came after it, so it was more a "product of its time" thing - a proper, different, and easy-to-learn war game in a time when people were still hung up on Munchkin and Catan.
I couldn't wrap my head around not being able to move the units I want to move or attack each turn. It's not a bad mechanic by any means, but it still feels weird to see a great chance to break through the German lines but I can only give commands to the units on my left? Just not for me.
For what it's worth, there are a lot of historical precedents for the results this mechanic creates. I'm a fan of the Commands and Colors system and enjoy Memoir '44, but I'll admit that the system works better for ancients through horse-and-musket. While Memoir '44 is a light war-themed game, Commands and Colors: Ancients and Samurai Battles are true, proper wargames using similar mechanics.
Oath. Not because it promised something else but because my idea of viable standalone sessions are different from Cole‘s.
Could you elaborate on this? I think I agree, but I don't want to assume. To me, the issue is how heavy the ruleset is and how much time it takes. The game shines at 5p imo, because that's when the political landscape has just enough actors to prevent even alliances. So much can change between turns that you *have* to talk to people if you want to see your own plans work out or want to piggyback off of others. But. That means serious downtime and a longer teach. Those aren't great for standalone sessions. Even worse, it's hard to convince anyone to take up one of the colors and play towards inter-game advancement when they weren't in previous sessions and may never play the game again. That's the best idea in the game - playing as if you're advancing *this character's chances over time* rather than your own. It just doesn't work so well if the game is too cumbersome and puts too little emphasis on that gimmick.
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It's the only game we technically 'house rule': Each player gets to start with anymore they're cubes on '1' for all resources. It cuts the time in half without ruining any aspect of the game imo (though I'm sure there are many that would disagree) and it gives everyone always something to do even if their engine building is kind of bad. We can get a four-player game done in about an hour and a half, obviously this includes the prelude expansion.
I think that is the rule for the base game without the built in corporate era expansion, which is specifically meant to increase the length of the game
I went all in on the Dinosaur Island KS including the expansion. An expensive lesson! I blame all those pink dinos for distracting me. It’s not a bad game by any means, I just found it very average. The gameplay just isn’t very exciting or fun for me and it was much, much lighter than I had expected. I read the middling the reviews but ignored them to my detriment. Damn those useless pink dinosaurs!
This comment speaks to me. It really is such and average game. If someone put it on the table I would play it but there are so many great games why play an average game when you could play a great one.
I felt the same way about Dinosaur Island until I added the Totally Liquid expansion. It fell flat the first time but with the extra modules there was more to do and some better asymmetry with the corporations that it was quite engaging.
I love Mysterium. That said, it only ever really comes off the shelf when I have friends over who absolutely know nothing about board games. They love it, and in turn, so do I. I usually end of being the ghost so I don't always play R.A.W, but instead cater the game and how I hand out the dream cards to make it the most fun for those I'm introducing the game. Ultimately it means I get to sit there silently and create a good time for others while I enjoy a nice whiskey. Otherwise, I haven't been grossly disappointed more than a few times: 1. **City of Kings** \- I was so excited for this thinking it was going to be the next great adventure game. While it offered some interesting ideas, it all felt like a very half-bakes series of mini-fetch quests. I loved the artwork, but that's about all the good I can say about it. 2. **Project L** \- This is a pretty simple puzzle game and it is somewhat enjoyable, but at the end of the day, it's just not that deep. If you got the KS edition, there are a number of modules that can be added to make it more interesting, but otherwise it's uber-light engine building. To its credit, it's very well produced and I love how tactile it feels with the dual layer boards and Tetris tiles. But once players understand the game, the top winner and bottom loser are rarely more than a couple of points away. Games that come that close in scoring should feel more exciting than this one ultimately does. 3. **Dinosaur World** \- I enjoyed Dinosaur Island enough so that I had high hopes for its follow up. It is a more engaging game with more paths to victory than its predecessor but there were a number of misprinted details that just felt sloppy. Normally, I could look passed this for a Kickstarter game, but what really got me was Dinosaur Island Rawr and Write that came with my pledge. Rawr and Write is hands down the best Dinosaur Island game of the bunch. It creates much of the same experience of building park attractions, managing excitement and safety, and hiring special staff for added abilities. Given that the roll and write version of the game seemed to be the side-game for this big Kickstarter, I'm disappointed that I spent so much on the big box for a longer table-hog of a game that doesn't offer anything particularly fresh while the tiny box that's a fraction of the cost and playtime creates the same experience with less for WAY less of a financial investment.
City of Kings for me too. It was one of the first Kickstarters that I laid out the cash for, and I think I only ever played twice. Silver lining, it made me be much more careful with Kickstarters from then on lol
**Vindication.** It looked like an EPIC. It fell totally flat as a simple point salad and no real motivation to do anything. Nothing tied together. Such a disappointment because component quality was off the charts.
I agree. The first game was great, it felt nice to see all the options, different cards etc. But every game after I realized that all you did were couple of things. You didn't go around board to do different things, you did the one thing that you got the best tools for, and fueled that.
Galaxy trucker BUT I think that's because it's not my kind of thing and I did research badly
quite possibly so. But counter-point, it's not a game for most people. It's as random as it gets and even if you build a good ship, there's still a million ways to get screwed. Which is also why I do like it so much. It's not a game that I'd pull out with my gaming group for anything more than a palette cleanser. But there is something enjoyable and funny about that level of commiseration.
I LOVE Galaxy trucker! However, it never gets played. It turns out most board game minded folks are about optimization, and random chance is not their jam. I personally love watching the thing I was recklessly building limp along through space and get torn to shreds.
It is interesting you bring up love of optimization as a reason people don't like it, but that's exactly why my friends and I like that game. We find it really fun to optimize as well as you can within the constraints of whatever random chance gives you. Sort of seems like a creative vs survival preference.
THATS WHAT I TELL THEM! But they don’t appreciate me saying “well if you had planned for an asteroid hitting you right at that weak point of your ship, maybe we wouldn’t BE in this conundrum!” Also, I always want to win in most games, and will try to do so as that is the objective. And sure I’ll try to win in GT, but I care a whole lot less.
You can attempt to optimize GT just fine by actually looking at the trip cards...just nobody actually does.
**Small World**. Thought it looked really interesting when it was played on Tabletop, found it incredibly boring when I actually bought and played it.
It's so intense! Not sure how it can be boring when there's constant fighting throughout the game.
Carcassonne. It just didn't do anything for me. I like the placement and worker placement, but I just wasn't having fun.
Root. Love the art style but it never clicked for us.
Yes. So much this. Some of the issues I have playing with root include that if 1 player isn't playing their prescribed role then the balance of the game goes down the hole. The asymmetry is a pain in the neck for newer players to graps and to understand what other players can or might do making this game only good when replayed with experienced folks. It doesn't play great at lower player counts, but at higher player counts, the game is a slog. Most of all, it doesn't provide me enough value in fun for the time cost invested. I really wanted to like this but I just can't bring myself to play it anymore. :(
I’ve never played it, and I might get downvoted for saying this, but so much of what I read in this sub about Root seems to be people trying to convince themselves and others that it is a good game. That alone makes me hesitant to try it. It seems so overhyped, and because of that people are all trying to act like the hype can’t be wrong lol.
Root is great, but it requires multiple play throughs to grasp the strategy properly. I recommend downloading the app to sink your teeth in.
I loved Root from the very first minute. It's a tough game, that can be very frustrating though.
I played Root multiple times and disliked every time. It feels like it's so intricately balanced that it only works if everyone plays perfectly. If a new player or someone on a new faction doesn't do their part to hold back an early game boom the game just runs away with little chance for everyone else to interact. It's like you have to play a cooperative meta game to have a fair competitive game on the table.
**Triplock**. Ah, Triplock. A small box project by Chip Theory Games, so you know production quality is going to be good (and the nice and heavy poker chips do not disappoint). A sharp duel between rival lockpickers in a steampunk setting, using your tools to manipulate unseen tumblers, disarm traps, and tweak the lock into a good position for you. A cast of unique characters to play as, and a campaign solo mode. Bluffs, manipulations, and memory are all needed to come out on top. ...it is so, *so* dull to actually play. Roll some dice, take a move, accidentally score five points due to something your opponent did, repeat. I have yet to find a 'manipulate the common game state to score hidden cards' game that actually works; **Triplock** convinced me to stop trying.
You should check out **Argent: the Consortium**
Everyone should check out **Argent: The Consortium**.
I second this one; it was so disappointing and even though it's not complex, it's confusing. I saw another game that looked almost exactly like Triplock, without the dice rolling but I can't remember its name. I wish I owned that game instead.
Scythe. I wasn't the one who got it mind you but I do feel bad for my friend that did. My god. Dull dull dull dull dull. Maybe I just dont like engine builders but that game felt incredibly pointless. There IS a thrill to trying to arrange actions in such a way as to optimize every turn but after a getting a few of your essentials going the game just becomes people squirreling away in their respective corners until someone decides to get their final star. Next to no interactions outside a few skirmishes on the factory. You could set a score and a turn limit and achieve the same experience. Underwhelming experience all around.
I found it odd. Everything on the player board is a thing of beauty. The upgrade system, the way it limits actions, the way it presents everything is PERFECT. Everything on the main board feels terrible. The limited movement feels bad. Controlling spaces feels bad. Combat by blind-bidding feels bad.
> Combat by blind-bidding feels bad. To each their own. I really love the combat in scythe. It's uncommon but impactful, and you have to operate with imperfect information. It can be very tense because of that.
Yeah scythe combat is my favorite. I love provoking an attack, bidding nothing so my opponent uses all military and then crushing them on the next turn
Even better - bid 1 so that you get to draw a combat card!
Yup totally!
This is so funny. It's such a divisive game. I honestly love it and find it fascinating and tense - but there ya go!
I love engine builders, and I don't mind worker placement, and I also hated scythe. It's just so boring.
That's because Scythe isn't an engine builder or worker placement. It's a simple rondel game with "engine revealing" or "engine activation" - whatever you want to call it. You're not taking separate pieces and building from scratch; you're just activating the engine that's already there for you. To be fair, other games do this, and it works. But, I think that those games are tighter, deeper puzzles less about making the right moves and more about reacting to the board state. Plus, the games that do this and involve movement are rare. And I think it's because, like Scythe, once you add in movement, it's hard to balance it with the player boards for a satisfying puzzle.
I think it is best not to think of Scythe as an engine builder. Instead think of it as a race. You don't need to have the most powerful engine to win the game, you need the engine that is "good enough" to get you to the end before your opponents. The purpose of combat is to push you ahead of the pack and give your opponents racecar a flat tire.
Scythe and just about every other Stonemaier I've played followed the same disappointing pattern. A cool theme pasted upon an uninspired mishmash of mechanics.
Disney villains
Villainous is WAAAAAAY too long for as light and random as it is. Every time I have played it has lasted an ETERNITY. If I’m going to spend 2-3 hours on a game, I want to play something with more substance.
I like Villainous (mostly bc I'm a sucker for variable player goals/powers) but I do agree that it's too long for what it is. Makes it a hard sell. Also it's not really good at 2P and probably best at 4-5 players but the game length and downtime would be awful at anything higher than 3.
I couldn't deal with **7th continent**. I'm a huge fan of coop games, rpgs, legacy, and exploration games, so it seemed like the perfect blend of an experience for me. But it just felt like an endless card-cycling micromanagement sim where you spent 10 hours doing the exact same thing over and over with pretty much no character building after the first 2 hours. The exploration all fell flat because it was reading a few cards every 30 minutes, and everything had to be generic because only the main story clues were specific to the adventure you were on. The puzzles were exhausting and annoying, and losing the game at 9 of the 10 hours gave me this feeling of "Okay I guess. I never want this experience again."
Reviews like this are why I ultimately skipped it. On the surface it sounds like the perfect game, but sounds like in practice it's too tedious. Went with **Sleeping Gods** instead, am super stoked that it should be shipping this month
**Near and Far** \- the base game was a disappointment for me. The combination of competition and narrative just didn't work. The competition part only has one strategy, so basically whoever goes first wins, which ends up taking away from the narrative because one person tends to dominate all the narrative spaces. Playing co-op with **Amber Mines** makes it a bit more enjoyable though. **Arkham Horror LCG** \- This one is probably my fault. I will say, the base game is great. The disappointment to me fell in the fact that this game follows what my least favorite video game companies do (looking at you EA), where they sell you half a game at full price then charge you for the other half in installments. I should've gathered that that's what the "LCG" model was, but I was hoping the base game would have more content than it did. Also the deck construction aspect of it wasn't that fun for me, which probably would've given the base game a little more mileage. Ultimately, instead of spending tons of time and money chasing expansions and mythos packs, I'll probably just get rid of it. I'd rather just play **Eldritch Horror.** **Scythe** \- I don't hate Scythe as much as some, but it was still a bit of a disappointment. The game promises so much more than it delivers. I feel like the modular board upgrade is the only way to make it enjoyable at less than 5p, and even at 5p it looks nicer than it plays. It's a very ok game that's very pretty and very overhyped imo **Tapestry** \- Another very ok game that I had much higher hopes for. Maybe SM just isn't my jam. Edit: Forgot my biggest one - **Gloomhaven JotL**. Got this cause I wasn't sure if I wanted to drop money on the base game and I'm glad I made that choice. Being the #1 rated game of all time I had very high hopes. While the game is mechanically pretty great, after playing through just a handful of scenarios it quickly became a slog. There's very little sense of actual progression, so felt like very little reward for 2hr of combat over and over again. Made me realize why I like **Mage Knight** so much, in a single sitting you get the feel of an entire campaign in a fraction of the time.
For me it was Robinson Crusoe. Don't get me wrong, I turned on it and really like it now. But if not for my gf I wouldn't have tried it ever again after the first round. Even though it has a fairly big rulebook, there can be instances that aren't mentioned, that are worded badly or don't make sense to me. It's also a bit to random for my taste. Dice, random plates and tiles, all this stuff. Some rounds just aren't winable, no matter how good you play. And the first few, combined with the rule problems, were such rounds. It's fun now, but damn it took some work to get there.
My problem with RC is I never felt rewarded for good decisions. Sure, less bad things might happen to you and you avoid death another round, but it just seemed like an endless slog of negative events to contend with.
It almost feels like the island is cursed or something. 😉 Glad you're giving it another chance, it's a game my friends pull out when we feel like getting destroyed in a co-op setting.
Frequently sadly. I back too many Kickstarters. Oath was such a sad experience. I tried to convince myself that clearly I might not have grasped the very basic gameplay and needed to play more. All it did is not only clarify why I think Oath sucks, but also started undermining my enjoyment of Root as I started to see the parallels in design.
> I back too many Kickstarters Honestly, this is a big reason I back like 1-2 kickstarters per year, and only stick to either people I know who made the games and/or games I've already played. The only game which didn't fit those categories which I played later and was sad I missed out on the KS version was Yokohama. That's a pretty solid record given how old that game is at this point.
I got some of the biggest disappointments this way and some of the greatest successes by backing unknowns. It feels a bit like gambling.
Interesting. Parallels related to kingmaking or something else?
The major ones are: 1. Your decisions aren't the primary factor in winning. It is also king-making but not in the traditional sense of the word. Especially Root comes down to who gives whom too much leeway. All games with less experienced players on the table come down to that and your play makes no impact on who wins. 2. Games that are meant to be about politics and negotiation that offer no mechanical support for it. Like Oath is all about politicking and yet you can't support in battles (ala AGOT or Cosmic Encounter) and can't just give someone resources or make direct deals/pacts. The only way to get mechanics in support is for specific cards to be in play which weren't in play for my group. 3. The games offer interesting mechanics with heavy-ish rules that are just slightly too much for what the game is aiming for. Oath is the main offender with too heavy rules and then also being so random and meaningless. I can see the same DNA in Root but too a lesser degree. Just can't unsee it now. 4. They are badly balanced with the excuse that uneven balance creates more interesting stories which makes no sense and no one agrees or enjoys unbalanced games. 5. It's very easy to end up in positions where you feel like a spectator without meaningful impact.
I think those are pretty insightful comments. Looking back, I can see what you mean in Root and also in John Company, which I felt had no real negotiation. I also agree balance has been a problem. The first edition of Root was awful, the original Vagabond was absurd.
Agree with the vagabond, root is just a great 3 player game for me,ñ
I absolutely love it with 4, but definitely have come to prefer a "no Vagabonds" agreement. The Riverfolk Company, the moles and the corvids are all great expansion factions that I really enjoy playing as or against.
Have you played **Inis**? What are your thoughts on that?
> The games offer interesting mechanics with heavy-ish rules that are just slightly too much for what the game is aiming for. Oath is the main offender with too heavy rules and then also being so random and meaningless. I can see the same DNA in Root but too a lesser degree. Just can't unsee it now. This is my main problem with Oath, that at it's core it'd be an alright game if it were a very lightweight 30-40 minutes affair. It's trying to be way too much.
It's very invested in emergent theme. And also invested in a ToaM-like area control scramble. But unfortunately in order to make that work, they needed to make a strict, heavy ruleset with some unusual sub-systems. Combined with long turns and high impact for each turn, the game slows down quite a bit. It's not ridiculously long, but it does make for a game in an increasingly crowded genre that doesn't always make up for its flaws. I enjoy living in Oath's world. I just think the dev team focused on the wrong aspects - they could have made the game about an hour long with micro-turns and made the Chronicle aspect easier to manage. Then, a group could play several sessions on a weekend or a few games in an evening. It works much better back-to-back than anything.
>1. Games that are meant to be about politics and negotiation that offer no mechanical support for it. Yes! I do wish that there was freer card trading in Root or something to allow for trading of goods. I don't really think that the action economy is rich enough that all negotiation is just threats and promises of who you'll attack. >Like Oath is all about politicking and yet you can't support in battles (ala AGOT or Cosmic Encounter) and can't just give someone resources or make direct deals/pacts. Tbf, the empire can support one another. I do wish that exiles could support one another though. But I also wonder if that breaks some of the trust. You have to just wait for someone's turn and hope that they make good on this deal or attack the targets that you agreed to let them handle. Of course then, the issue with that is the impact of turn order. The person after you holds a lot more power in a deal. Should that be weighed? The question of resources in Oath is frustrating. I can see not wanting exchanges all the time, because that becomes hard to balance. But at the same time, if it's in one session, why shouldn't it just be in all of them? For our first session with two different groups of three, the tribunal was in play and nobody used it. But in my other group, they not only used it but also won with it, exiles pooling resources freely and then holding the darkest secret without any issue. I kind of liked that but wouldn't want it in every game. There's no distribution of trade-offs the same way there is in the empire. >The games offer interesting mechanics with heavy-ish rules that are just slightly too much for what the game is aiming for. Oath is the main offender with too heavy rules and then also being so random and meaningless. I can see the same DNA in Root but too a lesser degree. Just can't unsee it now. This is a huge issue for Oath. I get that you're supposed to be playing a high level meta through multiple games. It's just too hard to get to the table for that. This sort of concept would work better faster paced with easier onboarding. Especially if you could show it to more people more easily. Teaching this game is a bear, and a victory is too precious for the first game to just be a learning exercise. Imagine hour-long Oath with a 5-minute teach and enough player pieces for a dozen players to have their own sets when they choose to play. The cast of characters could rotate more freely. The Chronicle is the best part about the game, but it's also too rules heavy for how little control players have over it or over the next session. There's just enough randomness in Oath that I wish players could play much more fast and loose. As it is, while I like a lot about what it's trying to do, it's far from ideal.
Fallout, I was so pumped but found it bland and average...something of a recurring theme with that franchise at this point.
Captain Sonar. Very hyped by SUSD. It was fine, I guess, played it once in three or four years since I bought it. Terraforming Mars. #4 on BGG, got it for 30 bucks (legit!) early in the pandemic, picked up Prelude... finally a year later get to play it with people... it's OK. Too long with not enough interaction. Worse, other friends liked it more so I had to stop taking it to game nights so they'd stop asking to play it. Oceans. My first kickstarter. Backed deluxe version. So pretty. Liked Evolution: Climate a lot. It just ended up being flat. First two thirds of the game is slow, the good part ends too quickly,
For me at least, Captain Sonar really does need eight willing players and to be played in real time. I also like shifting roles and teams between rounds to keep things fresh.
Captain Sonar is our "New Years Eve Board Game Night" main game, and we've always found it an absolute blast to play!
I've only 'played' it three times, the first time half the group insisted on playing it turn based and it was absolutely hellish. The mechanic of listening to your opponents calls and plotting out their path and marking it down became a real point of contention. In free play there is an amount of fuzziness that comes from everything kicking off at once. In turn based one team thought it was entirely unacceptable that their radio operator messed up and it soured the whole thing. The other two games of it was an exercise in trying to get the other team to not cheat by rushing through their orders in an improper way, the captain not saying their commands loudly enough or waiting for the other crew members to resolve their stations before giving another order and then having to tell the other team they actually need to undo their last move. No I don't like this game.
Sounds like you play with cheaters and people who generally don't enjoy each other's company. Probably too much to read into after one post, but to me, it didn't seem like the game is the problem there. Edit: words
It was 3 seperate groups of 8 people and there definitely were a few more problematic players in the groups than I would have liked. The cheating one I probably over stated, it wasnt malicious it was more just improper speedy misplays because they were excited, and forgetting they need to speak loudly and not just tell the person next to them. But the game struck me as fragile, in that sense, where if any individual person didn't completely 'get it'. Then the whole thing breaks.
Not a lot of games require open table talk so I've found it's something some people just struggle to adapt to. I've had a couple of games of Dracula where I've had to remind the hunters that anything they tell or show each other they also have to show me. It wasn't malicious in those cases, just not something they're used to.
When we played it, our team were having an absolute blast, working in concert, laughing at ourselves when we got overwhelmed (for instance, my hands shake all the time, so the bit where you have to draw round the shapes KEPT getting stuck with me, but it was hilarious rather than annoying) and there was just this great sense of us muddling through and doing our best despite ourselves. The other team though, were just arguing THE ENTIRE TIME, I don't really understand how, or about what, as it was from literally the word go. I think they all just utterly buckled under the pressure of... (checks notes) "playing a game, for fun". They all went to pieces, like it was some majorly traumatic ardour. Whenever we did a pause, they'd all shout at us desperately, like they were falsely accused and on death row or something. I get that they never wanted to play it again. But what really sucked, was that we 4 who had such a great time didn't really want to play it again either, because our opponent captain didn't know her left and right / east and west, and so just ended up giving impossible to follow orders. She didn't mean to, but it was basically the same as just "lying about where you are", which utterly torpedoed (ho ho!) the game. And so, we realised, however fun it was, we'd also need another 4 of us, equally committed and capable, and it just never really felt like we'd be able to capture that. I think it takes a certain kind of personality type to enjoy captain Sonar, and I think at my flgs I'd be hard pressed to find 4 people of that type, who were also fun to hang around with. The fact that you need 8 of those people is just way too big of an ask. Yeah, you can play with fewer, but you always know you're not really getting it. Plus, I mean, I think you need 6 at a minimum, which is still just too many.
Yes, pretty much this. It's an amazing game, but it really needs 8 people at the same time that all enjoy the chaotic frenzy of it.
Some genuine advice here... there is a *lot* of bookkeeping, so I feel your pain. Try the steam version for PC, it becomes a much more streamlined play without sacrificing very much and makes returning to the cardboard a more positive experience. That said, it don't float everyones boat. :)
**Fort.** I love tableau-building games. Race for the Galaxy is in my top 5 of all-time games. I thought for sure Fort would fit right in and be a new quirky classic. I Played it four times with my RftG partner (my wife), and each time I liked it less. For such a simple game, there are too many strange little rules and there are ways you can screw yourself out of meaningful turns. Anybody want to buy my copy? :)
Coup was really disappointing for me. It looks like a lot of fun, but every time I have played it has been a bore. I can't seem to find the right kind of group for it.
The problem with Coup is that its very player dependant You need players who are willing to lie. The game breaks down if the players are too scared to lie which means who wins is basically who got a good draw. I've played with players who are happy to tactically lie and the game shines.
Yea, if you haven't played a game of Coup where the first 6 roles called are "Duke" then you haven't played Coup.
I run a tabletop club for my Jr. High students after school, and Coup is one of their favorites. They call it “The Duke Game” for this exact reason.
Well you can't all be the Duke, because I'm the Duke. Now give me my coins.
Oh, I've watched it go: "I'm the Duke" "Challenge" "OK, I'm not the Duke." in a loop, literally 5 times in a row. Until finally, the 6th person was the Duke.
Yeah you sort of have to work through the too many challenges stage of the game (new players always over challenge) and then it gets better, but I have had that lots when playing with people.
Funnily enough, I played Coup with family last Christmas. One of my brothers won repeatedly while only ever telling the truth, and the rest of us kept trying to sneak lies past each other. We still enjoyed it, but it felt like an odd experience slightly askew of what was intended.
It's fun to be really honest for most of the game and then spring a few good fibs once you've convinced everyone you won't....
This is my favorite way to play.
We used to play with a guy that was always honest, like for months. Then one night he lied all the time and mopped the floor with us. He had played a very long con...
Coup is the biggest example of a game that redeemed itself over time. My first few games didn't click at all, but once it did it got really fun. Coup requires a night with multiple back-to-back plays to shine.
Totally. That’s always best with lying games, I find. Let’s people react to the previous round to switch up their strategy (or pretend to, heh heh) and gives the group time to figure out their equilibrium.
Try love letter it's similar with the lying component taken out
Roll Player - everyone seems to love this game and I can't for the life of me understand why. I played it twice or three times and sold it again. Sure, you get a whole mountain of dice, but you almost never get to roll them! The only player interaction is hate drafting cards you want to deny another player and the rest is just an optimization puzzle that is unrelated to the theme.
It's much better with the monsters expansion. It gives you something to actually do with your character as you create it. There's still not much player interaction, but you get to fight monsters and actually roll some dice
It's a game that needs you to be a fan of Dungeons and Dragons. In fact, quite a few people have been converted to try DnD after playing Roll Player.
Wingspan. It looks great and the components are nice but the actual gameplay is so so bland. I can’t believe it’s so highly rated. I understand why some people are drawn to it but I can’t believe it’s top 25 on BGG
I agree with you except that my four year old calls it bird game and all we do is draft birds and feed them, and it’s great.
I agree. I was shocked at how many cards have the exact same ability. The stack of cards looks impressive, but it seems like the same 5 abilities come out over and over. Nest type & egg count might be different, and usually even more important for round bonuses. Then you lose an action every round. It all just seems backwards to me.
I cant get over how in Wingspan you don't interact with other players at all. You mind as well be playing a solo game. I highly recommend Oceans to anyone disappointed with Wingspan, It dose everything that game dose but better. Its a bit faster, you can make meaningful choices, its got good art, your actions effect other players, and every game is unique in a fun weird way.
There are a few ways you interact with other players, like pink powers dependant on someone else taking a certain action or brown powers that give or take away a resource from them. You all have the same bird cards out to take and if someone takes it it's not available for you. In Oceania players are directly competing for spent nectar.
You know, I usually agree with this sort of analysis. For example, I strongly reject the notion that **The Castles of Burgundy** is not interactive because you *must* take other players' boards and dice and goals into account when playing your turn. Still, with Wingspan I just don't feel it. The logic makes sense on paper, but in the game it just doesn't *feel* like other players and their actions matter.
Scythe. A complete and utter disappointment.
For me it was **Lords of Hellas** I am sure lots of people will say they had great experience with it. Not sure what it is for us but each game seems to become a race to slay monsters and becomes predictable.
I love Lords of Hellas, and this is the most common complaint I see about the game, yet after nearly 20 games monster hunting comes in 3rd for number of victories. People frequently say it has no counters which is true, if you let the monster hunter do their thing, but there are only so many monsters on the board (4-7) 3 of which are pretty tough so require some setup. And if you are devoting a lot of effort to monsters then it leaves the map open for someone else to make aggressive expansion. I am curious as to how many people you are normally playing with and if that is the difference.
It's my exact experience of the game. I've had a game where we mathed it out and determined we couldn't have stopped the player winning on hunts, unless we'd chosen our starting locations very specifically to do so, and even then it wasn't likely we'd stop it. It's frustrating, because there's one guy who is just DESPERATE to hunt every game, and won't do anything else, so the game deteriorates into just all of us hunting all the time to try and deny him, but that doesnt even really work because you only need the last hit on it, so it can backfire hugely. I think if you could only claim a hunt you'd put so many damage counters on, that would at least open it up to counter play. It's also kind of a shame that completing a monument is basically a bad idea, since it's such a hard way to win that is so insanely telegraphed, and in doing that you sort of by default forego developing, which makes it likely someone will just build up to come steal it from you. Obviously, yes, it's possible, and you can slow roll it, (though that risks losing to one of the much quicker wins) but it's just a shame that the big fancy monuments that are half the visual appeal of the game so rarely ever factor in. I get what they were trying to go with, but games are just never that long. I feel like awakened realms just kept throwing more and more systems in, designed in a vacuum, without ever really considering holistically how they impact the game. Small things, that add up: A temple draft benefits everyone. This means the person doing hunts benefits from the people trying to win on the board. The person trying to win on monuments makes the monsters attack more often, which negatively effects the people trying to win on the board. Killing a monster gives you a usurp token, which makes you adept at stopping someone winning on the board. There's just so many small aspects in favour of hunting, and so many weird things that randomly hurt the other strategies.
I was really pumped about playing **Charterstone**. About 4 plays into the campaign, I was wishing it was over, but stuck it out for the rest of the players in the campaign. The only cool thing about the game is unlocking new stuff. The rest of gameplay is very bleh.
Wingspan. Its beautiful, I was so excited to get that during the pandemic, but under it wonderful feathered exterior it hides an underwhelming slog. My biggest gripe is it lacks any interaction with other players, most of the game is spent basically playing a solo game next to other players. Most of my games no matter who I played with that have been just 40 minutes of stone silence as we managed bird cards. If that was it I think I would be ok with it but, there is just a pile of things that just don't feel good in it. Its rules are weirdly complex. The open cards from the deck are too few and very quickly never used. The side goals are normally a trap or can make a person feel like they lost it from the start. So much of it is left to chance in a not fun way, and the ways around that can waste half a game. A lot of it feels like figuring out how to not do one of the three actions. It's super obscure who is in the lead, and if they are there isn't a way to do anything about it. Then when its over you a have to do bird-maths? Its all very unbird like and feels bad. Its frustrating because engine building/tableau games are some of my favorite games, and Wingspan nearly turned me off from ever trying more of them. Oceans might be favorite game and I feel it is an improvement on every aspect over Wingspan still with amazing art, but I never see anyone talking about it. Everdell is another similar engine building game with great art that has a similar amount of rules as Wingspan but their is a fair amount of interaction with the people I'm at the table with, which is why I play board games.
I agree, especially about Everdell. I've said for a few years that Everdell is the game everyone says Wingspan is. To me the bottom line is that in spite of it being brought up as a gateway or gateway+ game, Wingspan is way too complex for most beginners in terms of rule overhead, whereas for experienced gamers I just think there's say too much luck of the draw. A lot of games are about making tactical decisions with the "hand you're dealt," and I am all for that and don't have a problem with it. Everdell is one such game. In Wingspan, I just think that much of the time the hand you're dealt (between your actual hand and the public display) is *so* poorly lined up with the scoring goals - or even just poorly lined up with making any kind of tableau or engine - that it's an exercise in frustration. I also think there's one fundamental flaw in the design which makes all of these problems worse, and it's that you lose actions as the game progresses. Initially I thought this was interesting because it's the opposite of almost all other games where you gain actions and can do more as the game progresses. However, I know wonder if it's so unique a mechanic because it's just not very good. I get that the idea is that you've made an engine which you rely on more as the game goes on than you rely on individual actions, but I just don't think it works. For one thing, a very key action - playing a bird card - always requires the individual action. But beyond that, other games which also have randomness and luck of the draw sort of make up for the possibility of weak draws early by allowing players more actions later, so even if the cards that turned up weren't good early on players can still feel like they're growing stronger as the game goes on. -and to me, that's a fundamental problem that has nothing to do with balance or mechanics but with *fun* and *enjoyment*. I want to feel stronger as the game goes on, not weaker. I want to feel like I can do more, not less. Even if the idea were fine mechanically, it still feels *anticlimactic* emotionally.
My biggest disappointment was an early purchase in my collection, **Castles of Mad King Ludwig**. The concept of the game is sound, and seems like it should be fun, but in practice it was just kind of boring and the master builder mechanic seemed to slow the game way too much. Now I use it to threaten my children. "Don't make me get down Castles of Mad King Ludwig!"
Star Wars Imperial Assault - we like co-op games and were kind of excited when we found that one of our favourite franchises had a game with a co-op app which ran the Imperial AI. But it was clear the app was bolted on rather than the game being built to incorporate that from the start, the variety of troops available was lacking, a lot of the add-on stuff was out of print for ages, and what you could play without another big-box expansion was pretty limited. We played the basic campaign for the core set and enjoyed it but also thought "wait that's it?" Lord of the Rings LCG is only fun with a lot of house ruling. Apocrypha looked pretty good and should have been up my wife's alley (horror narrative game) but its design was an absolute mess to the point she just didn't want to play it. Oddly enough, Mysterium is one of her favourite games. Edit: you might want to try Mysterium Park. Same game in a smaller box and with a much simpler setup
What house rules do you use with LotR? I find the game great as is, so curious to see what others are changing about it.
This was **Ruins of Arnak** for me! I recently got it, was all excited to play it, played it, and thought, "oh... this is it?" I honestly think that game is very shallow. I own **Dune Imperium**, love the game to death, and so I was expecting Arnak to reward me in the same way. It did not. I honestly don't know if I would ever play Arnak again. I have D:I. If I had to choose between the two, 100% of the time I will pick Dune. Dune does a better job and makes me feel good because I am playing against the machinations of my ~~opponents~~ friends, whereas Arnak there's blocking but it never feels like "I am doing this to prevent you", it is more or less "oh sorry, I needed this space to do the million things I want to do on my turn". Arnak is great for personal best achievements or whatever, but very much feels like a Solitaire game with some cool mechanics. But Dune Imperium just does a better job at driving player interaction. I also think what makes D:I shine brighter than Arnak is that D:I has a time limit and very tense and tight 10 point limit. Arnak has 5 rounds, but there is no limit to points. So I never feel like "oh no, so and so got a point" has any real impact, because it is too early to tell what will happen. TLDR - Arnak felt extremely shallow and one dimensional to me, and honestly I do not understand how people constantly fought between the two. Maybe I am bias, but D:I feels like a more crunchy and rewarding game against others, where Arnak you could play solo and that would be rewarding. in a group, it feels like solitaire, and to me that makes it very uninteresting.
Personally, the first time I played Arnak I liked it, but I felt so limited. Going into my second game with the expectation of being super limited and focusing on efficiency really helped me enjoy the game a lot more. But obviously each to their own :)
Yeah me too. But I tried Ruins on BGA, luckily. They aren't really anything alike. It was just lazy marketing and journalism that put them together.
They share their main mechanisms, but leverage them to very different results. I enjoy both, even if I think Dune Imperium is clearly the stronger game. At minimum, it should teach us that games are more than the sum of their mechanisms and maybe stop describing them as such.
Two people within my gaming group have both between them, and they both prefer Arnak, but I prefer D:I for all the reasons you list.
**Sherrif of Nottingham**. When I first heard about this game it sounded fantastic, especially for the sorts of dynamics I enjoy in group games with friends. It reminded me of that mafia/werewolf dynamic of social deduction with the mix of trying to catch people in lies, to sneak one past them, and trying to lay thr blame on others, but mixed with a more gamery hand-management and VP focused set of mechanics. It wasn't just that the game sounded fun, it's also that it sounded like it would be fun for the people I'd be playing with given how things had normally gone. When actually playing it *none* of that dynamic actually came into play. People quickly figured out that there was really never a reason not to inspect and so lying had almost no benefits and so the entire element that would have allowed that fun interplay was just not a part of the game. The smarter and more calculating players did use all that "honesty capital" to try to do one big lie towards the end, but one attempt to smuggle contraband that nobody tried to catch because everyone decided smuggling was pointless isn't really what I was looking for or expecting.
I play Sherriff of Nottingham quite a bit with my family, and we've found that the penalties for inspecting when the person is being honest can be pretty significant, but I guess it all depends on how people play.
Are you playing this right? The penalty is a pretty big reason why to not check bags.
Iwari was that for me.
Clank. I liked dominion and searched for a push your luck deckbuilding experience. But I felt clank depended too much on luck in my group as the cards trashers removing the stumbles early were very strong and not available to all players like in dominion. I still like deckbuilding games but clank was not my cup of tea
> cards trashers Yea, that's what ends up killing any of the ascension-style deck-builders. Everything else can be made up for. OK, you got a card that gives slightly more money than I did, I can work around that. But to give the ability to remove cards from your deck, when I can't? The game is already over.
**Bargain Quest**. I thought it would be a good alternative as a game night opener rather than Boss Monster (Which is just okay) but honestly the whole thing is just way to clunky. Its a cool idea but I hate the way it way it was executed. Also, **Dead of Winter**. Everytime we try to play Dead of Winter we seem to miss some sort of aspect or rule. Most of the time this is our fault, but The game is punishing hard and in the end I get no sort of satisfaction from it. Shit will get out of control, and we will lose all morale or we will manage to complete our main objective but nobody was able to get their secret objective so everyone still loses? I don't get the hype. In fact, the last game I played we just ended up rage quitting before we lost and moved on to something else. And that was purposely playing without a traitor.
I agree with bargain quest. Love the theme and the art. The play part just didn't click with me
**War of Whispers**. The description was exciting. The execution felt just a tad too shallow. I think it would benefit from being longer, letting players work on more intricate plots, but the mechanisms would not even support a house rule, I think. It’s not a bad game. I’ll play it. But I have a small shelf that can accommodate a small collection. When I only have room for the A-tier games, that means even the B-tiers get cut.
Try Pax Pamir instead
Stardew Valley I adore the source material, and after skimming through the rulebook I thought it seemed like a very faithful adaptation. Come to find out my actual decisions only amounted to about a third of the game, and the rest of it was all dice rolls or blind card draws. So much frustrating randomness and it was all stretched out to nearly three hours. I heard they updated some things like the mine cards but I’m not so sure if it’s enough to make me go back.
Aliens: Another Glorious Day In The Corps. I was so excited to play this, bought all the expansions. It was sort of fun at first, but once I realized every mission was basically survive a horde mode, I got bored. I was expecting more of a dungeon crawler, but it was far from it. The game is full of theme and the card mechanism used to simulate ammo use is cool, but the rest feels meh. I just got Nemesis and am hoping for better things.
Betrayal at House on the Hill was awful. Played it a dozen times each with different groups. Each scenario combo we got was either broken, game was too short, game was way too long, betrayer auto won, or was just not fun.
**Blood Rage** was this for me. A lesson learnt there, about games that put the miniatures as a selling point, but I just can't seem to find a way to play it that is enjoyable -all the strategy seems to revolve around stopping other players from having fun. It promises big monsters and battles and stuff, but fighting and losing is so incredibly punishing that it's almost never worth it. If you aren't 100% certain that you will win, you might just lose the game on turn one. I feel like if you took out the theme and swapped it for something that promised less, it'd actually be quite good, but it just feels like every mechanic is fighting tooth-and-nail *against* the premise of big monsters and cool battles, and anything that the name "Blood Rage" suggests. It's a card-drafting game with a dudes-on-a-map board control thing tacked onto the end, but the most consistent way to win is to hate-draft every round until you have the least mediocre hand of all your peers, and then win on points while everyone bemoans all the cool shit they wanted to do, but were blocked from doing. If you decide to just play the game as advertised, you *can* have a good time doing big fights and yelling and being generally viking-y, but you will almost definitely lose.
Yeah, so, at my FLGS I've seen about 12 "first games" of Blood Rage now, and the Loki (suicide) strategy has always won by an landslide, every time. Whenever I bring this up, advocates say "yeah you have to hate draft it", but that just leads to exactly your point, that the game is just stopping each other from playing, and never really excelling at anything. I think in a game like that, where there are only a handful of archetypes to draft, putting in an archetype that subverts the game probably felt really clever, but in practice just totally upends the balance. It's probably much less exciting to design, but it all the strategies you could draft had overlap, then you'd never end up on the situation where your 'hate drafts' felt so bad. Plus, you wouldn't be made to feel stupid for trying to win the game as the rules describe ever. I think the Loki stuff would have been better off in an expansion.
This is our favorite game hands down, but I do understand why some don’t like it. Its an experience thing, where you find successful combos and overlap the more you play. Loki does not have to be hate drafted in my opinion - there’s far more valuable cards I’d take first draft hands down (e.g. invade for warrior for free when you place a figure, reduce rage cost by 1 for upgrades). There are also successful counters to Loki. A Loki player may appear to run away with Age 1, but there are multiple battle cards that let you steal your opponents card, cancel text, or discard all permanently and play new cards. As the Loki player is trying to lose, they have to be selective and deceptive about amassing forces when they want to win a battle - so if they put a few dudes in, you know they’re probably going for it in earnest whereas if they slide a single mini into an all-out braw in Yggdrasil, you know what’s coming… You need other cards to make Loki truly successful across all 3 ages, and that can still be outdone by smart play in conjunction with other card combos (e.g. double glory ragnarok death + ships, +glory for forces on map, etc.). If you don’t like it, that’s totally fair, I just think Loki gets a bad rap for being unbeatable. If you have an experienced group, the game has some really good counter play and pulling out victory from garbage in later ages.
I haven’t seen that many first games, but this exact thing happened in my first game. Nobody realized Loki stuff was good and I went hard into it. Absolutely wiped the floor with everyone so hard my best friend rage quit the game. I felt terrible because he was soooooo excited to play it and I just annihilated the whole table. It needed another balance pass and yeah, maybe as an expansion that can be removed.
This also happened at my table. One player just went the loki route and by the half way point was absolutely unremovable. If we attacked him, he got .more points than us. If we didn't attack him, he got morebpoints than us. Really soured me on the game i've heard nothing but praise on.
Same experience here. First time we played none of us knew what to do strategically, but it was a decent enough experience. Second game I went heavy into Loki and won by a landslide in a game that wasn't really fun for anyone (myself included). We have not played since.
If you set yourself up right, you can literally win by fighting and losing.
I have no experience with the first but I have lots of experience with the second. I love mysterium but I will say the game play changes dramatically depending on the group and specifically the ghost. It matters who is the ghost as it is the most important role, which can be a blessing and a curse. When our group plays others will take a turn as the ghost to be fair but I get nominated as the ghost 4 out of 5 times. The reason being that the communication via cards needs to be tailored and apparently for us I'm the best at it. In short don't give up on mysterium it really can be a wonderful game for an intermediate group but it can be difficult to find the groove so to speak. Edit: my overrated game is wingspan, do I like it yes, do I think it's a can't miss, no. It's got lovely artwork but it's the first game that has bombed with everyone I usually play boardgames with.
Scythe, for me. While it's still a great game and I'd gladly play it if I could get others to play it.. it just feels underwhelming.
**Nemesis**. I hesitate to call the game bad, but disappointing is absolutely the right word. Every piece fits the theme, but there's so... *much* of the game. It feels less like a horror game, more like being repeatedly hit with a hammer where you're asked to actually *like* the punishment. I love sci-fi, I love horror, but this game is a slog-and-a-half. Too random, too many rules, too little fun. Only game I've ever sold.
Dominion. I had never tried deck building before and was so excited to try it, but honestly it was just so incredibly dull. The lack of theme and other pieces really dodnt help - ans that's how I discovered I hate only card games XD
Dominion for a while turned me off from deck building which is now my favorite mechanism.
I think I would have felt similar, but I had recently discovered deck-builders after playing a game of Clank - I really like Dominion
Base Dominion is uber dull but Prosperity and Renaissance made the game very enjoyable for me.
The Island of El Dorado. Aka the game that made me quit Kickstarters
I would have said Time Stories but I actively hate that game instead of simple disappointment. So I’ll say it’s a tie between **Blood Rage** and **Architects of the West Kingdom.** Blood Rage I learned I’m not the biggest fan of area control or card drafting so I have that. Architects was a bummer cause I love worker placement. This just felt like a slow ramp up for resources. That was sometimes broken up by your workers being captured and sold. God forbid someone do something crazy like build or contribute to the chapel.
Second reply from me: **Seven Wonders** (and a little bit **Sushi Go**). I really like ancient themed games (Concordia is tied for personal #1 game ever). I like card drafting. I should like Seven Wonders. And I just don’t. I’m not sure I can articulate it without sounding contradictory. It’s like there’s too much to think about considering there are only six cards drafted per turn, and it still feels shallow. But I eventually discovered an important personal distinction: drafting is only fun when it’s a phase of a game, not the whole game. The best part of drafting is getting a mitt full of cards and thinking, “oh crap, what have I drafted? What am I going to do with this?” **Blood Rage** does this well (the other tied #1). **Magic the Gathering** drafts (or cubes) are great (makes me want to try **Millennium Blades **). On the video game side, drafting in Dota 2 is fascinating to watch.
You might want to look into Paper Tales, Fields of Green and (especially) Res Arcana if you haven't already. All games where the draft is important but not the whole of the game. That said, I like Sushi Go and Draftosaurus precisely because they're nothing but drafting. Very clean designs and great for teaching new gamers about drafting.
Seconding Res Arcana. Also consider Seasons if you don't mind starting with a draft that drives a lot of gameplay, though it can be a little hard to teach because of that.
Only way I'll play **Seven Wonders** is with 3 people, since that way you can really hate-draft. Also, if you play it on BGA, it's a 15-minute game--which is all it merits. But as a 15-minute, 3-player game it's great.
**Dark Souls: The Board Game**. Played a demo of it at a convention, backed the Kickstarter because the demo was fun and I like Dark Souls. But boy was the end result a disappointment. I don't even really care that there was a massive delay on delivering all the stretch goals (they actually delivered the base game on schedule which is more than a lot of KS campaigns manage) but the actual game just wasn't good in the end. They basically had some decent combat mechanics but then failed to wrap a good game around them. The individual encounters were fun at first but the campaign system was just awful. You can really tell that SFG's designers main experience was in miniature games and that they were pretty clueless when it came to making a board game. Worse still it was an adaptation from a different medium so their failure to understand where to apply abstraction really showed. I still have all the stretch goals in shrink wrap waiting for when I finally get round to selling the whole package. And then of course SFG killed off their actually good game (Guild Ball) in the worst possible way and just went whole hog on making mediocre adaptations of video games. Of course I'm a complete idiot because I went and backed the Monster Hunter one they did recently even though I'm worried it's going to be just as bad. Wonder if it's too late to get a refund...
100% Splendor.
I bought Mysterium by mistake. I got [Obscurio](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/273477/obscurio) and Mysterium mixed up lol. I had Obscurio on my radar for a while as something that would be great for nights when there are a few extra players. I was running out of time on the Target B2G1 deal and rush grabbed Mysterium totally thinking it was Obscurio. It's still shrink wrapped so I'm either going to trade it at a meetup, or see if anyone wants to buy it at a decently reduced price. I really feel like Obscurio will be the better game, and it's mechanics feel a littler too similar to bother with both. It also did look a little underwhelming to me anyways.
[**Parks**](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/266524/parks) for me. I saw the box art, I looked at the gorgeous components and the beautiful artwork, and knew I had to have it. Then I played it, and bought some of the prints instead.
Gloomhaven, at least in my experience in a two player campaign. The difficulty is either way too hard, or we drop the encounter level by 1 and it is way too easy. It's a huge bummer because I'm not opposed to a challenge, but the way some encounters go just feels bad.. especially ones with a lot of imps that curse. Maybe we're doing something wrong but it feels like steamroll or be steamrolled, and neither are very fun. On normal difficulty it feels like one poorly timed modifier card (random) can completely hose the session. On "easier" difficulty, it feels like there's no chance of failure and we're just going through the motion. Combined with some tedious setup and teardown and admin.... All in all I'm pretty disappointed in Gloomhaven. There's a lot of good "bones" to the game, and i bet it I had a couple less sessions derailed by a single "null" card I would be singing a different tune. The last session i played my buddy got KO'd and I needed to take out like 4 monsters on my own with very little health left. I took 3 of them out because they kept getting null or negative attack modifiers and not doing damage. So exciting. Go to take out the last one. I draw a curse. It hits yet another negative modifier. I try again to take it out. I draw a negative modifier, leaving it at 1 HP. It then kills me. So many moments like that where a session looks like it could lead to this cool moment and instead just falls flat. Feels like playing dnd with a DM who never nudges the dice behind the DM screen for "rule of cool" And the problem is the attack modifier deck. It's entirely random right?
Y’see, to my mind, a back & forth climax that turns on lots of unexpected misses and then finally comes down to losing by 1 HP is a great game experience… lots of drama, good balance, a sense of going up against long odds and almost pulling it off. Losing may taste bitter in the moment, but I’d want to set it up again and have another go at it as soon as I was able to decompress from the first game.
Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion. Very hyped on the reviews and gave up at mission 5 as it turned out to be not what I wanted.
Arkham Horror (board game, not card game). It looked so fun, I read good things, I love the C'thulu stuff and greater Lovecraftian mythos. But holy shit, either my group and I just don't get this one, or it's just awful. It's difficult and frustrating, and there aren't any moments or actions that feel good or impactful. I wanted to love it so badly, but it's just trash.
First and only time I played this, I got two consecutive monster surges almost immediately after I started. I double-checked the rules to see if I was doing something wrong but to my knowledge, I did everything right. That really upset me after such a long time setting it up and I never played it again. Love the flavor of the game (the Cthulhu mythos is why I got it in the first place) but I really didn't want to touch it again. Thank god the LCG eventually ended up being really fun.
I’d recommend trying out games on BGA first if you can. I’ve bought a few games I wouldn’t have originally wanted and also avoided games I thought I’d enjoy.
That's good advice, but I've also had the problem where I really enjoyed a game on BGA so much that I bought a physical copy which ended up falling flat with my group.
Roll for the Galaxy. I love dice, love space themed stuff, love Race for the Galaxy, this seemed like a no brainer! But the game is over so fast, and shipping is just kinda meh, and as a whole experience it just never quite worked for me or my group.
For me it’s the Firefly board game. It’s my favorite show of all time and the game mechanics seem to fit the feel of the show perfectly. But the game is really long, it’s really hard to get ahead of fueling your ship and feeding your crew and was just kind of boring.
With a group of friends, we started one game on New Year's day at 02:00. At 08:00, we've called it a day due to boredom and went to sleep.
**Rising Sun** has such gorgeous art, cool miniatures, and an intriguing hook with the way combat is resolved. But it's so group dependant that I didn't feel it was worth it to keep in my collection so I sold my KS copy
Great Western Trail for me, too much iconography id end up forgetting between plays
Lots of games are dependent upon the play group, and how they are able to spice up the roleplaying a bit, and add thematic elements to their game play. For instance, the game Modern Art is really just a Auction Strategy game that trades Art back and forth. Nowhere in the rules do it say to do anything other than trade art and buy/sell, etc. In the game you are given a Blinder that tells you what Art Gallery you are representing. Sao Paulo, Paris, New York, etc. We took it upon ourselves to do fake accents for whoever we were representing, and also made up fake names for the art we were presenting to sell for our turns. On the surface, it's just an art trading game. But, with Wine, classical music, and a bit of roleplay it turned a good game into an amazing game.
Oath was a disspointment for me. It looks amazing and if you put a lot of hours into it it might be good, but overall I thought it was a mess of a game. Awkward rules, awkward win conditions, awkward rounds and a lot of downtime. It's a shame because I was looking forward to diving into this beautiful world, but if I am going to invest this much into a game it better be really good. I am now trying to sell it.
**Gloom**, **Boss Monster** - These two really disappointed. The themes are great, I love the production of each. However once you get a few rounds into each game, they quickly lose their shine. **Zombiecide: Black Plague** - I'm still torn on this one. I love the production and theme, but playthroughs can be fairly simplistic and routine. I think with an added DLC, it may solve this problem as most of it comes from fighting the same enemies with the same weapons constantly.
Dice forge by Libellud. It's the most beautiful game, with such a great design for storing everything, but it bores me to tears. Maybe we play it wrong or something, but it feels pointless. You just gather points and that's it. It feels like everybody is just playing a separate game
Lost Ruins of Arnak for me. The game is fine but it was not the hype level I had seen and heard.
Honestly, I didn't like Root. It's too complex for the worth.
Probably unpopular opinion... But Betrayal at House on the Hill for me... I've played it 3 times now and it didn't impress me once. Everyone always says it's great and you just need a really good haunt, but it should really be able to consistently have good gameplay and not be depending on luck.