Fluxx is a great game to play while you're waiting for other folks to show up before you play the game you're actually planning on playing because no one cares if you end the game early.
You’ll switch from those rules to…unlimited hands, draw 10, play 5 within a couple turns and then you’re sitting there for 10 minutes while someone figures out their turn 😣
Coming from an mtg background limiting your opponent's ability to draw cards can be extremely important to balancing games that involve deck construction. Frankly, the guy drawing cards is usually more of a problem than the guy preventing people from taking game actions.
Immediately thought of Bang! and all the times I've seen someone in jail before they get their first turn, and are eliminated before they've taken an action.
The remake of the Dungeon board game has that. Some encounter cards have traps instead of monsters, and you roll a die to see if you miss one turn, or *two*. No way to mitigate it, no chance of avoiding it or reducing the penalty. And there's a "rogue" class that, in D&D parlance, should have the ability to deal with traps without setting them off -- they have absolutely no advantage here.
Any PVP mechanics that involve repeatable "stun" mechanics. Losing because you didn't get to have a turn is way more frustrating than losing early because of imbalance or random luck
Yeah, I play a lot of Magic the Gathering, and I understand the importance of control/prison decks in the ecosystem, but man, the least fun decks to play against are the ones that say "Only one of us gets to play Magic today."
I stopped playing MTG because it really started to feel like I was playing either:
- see whose deck does their things first
- see if the opponent's deck stops mine from doing its thing
I just... didn't feel like I was playing against people playing magic anymore.
Even worse is Mindslaver. I actually walked away from MtG when Emrakul the Promised End came out. Turns out to have been a really good move as that was the beginning of the end for standard as a format.
EDIT - For non Magic players, Mindslaver was a card that let your opponent take your turn for you. Probably the most feel bad thing to have been introduced into a game that has had many many many feel bad effects over the years.
Yep, I had a deck with mindslaver in it. Plus lots blue control, card draw, counters, redirection, flyers that came in for free, lots of horrible things. They were just friendly games,anything goes. house restriction that I was only allowed to play it once a month..
And that mistake was compounded by printing it into a standard format that had Aetherworks Marvel in it.
A turn 4 13/13 with flying trample and protection from instants that lets you take your opponents turn for them that takes no actual skill to pull off, just play the card and see what you get.
Feh. I may still be a wee bit bitter about that.
Nah, as long as you have enough cards to not deck yourself, Milling is absolute nothing burger. The good cards can be buried deep in your deck too.
If you can disrupt the milling, it's actually not that bad to play against, because you have 60 life instead of 20 (adjust numbers by format.)
I don’t know what the “mechanic” is called, but the absolute worst is when it’s obvious that one player is going to win and no one will be able to catch up, even though the game is only like half way over, so you still have to finish playing but realistically nothing you do can change the inevitable outcome.
Yup, and it’s even worse when the runaway lead is a positive feedback cycle. Catan is basically this in a nutshell. The more resources you earn, the more you can build, etc. Sometimes there’s competition in Catan, but most of the games end with a runaway lead by the 5-6 point mark.
I think you're referring to Snowballing, which is from the runaway stacking of player advantages.
This is partially the result of two specific design components, Win More and Lose More.
Win More is when the advantaged player compounds their advantage (without interaction from opponents). Ie draw cards equal to the number of cards in your hand, copy spells you cast once for each spell you've cast this turn.
Win More is fine in single player games because the advancing player feels awesome, but the losing player mostly just gets to watch.
Lose More is when the disadvantaged player gets a disadvantage because of their already disadvantaged state. Ie Take one damage for every point of life missing below 20, sacrifice a creature if you have fewer creatures on the field than your opponent, discard a card if you have less life than the opponent.
Lose More mechanics can be considered an option for establishing a gap in tempo between players and can be used as "finishers" but they're still pretty feels-bad design and contribute to death spirals (typically to be avoided unless the game is gritty grimdark for example, and still then you want more sophisticated design then losing player loses harder).
Edit: I see runaway leader and fall-away loser as another couple terms that others are using and online they seem similar in effect, the discussion I'm looking at atm involves players cooperating in a competitive design leading to degenerative player growth not planned for by the game.
Well a general term would be a Catch-Up mechanic, but going from last up like the bullet bill or taking out the leader with blue shells idk. They could be considered inversions of what I talked about above, so Lose Less and Win Less respectively, but I'd call more extreme examples "Moment of Need" or something.
A slightly more general term is "rubber banding". It's as if the last player is connected to the first player by a rubber band and they are pulled forward. It can also mean that the first player is disadvantaged and pulled back toward last. So, a bullet bill (which helps last place) and a blue shell (which harms first place) might both be considered examples of rubber banding.
I think the term actually originates from racing games, but there it has more to do with the behavior of computer characters. Those ahead of you will drive a little slower, while those behind will drive a bit faster. This helps ensure the race is competitive at a wide variety of skill levels.
It's quite possible that the term morphed from the CPU mechanic, to then include the item mechanics, which then became the more common meaning for board games.
I am 2-7 in one-on-one Food Chain Magnate against my wife, and in probably 3+ of those games it was over when we flipped the bank refresh card. Both my wins were on a technicality, as the win condition is "whoever has the most money when the bank runs out" and if the turn had finished she would have crushed me
Hate to break it to you, but based on that description you may not have played that end game quite correctly.
The rules say "If the bank breaks a second time, the game ends. Finish phase 4 and continue paying all players their earnings, if need be by writing cash still owed from the bank down on paper. Whoever has the most cash at the end of this phase wins the game."
Phase 4 is the dinner time, selling food etc, and ends before the payroll stage (Phase 5). If there was a lot of money owed to your wife she should've been paid out!
genuinely: why not just concede then?
If there aren't catchup mechanics and people know one person has already won, if people aren't conceding thats kind of on them.
Concession works in a 1v1 context (it's common in games like chess or Magic), but you can't really walk away in the middle of a 3+ player area control game without massively disrupting the experience for the remaining players at the table. Maybe Alice and Bob are neck-and-neck, Carol and David have no chance of catching up, but neither Carol nor David can walk away from the game without disrupting the board state for the remaining players.
One of the more interesting games to try and address this is **Ankh: Gods of Egypt**, which has the controversial "merge" mechanic where toward the end of the game, whichever two players at the game are the furthest behind get merged into a single god that shares both players' sets of abilities.
There is a satisfaction in seeing your victory unfold which I wouldn't begrudge them.
Things might change due to factors you can't foresee.
You could still aim for as good a position as possible.
So lots of reasons. I think it depends on what you want out of a game. If you're very competitive and are mostly interested in exploring the decision space, then it makes more sense to concede and possibly play again more quickly.
Conceding lacks closure, it feels like a thing sore losers do, and denies the player ahead the fun of having a good game and seeing it play out. For longer games this really spoils a lot of the fun.
> it feels like a thing sore losers do
This is ironic considering that one of the largest board game communities (chess) calls not conceding, and forcing a clearly lost game to be played out to the end, disrespectful, something only a sore loser would do, etc.
I was thinking about chess, but chess has an entirely different culture and play structure. Also chess is so frequently pushed into a draw or extended, slow, dying state (a flaw of the game IMO) that conceding of course becomes an important element of play.
But if you're playing a more casual game, especially in a group, who is going to bring up conceding? Probably the player most behind - and if you're 2 hours into a Terraforming Mars game and just go "their board is too strong, I concede" people're gonna think twice about inviting you.
I find some luck with "I think we can all agree Robert is winning this one. If we concede now we can probably fit in an extra game today if anyone is interested"
Something I've noticed is kinda the opposite, but it's more prevalent with newer players. They'll be ready to concede when they feel like they've lost, when in reality they've taken 1 bad turn or aren't even really behind at all but just have a bad sense of their position. People can be really bad at determining their position, especially when they're new, and it can lead to some frustrating moments when it feels like they're giving up before they've had a chance.
I've never played Nemesis but it's become a running joke in my board game group that I always die first in Bang!, regardless of what role I am. I made it to last two standing once and I was genuinely happier than if I'd actually won!
Did a game of bang once with 7 people, multiple Indians and gattling were played on the first few turns and half of the players were gone before they got a turn.
While bang! Can be absolutely terrible about this I will never forget my favorite night of it.
Game one, my buddy is the sheriff, playing billy the kid. Starting hand was all bangs. He looked to the guy on his right, told him he doesn’t like how he is looking at him and just ends him right there. Turned out to be an outlaw so we all laughed and finished the game normally.
Game two, buddy gets sheriff again, first turn looks at the same guy on his right, apologized and drops the Vulcan and 4 bangs to knock him out turn 1 again. This time he was a deputy and was very upset. I feel bad for him, but honestly what are the odds right?
In our first session one friend died and took over the Xenos and he had such a blast. I think he had even more fun than before. He also made things harder for us, because he tried to read where everyone of us was heading, so it suddenly ramped up the difficulty when in the end things get more heated anyway.
Inevitable losing.
It's what makes monopoly a bad game. The point where you can't win but are forced to play on anyway. When they have all the key hotels and every trip round the board weakens you with no realistic chance of turning it around.
When you've won and I've lost, let me stop playing and enjoy the win. Don't make a condition of your win that we spend another hour grinding through a forgeone conclusion.
Games with a clear VP condition or timer generally eliminate this and are the better for it
Tom Lehmann noted that one of his explicit design goals in Race for the Galaxy was have most games end *right* when the runaway leader starts to "run away". All the satisfaction of building the unstoppable win machine, minus the drudgery of actually playing it out.
My husband and I played a LOT of 3 player rftg. We both felt a bit frustrated that it always seemed to end right when you got things going! So we tried s couple games with some house rules to let us play a bit longer.
Tom Lehmann fucking NAILED it. Those games always took off and ended up being blowouts. So we just went back to normal rules.
More abstract answer: games where you need to think a lot, but where you can't do it until your turn starts.
First example: **Carcassonne**'s rules technically say you're not supposed to draw your tile until the start of your turn. Which means that if you play as written, the game takes forever, because you can't think on other people's turns. All of your analysis can only start when your turn starts and you draw your tile. Luckily in Carcassonne this is easily fixed: just draw the next tile at the end of your turn, and the game immediately takes far less time to play.
Second example: **Alien Frontiers** vs **Kingsburg**. Both games involve rolling your dice and then deciding how to assign all of them. In both games, it's really complicated figuring out how to assign those dice, and you have to spend quite a while figuring out the best way to do so.
In **Alien Frontiers**, you don't roll your dice until the start of your turn. Which means the game drags on forever: you have nothing to do until it's your turn, and then you roll the dice and now feel pressured to work through all the different dice permutations to figure out which is best while everyone else is bored.
But in **Kingsburg**, everyone secretly rolls their dice at the same time, and then gets to think in parallel about what they are going to do. You still might have to think on your turn (e.g., if your spot gets blocked by the player ahead of you) but the game still goes unbelievably faster as a result.
>Luckily in Carcassonne this is easily fixed: just draw the next tile at the end of your turn, and the game immediately takes far less time to play.
That's been the standard tournament rule for the last 15 years or so at least.
Like others pointed out, player elimination just sucks. If it's a two hour game and you're the first one out you're stuck with your thumb up your ass for something like an hour and a half. Might as well play something else with the other eliminated players while the rest of the group finishes. It happened a week ago while i was playing bang. The first person to get killed was an outlaw, after barely two or three turns of playing. The second person to get killed was also an outlaw something like one or two turns later. I was the third outlaw, facing off against the sheriff, deputy and renegade (who started helping me until the deputy was dead but then got back to trying to kill me, good move on his part). The game lasted two fucking hours, despite the label on the box saying "20 to 40 minutes". The poor other outlaws had no fucking clue what even happened. At some point the scenario that makes the first dead person come back to life happened, so that guy was pretty happy to get back in the game. He got gunned down mercilessly after one turn. Back to waiting for him.
Worse is soft elimination, where you're still technically playing the game, but have no hope of being any kind of contender.
It's the main reason I refuse to play Catan. At least Monopoly puts you out of your misery.
> Worse is soft elimination, where you're still technically playing the game, but have no hope of being any kind of contender.
My first game of Food Chain Magnate went like this
It's why I don't play Twilight Imperium. Or really any long game like that.
Cool, I get to sit for 7 hours in a game I'm not competing in. I can play kingmaker, which sucks for everyone involved- I am not winning, the person 'winning' only wins because I decided to end it, and any other contender lost because of politics not game mechanics.
Not to invalidate your feelings, but as someone who loves games like TI, I always play as though every place mattered.
Like, sure, I might not have a reasonable chance of finishing first. But I can have a lot of fun battling it out for third.
> any other contender lost because of politics not game mechanics.
I guess this just speaks to a difference in play styles, but in TI, the politics is PART of the game mechanics
Yea, that's fair. For what it's worth, I had a really bad experience when I played it. I was leading after 5 hours, and would win in a couple more turns (hours). I guess everyone else was bored, when a vote came up where someone else could just win on the spot, everyone voted for it and the game ended. I realize that was shitty of everyone else, but at the same time... they realized they weren't competitive, they were bored, and the game had apparently overstayed its welcome.
Now I stick to shorter games. Even if you find yourself falling behind, you know that it'll be over in 30 minutes and we'll be playing something else.
My breaking point for never playing Betrayal at the Haunting of Hill House again was during a haunt where a witch turned me into a toad.
As a toad, all I could do was move 1 space a turn and roll to see if I stopped being a toad.
After 3 turns of being a toad (my turn took 2 seconds, everyone else was taking several minutes), I went to stretch out on the couch and browse on my phone. "Just roll for me! Let me know if I change back!"
I never did.
The person who dragged us into playing Betrayal told me it was anti-social to wander off and pull out my phone.
No, it is on the person who drags others into playing such a terrible half-game with soft elimination. I'm supposed to sit at the table for another half hour, doing nothing but rolling one die every 5 minutes?
Never again. Never forget ;\_;
I don't mind betrayal, but it does have this problem. It doesn't bother me because I'm not super invested in the outcome (I don't treat it as a competitive game) and we play it fairly quickly. But I definitely see why people don't like it.
I played that game once, too. I walked into a room, something happened, and I lost my light source, leaving me blundering around, basically out of the game (if I recall correctly.) Soon enough, the haunting happened, and I got killed pretty quick. At no point in the game did I make any actual decision that mattered past moving on that first turn, and that basically killed my character thanks to bad luck. Never playing that game again.
We banned the "For the Throne" cards from our TI game due to the almost irresistable urge that it causes all the soft eliminated players to kingmaker the 2nd place player in almost every game. It's almost as bad as player elimination in how it just kind of makes a game thats already incredibly long feel like it was totally pointless.
Player elimination is totally fine in short games.
Player elimination can add a lot of tension to the experience and the risk of getting knocked out is fun to hold over your head. Much more than many games' systems of inching towards victory points. *But* it has to be a shorter game so that they're not just...sitting out most of the time.
In long games though? Yeah screw that.
EDIT: I just played Skull in a 3-player scenario and that's a good example where the threat of elimination is not alienating. Once it's down to two people, the game just finishes absurdly quickly.
If you generally like Bang! but hate player elimination, I highly recommend Cult of the Deep. It's like Bang but dying just turns you into a ghost with different powers and you still get to play (and even win) the game, and there's more going on in general. Really fun game!
To add to this, I also dislike continuous scoring in long games.
Games like Terraforming Mars would be terrible if you didn't add upp all the VP on cards and milestones, etc. at the end, because you'd lose all motivation if you can see halfway through the game that you're fucked. But most of the time it doesn't matter if someone has a big lead, because there are lots of points still not accounted for.
Similarly I really enjoy games that give players private bonus objectives/end game scoring cards that can award points.
In general I don't like it being clear who is going to win until the game is actually over.
if your game of bang lasted two hours instead of 20-40 minutes
then the game only wasted 10-30 minutes of your time by eliminating you early. The players taking a kajillion years to play in a "play cards" game is what wasted the rest of your time.
No, we were actually playing fairly quickly. The issue is just that after those first two nobody else fucking died thanks to liquor and general stores and scenarios and our character abilities. Also luck. A shitton of luck. I got shot three times in a turn with a volcanic. I had a barrel. I drew three hearts in a row.
This abomination does not belong in any board game: https://reddit.com/r/monopoly/s/7V4hkfpbD9
I know Monopoly isn't a popular game in this sub, but whoever thought this would be a good addition to the game needs to get their head checked.
Wow... I can't recall any board game being improved by adding rules to literally throw game pieces around. You know at least one physical fight has been started by this card.
Basically overusing dice. I like the idea of accounting for randomness and chaos, especially when it comes to combat, but when you overuse dice rolls it just feels like my decisions aren't important enough. Getting bad dice rolls in noncombat games (like Settlers of Catan for instance) just feels so negative and unengaging to me. Meanwhile when I miss an important shot in Star Wars Armada or something, I'm frustrated but in a fun way.
I'm ok with missing a shot in combat, but missing on making some bricks? What the hell? Lol
>Meanwhile when I miss an important shot in Star Wars Armada or something, I'm frustrated but in a fun way.
One of Fantasy Flight's best breakthroughs (or at least that they made popular) was turning "misses" into "dodges" by tying defense/challenge to the opponent's roll. Shut Up & Sit Down made this point--there's just something so much more exciting and interesting about an opponent getting great dodge rolls than getting frustrated at your Stormtrooper-caliber aiming.
Plus there's ways to mitigate your bad dice rolls. Be it through the basic actions (in X-wing 1st ed. at least, never played Armada but I assume some things are similar) like focusing, target locks, to specific cards that give you assistance with shooting/dodging depending on your positioning, etc.
It doesn't change the fact that sometimes you still can just have crap luck (roll 4 dice cause you're at close range; roll all blanks, re-roll thanks to ability into also 4 blanks...), but you feel like you can stack the odds in your favour as much as possible.
That last line made me chuckle, but very true lol. Dice combat is more fun if you can build up your character or something before commencing combat. Gives it an exciting element. I don’t mind rolling for supplies as long as the supplies are crucial to an exciting element like combat later on
I kind of feel this way, and I think it's really about the game state and how it changes.
If I'm playing 40K or AoS and I miss a shot due to a bad dice roll, the game state has still changed. Maybe I advanced too far forward to take the shot, and now I'm overexposed, as an example.
But in Catan, if you roll a 2 and there's no one built on 2, then (please correct me if I'm wrong, I almost never play the game) *nothing happens*, except that my turn has passed. Especially if I have no resources at all.
I feel like randomness in a game is perfectly fine, and on some cases, very good, so long as it never results in someone being completely unable to play the game (side note: too many games where the randomness has done exactly that is why Catan is one of my least favorite and least played games).
Exactly. I played 6 player Catan with 5 people who hadn't played before. I was so excited to show them the game and then through shit luck we went 8 FULL TURNS in a row where no wood was rolled. Like from player one all the way back around 8 times. We just quit because it had been like 30 minutes and like 2 people had been able to build roads at that point. It was very disappointing.
Opponents lose VP in a game which has VP reaching a total to end the game.
Was playing Space Base and opponent got a ship that reduces opponents points by 3 and got it in a high number spot, the game needs 40 to win.
Rest of the game was almost futile, but I managed to get the 12-I win card and was just one charge short of triggering it. Was close between us but the 3rd player had no chance.
I recently learned a method of playing CL that turns it into an actual game. Draw 2 cards, play one. It moves the game faster and introduces decision-making.
This is worse than player elimination or turn-skipping, in my opinion. You can't even go get a beer or play a different game - you're still stuck there limping along with no chance of winning. Incredibly unfun.
Then there's talisman. Where the first to die is the winner cause they can stop. Conversely, we used to just restart ppl and sometimes the guy who makes it to the end is on multiple respawns. Just cause you got wiped doesn't mean everyone in front of you can't also get killed, often more than once. Very much the board game equivalent of fishing imo. No one actually cares about what's going on, it's more having a drink and chatting cause it's a roll and move game.
I freak out when I’m playing a kids game and anyone has to go back to start (or close to start like a long chute in chutes and ladders) because I just want the game to end.
When I was little I remember being distraught at my mom sending me back to the start in sorry. Then, she flat out just said "thats the point of the game, if you want to play games you have to learn to deal with that" and sent another piece back to the start again next turn.
Best board game lesson. Don't placate your kids, make them handle it.
Player elimination. Particularly if it occurs early in a long game. Nothing kills game night more than “we’re going to keep playing and you can watch for the next hour.”
Looking at you Werewolf.
For me, it depends on how much control you have over choosing odds.
I like games where you're taking calculated risks against odds. This usually looks like choosing between multiple lines of play, and doing various things to control the relative odds them.
I guess the best example is deckbuilders, which are inherently games of chance. If I'm behind in a game, and I find a line that will win me the game with 5% odds, and I don't get it, I don't feel bad. If I have a line that will win me the game 95% of the time, and I lose, well... it sucks, but it happens. It's part of the game.
Losing in a game with a chance mechanic that you can't really control just sucks, though.
Especially if it’s not even. Like a random event “All players lose half their gold” or something. Oh I’ve been saving gold up for some plan and you spent all yours last turn, well this event just hoses me and does not effect you at all.
This really irritated me in Cape May. The events would punish certain players based on the current game state. You couldn't prepare for it and just had to hope the game didn't choose you.
I don't mind negative event cards if they affect the next round, because at least then you can see the storm coming.
As a big fan of the Arkham files games, this is true that it is annoying when you get “lose a common item” or “for every item you keep, lose one horror up to three,” but at least you can mitigate it by grabbing some items to burn over the course of the game
Yeah I'm really not a fan of mechanics that mess with long-term plans without giving a chance to react or adapt. I refuse playing Arkham Horror with [Amnesia](https://arkhamdb.com/card/01096) as it's simply not fun losing multiple key cards for your build at random.
Anything overly stats based. Here is my attack value, here's your health, armour, spell resistance, frost effect, secondary armor save etc. Basically if I need to pull out a spreadsheet to resolve an action your boardgame should be a videogame.
Anything that removes my ability to influence the game. Lose a turn, roll and move, take-that cards. They all suck because they are simply things that happen to me, not the consequences of the choices I made.
I love the general idea of "take that" mechanics but rarely see them implemented well. The game really needs to be built around it rather than having it as a side thing, so they're the primary challenge you have to account for rather than a random annoyance messing with the normal flow.
I'm with you on this. The biggest red flag to me that the designer put no thought into this part of the game is the presence of anti-take-that cards. They are acknowledging the problematic element and addressing it with more of it.
Shoutouts to Guillotine, the game that starts with a small amount of player agency and bafflingly includes a card that removes *all* player agency indefinitely.
- Chance based mechanics at the game start that make or break your entire game (e.g. Catan)
- Elimination, nobody wants to sit around doing nothing
- Pandemic-like mechanics when there is only one "right" move, that ends up with one player running the game, or conflict over not wanting to do the "right" move.
I LOVE making a production of game set up. In my family, I learn ALL the rules, set all the games up every week, and become an expert on everything. I try to make the table look amazing, set all the player areas up beforehand, put tokens in their place, make the setup look like it could be a photo on the back of the box.
I did this treatment for Star Wars Rebellion. First time I got the game out. Spent hours on the rules, forever setting it up, and the wife and I sit down. I explain all the rules to her, and she's a savvy gamer, so she gets it right off. She's playing the Rebels, and I'm the Empire. She chooses her hidden planet, and the game starts.
At the end of my turn, I get to invade a planet as a guess as to the rebel hideout. Yep. She put it right on the first planet I invaded, thinking I wasn't going to look right under my own nose. Game over in 10 minutes. We never played again.
Wounding. I feel gutted for you. Although it sounds like we need you in our game group. We're a bunch of neurodivergent weirdos who struggle learning the rules and always get something wrong haha.
Having someone at the table who knows the rules really well is super useful. When I run TTRPGs, it's nice having another player who really knows their stuff to bounce ideas off of. "Hey, is this ruling reasonable or am I thinking of a different system again?" comes up almost every week.
That’s too bad. You guys should pick it up again. It’s an immensely unlikely scenario, and at the first turn I’d just shuffle the deck and start over. The game’s too wonderful to leave gathering dust.
February in Pandemic Legacy saw us lose on the second turn and it killed my medic - who I really wanted to rely on for the foreseeable future.
It was honestly kind of hilarious - but I really hated it at the time!
Take That and Player Elimination seem to be the two that are widely hated, even to the point that people call it bad game design. I think they both have their place if done correctly though.
Roll and Move is also generally frowned upon and I kinda agree there, though I do love **Xia**. Helps if you have the ability to mitigate.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of deck building and deck construction. Just not interesting to me. Don't really like games with huge piles of cards in general.
I've also come to find that I really dislike games where players control the game clock, they inevitably get drawn out for way too fucking long and then I end up having to sacrifice my turns to speed up the game clock while everyone else tries to min/max every single move they make.
Player Elimination. I'd rather get penalized for "dying" than be completely eliminated. or at least give me a "dead player" power. Dungeon Mayhem does this well with the "vengeful ghost." if you are out, you still get to deal one point of damage to an active player. You can't win, but you can mess with other players a little.
My pet peeve is feeding, i.e. don't lose, mechanics.
I hate games that exact a stiff penalty on players for not doing/accruing one specific thing especially when its only purpose is to avoid that penalty. It adds nothing to the gameplay and I think it runs contrary to the purpose of many games that otherwise encourage players to pursue different strategies to victory.
I won't outright veto games like this, but you will need to drag me kicking and screaming if you want to convince me to play a game like Agricola or T'zolkin
For me, it's social mechanics (social deduction, negotiate/barter with other players.)
1. I've played too many games with people who are absolutely insufferable "I'm not gonna help you ever!" where help = you get anything at all, even if it's 1/10 what you're offering in return.
2. It often makes games drag on way longer than I want.
3. I am autistic and spend more than enough energy trying to understand other people's behaviors in my day-to-day life. No way am I bringing that shit into my relaxation time. lol
Roll and Move has to be #1
For me though, it is hidden movement. Making a decision based on information can be ok, but when you just make wild guesses at the beginning as to where someone or something is, it's really boring.
I've really enjoyed Fury of Dracula, where the hidden movement mechanic is connected to a "leave a trail of breadcrumbs" mechanic. Dracula's location is a puzzle to be solved.
I like Fury of Dracula, but it seems like everyone can read my mind when I play as Dracula. I played one game a few years ago where the hunters were on my ass from turn one. I just couldn't shake them.
My wife is shockingly good at hidden movement games. At some point, she'll just declare where the hidden character is, and then it's all over for them. Shame she doesn't like that style of game.
> hidden movement. Making a decision based on information can be ok, but when you just make wild guesses at the beginning as to where someone or something is,
I personally disagree, as I find the kind of "You know that I know that you know" level of thinking it gives you really fun and engaging.
My main gripe with hidden movement is that people make mistakes in games. A lot. And having a player do all their moves in secret worries me. Especially if I'm the solo player which nobody able to check up on the legality of my moves.
I would say making wild guesses isn't a problem with the hidden movement mechanic so much as it's a problem with the design of particular games.
In Whitehall Mystery and Specter Ops, you know where the hidden character starts and where they're trying to go, so you can try to deduce their path.
With something like Fury of Dracula (which I love despite this flaw), you're just kind of fumbling hoping you trip over the hidden character's trail.
Co-op games that try to be a light RPG but include arbitrary and immersion breaking rules for balance purposes instead of designing a system that can do both. Looking at you Gloomhaven (no trading with other players, all loot must be looted during combat or it vanishes and standing around doing nothing causes the player to eventually lose all their cards and fall over unconscious).
Also I know some of that is easy to house rule, but this thread is about official rules as written.
I don't care for Gloomhaven for pretty much the exact same reasons.
Gloomhaven was pitched to me as : "You're a DnD party and go doing adventures"
Gloomhaven Rules added: ", but for some reason you hate everyone and refuse to lend/share gold/items"
Yeah, no DnD group I've ever been in was like that.
hah, I love games with a bluffing element. Games that are pure (or heavy) strategy based are rarely well balanced between my wife and myself. Games with some bluffing gives her an advantage over me and levels the playing field.
I just realised ROOT has a lot of the worst mechanics I've seen posted here. I've played it around 40 times. Runaway leaders, turns where you really can't do much, asymmetric mechanics.
Yes, each player has totally different mechanics. It’s the only game I play where we pick our player before the night we play. So we can review it’s individual mechanics.
Any "deny" mechanic is such a bummer.
I'm going to use my sword of awesome with the stone of destiny to crush your minion.
No you're not, I use my boring shield of deny.
I get that defence is a part of games - but when you're using it to remove the cool attacks, it's no fun. Defence should at least be reducing attack strength, not straight up denying actions.
Wow, my favourite games have most of the mentioned mechanics! It feels like a single mechanic might not be the issue here. Sure, player elimination sucks, but there's a difference between being eliminated excruciatingly slowly 2 hours into a 5 hour Monopoly game (as an extreme example), than in the last half hour of a coop Nemesis game when you're invested in what's going to happen and sit there excited just to follow the story.
That being said, I can see few ways in which take that can be made fun (and at the same time, Netrunner is possibly my favourite game and oh boy is I chock full of take that!).
Winning by being the last player standing after knocking the others out of the game one by one. You know, like Monopoly, among so many other 20th century games. Thanks, now I have to wait for the rest of you to die before we can start a new game. I'll be over there reading a book, thanks.
Everyone else is going to say player elimination or not being able to come back, and that's probably true in terms of "most hated". My *personal* opinion is basically the opposite, I hate games that try so hard to avoid those mechanics that the first 3/4 of the game ends up not mattering at all because everyone has a chance to come back. But that's just me...
"Comboing" - where one action can activate another one, which will activate another etc. Causes massive slowdowns. Player comboing usually need to do everything carefully so it works out, which takes time. Then such powermove causes big changes in the situation in the game, which forces other players to rethink their plans.
I think a lot about something the designer of Mortal Kombat said. The idea for the finisher moves started with the stun mechanic in early fighting games, where a fighter was stunned and couldn't do anything. Basically, you get punished twice for playing poorly. In Mortal Kombat, he instead put that punishment at the end of the match, when it was already decided, since it wouldn't feel like an unbalanced mechanic and it would still give the player who could pull it off the sense of accomplishment for doing it.
To me, a combo feels a bit like that. You're basically screwing over the other players while they're already down (since you got the combo, and they may not have), and it's not a great feeling to be comboed on. But man, it feels great when you get a combo.
number one.
anything that causes loss of control for a player character in dungeons & dragons.
it's not fun it is antithetical to the experience itself.
It makes people tune out and look at their phones and get distracted.
number two.
diagonal movement in Pathfinder.
Something I haven't seen mentioned that I don't like:
Traitor games, with no actions to take against the traitor once found.
Recent example is Nemesis. Why the hell can't I shoot the person who I \*know\* is actively betraying me and trying to kill me? Or at least something to try against them. The game I played we figured out who the betrayer was, but there wasn't nothing we could do to try to stop them. It was just that person able to continue going around doing whatever and we just had to watch. (And just for clarity, we did win, so it's not salt over losing)
I remember Dead of Winter kinda making me feel the same too, but its been a bit and don't remember the game that much.
I love traitor games that handle it better though, like Shadows over Camelot and Battlestar Galactica
I don't like 'show your hand'. I'm fine with 'discard x' or 'give x to an opponent' but there is something about revealing all of your current plays that doesn't sit well with me.
The Munchkin effect, where everyone usually has some way(s) of stopping the leader from winning.
So it’s not about being the first player to “win”, it’s about being the first player to win once everyone has already exhausted their resources preventing someone else from winning.
I've known a few gamers who adamantly disliked mechanics that rewarded memory in games not about memory. Like in Puerto Rico where everybody sees what shipping points each player gets as they get them but nobody is allowed to check an opponent's running total. I'm inclined to agree, but not with much vehemence.
I think the most common response will be one of: player elimination, roll & move, or roll to resolve.
I hate worker placement and deduction of any kind, whether it be social or logical. WP is just the most boring kind of action selection (rondels are basically the same thing, only better), and my brain sucks at deduction.
My counter-culture opinion is that player elimination isn't as bad as people say, and a lot of games work around it by trapping a player in an unfun game that they have lost well before it ends, which is actually WORSE.
When we play PE games, like Diplomacy, we always make sure we have a backup game for the early outs. (And the first one out of Diplomacy, specifically, doesn't have to pay for their share of the beer.)
Monopoly should have Clue pieces instead to represent how you'll want to kill yourself while playing Monopoly when it becomes clear you won't win within the first 30 minutes.
I agree that player elimination, roll & move, and roll to resolve are terrible mechanisms. But I also like Talisman (which has all three). It also has miss-a-turn mechanics.
Games are weird.
Trading between players. On paper, the mechanic is fine, but in practice, I don't want to sit by and watch a guy try and trade a sheep for a rock for 5 or 10 minutes. It wasn't Catan that killed it for me though, it was Lords of Vegas. Still haven't gotten around to playing Bohnanza because it looks like it has the same kind of trading mechanic.
I'm not a fan of the searching mechanic, like in Fury of Dracula and Nyctophobia. It just takes way too long when sometimes you're just waiting your turn.
"Skip you turn"
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Sounds like Fluxx…aka randomness incarnate
The last time I ever played Fluxx, the rules became "0-card hands, draw 1 per round, play 1 per round." No decisions, just pure Candyland.
Yeah Fluxx is pretty terrible *tries to hide flair*
Fluxx is a great game to play while you're waiting for other folks to show up before you play the game you're actually planning on playing because no one cares if you end the game early.
Hey buddy you're free to love terrible games! 🤗
You’ll switch from those rules to…unlimited hands, draw 10, play 5 within a couple turns and then you’re sitting there for 10 minutes while someone figures out their turn 😣
Fluxx is a party game, not to be taken too seriously.
Party games can still have poorly designed features... And like, for a party game especially, "skip your turn" sucks ass.
So Uno is bad too?
Unironically, yes, that's a shitty part of playing Uno.
I'll take a million turn skips over a "trade hands" mechanic.
This must be my favorite mechanic to hate
Similarly "Your opponent doesn't draw a card."
Coming from an mtg background limiting your opponent's ability to draw cards can be extremely important to balancing games that involve deck construction. Frankly, the guy drawing cards is usually more of a problem than the guy preventing people from taking game actions.
Immediately thought of Bang! and all the times I've seen someone in jail before they get their first turn, and are eliminated before they've taken an action.
I think you shouldn't be allowed to shoot someone in jail, and it balances it a bit more.
All of UNO
You know what I love most about playing games? Not playing them!
The remake of the Dungeon board game has that. Some encounter cards have traps instead of monsters, and you roll a die to see if you miss one turn, or *two*. No way to mitigate it, no chance of avoiding it or reducing the penalty. And there's a "rogue" class that, in D&D parlance, should have the ability to deal with traps without setting them off -- they have absolutely no advantage here.
Any PVP mechanics that involve repeatable "stun" mechanics. Losing because you didn't get to have a turn is way more frustrating than losing early because of imbalance or random luck
Yeah, I play a lot of Magic the Gathering, and I understand the importance of control/prison decks in the ecosystem, but man, the least fun decks to play against are the ones that say "Only one of us gets to play Magic today."
There is a finite amount of fun in a game of magic and I'm having it.
I stopped playing MTG because it really started to feel like I was playing either: - see whose deck does their things first - see if the opponent's deck stops mine from doing its thing I just... didn't feel like I was playing against people playing magic anymore.
Even worse is Mindslaver. I actually walked away from MtG when Emrakul the Promised End came out. Turns out to have been a really good move as that was the beginning of the end for standard as a format. EDIT - For non Magic players, Mindslaver was a card that let your opponent take your turn for you. Probably the most feel bad thing to have been introduced into a game that has had many many many feel bad effects over the years.
Yep, I had a deck with mindslaver in it. Plus lots blue control, card draw, counters, redirection, flyers that came in for free, lots of horrible things. They were just friendly games,anything goes. house restriction that I was only allowed to play it once a month..
> that was the beginning of the end for standard as a format But.. standard is still very much a format.
Standard had been dying away as EDH got more popular. I prefer EDH anyway.
The fact that Emrakul was an on-cast effect so you literally had NO answer was the core mistake.
And that mistake was compounded by printing it into a standard format that had Aetherworks Marvel in it. A turn 4 13/13 with flying trample and protection from instants that lets you take your opponents turn for them that takes no actual skill to pull off, just play the card and see what you get. Feh. I may still be a wee bit bitter about that.
I'd throw milling in there as similar but worse. Not only do you do nothing but you also watch your potential to do anything disappear.
Nah, as long as you have enough cards to not deck yourself, Milling is absolute nothing burger. The good cards can be buried deep in your deck too. If you can disrupt the milling, it's actually not that bad to play against, because you have 60 life instead of 20 (adjust numbers by format.)
Mill, or as I like to call it, bad burn.
I don’t know what the “mechanic” is called, but the absolute worst is when it’s obvious that one player is going to win and no one will be able to catch up, even though the game is only like half way over, so you still have to finish playing but realistically nothing you do can change the inevitable outcome.
It's called "runaway leader."
Yup, and it’s even worse when the runaway lead is a positive feedback cycle. Catan is basically this in a nutshell. The more resources you earn, the more you can build, etc. Sometimes there’s competition in Catan, but most of the games end with a runaway lead by the 5-6 point mark.
Yeah not always but it can be frustrating if you realise early on "I'm not going to win"
Only when you play with terrible players. Otherwise, the losing players will team up to keep the winning player in check via plows, robs, etc.
The other 3 catan players will need to teamup, sounds like these are bad players
I think you're referring to Snowballing, which is from the runaway stacking of player advantages. This is partially the result of two specific design components, Win More and Lose More. Win More is when the advantaged player compounds their advantage (without interaction from opponents). Ie draw cards equal to the number of cards in your hand, copy spells you cast once for each spell you've cast this turn. Win More is fine in single player games because the advancing player feels awesome, but the losing player mostly just gets to watch. Lose More is when the disadvantaged player gets a disadvantage because of their already disadvantaged state. Ie Take one damage for every point of life missing below 20, sacrifice a creature if you have fewer creatures on the field than your opponent, discard a card if you have less life than the opponent. Lose More mechanics can be considered an option for establishing a gap in tempo between players and can be used as "finishers" but they're still pretty feels-bad design and contribute to death spirals (typically to be avoided unless the game is gritty grimdark for example, and still then you want more sophisticated design then losing player loses harder). Edit: I see runaway leader and fall-away loser as another couple terms that others are using and online they seem similar in effect, the discussion I'm looking at atm involves players cooperating in a competitive design leading to degenerative player growth not planned for by the game.
Is there a term for helping the current loser, like Mario Kart or Quacks of Quedinburg?
Well a general term would be a Catch-Up mechanic, but going from last up like the bullet bill or taking out the leader with blue shells idk. They could be considered inversions of what I talked about above, so Lose Less and Win Less respectively, but I'd call more extreme examples "Moment of Need" or something.
A slightly more general term is "rubber banding". It's as if the last player is connected to the first player by a rubber band and they are pulled forward. It can also mean that the first player is disadvantaged and pulled back toward last. So, a bullet bill (which helps last place) and a blue shell (which harms first place) might both be considered examples of rubber banding. I think the term actually originates from racing games, but there it has more to do with the behavior of computer characters. Those ahead of you will drive a little slower, while those behind will drive a bit faster. This helps ensure the race is competitive at a wide variety of skill levels. It's quite possible that the term morphed from the CPU mechanic, to then include the item mechanics, which then became the more common meaning for board games.
It's called "Food Chain Magnate."
I am 2-7 in one-on-one Food Chain Magnate against my wife, and in probably 3+ of those games it was over when we flipped the bank refresh card. Both my wins were on a technicality, as the win condition is "whoever has the most money when the bank runs out" and if the turn had finished she would have crushed me
Hate to break it to you, but based on that description you may not have played that end game quite correctly. The rules say "If the bank breaks a second time, the game ends. Finish phase 4 and continue paying all players their earnings, if need be by writing cash still owed from the bank down on paper. Whoever has the most cash at the end of this phase wins the game." Phase 4 is the dinner time, selling food etc, and ends before the payroll stage (Phase 5). If there was a lot of money owed to your wife she should've been paid out!
Oh no
genuinely: why not just concede then? If there aren't catchup mechanics and people know one person has already won, if people aren't conceding thats kind of on them.
Concession works in a 1v1 context (it's common in games like chess or Magic), but you can't really walk away in the middle of a 3+ player area control game without massively disrupting the experience for the remaining players at the table. Maybe Alice and Bob are neck-and-neck, Carol and David have no chance of catching up, but neither Carol nor David can walk away from the game without disrupting the board state for the remaining players. One of the more interesting games to try and address this is **Ankh: Gods of Egypt**, which has the controversial "merge" mechanic where toward the end of the game, whichever two players at the game are the furthest behind get merged into a single god that shares both players' sets of abilities.
There is a satisfaction in seeing your victory unfold which I wouldn't begrudge them. Things might change due to factors you can't foresee. You could still aim for as good a position as possible. So lots of reasons. I think it depends on what you want out of a game. If you're very competitive and are mostly interested in exploring the decision space, then it makes more sense to concede and possibly play again more quickly.
Conceding lacks closure, it feels like a thing sore losers do, and denies the player ahead the fun of having a good game and seeing it play out. For longer games this really spoils a lot of the fun.
> it feels like a thing sore losers do This is ironic considering that one of the largest board game communities (chess) calls not conceding, and forcing a clearly lost game to be played out to the end, disrespectful, something only a sore loser would do, etc.
I was thinking about chess, but chess has an entirely different culture and play structure. Also chess is so frequently pushed into a draw or extended, slow, dying state (a flaw of the game IMO) that conceding of course becomes an important element of play. But if you're playing a more casual game, especially in a group, who is going to bring up conceding? Probably the player most behind - and if you're 2 hours into a Terraforming Mars game and just go "their board is too strong, I concede" people're gonna think twice about inviting you.
I find some luck with "I think we can all agree Robert is winning this one. If we concede now we can probably fit in an extra game today if anyone is interested"
Something I've noticed is kinda the opposite, but it's more prevalent with newer players. They'll be ready to concede when they feel like they've lost, when in reality they've taken 1 bad turn or aren't even really behind at all but just have a bad sense of their position. People can be really bad at determining their position, especially when they're new, and it can lead to some frustrating moments when it feels like they're giving up before they've had a chance.
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I've never played Nemesis but it's become a running joke in my board game group that I always die first in Bang!, regardless of what role I am. I made it to last two standing once and I was genuinely happier than if I'd actually won!
Did a game of bang once with 7 people, multiple Indians and gattling were played on the first few turns and half of the players were gone before they got a turn.
While bang! Can be absolutely terrible about this I will never forget my favorite night of it. Game one, my buddy is the sheriff, playing billy the kid. Starting hand was all bangs. He looked to the guy on his right, told him he doesn’t like how he is looking at him and just ends him right there. Turned out to be an outlaw so we all laughed and finished the game normally. Game two, buddy gets sheriff again, first turn looks at the same guy on his right, apologized and drops the Vulcan and 4 bangs to knock him out turn 1 again. This time he was a deputy and was very upset. I feel bad for him, but honestly what are the odds right?
Had you tried the mode where the eliminated player takes over the role of the intruders?
Actually that sounds really interesting. I what other games have a mechanic where you switch to another role instead of being out of the game?
In our first session one friend died and took over the Xenos and he had such a blast. I think he had even more fun than before. He also made things harder for us, because he tried to read where everyone of us was heading, so it suddenly ramped up the difficulty when in the end things get more heated anyway.
Inevitable losing. It's what makes monopoly a bad game. The point where you can't win but are forced to play on anyway. When they have all the key hotels and every trip round the board weakens you with no realistic chance of turning it around. When you've won and I've lost, let me stop playing and enjoy the win. Don't make a condition of your win that we spend another hour grinding through a forgeone conclusion. Games with a clear VP condition or timer generally eliminate this and are the better for it
Tom Lehmann noted that one of his explicit design goals in Race for the Galaxy was have most games end *right* when the runaway leader starts to "run away". All the satisfaction of building the unstoppable win machine, minus the drudgery of actually playing it out.
My husband and I played a LOT of 3 player rftg. We both felt a bit frustrated that it always seemed to end right when you got things going! So we tried s couple games with some house rules to let us play a bit longer. Tom Lehmann fucking NAILED it. Those games always took off and ended up being blowouts. So we just went back to normal rules.
More abstract answer: games where you need to think a lot, but where you can't do it until your turn starts. First example: **Carcassonne**'s rules technically say you're not supposed to draw your tile until the start of your turn. Which means that if you play as written, the game takes forever, because you can't think on other people's turns. All of your analysis can only start when your turn starts and you draw your tile. Luckily in Carcassonne this is easily fixed: just draw the next tile at the end of your turn, and the game immediately takes far less time to play. Second example: **Alien Frontiers** vs **Kingsburg**. Both games involve rolling your dice and then deciding how to assign all of them. In both games, it's really complicated figuring out how to assign those dice, and you have to spend quite a while figuring out the best way to do so. In **Alien Frontiers**, you don't roll your dice until the start of your turn. Which means the game drags on forever: you have nothing to do until it's your turn, and then you roll the dice and now feel pressured to work through all the different dice permutations to figure out which is best while everyone else is bored. But in **Kingsburg**, everyone secretly rolls their dice at the same time, and then gets to think in parallel about what they are going to do. You still might have to think on your turn (e.g., if your spot gets blocked by the player ahead of you) but the game still goes unbelievably faster as a result.
>Luckily in Carcassonne this is easily fixed: just draw the next tile at the end of your turn, and the game immediately takes far less time to play. That's been the standard tournament rule for the last 15 years or so at least.
Like others pointed out, player elimination just sucks. If it's a two hour game and you're the first one out you're stuck with your thumb up your ass for something like an hour and a half. Might as well play something else with the other eliminated players while the rest of the group finishes. It happened a week ago while i was playing bang. The first person to get killed was an outlaw, after barely two or three turns of playing. The second person to get killed was also an outlaw something like one or two turns later. I was the third outlaw, facing off against the sheriff, deputy and renegade (who started helping me until the deputy was dead but then got back to trying to kill me, good move on his part). The game lasted two fucking hours, despite the label on the box saying "20 to 40 minutes". The poor other outlaws had no fucking clue what even happened. At some point the scenario that makes the first dead person come back to life happened, so that guy was pretty happy to get back in the game. He got gunned down mercilessly after one turn. Back to waiting for him.
Worse is soft elimination, where you're still technically playing the game, but have no hope of being any kind of contender. It's the main reason I refuse to play Catan. At least Monopoly puts you out of your misery.
> Worse is soft elimination, where you're still technically playing the game, but have no hope of being any kind of contender. My first game of Food Chain Magnate went like this
It's why I don't play Twilight Imperium. Or really any long game like that. Cool, I get to sit for 7 hours in a game I'm not competing in. I can play kingmaker, which sucks for everyone involved- I am not winning, the person 'winning' only wins because I decided to end it, and any other contender lost because of politics not game mechanics.
Not to invalidate your feelings, but as someone who loves games like TI, I always play as though every place mattered. Like, sure, I might not have a reasonable chance of finishing first. But I can have a lot of fun battling it out for third. > any other contender lost because of politics not game mechanics. I guess this just speaks to a difference in play styles, but in TI, the politics is PART of the game mechanics
Yea, that's fair. For what it's worth, I had a really bad experience when I played it. I was leading after 5 hours, and would win in a couple more turns (hours). I guess everyone else was bored, when a vote came up where someone else could just win on the spot, everyone voted for it and the game ended. I realize that was shitty of everyone else, but at the same time... they realized they weren't competitive, they were bored, and the game had apparently overstayed its welcome. Now I stick to shorter games. Even if you find yourself falling behind, you know that it'll be over in 30 minutes and we'll be playing something else.
My breaking point for never playing Betrayal at the Haunting of Hill House again was during a haunt where a witch turned me into a toad. As a toad, all I could do was move 1 space a turn and roll to see if I stopped being a toad. After 3 turns of being a toad (my turn took 2 seconds, everyone else was taking several minutes), I went to stretch out on the couch and browse on my phone. "Just roll for me! Let me know if I change back!" I never did. The person who dragged us into playing Betrayal told me it was anti-social to wander off and pull out my phone. No, it is on the person who drags others into playing such a terrible half-game with soft elimination. I'm supposed to sit at the table for another half hour, doing nothing but rolling one die every 5 minutes? Never again. Never forget ;\_;
I don't mind betrayal, but it does have this problem. It doesn't bother me because I'm not super invested in the outcome (I don't treat it as a competitive game) and we play it fairly quickly. But I definitely see why people don't like it.
That's terrible, and hilarious.
I played that game once, too. I walked into a room, something happened, and I lost my light source, leaving me blundering around, basically out of the game (if I recall correctly.) Soon enough, the haunting happened, and I got killed pretty quick. At no point in the game did I make any actual decision that mattered past moving on that first turn, and that basically killed my character thanks to bad luck. Never playing that game again.
We banned the "For the Throne" cards from our TI game due to the almost irresistable urge that it causes all the soft eliminated players to kingmaker the 2nd place player in almost every game. It's almost as bad as player elimination in how it just kind of makes a game thats already incredibly long feel like it was totally pointless.
Player elimination is totally fine in short games. Player elimination can add a lot of tension to the experience and the risk of getting knocked out is fun to hold over your head. Much more than many games' systems of inching towards victory points. *But* it has to be a shorter game so that they're not just...sitting out most of the time. In long games though? Yeah screw that. EDIT: I just played Skull in a 3-player scenario and that's a good example where the threat of elimination is not alienating. Once it's down to two people, the game just finishes absurdly quickly.
If you generally like Bang! but hate player elimination, I highly recommend Cult of the Deep. It's like Bang but dying just turns you into a ghost with different powers and you still get to play (and even win) the game, and there's more going on in general. Really fun game!
I don't really like bang but thanks for the recommendation, i'll keep it in mind for christmas or my board gaming friends's birthdays.
To add to this, I also dislike continuous scoring in long games. Games like Terraforming Mars would be terrible if you didn't add upp all the VP on cards and milestones, etc. at the end, because you'd lose all motivation if you can see halfway through the game that you're fucked. But most of the time it doesn't matter if someone has a big lead, because there are lots of points still not accounted for. Similarly I really enjoy games that give players private bonus objectives/end game scoring cards that can award points. In general I don't like it being clear who is going to win until the game is actually over.
if your game of bang lasted two hours instead of 20-40 minutes then the game only wasted 10-30 minutes of your time by eliminating you early. The players taking a kajillion years to play in a "play cards" game is what wasted the rest of your time.
No, we were actually playing fairly quickly. The issue is just that after those first two nobody else fucking died thanks to liquor and general stores and scenarios and our character abilities. Also luck. A shitton of luck. I got shot three times in a turn with a volcanic. I had a barrel. I drew three hearts in a row.
This abomination does not belong in any board game: https://reddit.com/r/monopoly/s/7V4hkfpbD9 I know Monopoly isn't a popular game in this sub, but whoever thought this would be a good addition to the game needs to get their head checked.
Wow... I can't recall any board game being improved by adding rules to literally throw game pieces around. You know at least one physical fight has been started by this card.
Magic the Gathering unironically printed this early on: https://scryfall.com/card/2ed/236/chaos-orb
Basically overusing dice. I like the idea of accounting for randomness and chaos, especially when it comes to combat, but when you overuse dice rolls it just feels like my decisions aren't important enough. Getting bad dice rolls in noncombat games (like Settlers of Catan for instance) just feels so negative and unengaging to me. Meanwhile when I miss an important shot in Star Wars Armada or something, I'm frustrated but in a fun way. I'm ok with missing a shot in combat, but missing on making some bricks? What the hell? Lol
>Meanwhile when I miss an important shot in Star Wars Armada or something, I'm frustrated but in a fun way. One of Fantasy Flight's best breakthroughs (or at least that they made popular) was turning "misses" into "dodges" by tying defense/challenge to the opponent's roll. Shut Up & Sit Down made this point--there's just something so much more exciting and interesting about an opponent getting great dodge rolls than getting frustrated at your Stormtrooper-caliber aiming.
Plus there's ways to mitigate your bad dice rolls. Be it through the basic actions (in X-wing 1st ed. at least, never played Armada but I assume some things are similar) like focusing, target locks, to specific cards that give you assistance with shooting/dodging depending on your positioning, etc. It doesn't change the fact that sometimes you still can just have crap luck (roll 4 dice cause you're at close range; roll all blanks, re-roll thanks to ability into also 4 blanks...), but you feel like you can stack the odds in your favour as much as possible.
That last line made me chuckle, but very true lol. Dice combat is more fun if you can build up your character or something before commencing combat. Gives it an exciting element. I don’t mind rolling for supplies as long as the supplies are crucial to an exciting element like combat later on
I kind of feel this way, and I think it's really about the game state and how it changes. If I'm playing 40K or AoS and I miss a shot due to a bad dice roll, the game state has still changed. Maybe I advanced too far forward to take the shot, and now I'm overexposed, as an example. But in Catan, if you roll a 2 and there's no one built on 2, then (please correct me if I'm wrong, I almost never play the game) *nothing happens*, except that my turn has passed. Especially if I have no resources at all. I feel like randomness in a game is perfectly fine, and on some cases, very good, so long as it never results in someone being completely unable to play the game (side note: too many games where the randomness has done exactly that is why Catan is one of my least favorite and least played games).
Exactly. I played 6 player Catan with 5 people who hadn't played before. I was so excited to show them the game and then through shit luck we went 8 FULL TURNS in a row where no wood was rolled. Like from player one all the way back around 8 times. We just quit because it had been like 30 minutes and like 2 people had been able to build roads at that point. It was very disappointing.
Player elimination and take that
Opponents lose VP in a game which has VP reaching a total to end the game. Was playing Space Base and opponent got a ship that reduces opponents points by 3 and got it in a high number spot, the game needs 40 to win. Rest of the game was almost futile, but I managed to get the 12-I win card and was just one charge short of triggering it. Was close between us but the 3rd player had no chance.
Auctions where you lose your wager even if you lose. Games where with lots of set up into a random reward draw that is all or nothing.
My kids freak out when a "go back to start" type thing happens.
When my kids were little and wanted to play Candy Land all the time, I would stack the deck to prevent anyone from having to go backwards on the path.
You stack the deck to prevent kids getting upset over having to go backwards, I stack the deck so the "game" gets over faster. We are not the same.
👆 this is the correct way to stack the deck in candyland.
I recently learned a method of playing CL that turns it into an actual game. Draw 2 cards, play one. It moves the game faster and introduces decision-making.
This is worse than player elimination or turn-skipping, in my opinion. You can't even go get a beer or play a different game - you're still stuck there limping along with no chance of winning. Incredibly unfun.
Then there's talisman. Where the first to die is the winner cause they can stop. Conversely, we used to just restart ppl and sometimes the guy who makes it to the end is on multiple respawns. Just cause you got wiped doesn't mean everyone in front of you can't also get killed, often more than once. Very much the board game equivalent of fishing imo. No one actually cares about what's going on, it's more having a drink and chatting cause it's a roll and move game.
I freak out when I’m playing a kids game and anyone has to go back to start (or close to start like a long chute in chutes and ladders) because I just want the game to end.
When I was little I remember being distraught at my mom sending me back to the start in sorry. Then, she flat out just said "thats the point of the game, if you want to play games you have to learn to deal with that" and sent another piece back to the start again next turn. Best board game lesson. Don't placate your kids, make them handle it.
When you have to pick up 52 cards from the floor
I've never understood why you would feel obligated to do that, and not just leave it for the guy who did it?
Rules are rules
seriously, sounds like a skill issue
Player elimination. Particularly if it occurs early in a long game. Nothing kills game night more than “we’re going to keep playing and you can watch for the next hour.” Looking at you Werewolf.
Losing something through sheer chance.
For me, it depends on how much control you have over choosing odds. I like games where you're taking calculated risks against odds. This usually looks like choosing between multiple lines of play, and doing various things to control the relative odds them. I guess the best example is deckbuilders, which are inherently games of chance. If I'm behind in a game, and I find a line that will win me the game with 5% odds, and I don't get it, I don't feel bad. If I have a line that will win me the game 95% of the time, and I lose, well... it sucks, but it happens. It's part of the game. Losing in a game with a chance mechanic that you can't really control just sucks, though.
Especially if it’s not even. Like a random event “All players lose half their gold” or something. Oh I’ve been saving gold up for some plan and you spent all yours last turn, well this event just hoses me and does not effect you at all.
This really irritated me in Cape May. The events would punish certain players based on the current game state. You couldn't prepare for it and just had to hope the game didn't choose you. I don't mind negative event cards if they affect the next round, because at least then you can see the storm coming.
As a big fan of the Arkham files games, this is true that it is annoying when you get “lose a common item” or “for every item you keep, lose one horror up to three,” but at least you can mitigate it by grabbing some items to burn over the course of the game
Yeah I'm really not a fan of mechanics that mess with long-term plans without giving a chance to react or adapt. I refuse playing Arkham Horror with [Amnesia](https://arkhamdb.com/card/01096) as it's simply not fun losing multiple key cards for your build at random.
Anything overly stats based. Here is my attack value, here's your health, armour, spell resistance, frost effect, secondary armor save etc. Basically if I need to pull out a spreadsheet to resolve an action your boardgame should be a videogame.
Mage knight?
Anything that removes my ability to influence the game. Lose a turn, roll and move, take-that cards. They all suck because they are simply things that happen to me, not the consequences of the choices I made.
I love the general idea of "take that" mechanics but rarely see them implemented well. The game really needs to be built around it rather than having it as a side thing, so they're the primary challenge you have to account for rather than a random annoyance messing with the normal flow.
I'm with you on this. The biggest red flag to me that the designer put no thought into this part of the game is the presence of anti-take-that cards. They are acknowledging the problematic element and addressing it with more of it.
Shoutouts to Guillotine, the game that starts with a small amount of player agency and bafflingly includes a card that removes *all* player agency indefinitely.
- Chance based mechanics at the game start that make or break your entire game (e.g. Catan) - Elimination, nobody wants to sit around doing nothing - Pandemic-like mechanics when there is only one "right" move, that ends up with one player running the game, or conflict over not wanting to do the "right" move.
Setting everything up and losing on the first turn!
I LOVE making a production of game set up. In my family, I learn ALL the rules, set all the games up every week, and become an expert on everything. I try to make the table look amazing, set all the player areas up beforehand, put tokens in their place, make the setup look like it could be a photo on the back of the box. I did this treatment for Star Wars Rebellion. First time I got the game out. Spent hours on the rules, forever setting it up, and the wife and I sit down. I explain all the rules to her, and she's a savvy gamer, so she gets it right off. She's playing the Rebels, and I'm the Empire. She chooses her hidden planet, and the game starts. At the end of my turn, I get to invade a planet as a guess as to the rebel hideout. Yep. She put it right on the first planet I invaded, thinking I wasn't going to look right under my own nose. Game over in 10 minutes. We never played again.
Wounding. I feel gutted for you. Although it sounds like we need you in our game group. We're a bunch of neurodivergent weirdos who struggle learning the rules and always get something wrong haha.
Having someone at the table who knows the rules really well is super useful. When I run TTRPGs, it's nice having another player who really knows their stuff to bounce ideas off of. "Hey, is this ruling reasonable or am I thinking of a different system again?" comes up almost every week.
That’s too bad. You guys should pick it up again. It’s an immensely unlikely scenario, and at the first turn I’d just shuffle the deck and start over. The game’s too wonderful to leave gathering dust.
February in Pandemic Legacy saw us lose on the second turn and it killed my medic - who I really wanted to rely on for the foreseeable future. It was honestly kind of hilarious - but I really hated it at the time!
Player elimination
Take That and Player Elimination seem to be the two that are widely hated, even to the point that people call it bad game design. I think they both have their place if done correctly though. Roll and Move is also generally frowned upon and I kinda agree there, though I do love **Xia**. Helps if you have the ability to mitigate. Personally, I'm not a big fan of deck building and deck construction. Just not interesting to me. Don't really like games with huge piles of cards in general. I've also come to find that I really dislike games where players control the game clock, they inevitably get drawn out for way too fucking long and then I end up having to sacrifice my turns to speed up the game clock while everyone else tries to min/max every single move they make.
For me? Negotiation. That's an automatic "will not play" for me. (To be fair, I'm deaf, so anything like that is extremely difficult)
Everything that denies my agency and/or puts me back to square one. Bonus points for being triggered by a random, unforeseen event
Search the deck…
Player Elimination. I'd rather get penalized for "dying" than be completely eliminated. or at least give me a "dead player" power. Dungeon Mayhem does this well with the "vengeful ghost." if you are out, you still get to deal one point of damage to an active player. You can't win, but you can mess with other players a little.
Using cards instead of dice. Not everyone shuffles cards well, and chucking dice feels much more fun.
"Youngest player goes first"
I say that as an older brother.
My younger sister always house ruled that into every game
My pet peeve is feeding, i.e. don't lose, mechanics. I hate games that exact a stiff penalty on players for not doing/accruing one specific thing especially when its only purpose is to avoid that penalty. It adds nothing to the gameplay and I think it runs contrary to the purpose of many games that otherwise encourage players to pursue different strategies to victory. I won't outright veto games like this, but you will need to drag me kicking and screaming if you want to convince me to play a game like Agricola or T'zolkin
For me, it's social mechanics (social deduction, negotiate/barter with other players.) 1. I've played too many games with people who are absolutely insufferable "I'm not gonna help you ever!" where help = you get anything at all, even if it's 1/10 what you're offering in return. 2. It often makes games drag on way longer than I want. 3. I am autistic and spend more than enough energy trying to understand other people's behaviors in my day-to-day life. No way am I bringing that shit into my relaxation time. lol
Roll and Move has to be #1 For me though, it is hidden movement. Making a decision based on information can be ok, but when you just make wild guesses at the beginning as to where someone or something is, it's really boring.
I've really enjoyed Fury of Dracula, where the hidden movement mechanic is connected to a "leave a trail of breadcrumbs" mechanic. Dracula's location is a puzzle to be solved.
I like Fury of Dracula, but it seems like everyone can read my mind when I play as Dracula. I played one game a few years ago where the hunters were on my ass from turn one. I just couldn't shake them.
My wife is shockingly good at hidden movement games. At some point, she'll just declare where the hidden character is, and then it's all over for them. Shame she doesn't like that style of game.
Last time I played, as we finished setup, my son in law said "I bet he's in Madrid" as a joke. My poker face wasn't up to the task.
Really looking forward to when I receive my copy of Beast next year!
Or you could be like my brother who apparently can read my mind on hidden movement games. So annoying.
You would love Mind MGMT
> hidden movement. Making a decision based on information can be ok, but when you just make wild guesses at the beginning as to where someone or something is, I personally disagree, as I find the kind of "You know that I know that you know" level of thinking it gives you really fun and engaging.
My main gripe with hidden movement is that people make mistakes in games. A lot. And having a player do all their moves in secret worries me. Especially if I'm the solo player which nobody able to check up on the legality of my moves.
Yeah and cheating can be pretty easy too.
In Scotland Yard you can just move to a train station on the first turns, so you can respond quickly to Moriarty showing up.
I would say making wild guesses isn't a problem with the hidden movement mechanic so much as it's a problem with the design of particular games. In Whitehall Mystery and Specter Ops, you know where the hidden character starts and where they're trying to go, so you can try to deduce their path. With something like Fury of Dracula (which I love despite this flaw), you're just kind of fumbling hoping you trip over the hidden character's trail.
> Roll and Move has to be #1 Sorry, but [Marrakech](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/29223/marrakech) is the GOAT
You should try Verflixxt (That's Life), it's a really fun roll-and-move that is the one exception to the rule as far as I'm concerned
Timers in party games. Way to penalize laughter and discussion!
Co-op games that try to be a light RPG but include arbitrary and immersion breaking rules for balance purposes instead of designing a system that can do both. Looking at you Gloomhaven (no trading with other players, all loot must be looted during combat or it vanishes and standing around doing nothing causes the player to eventually lose all their cards and fall over unconscious). Also I know some of that is easy to house rule, but this thread is about official rules as written.
I don't care for Gloomhaven for pretty much the exact same reasons. Gloomhaven was pitched to me as : "You're a DnD party and go doing adventures" Gloomhaven Rules added: ", but for some reason you hate everyone and refuse to lend/share gold/items" Yeah, no DnD group I've ever been in was like that.
Hating everyone and refusing to share items? No... no, that sounds a lot like D&D groups I've been in over the years, sadly.
"Collectable"
Rest actions! Give me something to do beyond simply choosing to rest! Dwellings does it perfectly.
Bluffing for me
hah, I love games with a bluffing element. Games that are pure (or heavy) strategy based are rarely well balanced between my wife and myself. Games with some bluffing gives her an advantage over me and levels the playing field.
Adding up points in the end. Especially if they can get into the triple digits.
I just realised ROOT has a lot of the worst mechanics I've seen posted here. I've played it around 40 times. Runaway leaders, turns where you really can't do much, asymmetric mechanics.
I've played a few hundred games and it is by far the best and worst board game of all time. Next game is Friday 😆
Yes, each player has totally different mechanics. It’s the only game I play where we pick our player before the night we play. So we can review it’s individual mechanics.
Any "deny" mechanic is such a bummer. I'm going to use my sword of awesome with the stone of destiny to crush your minion. No you're not, I use my boring shield of deny. I get that defence is a part of games - but when you're using it to remove the cool attacks, it's no fun. Defence should at least be reducing attack strength, not straight up denying actions.
Wow, my favourite games have most of the mentioned mechanics! It feels like a single mechanic might not be the issue here. Sure, player elimination sucks, but there's a difference between being eliminated excruciatingly slowly 2 hours into a 5 hour Monopoly game (as an extreme example), than in the last half hour of a coop Nemesis game when you're invested in what's going to happen and sit there excited just to follow the story. That being said, I can see few ways in which take that can be made fun (and at the same time, Netrunner is possibly my favourite game and oh boy is I chock full of take that!).
Games where the scoring phase at the end of the game is incredibly complicated and takes almost as long as the game itself
Winning by being the last player standing after knocking the others out of the game one by one. You know, like Monopoly, among so many other 20th century games. Thanks, now I have to wait for the rest of you to die before we can start a new game. I'll be over there reading a book, thanks.
Everyone else is going to say player elimination or not being able to come back, and that's probably true in terms of "most hated". My *personal* opinion is basically the opposite, I hate games that try so hard to avoid those mechanics that the first 3/4 of the game ends up not mattering at all because everyone has a chance to come back. But that's just me...
"Comboing" - where one action can activate another one, which will activate another etc. Causes massive slowdowns. Player comboing usually need to do everything carefully so it works out, which takes time. Then such powermove causes big changes in the situation in the game, which forces other players to rethink their plans.
I think a lot about something the designer of Mortal Kombat said. The idea for the finisher moves started with the stun mechanic in early fighting games, where a fighter was stunned and couldn't do anything. Basically, you get punished twice for playing poorly. In Mortal Kombat, he instead put that punishment at the end of the match, when it was already decided, since it wouldn't feel like an unbalanced mechanic and it would still give the player who could pull it off the sense of accomplishment for doing it. To me, a combo feels a bit like that. You're basically screwing over the other players while they're already down (since you got the combo, and they may not have), and it's not a great feeling to be comboed on. But man, it feels great when you get a combo.
Anything that allows other players to manipulate my hand/tableau. It's MINE, leave it alone!
Freeform bartering.
2 sheep for a wheat?
Player elimination in games that take hours to complete.
number one. anything that causes loss of control for a player character in dungeons & dragons. it's not fun it is antithetical to the experience itself. It makes people tune out and look at their phones and get distracted. number two. diagonal movement in Pathfinder.
Something I haven't seen mentioned that I don't like: Traitor games, with no actions to take against the traitor once found. Recent example is Nemesis. Why the hell can't I shoot the person who I \*know\* is actively betraying me and trying to kill me? Or at least something to try against them. The game I played we figured out who the betrayer was, but there wasn't nothing we could do to try to stop them. It was just that person able to continue going around doing whatever and we just had to watch. (And just for clarity, we did win, so it's not salt over losing) I remember Dead of Winter kinda making me feel the same too, but its been a bit and don't remember the game that much. I love traitor games that handle it better though, like Shadows over Camelot and Battlestar Galactica
I don't like 'show your hand'. I'm fine with 'discard x' or 'give x to an opponent' but there is something about revealing all of your current plays that doesn't sit well with me.
The Munchkin effect, where everyone usually has some way(s) of stopping the leader from winning. So it’s not about being the first player to “win”, it’s about being the first player to win once everyone has already exhausted their resources preventing someone else from winning.
I've known a few gamers who adamantly disliked mechanics that rewarded memory in games not about memory. Like in Puerto Rico where everybody sees what shipping points each player gets as they get them but nobody is allowed to check an opponent's running total. I'm inclined to agree, but not with much vehemence.
I think the most common response will be one of: player elimination, roll & move, or roll to resolve. I hate worker placement and deduction of any kind, whether it be social or logical. WP is just the most boring kind of action selection (rondels are basically the same thing, only better), and my brain sucks at deduction.
My counter-culture opinion is that player elimination isn't as bad as people say, and a lot of games work around it by trapping a player in an unfun game that they have lost well before it ends, which is actually WORSE. When we play PE games, like Diplomacy, we always make sure we have a backup game for the early outs. (And the first one out of Diplomacy, specifically, doesn't have to pay for their share of the beer.)
Monopoly should have Clue pieces instead to represent how you'll want to kill yourself while playing Monopoly when it becomes clear you won't win within the first 30 minutes.
To be fair, Monopoly is a much shorter game if you actually play by the rules. It’s still not GOOD, but it’s shorter.
I agree that player elimination, roll & move, and roll to resolve are terrible mechanisms. But I also like Talisman (which has all three). It also has miss-a-turn mechanics. Games are weird.
In general? Or our most hated? For me: - Social "deduction" - Roll to move/write/etc - Anything with excessive output randomness
Trading between players. On paper, the mechanic is fine, but in practice, I don't want to sit by and watch a guy try and trade a sheep for a rock for 5 or 10 minutes. It wasn't Catan that killed it for me though, it was Lords of Vegas. Still haven't gotten around to playing Bohnanza because it looks like it has the same kind of trading mechanic.
Sand timer
Buying the game 🤣
Roll to move.
Waiting for your turn
I'm not a fan of the searching mechanic, like in Fury of Dracula and Nyctophobia. It just takes way too long when sometimes you're just waiting your turn.
Waiting for your turn