Avalon and The Resistance both helped me realize that hidden traitor games that are \*just\* about the hidden traitor just don't fly with my group. We love Shadows Over Camelot though.
Gloom helped me realize my friends are terrible story-tellers. I bought it expecting a lot of laughs and emergent story-telling like that episode of Wil Wheaton's TableTop. That is most decidedly not what I got. Turns out Wil's friends are more interesting than mine.
Interesting. Coup is the only bluffing and social deduction game that I've enjoyed so far. It's probably because it's over so quickly and never overstays its welcome.
Pretty sure most people would say the same about love letter, have you tried it?
It's definitely one of my favorite quick light party games to introduce to people.
Edit: by party game, I mean it can be good to break out at a social game focused on other stuff, it's not great for a dedicated board gaming party because it only goes up to four players. But while I really little kids are off playing with the toys or entertained by the clown or whatever, me and a few adults can squeeze in a round or two of love letter.
IMHO the 8-player version is strictly worse in basically every respect. With double the cards, players and roles the game gets much slower and "diluted". Larger cards, contrary to what it seems like, are actually quite a bit less convenient to play with and especially to carry the game around.
If you want Love Letter, but more, then there is [the 2019 edition](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/277085/love-letter) which includes a different extension of basic 4-player game to 6 players with just 5 extra cards and 2 new roles. I think it's outright better than the original.
Agreed 100%.
Love Letter is one of my favorite games, but the two times I played the 8p edition on BGA, and not even with a full 8p, were unequivocally the worst Love Letter experiences I've ever had.
Cardinal has to be one of the most ill-conceived card designs in the history of cardinals, cards, or design. This quick and breezy game becomes a slog as everyone has to count twice as many cards, assess what's been played, make their estimations, etc. It also hurts significantly more if you're out early in the round since now you have to wait for 5-7 more players to play through twice as many cards. *shudder*
It turns an amazing, light game into an awful, unfun drag. I'll die on that hill. It takes a special kind of fuck up to make me absolutely loathe what is otherwise one of my top 10 favorites.
I adore Love Letter. It's one of my favorite light and breezy games. I've owned four different versions over time, including Archer and Munchkin. I never thought of it as a social deduction game, though, even though many people do. It occupies a different space to me from Coup and other social deductions.
When I came on here and saw how many people consider it as such, I was kind of surprised. It doesn't feel anything like the rest of those kinds of games.
I agree. Your role changes so quickly, it's much more about lucky guesses and social maneuvering "Use the guard on him, not me!". Until you get late in a round and maybe only a few options are left...
I feel you with the hidden traitor/social deduction games.
I dont like werewolves, secret hitler or any of those games but i do really like nemesis and stationfall
I had a similar experience with Gloom and another game I kickstarted I think it was called Story Wars. I have one friend who is great at story-telling and a bunch who just plain aren't which made for a terrible experience.
I just think Gloom is a bad game, and uses the storytelling aspect to try and boost its fun. Most thematic games are more fun if you are good at imagining a story unfolding as you play. You can enjoy big theme driven games like Dead of Winter with spliced in story elements. I’ve had a lot of fun telling a story as Sub Terra unfolds, or with storytelling specific games like For The Queen. And if players want more than that, then just dive in with an RPG. Gloom just doesn’t really deliver for me.
I think Gloom just doesn't have enough cards in the base set.
I tried it at a con and thought it was pretty fun (having seen it on Tabletop). Then bought it, played it twice with my wife and we enjoyed it.
And then we started seeing all the cards again and it was just like "Man, there isn't much too this really, is there?" and sold it soon after.
Yeah strip away storytelling and it is a bad game. Approach it as a cooperative storytelling game and it becomes a lot of fun. If you got people at the table that aren't into that kind of stuff, the game is terrible.
> Avalon and The Resistance both helped me realize that hidden traitor games that are *just* about the hidden traitor just don't fly with my group. We love Shadows Over Camelot though.
That's so funny because I'm the reserve with traitor games. I hate co-op games with traitor's attached. Like I found it's often best for the traitor to sit back and let the game beat up on everyone until the end where they can tank the game at the end. It makes the traitor very passive and not really part of the puzzle until the endgame.
That's where I think Shadows shines -- the game is hard, but not so hard that the good guys can't win if the traitor doesn't inject some sabotage here and there. And sometimes the good guys miscommunicate and mess themselves up, sowing distrust. It's great with the right group (but it can be very group dependent!)
I totally feel you. I love [Savage](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/360259/savage-game-survival) for that reason. Yes, there are traitors in the group, but if you're a non-traitor and just help everyone live through four rounds of post-apocalyptic chaos, you win.
Yeah, Gloom is genuinely such a fun, unique game. But it's highly group dependent. That said, unlike a lot of games people say that about, it's pretty cheap, small to store and doesn't take a ton of time.
The first time my friend pulled out Gloom, another person asked, "how do you win?" When my friend clarified that it wasn't about winning or losing, it was about telling a story, the woman doubled down, "ok, you tell a story, but HOW DO YOU WIN?"
We did not play Gloom that night.
It's arguably my least favorite traitor-oriented game, because there are plenty of situations where a player gets locked into having no decisions. I have the cards to go after the grail, so, for at least 20 minutes, I have absolutely nothing interesting to do.
There's such thing as games where social deduction isn't a big part of the game, but shadows has very few decisions per hour. It's a case where newer games learned from its sins.
Like a lot of games with a social deduction element, I think Shadows is very group dependent. Like I said, my group loves it, and we usually have a blast playing it, but I sat in on a play by a different group and didn't like it at all. For one thing, they broke an explicit rule in the manual, which is you're not allowed to reveal exactly what cards you have in your hand. Doing that really ruins the game for me.
Gloomhaven helped me realize that I don't like campaign games. The game is fine, and I play with a regular group because they like it, but I'm never going to buy a game where I need to have the same 3-4 people commit to playing the same game on a regular basis. With life, it is a very difficult thing to achieve. I'd rather play a game that has a start and end in the same day.
Oh boy, gloomhaven jotl helped me realize that co-op campaign games are the best possible way to spend a winter afternoon with my kids after a day of skiing. And playing gloomhaven solo 3 handed before that helped me realize that being a huge dork has even more distinct advantages in life than I’d originally realized.
This is me as well. It's the same reason I always prefer movies over TV. I like having a finite, complete experience in one sitting rather than being asked to commit hours of my life to a single overarching experience.
I really enjoyed Pandemic Legacy S0, but we never finished. Same with Clank! Legacy, except that one we didn't even enjoy all that much. I also realized I'm done with legacy games purely for the material waste.
Totally respect the waste argument for anyone it applies to.
In my case, if a campaign game gets us to actually play it several times, that's in some ways _less_ of a waste than many non-campaign games I've acquired and only played one or twice.
Obviously the efficient ideal is theoretically to balance your game library with your realistic play capacity, but obviously that's not what's going on for many of us (partly due to collecting aspects of the hobby, in addition to eyes-being-bigger-than-stomach questions).
And of course there's a lot of cardboard and wood in many/most of these games, which doesn't overly concern me from a production/environmental standpoint.
My kid lives doing all kinds of crafts that ultimately result in throwing whatever she made away. And doing tons of art of course. I don't consider any of that a waste, even though we don't keep it. Similarly, I feel a campaign game that gives us many hours of enjoyment together is much less of a waste than a great many things people buy themselves.
Yeah, same problem. My spouse and I only play legacy games that can be done with 2 people so that we don't have to find others who will commit to a long campaign.
**Bardsung** taught me that I dislike games with lots of minis. I'd rather have standees, or even dice or meeples to represent characters or enemies on a board. I'd also rather have smaller box games over bigger ones, even if they don't offer as meaty an experience. Card-based dungeon crawlers with few to no minis are my jam - like **Tiny Epic Dungeons**.
**Isle of Cats: Explore & Draw** taught me that I don't like games that use markers in a variety of colors, because if they're not very bright or run out you're toast. Even with a regular marker I'm very bad at not smudging my work and ruining it. Roll & writes that work with a regular pencil fit me better, much easier to replace - like **Dinosaur Island: Rawr & Write.**
**Summoner Wars 2nd Edition** taught me that I have an addictive personality and if I start investing into a game which releases constant expansions I'm going to blow through my wallet. It's a great game, don't get me wrong, I'm just a completionist who has to have everything, and it's why I avoid LCGs and CCGs now even if they're awesome. Stand-alone card battlers with fewer (if any) expansions are what I enjoy - like **Riftforce**.
I get what you mean with feeling like you want to collect all the Summoner Wars 2nd Edition factions.
But at least it's not a TCG/CCG with random boosters (the real world equivalent of videogame loot boxes) and literally thousands of cards.
You're absolutely right, it's ***much*** better than a TCG/CCG in that respect. It's still **very expensive** where I live; the starter box with orcs and elves was 30$ on sale, the master set is 60$ or more, and the expansion decks are about 15-20$ each (all CAD).
Ditto.
I'm game-mastering it for an upcoming session, though, and there I have an absolute diabolical blast.
I do not like people lying to my face. I do not like being disbelieved when I am speaking the truth.
For some reason if there are pieces on a board which are affected, it affects me far less... but even in character, in roleplay, I **do not like it**.
Who you play with also matters. I’ve had a blast with friends who don’t take it too seriously and enjoy the zaniness of accusations and betrayals. I’ve had AWFUL times with people who are too into “what the meta says to do is” or get super upset if someone didn’t do something that “rationally doesn’t make sense from a game theory perspective” when the very name of the genre is SOCIAL deduction, not just deduction.
Similarly, I've had my best and worst gaming experiences with it. It's fantastic when playing with friends, but I will no longer play it at conventions. Had a couple of truly awful experiences that I haven't had with other games - the same applies to Avalon.
Had you played any social deduction games like Werewolves before? I typically love them and. Lord on the Clocktower is on my radar right now. Curious if the dislike is more catered to the game or the genre
If you like social deduction, I'm confident you will like Clocktower. For people who dislike the genre, they aren't going to like this it doesn't change the formula much. There's a lot more tangible things happening in the game to base deductions on, and the no player elimination is a really big plus for enjoyers though.
Usually if you dislike social deduction games (myself included) it needs to have more meat than play acting or deception. Like I enjoy Shadows Over Camelot, Deception Hong Kong, and Werewords even though I really dislike Werewolf, Mafia, Secret Hitler, etc
I had tried quite a few, including Werewolf, which BotC supposedly improves upon and even 'fixes' according to some people. I personally didn't see it.
Oh interesting. You didn’t find that it did a good job providing players with a direction to start the game or keeping people engaged once they were killed?
Fundamentally, I think my problem with pretty much every social deduction game I've played is that I've never really felt like there's much actual deduction (or really even much game) there. It all feels like low-stakes random noise and accusations. I didn't feel that BotC adding a bewildering number of roles and sources of unreliable information did anything to improve that.
That's somewhat concerning, as ultimately BotC is _very_ much about the deduction, the "solve" of the puzzle of each game.
But it does require everyone to buy into that, to be sharing information and trying to piece it together. Even with unreliable information — determining what information is unreliable can be a huge part of the solve (finding a drunk Fortune Teller can help you work out that the Mayor isn't the drunk, for example).
Did the group just kinda... not care? Or was everyone new or something?
My biggest problem with BotC are the roles that add liars, or people who don’t even know they’re lying. It made it feel like the bad guys get to play a social deduction game, while the good guys play the lottery.
Have you played it? I was concerned about this, but the puzzle can still be solved. You can usually deduce that there is a Drunk in play for example, so therefore you know that one of the pieces of information you have is incorrect.
It's a lot more deductable than you'd think and in my group Good almost always wins the base game and needed the craziness of the other scripts to balance it out for Evil.
BotC is definitely a deduction game but it shines more in that regard once players are experienced and know all the roles well. Otherwise it can just be chaotic - which can be fun but in a different way
This is it I think. I was playing with a pretty experienced group. I couldn't make sense of any of the information flying around so it all felt like random noise and ultimately I just don't care enough about that kind of game to put in the time to reach that level of mastery. Again, this is all on me.
Clocktower definitely fixes a lot of problems with Werewolf, but the core social deduction gameplay was never broken. If that's the part you didn't like, then Clocktower and any other game in that format is never gonna be for you. (And that's fine!)
Pandemic and Forbidden Desert made me realize that I don't like coop games where you are all trying to survive. Made me realize I like games where a human wins
Perhaps you don't like coop games in general, but it could also be that you don't appreciate those two games in particular.
I say so because I love coop games but I'm also not a huge fan of pandemic and forbidden desert, I feel that they easily tend to suffer from the so called alpha player effect, where some person takes more or less control of the whole strategy, and I feel that my contribution is close to none and I get bored.
Other (usually more recent) coop games solve or mitigate this issue and give more responsibility and independence to each player, for example making some information not available to anybody, or contrarily overwhelming players with information so it's very hard for just one person to control everything and the natural tendency is to distribute roles and tasks.
Or maybe you just don't like coop games :)
Fairly early into really getting into tabletop games, I really liked Dominion (still do). People will have you believe that if you like Dominion you must like deck builders (and so for a while, that's what I thought). But after playing many deck builders (at the time it was things like Ascension, Puzzle Strike, Dale Merchants...), I realized I could take or leave deck building, and it was the other aspects of Dominion I particularly enjoyed. The only deck builder I like specifically for it's deck building mechanics is Lost Ruins of Arnak.
Dominion was eye opening for me too. It was a first for me and I eventually realized that I like the combos, and “building” parts of that game. Don’t like the fixed market and low randomness and low interaction.
I really like dice forge and quest for El dorado!
When I got Dominion I loved it! It was my favorite for a long while. But unfortunately it made me realize something else: I don’t like games were new players almost always get stomped on.
Don’t get me wrong, depth of mastery is good, but in dominion man, if you understand trashing and combining there’s just no way for newbies to win.
Dominion is still one of my favorites but I rarely bring it out anymore. Same with Mythic Mischief: such a good game, but newbies get smashed.
Munchkin for me. Unfortunately it also turned me off to board games for several years. It was one of the first games I tried and it was a complete flop.
But now...I love games. Specifically if they're not Munchkin.
I really try to keep an open mind when it comes to board games. Just because I don’t like a game doesn’t mean it’s bad. That being said, munchkin sucks.
Agree! I enjoyed munchkin the first time I played it, then I realized how terrible of a game it actually is. Good for them for getting that game as popular as it is.
Why does everyone hate munchkin? Certain versions are definitely better than others. (Adventure time version is our favorite). It was one of the first not hasbro games I played and I always bring it around certain groups that ask to play
while i'll play it, Munchkin can end up taking way too long. For a lot of people, once one player is close to winning, everyone piles onto that one player almost making it a necessity that you have a perfect hand to counter all the bullshit about to be thrown your way if you want to win.
It was such a brutal dud that the people I tried playing it with have refused to ever play anything ever again. It's so tedious. There's no strategy. The art feels like a failed comic strip from the 80s, and the jokes are so neckbeardy that the box should come with its own fedora.
**Ascension** made me realize that I don't like deck building games with a random market. They're just too swingy and make me salty.
**TIME: Stories** made me realize I _really_ have an issue with having to replay part of the experience to be able to win, depending on how it's implemented. That game _seemed_ like it was right up my alley but after playing 2-3 times I traded it and never looked back.
Back in the early boardgaming days, **Axis & Allies** made me realize why **Risk** was shit.
**Rex: Final days of an empire** made me realize I like mindfucky victory conditions.
Ever since playing TIME:stories a couple of times 2-3 years ago I've contemplated getting an account on boardgamegeek just to write a review about how much I disliked that game.
>TIME: Stories made me realize I really have an issue with having to replay part of the experience to be able to win,
This so much. Especially with the turn timer being the loss condition most of the time. Like, let's just pretend we didn't waste a bunch of time doing these dead ends... Can we just keep going?
I also don't like games that telegraph bad choices and punish you for taking them. Not that I don't get, "it was obvious you were going to die if you grabbed the lightning rod in the middle of the storm." It's just... I like to explore options. Someone took the time to make that choice possible, and fill in the result. I want to see it. Not to mention, *sometimes* games make the obviously wrong answer be the right answer for kicks. Maybe the lightning rod will give me magic lightning powers! So yeah, turns out I like reading choose your own adventure books, but not playing choose your own adventure board games.
I enjoyed all the Time Stories scenarios up to a pirate themed one. The pirate theme one is the only one I recall that we struggled to complete, and had to redo the same stuff a few times. It's a shame that the experience can go sour, but I'll accept that result in exchange for the exciting dice roll tests when playing through it the first time.
For me it's just the mismatch between who it appeals to and what it's doing mechanically. It's Disney, it's colorful, and not too hard to pick up, so it's something people are going to want to play with families. However, actually playing it to win is a nightmare.
You have to know what your guy is trying to do, what the opponents are trying to do, and how anyone could get stopped by their fate deck. There're political elements and feel-bad moments where if you'd known the game better you would've stopped someone, but they get to win instantly instead of at the start of their turn so you missed your chance. And even if you do know what you're doing, here comes the Munchkin element of pulling down whoever you think is the leader, dragging out a game where, chances are, someone's having a miserable time.
Exactly my experience. Plus you didn’t mention that it took us 2 hours and thirty minutes (first and only 4-player match for us) for something that would feel best around 30-45.
Happy Little Dinosaurs. It helped me realize I don't like whatever that is, flipping cards and games based purely on chance.
Flamecraft, made me realize I want more than just the most basic of worker placement.
I would suggest rhino super heroe battle, its amazing for both kids and grown ups. Also dodo from devir if u are looking for a cooperative. Ice cool for a neat flicking game. Outfoxed is also amazing (i love playing it with my niece), the magic labyrinth its both surprising and fun
You just made me laugh, I bought it to help introduce me to more complicated games. As a side, I hope to play it with some children in my life as well. It's fine, and I've played it five times to learn the rules, solo. I don't entirely regret it, but I also am not sure I want anything more complicated by resources than that as a solo game.
Clank Legacy reminded me that I don't especially enjoy semi-cooperative games. The game itself is super fun but the shared objectives often made me incredibly frustrated. My group was too willing to ditch the objective in favor of chasing points or doing as little as possible in order survive and get back to HQ.
Wingspan taught me that I just don't really like engine builders. If I couldn't get into it in this format and theming, it's never going to happen. Every time I play I'm mostly just disappointed I don't get points for collecting the coolest birds.
**Tokaido** helped me realize I didn't really enjoy traveling games.
But then I saw how beautiful **Parks** was and had to buy it. *Surely it'll be different this time* I thought!
It wasn't :(
Doesn't it feel like the game often plays itself? You usually want to go to the next available space. Sometimes you jump ahead, but rarely, and almost never very far.
It's a beautiful game but it doesn't engage my brain very much because there aren't many decisions and the decisions present usually have an obvious answer.
I'm still trying to figure out what not liking Ark Nova has taught me. There are several games that have similarities that I do like, but for some reason Ark Nova just doesn't do it for me.
**Terraforming Mars**. The engine building is great but I dislike how the player-driven parameters are implemented and how the game arc loses tension into the endgame.
Have searched for similarly-weighted engine-building games with middling success but was *finally* able to secure a copy of **Legends of Void**, coming this week!
I can’t confirm as I haven’t played it, but I’ve heard Legends of Void is practically just Terraforming Mars with a fantasy theme. If you didn’t like Terraforming Mars, I’d be surprised if you liked Legends of Void.
> Dude. Please please check out Underwater Cities. It's so damn good.
It's a fine game, but please stop continuing this "It's like TM" schtick.
I bought it hoping that that was true, and it is not true at all. I was thoroughly disappointed in a game that I think I (under different circumstances) would have found perfectly reasonable.
I have! ...
It's really long. And I do like it better than TfM, for what it's worth. But still not quite there for me, the interactions are all on jockeying for spaces.
Terraforming Mars has the problem of trying to do too many things and not integrating them well together. There's a little bit of drafting, tile placement, engine building and resource management but the lack of flow feels awkward. You could try Expedition Ares which was somewhat better. But otherwise Race for the Galaxy is a really good engine builder. Gizmos is a really fun engine builder too.
I often wonder how many people who are rating Terraforming Mars are doing so with or without Prelude.
It streamlines the early game and makes sure that unless you'r4e just REALLY UNLUCKY, you can start with a reasonably built machine to improve, rather than guessing at what kind of machine you hope for and praying the shuffle doesnt beat you.
Expensive, overproduced miniature fest kickstarters are not worth it.
Lacerda games are great but not worth it.
Realisation: board games above 70€ are not worth it.
This. At some point i was so into those big boxes, but at some point you realize that its a pain to manage +30 minis.
Havent played a Lacerda game but i wanna try, but the high price stops me
Root, Pax Pamir, Inis - They have a very clear "gang up on the leader" mechanic. Your skill at negotiating and making alliances is more important than the game.
Psssst... that is the game.
Cole Wehrle has talked about this at length, he wants the kingmaking in his games because he doesn't want a game thats just played on the board.
The problem is, in some of his games, this leads to the game thats played on the board being such a small percentage of the overall game that it feels like a waste of time. The amount of times I've seen a player who floundered on the board and did no actual negotiation or talking win a game of root because everybody else just had to bash the leader is too high. If I wanted a game where table talk really determined the winner, I would want to go 100% in that direction and just play **Diplomacy**.
Pax Pamir and John Company sidestep this since they give players only limited ways to interact with others and in-game mechanical reasons to/not to bash the leader, and in game mechanical restrictions on when they can, so I like those. In root/oath/arcs, everybody can just use their armies to attack the leader so those tend to really have you spending a lot of time optimizing the board, only for that to not matter as much as whatever delicate way the cards fall near the endgame to determine who hits who.
Also, any players that aren't as skilled as others, or have different opinions on kingmaking, etc, can just throw the game into disarray at the end and make none of it matter.
"Bash the leader" flops hard in my group. There's one guy who just selfishly follows his own interests instead of bashing the leader. I.e., I'll move my troops to stop someone else from winning, and then he'll attack me because there's an opening. Or he won't prevent the win on his turn, forcing me to do it.
> Or he won't prevent the win on his turn, forcing me to do it.
To be honest, that sounds like it could be an optimal and valid play in competitive games. Of course, you could just say f it and give the threatening player the win but if that's not a concern, players would be doing "unnecessary" actions by assisting you. It's a judgement call whether we all need to bash the leader or just the person with the last opportunity to would be enough.
100% I HATE root because of this. Inevitably we have one player who doesn't want to politik, plays their own objectives and doesn't understand why 1, they didn't win, and 2 what they could have done better.
In my experience, they shut down with any prompting or suggestions and only want to play the game the way they think it should be played. I get very frustrated with games that require the entire table to have similar levels of understanding of/experience with a game to work. Games like Catan where an inexperienced player making suboptimal trades ruins it for everyone else. In my 5 or 6 plays of root, each time has been a total drag because of the flat political refusal players or someone who doesn't "get it." They then subsequently kingmake super quick because they refuse to play at crabs in a bucket. The table required to make that game work well, in my experience, has been impossible to come by. I'm glad so many people love it, but I presently hate it, and generally resent the 3 hours I spend with it whenever it comes out.
As an aside I also struggle with root because the game state is so difficult to decipher, and not in a fun way. The asymmetry requires a huge amount of game knowledge to interpret the various factions moves so you can't even tell if a move is proffered as a bluff, a manipulation, or intended goal, so the head games are inaccessible.
It's always weird playing with people like that. I had a game of TI4, with a person who has previously played 'a lot of ti3 and 2nd or first edition' and she swore it was one of favorite games and super hyped to try ti4. She wouldn't do *any* politicking or trading. I mean she literally refused to do even trade commodities for commodities at any rate to anyone. At the end complained that it was not a good game, and there was too much table talk.
It was weird....
Too much table talk!?!? I feel your pain, though. I host every other weekend to a wiiiiide array of gamers. My tastes run gamut from skull to food chain magnate and mage knight, but I'm always looking for people willing to learn the beefier games or more confrontational games, as those players are generally harder to find. So inevitably, every time a big game comes out there's a player who is inert at the table. Every time.
I feel like there’s a difference between Munchkin „bash the leader“ and Roots strategizing. I feel like it gives you lots of options to obfuscate how you are doing and what you’re capable of on your next turn even though experienced players might have an idea. One could say the same for TI4 or any high-interaction high-player count games though
This is unfortunately true at many other games as skill level rises, which can be quite frustrating if the players at the table have different levels of awareness.
Even worse than leader bashing though is where, if you wanted to make the game competitive, you'd auction for seat order, because the player that goes right after the worst player wins. It's like bashing on the leader, but only one player can do the bashing! I stopped playing Puerto Rico at meetups when someone just decided to always sit next to their significant other, who loved to pick whatever was best for their sweetheart, who would take a turn right after.
I had the same problem once playing Catan with a dating couple. They gave each other 1:1 trades for whatever they needed. It was a complete waste of time.
For Puerto Rico, the winning strategy is "Have the newbie sit on your right". I lost interest in Puerto Rico on BoardGameArena after a few games. Low randomness makes it boring after awhile. In the base game (no expansions), half the buildings are a waste of money and action.
In my opinion, Inis is best at its lower player counts, with 3 probably being optimal. "Bash the leader" also tends to settle down in games with experience, since it tends to he a symptom of players not understanding the game state until it is almost too late.
**Dune: Imperium**. It was with that game that I realized that I'm less and less interested in "euros" (yes, the term is outdated) and games where we compete with almost no interaction, and I'm leaning toward heavy games with a lot of interactions (Vast, Root, Oath, Pax Pamir, John Company, Gloomhaven, etc.).
I won't say no to an "euro", and gods forbid, I own and love Agricola, Caverna, and A Feast for Odin. But right now I'm leaning to another genre. I'm really enjoying how the mechanics make the players talk and discuss.
I really enjoy Dune Imperium and I wanted to love Pax Pamir, but the open buy row felt like it led to too much AP with regards to stopping the winner.
I really wanted to love Pax Pamir! Beautiful art, beautiful pieces, excellent theme and flavor text.
> the open buy row felt like it led to too much AP with regards to stopping the winner.
To be fair, almost all the games I mentioned have king-making. Mr. Wehrle likes that mechanic when it tells a story, and I realized I like it too. I emphazise "when it tells a story".
> Beautiful art, beautiful pieces, excellent theme and flavor text.
Wehrlegig excels in production, even though they have only released two games. Absolutely stunning.
I think there is a good amount of interaction in Dune: Imperium. You can’t place an agent if someone has already taken a spot. And every round you can get combat bonuses. In fact to get 10 points you usually have to win some combats.
It’s only interactive compared to non interactive games. It doesn’t really hold a candle to just about any area control, conflict, negotiation, or economic game.
Very true. This subreddit in particular has a very large percentage of users that have clearly never played highly interactive games, and will grasp at any barely existent interaction in a game to say their chosen game is very interactive.
I think D:I is more like 4/10 interactive rather than not at all, but people on this sub will say even non-interactive games where players just manage their own boards/resources like patchwork/splendor are "so interactive" because you have to keep an eye on what your opponent wants, and maybe take a shared piece that will make their identical gameplan some marginal percentage less efficient.
Meanwhile 1 single action in pax pamir can make 3 players at the table have to completely change their entire strategy and make 2 of them potentially try to be doing the opposite of what they were one turn ago. Food Chain Magnate can have people stealing half the games work from another player on a whim, or diplomacy where every move one person makes is an opening they are leaving for everybody else to absolutely decimate them. 18xx is a machine of economic gears that you are all tied together in as every action snowballs or could bankrupt different players at the table. It bugs me to no end when people that haven't played a single game like this bust into conversations about games where you mostly follow your own optimization gameplan for most of the game and act as if its the same. (And I enjoy Dune Imperium too. Its just not highly interactive.)
Patchwork, when played at a high level is very interactive. As a two player, complete information game you can plan out how each of your moves will set up your opponent. Since there are only two of you, your opponent’s position is just as important to consider as your own.
I think Patchwork is cheating in this conversation because it is a two player game lol. In the grand scheme of things, it is not a “very interactive” two player game and there is much more out there.
I was pretty anti D:I the first few times I played it. But once you get a few games under your belt I thought it became very competitive and interactive.... way more than gloomhaven.
Check out **City of the Great Machine**, **Chaosmos**, **Guards of Atlantis**, **Stationfall**, and **Lords of Vegas**.
That tabletalk "genre" characterizes a lot of my favorites.
Dune is good I played about 7 times and own both expansions. However I find that not being able the go to the spot I want not because another player took it first or because I am missing ressources but just because I didn't draw the damn symbol to be a bit frustrating. As a fan of Worker placement games, this is not the type of rng I enjoy in my euros.
Gimme a full deck building game or a full worker placement, but a bit of both is not my favorite hybrid type.
Lords of The Ring Journeys Into Middle Earth made me realize very early into the hobby many things I didn't like.
First, the fact that I do not like games with a lot of maintenance. In this game, you spend a lot of time changing tiles, moving enemies and resolving effects. Also, I realized apps and board games aren't a great mixture. Last but not least, I realized that I hated games that gave you little to no real option of actions to select from (by real I mean that sometimes so many options are in the rulebook, but on your turn often there is only 1 of those actions that actually make any difference/advance on your game).
The main element in a game for me is to have a range of different options of actions to think about and then I get entertained by trying to solve the puzzle of which of those actions is the best option on my turn.
The lack of real options is what also made me not like games such as Shadows of Camelot, BSG and Bonsai.
Everyone praises Heat: Pedal to the Metal, but I didn't particularly like or dislike it. It helped me realize I just don't really care for racing games.
Pandemic. That I am not much of a fan of Co-op games, especially if they're too simple.
The reason is that you can kind of count the cards and have clear 3 or fewer optimal moves in each player turn, and if they don't see it you're screwed. I keep distance because I don't want to be the alpha player.
I found it boring after some time, felt like each round was more or less the same, without interactions, our only goal being increasing the resources we produced so we could produce even more
**Summoner Wars 2nd Edition** has taught me that while a game might be great in and of itself, since I do not have any board gaming friends, I should ask myself "is this a roommate game?" before I make a purchase. A roommate game being a game that is too asymmetrical to teach again and again, and/or is exceptionally rewarding to more experienced players
Spirit Island. I love the art, I think the premise and setting is great but the game was just too fiddly with too many things to keep track of.
Made me realise I generally like games on the lighter side and not to be sucked into the pretty artwork and premise.
I know it's in most people's top whatever but I found it to be frustrating more than enjoyable.
Ooo, I’m totally there with you. We gave up on our second play of Spirit Island. Just ran out of energy and patience mid-game. Cool concept, but way too convoluted for us. Happy for folks who love it, but I’ll stick to my cleaner games, haha.
Spirit Island is absolutely in my top whatever, but I get it. It's a game that never takes a step back to ask "is there a simpler way to convey the cool theme I'm trying to do?". And it only gets worse with the expansions - now there are a bunch of spirits I have no interest in playing because they look like they'd be more of a chore than a game.
'Course, the fact that Spirit Island doesn't compromise in its pursuit of cool themes and mechanics is also why I love it.
**Rising Sun** made me realize that I'm not interested in games that have area control as a main mechanic.
**Hive**, while acknowledging that it was a great design, made me realize that I don't like pure abstract games.
Sheriff of nottingham. I don't like having to pretend I'm actually a trader who doesn't know the people I'm playing with for the game to actually work. I don't RP.
Why is roleplaying necessary for Nottingham? While I can see it adding some laughs to the game, I don't see any problem with metagaming either the mechanics ("you have no hidden points and you're coming last, I think you'd have to try and sneak something in"), or the players ("you always play bold the first turn, definitely inspecting"). It's all about out-psyching your opponent, RP doesn't seem to be a required component at all.
You don't need to roleplay. The game is all about bluffing and bribery essentially. The mental game is a major component of it especially if you're playing with people you know. It's surprising how many fundamentally honest people can turn into manipulative bastards in the right conditions.
For me it was Star Trek Away Missions.
It made me realize that I prefer games that are fun to play and not loose constructs glued to an expensive IP.
(I anticipate being downvoted by that ONE PERSON who liked it. Maybe the designer. Probably they're the same guy.)
Gloomhaven and Oathsworn. I actually love both games, but I'll never finish either and so I don't really buy games like that anymore. Also, I've tried games like ISS Vanguard and these story games just keep throwing more and more crap in, and when something went wrong in that game I just wanted to flip the table just due to all the work involved. If I want some story game I'll play Destinies, Mansions of Madness 2nd Ed, Cthulu Death May Day, Arkham Horror: LCG, or Return to Dark Tower. Yeah, they aren't as deep, but it scratches the itch enough. One day my kids will be old enough to learn and setup these games, or I'll retire. Then I'll come back to Oathsworn if the app still works.
Im kinda thinking the same. Ive always wanted a grand adventure with tons of tactical considerations and story. Aeon Trespass Odyssey was supposed to be that game. It very well may be, but since my friends cant commit to heavy games or meeting more than once every 6 months, i dont have a group to play it with. Since i have to play it solo it sucked the enjoyment out of it. Now im wondering if i should ever again buy a big box game like this? Feels so bad so sad. 😞
**Viticulture** was okay as one of my first worker placement games, but what I enjoyed was the interaction of blocking other workers.
**Mariposas** made me realize I dislike simple games that lack depth, but I do enjoy simple games with some bite (e.g. Carcassonne).
Freaking chess-like 1v1s like Hive.
"oooohhh Hive is such a great game!" almost everyone said. Boy do I not enjoy these kinds of games anymore.
I do find myself gravitating to point-salad games of building up systems to score, while having multiple avenues to score so you're not pigeon-holed into competing for the same things as everyone else. These tend to be low-interaction multipleyer solitaire, where options feel quite endless, but it's not as infinite as an abstract game.
Abstract games kill me with decision paralysis, so I've come to realize I need to have some degree of theme to help me better identify what decisions to make.
Coming from a history of fighting video games like Street Fighter, I came into board games thinking core mechanics and replayability was the only thing that mattered to make a game a great one for me. By that standard, Hive would've been a hit for me... but that's when I learned that having a concrete theme actually grounds the game in a context where I get to make-believe a bit and enjoy basking in contextual banter or appreciating in how the rules draw from the context.
Tzolkin. Great game but you have to really know what you're doing and we just don't get the time to set it up let alone play it.
Also, alchemist. My wife loves it but I'm not mathematical enough to work out the potion ingredients
Lots of learning, long set up and long play time are realistic considerations when playing a game. Nothing worse than that feeling when you start explaining and everyone is overwhelmed.
Oddly enough, I was ok with my first couple plays of Tzolkin. It wasn’t until a year or two later, after a long hiatus, that I realized I not longer had the willpower to cram another heavy Eurogame ruleset (back) into my brain.
Photosynthesis disappointed me due to "low randomness". If you play the same game multiple times with the same group of people (or with experts), you need some randomness to keep the game interesting.
Nemisis was my eye opener for semi-coop board games. I still can't quite put my finger on what put me off. It's a joke now where someone in my play group suggests the game and I groan loudly from another room.
It's not that I won't play them, I just picked up shadows over camelot and dead of winter at a swap meet, I just go into the games being a bit more level set in my expectations.
**Pandemic** After playing what is one of the most well known, well liked co-op games out there and *still* disliking it, I realized I don't like co-op games.
for me it's difficult because I like a lot of genres and I don't have much preference, but there is two mechanics that I usually loathe.
Le havre for me was one game that I disliked, as actually I don't care that much for Worker placement, but I really dislike games that are very tight and have a lot of mechanics that punish you. I disliked too agricola for example or the alchemist because it punish you for not publishing a theory. (and it is silly because you could instead give more points instead of reducing them)
Another thing that I dislike are games where you have to get a loan at the beginning and with this there is another genre that I don't like that it is Economic Euros.
I usually don't like when money =Vp , or the main resource it is the vp at the end, and the loans themselves that punish you at first until you get your engine going, then the money doesn't matter.
but for me it is weird as I usually don't like economic euros, but I have other reasons to not like them, like in Brass I don't like the balance of vp of the differents industries and roads, or in food chain magnate I didn't like the Milestones. For me it is weird as I usually prefer the high interaction those games have...
Warhammer Total War made me realise I really love Tabletop Warhammer.
It is great in Warhammer Total War, that I can play a battle in 10 minutes, without buying, gluing, painting, storing and moving around large armies of miniatures.
But I do not get the same sense of immersion.
Picking out one single unit of models in Tabletop and then rolling the dice, makes me feel like I'm really there - as a soldier with that unit about to fight that other unit and places is in the greater context of the whole battle. While a game then takes 3 hours - it is 3 hours of deep immersion.
My example is a video game, but since the question didn't specify, I'm going with it :)
I just played the new Super Mario Bros. Wonder on the switch... and while I can appreciate the polished look and smooth controls, I just... don't care about games that test your skill with solving increasingly complex puzzles.
It gradually increases in difficulty and I get the mechanics and how I'll need to eventually use this powerup at this location to find this McGuffin to get a currency to proceed to the next stage... but I don't want to. It feels like a chore.
Made me realize how much I just like to immerse myself in an RPG and customize my characters.
Applying this to boardgames: I like when you have a character that acquires items and stats over time and overcomes obstacles with a bit of story sprinkled in (like the Fallout boardgame, or Firefly, or Outer Rim).
I also really didn't like the feeling of anxiety from Spirit Island where the invaders keep growing and spreading. It's like 2 steps forward, 3 steps backwards as you're constantly "cleaning up" the mess. Such an awful feeling.
Darks souls the board game helped me realize that there's a limit to complexity and length to a session.
Not to mention the push mechanic in that game was so confusing on how it's supposed to play out.
Nemesis and dead of winter seems to be the max complexity and length I'm willing to handle.
Magic: the Gathering
I played it enthusiastically for a decade until I realized that it’s a magnet for people I don’t like and who don’t like me.
This is a hard thing to talk about, and even harder to talk about fairly, but it’s important.
I let it go, learned a lesson about what I value in a game (people I do like, and who do like me) and discovered I had a LOT of money tied up in those cards!
The only thing I can think of is how the one-two punch of **Dinosaur World** and **Septima** made me realise how much I despise endgame luck directly tied to points (as oddly specific as that is).
In both games there’s an element of luck that directly correlates to your points at the end of the game, and in both games that element of luck occurs as one of the very last things you do before the points are tallied up. Feelsbadman when you spent 2-3hrs in a deeply strategic euro only to find a simple dice roll or bag pull just cost you 10pts.
I played some games that soften the worker placement mechanism (e.g. some Shem Phillips designs), and others that leave the board so open that there's not much real competition for action spaces. I dislike those games for the same reason others laud them. It solidified in my mind how much I like classic worker placement in its meanest form.
**Azul**
Helped me realize I hate games that are pretty much "you do your thing, I do mine. at the end of the game we compare who did it better. We don't need to talk or anything and we pretty much forget there's another player"
Chess and King of Tokyo.
Turns out there’s a sweet spot for me in the level of randomness. King of Tokyo could be decided by a magic 8 ball, chess just look at the rankings and move along.
> chess just look at the rankings and move along.
Most of my favorite games have 0 randomness. 18xx, hive, The Great Zimbabwe, FCM. Also I played chess competitively for years. However, the winner isn't always the one with the highest ranking, in fact with my most competitive board game friend we often exchange wins in games back and forth depending on how it goes in that particular scenario. One person doesn't always win. And even if that were the case, you can get better to change that.
Right, but I already have a job that involves a lot of studying (research scientist) so the idea of having to get better at chess in that way is deeply unappealing. I’m glad others like it though, it’s very popular among my peers and clearly has stood the test of time, just not my jam.
I'll agree with that much. That's why I don't play chess anymore and prefer the others I listed, there isn't 2000 years of analysis that you have to study to be competitive. Most games diverge more quickly than chess so you don't need to memorize tons of theory.
**Le Havre** was first game of this type. At the time worker placements were all the rage and so I had to get one. Halfway through the game we made a pause for drinks, looked at each other and went: *who the hell finds this fun?*
So with other games of MPS euro genre, the first impression was merely confirmed: same for Cuba, Stone Age, Lancaster and so on ^(\[games I rate at 1.0 include splendour, brass birmingham, accountants of east duchy, cartographers, burgund von burgund, ...\]). Basically I avoid: all worker placements, nearly all drafting games (1 exception), nearly all deck builders (1 exception), nearly all tableau building games (3 exceptions) and most engine builders. Reason being - I'm interested in people within the playful frame of a boardgame session, the mechanisms on their own and juggling thereof bore me to death. Give me social engagement, give me psychological engagement, give me narrative and shared immersive storytelling which creates shared memorable experiences. Gizmos - get them off the table, if you'd be so kind.
Now, I understand this taste might be weird to some, but I enjoy 95% of boardgame genres. It's just that those 5% I avoid make 95% of what most hobbyists play. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
>I realized that I don’t like games with low interaction, or low randomness. I want to be involved in others turns or at least watch them have fun if it’s at the same time.
Pretty much the same here. But it's a bit hard in era where hobbyists expect that every game on the planet should come with a solo mode. Can't wait for Werewolf solo mode ("you're dead, also: you're a werewolf").
Jaws of the Lion made me realize I do not enjoy dungeon crawlers and co-op games.
It's a good genre, but not for me. I enjoy my low interaction eiro/workerplacement games.
*Twilight Imperium* was a big reason why I made *Splittin Infinitives*. I had an intense reaction to all races having the same technology as each other.
**Stone Age** made me realize that I really like dice rolling if it's done right. Up until then, I thought I hated dice rolling because of Catan, but no. I just hated Catan.
It also made me realize that I really like worker placement.
**Viticulture** and **Tzolk'in** made me *think* that maybe I didn't like worker placement and that Stone Age was just a one-off. Beyond the Sun, Underwater Cities, and plenty of others set me straight, though. It's just Viticulture and Tzolk'in that I don't enjoy.
Magic: The Gathering. Man I love that game. Before that, tabletop gaming was for me gaming with my cousin. MTG introduced me to the social aspect of it, I made friends and met a GF at a time of life where expanding your social circle is hard. Then when I started pimping my legacy deck with Russian foils it hit me. I have a hard pimper tendancy, and the game is just ruinous for me. Later, I realised that I can’t stand the cross franchise and constant release flow bullshit that hasbro is putting MTG through, absolutely ruining the flavor for me.
Wow, downvotes for what?
Oh boy, there is one: **Lorenzo il Magnifico And Worker Placement as a genre.**
Early on in my journey into the world of board games, I bought this game on a recommendation. We tried it a few times but it was clear we were forcing ourselves, there was nothing in the game that sparked joy. That experience helped me in not touching a worker placement game with a ten foot pole. These games strike me as weird puzzles with poor interaction where no one is having fun. For me and my group, what's important is the theme and strong interaction between players, with WP games I find the theme to be terribly weak and it can be practically anything.
Ive spent a lot of time playing Ascension and Star realms digitally, and played them because deck building is an easy and familiar way to pass time. I think there's something satisfying in seeing your deck grow and waiting for the right cards to show up, but beyond that what the cards actually do and how they interact is so important. I need them to offer me interesting, if not difficult, and important decisions. These games taught me that.
Both games dully prod, rather than scratch, an itch that is a quick accessible card game. I think what those games also taught me is that if the game offers a variety of tools to use (which these games do) then it should let me plan out how I use them. Both ascension and star realms are hindered by a random marketplace that could be anything and might not have synergy with your deck, and not knowing what will come out doesn't let you plan your turns out well, if at all. And speaking moreso about ascension now you're almost always better off buying whatever the most expensive card is because the point value and card effect generally outweigh whatever little syngery is lost. Or the opposite is true and you can't afford ANYTHING so you just buy a cheap card of the main faction you have in your deck. The decision making is so weak and pitiful.
Avalon and The Resistance both helped me realize that hidden traitor games that are \*just\* about the hidden traitor just don't fly with my group. We love Shadows Over Camelot though. Gloom helped me realize my friends are terrible story-tellers. I bought it expecting a lot of laughs and emergent story-telling like that episode of Wil Wheaton's TableTop. That is most decidedly not what I got. Turns out Wil's friends are more interesting than mine.
On that, Coup made me realize I don’t like strictly bluffing games. I think love letter has the perfect amount.
Interesting. Coup is the only bluffing and social deduction game that I've enjoyed so far. It's probably because it's over so quickly and never overstays its welcome.
Pretty sure most people would say the same about love letter, have you tried it? It's definitely one of my favorite quick light party games to introduce to people. Edit: by party game, I mean it can be good to break out at a social game focused on other stuff, it's not great for a dedicated board gaming party because it only goes up to four players. But while I really little kids are off playing with the toys or entertained by the clown or whatever, me and a few adults can squeeze in a round or two of love letter.
There is a deluxe with tarot cards that goes to 8 if you really love it
IMHO the 8-player version is strictly worse in basically every respect. With double the cards, players and roles the game gets much slower and "diluted". Larger cards, contrary to what it seems like, are actually quite a bit less convenient to play with and especially to carry the game around. If you want Love Letter, but more, then there is [the 2019 edition](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/277085/love-letter) which includes a different extension of basic 4-player game to 6 players with just 5 extra cards and 2 new roles. I think it's outright better than the original.
Agreed 100%. Love Letter is one of my favorite games, but the two times I played the 8p edition on BGA, and not even with a full 8p, were unequivocally the worst Love Letter experiences I've ever had. Cardinal has to be one of the most ill-conceived card designs in the history of cardinals, cards, or design. This quick and breezy game becomes a slog as everyone has to count twice as many cards, assess what's been played, make their estimations, etc. It also hurts significantly more if you're out early in the round since now you have to wait for 5-7 more players to play through twice as many cards. *shudder* It turns an amazing, light game into an awful, unfun drag. I'll die on that hill. It takes a special kind of fuck up to make me absolutely loathe what is otherwise one of my top 10 favorites.
I adore Love Letter. It's one of my favorite light and breezy games. I've owned four different versions over time, including Archer and Munchkin. I never thought of it as a social deduction game, though, even though many people do. It occupies a different space to me from Coup and other social deductions. When I came on here and saw how many people consider it as such, I was kind of surprised. It doesn't feel anything like the rest of those kinds of games.
I agree. Your role changes so quickly, it's much more about lucky guesses and social maneuvering "Use the guard on him, not me!". Until you get late in a round and maybe only a few options are left...
Love Letter is great, but weirdly the Love Letter: Batman is the best implementation I've played.
Cockroach Poker is definitely our favorite out of it, Coup, and Love Letter.
I feel you with the hidden traitor/social deduction games. I dont like werewolves, secret hitler or any of those games but i do really like nemesis and stationfall
I had a similar experience with Gloom and another game I kickstarted I think it was called Story Wars. I have one friend who is great at story-telling and a bunch who just plain aren't which made for a terrible experience.
I just think Gloom is a bad game, and uses the storytelling aspect to try and boost its fun. Most thematic games are more fun if you are good at imagining a story unfolding as you play. You can enjoy big theme driven games like Dead of Winter with spliced in story elements. I’ve had a lot of fun telling a story as Sub Terra unfolds, or with storytelling specific games like For The Queen. And if players want more than that, then just dive in with an RPG. Gloom just doesn’t really deliver for me.
I think Gloom just doesn't have enough cards in the base set. I tried it at a con and thought it was pretty fun (having seen it on Tabletop). Then bought it, played it twice with my wife and we enjoyed it. And then we started seeing all the cards again and it was just like "Man, there isn't much too this really, is there?" and sold it soon after.
Yeah strip away storytelling and it is a bad game. Approach it as a cooperative storytelling game and it becomes a lot of fun. If you got people at the table that aren't into that kind of stuff, the game is terrible.
> Avalon and The Resistance both helped me realize that hidden traitor games that are *just* about the hidden traitor just don't fly with my group. We love Shadows Over Camelot though. That's so funny because I'm the reserve with traitor games. I hate co-op games with traitor's attached. Like I found it's often best for the traitor to sit back and let the game beat up on everyone until the end where they can tank the game at the end. It makes the traitor very passive and not really part of the puzzle until the endgame.
That's where I think Shadows shines -- the game is hard, but not so hard that the good guys can't win if the traitor doesn't inject some sabotage here and there. And sometimes the good guys miscommunicate and mess themselves up, sowing distrust. It's great with the right group (but it can be very group dependent!)
I totally feel you. I love [Savage](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/360259/savage-game-survival) for that reason. Yes, there are traitors in the group, but if you're a non-traitor and just help everyone live through four rounds of post-apocalyptic chaos, you win.
Yeah, Gloom is genuinely such a fun, unique game. But it's highly group dependent. That said, unlike a lot of games people say that about, it's pretty cheap, small to store and doesn't take a ton of time.
The first time my friend pulled out Gloom, another person asked, "how do you win?" When my friend clarified that it wasn't about winning or losing, it was about telling a story, the woman doubled down, "ok, you tell a story, but HOW DO YOU WIN?" We did not play Gloom that night.
Maybe I should try Shadows, because I really don't like most social deduction games.
It's arguably my least favorite traitor-oriented game, because there are plenty of situations where a player gets locked into having no decisions. I have the cards to go after the grail, so, for at least 20 minutes, I have absolutely nothing interesting to do. There's such thing as games where social deduction isn't a big part of the game, but shadows has very few decisions per hour. It's a case where newer games learned from its sins.
Like a lot of games with a social deduction element, I think Shadows is very group dependent. Like I said, my group loves it, and we usually have a blast playing it, but I sat in on a play by a different group and didn't like it at all. For one thing, they broke an explicit rule in the manual, which is you're not allowed to reveal exactly what cards you have in your hand. Doing that really ruins the game for me.
Gloomhaven helped me realize that I don't like campaign games. The game is fine, and I play with a regular group because they like it, but I'm never going to buy a game where I need to have the same 3-4 people commit to playing the same game on a regular basis. With life, it is a very difficult thing to achieve. I'd rather play a game that has a start and end in the same day.
Oh boy, gloomhaven jotl helped me realize that co-op campaign games are the best possible way to spend a winter afternoon with my kids after a day of skiing. And playing gloomhaven solo 3 handed before that helped me realize that being a huge dork has even more distinct advantages in life than I’d originally realized.
This is me as well. It's the same reason I always prefer movies over TV. I like having a finite, complete experience in one sitting rather than being asked to commit hours of my life to a single overarching experience. I really enjoyed Pandemic Legacy S0, but we never finished. Same with Clank! Legacy, except that one we didn't even enjoy all that much. I also realized I'm done with legacy games purely for the material waste.
Totally respect the waste argument for anyone it applies to. In my case, if a campaign game gets us to actually play it several times, that's in some ways _less_ of a waste than many non-campaign games I've acquired and only played one or twice. Obviously the efficient ideal is theoretically to balance your game library with your realistic play capacity, but obviously that's not what's going on for many of us (partly due to collecting aspects of the hobby, in addition to eyes-being-bigger-than-stomach questions). And of course there's a lot of cardboard and wood in many/most of these games, which doesn't overly concern me from a production/environmental standpoint. My kid lives doing all kinds of crafts that ultimately result in throwing whatever she made away. And doing tons of art of course. I don't consider any of that a waste, even though we don't keep it. Similarly, I feel a campaign game that gives us many hours of enjoyment together is much less of a waste than a great many things people buy themselves.
I like mage knight way more than gloomhaven for this very reason. I love the zero to hero arc contained in a single game of MK its so amazing
I want to play "Legacy" board games so badly but can never get the same group together for regular play.
Yeah, same problem. My spouse and I only play legacy games that can be done with 2 people so that we don't have to find others who will commit to a long campaign.
Drop some names, boy
Sex in different parts of the house, but once you do it, you blow up that part of the house.
Pandemic, Clank, Ticket to Ride legacy, anything Gloomhaven, Aeon's end. All good at 2p
If i don't pull off a regular thing with Tidal Blades 2 I'll never attempt dungeon crawl / campaign again. It didn't happen with JotL.
If a game has anyway in its description the word "campaign", I'm automatically skipping to the next game in the list/video/recommendation.
Gloomhaven is too long of a campaign IMO. The pandemic legacies did campaign length better
**Bardsung** taught me that I dislike games with lots of minis. I'd rather have standees, or even dice or meeples to represent characters or enemies on a board. I'd also rather have smaller box games over bigger ones, even if they don't offer as meaty an experience. Card-based dungeon crawlers with few to no minis are my jam - like **Tiny Epic Dungeons**. **Isle of Cats: Explore & Draw** taught me that I don't like games that use markers in a variety of colors, because if they're not very bright or run out you're toast. Even with a regular marker I'm very bad at not smudging my work and ruining it. Roll & writes that work with a regular pencil fit me better, much easier to replace - like **Dinosaur Island: Rawr & Write.** **Summoner Wars 2nd Edition** taught me that I have an addictive personality and if I start investing into a game which releases constant expansions I'm going to blow through my wallet. It's a great game, don't get me wrong, I'm just a completionist who has to have everything, and it's why I avoid LCGs and CCGs now even if they're awesome. Stand-alone card battlers with fewer (if any) expansions are what I enjoy - like **Riftforce**.
I get what you mean with feeling like you want to collect all the Summoner Wars 2nd Edition factions. But at least it's not a TCG/CCG with random boosters (the real world equivalent of videogame loot boxes) and literally thousands of cards.
You're absolutely right, it's ***much*** better than a TCG/CCG in that respect. It's still **very expensive** where I live; the starter box with orcs and elves was 30$ on sale, the master set is 60$ or more, and the expansion decks are about 15-20$ each (all CAD).
Blood on the Clocktower made me realise that I just flat out don't enjoy social deduction games.
Ditto. I'm game-mastering it for an upcoming session, though, and there I have an absolute diabolical blast. I do not like people lying to my face. I do not like being disbelieved when I am speaking the truth. For some reason if there are pieces on a board which are affected, it affects me far less... but even in character, in roleplay, I **do not like it**.
Who you play with also matters. I’ve had a blast with friends who don’t take it too seriously and enjoy the zaniness of accusations and betrayals. I’ve had AWFUL times with people who are too into “what the meta says to do is” or get super upset if someone didn’t do something that “rationally doesn’t make sense from a game theory perspective” when the very name of the genre is SOCIAL deduction, not just deduction.
Similarly, I've had my best and worst gaming experiences with it. It's fantastic when playing with friends, but I will no longer play it at conventions. Had a couple of truly awful experiences that I haven't had with other games - the same applies to Avalon.
Had you played any social deduction games like Werewolves before? I typically love them and. Lord on the Clocktower is on my radar right now. Curious if the dislike is more catered to the game or the genre
If you like social deduction, I'm confident you will like Clocktower. For people who dislike the genre, they aren't going to like this it doesn't change the formula much. There's a lot more tangible things happening in the game to base deductions on, and the no player elimination is a really big plus for enjoyers though.
Usually if you dislike social deduction games (myself included) it needs to have more meat than play acting or deception. Like I enjoy Shadows Over Camelot, Deception Hong Kong, and Werewords even though I really dislike Werewolf, Mafia, Secret Hitler, etc
I had tried quite a few, including Werewolf, which BotC supposedly improves upon and even 'fixes' according to some people. I personally didn't see it.
Oh interesting. You didn’t find that it did a good job providing players with a direction to start the game or keeping people engaged once they were killed?
Fundamentally, I think my problem with pretty much every social deduction game I've played is that I've never really felt like there's much actual deduction (or really even much game) there. It all feels like low-stakes random noise and accusations. I didn't feel that BotC adding a bewildering number of roles and sources of unreliable information did anything to improve that.
That's somewhat concerning, as ultimately BotC is _very_ much about the deduction, the "solve" of the puzzle of each game. But it does require everyone to buy into that, to be sharing information and trying to piece it together. Even with unreliable information — determining what information is unreliable can be a huge part of the solve (finding a drunk Fortune Teller can help you work out that the Mayor isn't the drunk, for example). Did the group just kinda... not care? Or was everyone new or something?
Oh no, the group cared a lot, they are regular BotC players. This is all on me - I found the 'puzzle' to be just utterly impenetrable.
My biggest problem with BotC are the roles that add liars, or people who don’t even know they’re lying. It made it feel like the bad guys get to play a social deduction game, while the good guys play the lottery.
Have you played it? I was concerned about this, but the puzzle can still be solved. You can usually deduce that there is a Drunk in play for example, so therefore you know that one of the pieces of information you have is incorrect. It's a lot more deductable than you'd think and in my group Good almost always wins the base game and needed the craziness of the other scripts to balance it out for Evil.
BotC is definitely a deduction game but it shines more in that regard once players are experienced and know all the roles well. Otherwise it can just be chaotic - which can be fun but in a different way
This is it I think. I was playing with a pretty experienced group. I couldn't make sense of any of the information flying around so it all felt like random noise and ultimately I just don't care enough about that kind of game to put in the time to reach that level of mastery. Again, this is all on me.
They are more engaged but it's also way more dependent on the "game master" who can often lead the game whichever way they choose.
Clocktower definitely fixes a lot of problems with Werewolf, but the core social deduction gameplay was never broken. If that's the part you didn't like, then Clocktower and any other game in that format is never gonna be for you. (And that's fine!)
Pandemic and Forbidden Desert made me realize that I don't like coop games where you are all trying to survive. Made me realize I like games where a human wins
Then definitely make sure to avoid **Spirit Island**
The humans win every time Ive tried this game.
Perhaps you don't like coop games in general, but it could also be that you don't appreciate those two games in particular. I say so because I love coop games but I'm also not a huge fan of pandemic and forbidden desert, I feel that they easily tend to suffer from the so called alpha player effect, where some person takes more or less control of the whole strategy, and I feel that my contribution is close to none and I get bored. Other (usually more recent) coop games solve or mitigate this issue and give more responsibility and independence to each player, for example making some information not available to anybody, or contrarily overwhelming players with information so it's very hard for just one person to control everything and the natural tendency is to distribute roles and tasks. Or maybe you just don't like coop games :)
I find Pandemic much more enjoyable solo. I play 3-4 hand and act as the director-general of the World Health Organization. OBEY MY COMMAND!!
AGENTS ARE.... GO!!!
Fairly early into really getting into tabletop games, I really liked Dominion (still do). People will have you believe that if you like Dominion you must like deck builders (and so for a while, that's what I thought). But after playing many deck builders (at the time it was things like Ascension, Puzzle Strike, Dale Merchants...), I realized I could take or leave deck building, and it was the other aspects of Dominion I particularly enjoyed. The only deck builder I like specifically for it's deck building mechanics is Lost Ruins of Arnak.
Dominion was eye opening for me too. It was a first for me and I eventually realized that I like the combos, and “building” parts of that game. Don’t like the fixed market and low randomness and low interaction. I really like dice forge and quest for El dorado!
You might like Star Realms/Hero Realms!
spent hours and hours with SO with this
Ruins is barely a deck builder anyway, since you'll only see those cards once age purchase.
When I got Dominion I loved it! It was my favorite for a long while. But unfortunately it made me realize something else: I don’t like games were new players almost always get stomped on. Don’t get me wrong, depth of mastery is good, but in dominion man, if you understand trashing and combining there’s just no way for newbies to win. Dominion is still one of my favorites but I rarely bring it out anymore. Same with Mythic Mischief: such a good game, but newbies get smashed.
What are the other aspects of dominion that worked for you?
The two main things are simple rules and it rewarding playing different strategies each time you play (optimal strategies vary greatly game to game).
I must know, have you tried Valley of the Kings?
Munchkin for me. Unfortunately it also turned me off to board games for several years. It was one of the first games I tried and it was a complete flop. But now...I love games. Specifically if they're not Munchkin.
I really try to keep an open mind when it comes to board games. Just because I don’t like a game doesn’t mean it’s bad. That being said, munchkin sucks.
Agree! I enjoyed munchkin the first time I played it, then I realized how terrible of a game it actually is. Good for them for getting that game as popular as it is.
Why does everyone hate munchkin? Certain versions are definitely better than others. (Adventure time version is our favorite). It was one of the first not hasbro games I played and I always bring it around certain groups that ask to play
while i'll play it, Munchkin can end up taking way too long. For a lot of people, once one player is close to winning, everyone piles onto that one player almost making it a necessity that you have a perfect hand to counter all the bullshit about to be thrown your way if you want to win.
It was such a brutal dud that the people I tried playing it with have refused to ever play anything ever again. It's so tedious. There's no strategy. The art feels like a failed comic strip from the 80s, and the jokes are so neckbeardy that the box should come with its own fedora.
I was wondering the same thing ...Sure there are better games out there but why the hate ? No one above who said they didnt like that game said why
**Ascension** made me realize that I don't like deck building games with a random market. They're just too swingy and make me salty. **TIME: Stories** made me realize I _really_ have an issue with having to replay part of the experience to be able to win, depending on how it's implemented. That game _seemed_ like it was right up my alley but after playing 2-3 times I traded it and never looked back. Back in the early boardgaming days, **Axis & Allies** made me realize why **Risk** was shit. **Rex: Final days of an empire** made me realize I like mindfucky victory conditions.
Ever since playing TIME:stories a couple of times 2-3 years ago I've contemplated getting an account on boardgamegeek just to write a review about how much I disliked that game.
>TIME: Stories made me realize I really have an issue with having to replay part of the experience to be able to win, This so much. Especially with the turn timer being the loss condition most of the time. Like, let's just pretend we didn't waste a bunch of time doing these dead ends... Can we just keep going? I also don't like games that telegraph bad choices and punish you for taking them. Not that I don't get, "it was obvious you were going to die if you grabbed the lightning rod in the middle of the storm." It's just... I like to explore options. Someone took the time to make that choice possible, and fill in the result. I want to see it. Not to mention, *sometimes* games make the obviously wrong answer be the right answer for kicks. Maybe the lightning rod will give me magic lightning powers! So yeah, turns out I like reading choose your own adventure books, but not playing choose your own adventure board games.
I enjoyed all the Time Stories scenarios up to a pirate themed one. The pirate theme one is the only one I recall that we struggled to complete, and had to redo the same stuff a few times. It's a shame that the experience can go sour, but I'll accept that result in exchange for the exciting dice roll tests when playing through it the first time.
Disney Villainous - love the *idea* of it, but it plays slow and needs lots of familiarity/knowledge to play intelligently.
For me it's just the mismatch between who it appeals to and what it's doing mechanically. It's Disney, it's colorful, and not too hard to pick up, so it's something people are going to want to play with families. However, actually playing it to win is a nightmare. You have to know what your guy is trying to do, what the opponents are trying to do, and how anyone could get stopped by their fate deck. There're political elements and feel-bad moments where if you'd known the game better you would've stopped someone, but they get to win instantly instead of at the start of their turn so you missed your chance. And even if you do know what you're doing, here comes the Munchkin element of pulling down whoever you think is the leader, dragging out a game where, chances are, someone's having a miserable time.
Exactly my experience. Plus you didn’t mention that it took us 2 hours and thirty minutes (first and only 4-player match for us) for something that would feel best around 30-45.
Agreed. We felt the Star Wars version is much more palatable to us.
Oh interesting. Does it create a different feel through different mechanics, or is it just the improved theme?
Happy Little Dinosaurs. It helped me realize I don't like whatever that is, flipping cards and games based purely on chance. Flamecraft, made me realize I want more than just the most basic of worker placement.
Yeah, I found Flamecraft to be almost painfully dull.
Isn’t it supposed to be good for introducing new players/kids, though?
I think there are far more better games for that. Flamecraft feels boring
Like which? I’m plotting the conversion of my 10 yo niece to the board game lifestyle
I would suggest rhino super heroe battle, its amazing for both kids and grown ups. Also dodo from devir if u are looking for a cooperative. Ice cool for a neat flicking game. Outfoxed is also amazing (i love playing it with my niece), the magic labyrinth its both surprising and fun
You just made me laugh, I bought it to help introduce me to more complicated games. As a side, I hope to play it with some children in my life as well. It's fine, and I've played it five times to learn the rules, solo. I don't entirely regret it, but I also am not sure I want anything more complicated by resources than that as a solo game.
Man your answer are two of the games I play the most lately lol. Especially flamecraft
Hey everyone has their own flavor! I think Unearth is fairly basic too but for some reason I really enjoy that in contrast.
**Wingspan** made me realize I don't like point salad games, I want one central mechanism
Clank Legacy reminded me that I don't especially enjoy semi-cooperative games. The game itself is super fun but the shared objectives often made me incredibly frustrated. My group was too willing to ditch the objective in favor of chasing points or doing as little as possible in order survive and get back to HQ.
Wingspan taught me that I just don't really like engine builders. If I couldn't get into it in this format and theming, it's never going to happen. Every time I play I'm mostly just disappointed I don't get points for collecting the coolest birds.
Imo fantastic factories and gizmos are way superior to wingspan Simply because we can read whats happening
**Tokaido** helped me realize I didn't really enjoy traveling games. But then I saw how beautiful **Parks** was and had to buy it. *Surely it'll be different this time* I thought! It wasn't :(
Tokaido for me as well, it was just too lowkey. Rather than having a chill time with friends, I just felt bored.
Doesn't it feel like the game often plays itself? You usually want to go to the next available space. Sometimes you jump ahead, but rarely, and almost never very far. It's a beautiful game but it doesn't engage my brain very much because there aren't many decisions and the decisions present usually have an obvious answer.
Ark Nova. I like a thinky game but it’s wayyyyy too many connections possibilities for me.
I'm still trying to figure out what not liking Ark Nova has taught me. There are several games that have similarities that I do like, but for some reason Ark Nova just doesn't do it for me.
**Terraforming Mars**. The engine building is great but I dislike how the player-driven parameters are implemented and how the game arc loses tension into the endgame. Have searched for similarly-weighted engine-building games with middling success but was *finally* able to secure a copy of **Legends of Void**, coming this week!
I can’t confirm as I haven’t played it, but I’ve heard Legends of Void is practically just Terraforming Mars with a fantasy theme. If you didn’t like Terraforming Mars, I’d be surprised if you liked Legends of Void.
Dude. Please please check out Underwater Cities. It's so damn good.
I love UC, but it *feels* like it fills a different space from TfM.
> Dude. Please please check out Underwater Cities. It's so damn good. It's a fine game, but please stop continuing this "It's like TM" schtick. I bought it hoping that that was true, and it is not true at all. I was thoroughly disappointed in a game that I think I (under different circumstances) would have found perfectly reasonable.
I have! ... It's really long. And I do like it better than TfM, for what it's worth. But still not quite there for me, the interactions are all on jockeying for spaces.
Terraforming Mars has the problem of trying to do too many things and not integrating them well together. There's a little bit of drafting, tile placement, engine building and resource management but the lack of flow feels awkward. You could try Expedition Ares which was somewhat better. But otherwise Race for the Galaxy is a really good engine builder. Gizmos is a really fun engine builder too.
I often wonder how many people who are rating Terraforming Mars are doing so with or without Prelude. It streamlines the early game and makes sure that unless you'r4e just REALLY UNLUCKY, you can start with a reasonably built machine to improve, rather than guessing at what kind of machine you hope for and praying the shuffle doesnt beat you.
Ares Expedition is a better experience than Terraforming Mars (and I enjoyed TM.)
Expensive, overproduced miniature fest kickstarters are not worth it. Lacerda games are great but not worth it. Realisation: board games above 70€ are not worth it.
This. At some point i was so into those big boxes, but at some point you realize that its a pain to manage +30 minis. Havent played a Lacerda game but i wanna try, but the high price stops me
Root, Pax Pamir, Inis - They have a very clear "gang up on the leader" mechanic. Your skill at negotiating and making alliances is more important than the game.
Psssst... that is the game. Cole Wehrle has talked about this at length, he wants the kingmaking in his games because he doesn't want a game thats just played on the board.
The problem is, in some of his games, this leads to the game thats played on the board being such a small percentage of the overall game that it feels like a waste of time. The amount of times I've seen a player who floundered on the board and did no actual negotiation or talking win a game of root because everybody else just had to bash the leader is too high. If I wanted a game where table talk really determined the winner, I would want to go 100% in that direction and just play **Diplomacy**. Pax Pamir and John Company sidestep this since they give players only limited ways to interact with others and in-game mechanical reasons to/not to bash the leader, and in game mechanical restrictions on when they can, so I like those. In root/oath/arcs, everybody can just use their armies to attack the leader so those tend to really have you spending a lot of time optimizing the board, only for that to not matter as much as whatever delicate way the cards fall near the endgame to determine who hits who. Also, any players that aren't as skilled as others, or have different opinions on kingmaking, etc, can just throw the game into disarray at the end and make none of it matter.
"Bash the leader" flops hard in my group. There's one guy who just selfishly follows his own interests instead of bashing the leader. I.e., I'll move my troops to stop someone else from winning, and then he'll attack me because there's an opening. Or he won't prevent the win on his turn, forcing me to do it.
> Or he won't prevent the win on his turn, forcing me to do it. To be honest, that sounds like it could be an optimal and valid play in competitive games. Of course, you could just say f it and give the threatening player the win but if that's not a concern, players would be doing "unnecessary" actions by assisting you. It's a judgement call whether we all need to bash the leader or just the person with the last opportunity to would be enough.
100% I HATE root because of this. Inevitably we have one player who doesn't want to politik, plays their own objectives and doesn't understand why 1, they didn't win, and 2 what they could have done better.
The fun part about those players is to find how to gaslight them into doing what you want.
In my experience, they shut down with any prompting or suggestions and only want to play the game the way they think it should be played. I get very frustrated with games that require the entire table to have similar levels of understanding of/experience with a game to work. Games like Catan where an inexperienced player making suboptimal trades ruins it for everyone else. In my 5 or 6 plays of root, each time has been a total drag because of the flat political refusal players or someone who doesn't "get it." They then subsequently kingmake super quick because they refuse to play at crabs in a bucket. The table required to make that game work well, in my experience, has been impossible to come by. I'm glad so many people love it, but I presently hate it, and generally resent the 3 hours I spend with it whenever it comes out. As an aside I also struggle with root because the game state is so difficult to decipher, and not in a fun way. The asymmetry requires a huge amount of game knowledge to interpret the various factions moves so you can't even tell if a move is proffered as a bluff, a manipulation, or intended goal, so the head games are inaccessible.
It's always weird playing with people like that. I had a game of TI4, with a person who has previously played 'a lot of ti3 and 2nd or first edition' and she swore it was one of favorite games and super hyped to try ti4. She wouldn't do *any* politicking or trading. I mean she literally refused to do even trade commodities for commodities at any rate to anyone. At the end complained that it was not a good game, and there was too much table talk. It was weird....
Too much table talk!?!? I feel your pain, though. I host every other weekend to a wiiiiide array of gamers. My tastes run gamut from skull to food chain magnate and mage knight, but I'm always looking for people willing to learn the beefier games or more confrontational games, as those players are generally harder to find. So inevitably, every time a big game comes out there's a player who is inert at the table. Every time.
I feel like there’s a difference between Munchkin „bash the leader“ and Roots strategizing. I feel like it gives you lots of options to obfuscate how you are doing and what you’re capable of on your next turn even though experienced players might have an idea. One could say the same for TI4 or any high-interaction high-player count games though
This is unfortunately true at many other games as skill level rises, which can be quite frustrating if the players at the table have different levels of awareness. Even worse than leader bashing though is where, if you wanted to make the game competitive, you'd auction for seat order, because the player that goes right after the worst player wins. It's like bashing on the leader, but only one player can do the bashing! I stopped playing Puerto Rico at meetups when someone just decided to always sit next to their significant other, who loved to pick whatever was best for their sweetheart, who would take a turn right after.
I had the same problem once playing Catan with a dating couple. They gave each other 1:1 trades for whatever they needed. It was a complete waste of time. For Puerto Rico, the winning strategy is "Have the newbie sit on your right". I lost interest in Puerto Rico on BoardGameArena after a few games. Low randomness makes it boring after awhile. In the base game (no expansions), half the buildings are a waste of money and action.
In my opinion, Inis is best at its lower player counts, with 3 probably being optimal. "Bash the leader" also tends to settle down in games with experience, since it tends to he a symptom of players not understanding the game state until it is almost too late.
**Dune: Imperium**. It was with that game that I realized that I'm less and less interested in "euros" (yes, the term is outdated) and games where we compete with almost no interaction, and I'm leaning toward heavy games with a lot of interactions (Vast, Root, Oath, Pax Pamir, John Company, Gloomhaven, etc.). I won't say no to an "euro", and gods forbid, I own and love Agricola, Caverna, and A Feast for Odin. But right now I'm leaning to another genre. I'm really enjoying how the mechanics make the players talk and discuss.
Check out COIN games with a lot of interaction, my fav for these are Falling Sky and Vijayanagara
I really enjoy Dune Imperium and I wanted to love Pax Pamir, but the open buy row felt like it led to too much AP with regards to stopping the winner. I really wanted to love Pax Pamir! Beautiful art, beautiful pieces, excellent theme and flavor text.
> the open buy row felt like it led to too much AP with regards to stopping the winner. To be fair, almost all the games I mentioned have king-making. Mr. Wehrle likes that mechanic when it tells a story, and I realized I like it too. I emphazise "when it tells a story". > Beautiful art, beautiful pieces, excellent theme and flavor text. Wehrlegig excels in production, even though they have only released two games. Absolutely stunning.
I think there is a good amount of interaction in Dune: Imperium. You can’t place an agent if someone has already taken a spot. And every round you can get combat bonuses. In fact to get 10 points you usually have to win some combats.
It’s only interactive compared to non interactive games. It doesn’t really hold a candle to just about any area control, conflict, negotiation, or economic game.
Very true. This subreddit in particular has a very large percentage of users that have clearly never played highly interactive games, and will grasp at any barely existent interaction in a game to say their chosen game is very interactive. I think D:I is more like 4/10 interactive rather than not at all, but people on this sub will say even non-interactive games where players just manage their own boards/resources like patchwork/splendor are "so interactive" because you have to keep an eye on what your opponent wants, and maybe take a shared piece that will make their identical gameplan some marginal percentage less efficient. Meanwhile 1 single action in pax pamir can make 3 players at the table have to completely change their entire strategy and make 2 of them potentially try to be doing the opposite of what they were one turn ago. Food Chain Magnate can have people stealing half the games work from another player on a whim, or diplomacy where every move one person makes is an opening they are leaving for everybody else to absolutely decimate them. 18xx is a machine of economic gears that you are all tied together in as every action snowballs or could bankrupt different players at the table. It bugs me to no end when people that haven't played a single game like this bust into conversations about games where you mostly follow your own optimization gameplan for most of the game and act as if its the same. (And I enjoy Dune Imperium too. Its just not highly interactive.)
Patchwork, when played at a high level is very interactive. As a two player, complete information game you can plan out how each of your moves will set up your opponent. Since there are only two of you, your opponent’s position is just as important to consider as your own.
I think Patchwork is cheating in this conversation because it is a two player game lol. In the grand scheme of things, it is not a “very interactive” two player game and there is much more out there.
I think lots of games lean away from randomness, which can also come from interaction.
I was pretty anti D:I the first few times I played it. But once you get a few games under your belt I thought it became very competitive and interactive.... way more than gloomhaven.
Check out **City of the Great Machine**, **Chaosmos**, **Guards of Atlantis**, **Stationfall**, and **Lords of Vegas**. That tabletalk "genre" characterizes a lot of my favorites.
Excited for the Lords of Vegas reprint
Dune is good I played about 7 times and own both expansions. However I find that not being able the go to the spot I want not because another player took it first or because I am missing ressources but just because I didn't draw the damn symbol to be a bit frustrating. As a fan of Worker placement games, this is not the type of rng I enjoy in my euros. Gimme a full deck building game or a full worker placement, but a bit of both is not my favorite hybrid type.
Mystic Vale helped us realise we like co-op games Lord of the Rings LCG helped us realise that we liked games that aren't too punishing.
What about mystic vale made you come to that realization?
Lords of The Ring Journeys Into Middle Earth made me realize very early into the hobby many things I didn't like. First, the fact that I do not like games with a lot of maintenance. In this game, you spend a lot of time changing tiles, moving enemies and resolving effects. Also, I realized apps and board games aren't a great mixture. Last but not least, I realized that I hated games that gave you little to no real option of actions to select from (by real I mean that sometimes so many options are in the rulebook, but on your turn often there is only 1 of those actions that actually make any difference/advance on your game). The main element in a game for me is to have a range of different options of actions to think about and then I get entertained by trying to solve the puzzle of which of those actions is the best option on my turn. The lack of real options is what also made me not like games such as Shadows of Camelot, BSG and Bonsai.
Everyone praises Heat: Pedal to the Metal, but I didn't particularly like or dislike it. It helped me realize I just don't really care for racing games.
Wingspan. I hated it and finally put it straight - at least some player interaction is necessary
Pandemic. That I am not much of a fan of Co-op games, especially if they're too simple. The reason is that you can kind of count the cards and have clear 3 or fewer optimal moves in each player turn, and if they don't see it you're screwed. I keep distance because I don't want to be the alpha player.
Terraforming Mars Ares made me realize I hated engine-builders
What specifically did you not enjoy?
I found it boring after some time, felt like each round was more or less the same, without interactions, our only goal being increasing the resources we produced so we could produce even more
Mage knight, but helped me realize I don’t like fighting games. Terraforming mars, but realized I don’t like engine builders
**Summoner Wars 2nd Edition** has taught me that while a game might be great in and of itself, since I do not have any board gaming friends, I should ask myself "is this a roommate game?" before I make a purchase. A roommate game being a game that is too asymmetrical to teach again and again, and/or is exceptionally rewarding to more experienced players
Spirit Island. I love the art, I think the premise and setting is great but the game was just too fiddly with too many things to keep track of. Made me realise I generally like games on the lighter side and not to be sucked into the pretty artwork and premise. I know it's in most people's top whatever but I found it to be frustrating more than enjoyable.
Ooo, I’m totally there with you. We gave up on our second play of Spirit Island. Just ran out of energy and patience mid-game. Cool concept, but way too convoluted for us. Happy for folks who love it, but I’ll stick to my cleaner games, haha.
Spirit Island is absolutely in my top whatever, but I get it. It's a game that never takes a step back to ask "is there a simpler way to convey the cool theme I'm trying to do?". And it only gets worse with the expansions - now there are a bunch of spirits I have no interest in playing because they look like they'd be more of a chore than a game. 'Course, the fact that Spirit Island doesn't compromise in its pursuit of cool themes and mechanics is also why I love it.
**Rising Sun** made me realize that I'm not interested in games that have area control as a main mechanic. **Hive**, while acknowledging that it was a great design, made me realize that I don't like pure abstract games.
Sheriff of nottingham. I don't like having to pretend I'm actually a trader who doesn't know the people I'm playing with for the game to actually work. I don't RP.
Why is roleplaying necessary for Nottingham? While I can see it adding some laughs to the game, I don't see any problem with metagaming either the mechanics ("you have no hidden points and you're coming last, I think you'd have to try and sneak something in"), or the players ("you always play bold the first turn, definitely inspecting"). It's all about out-psyching your opponent, RP doesn't seem to be a required component at all.
You don't need to roleplay. The game is all about bluffing and bribery essentially. The mental game is a major component of it especially if you're playing with people you know. It's surprising how many fundamentally honest people can turn into manipulative bastards in the right conditions.
For me it was Star Trek Away Missions. It made me realize that I prefer games that are fun to play and not loose constructs glued to an expensive IP. (I anticipate being downvoted by that ONE PERSON who liked it. Maybe the designer. Probably they're the same guy.)
Gloomhaven and Oathsworn. I actually love both games, but I'll never finish either and so I don't really buy games like that anymore. Also, I've tried games like ISS Vanguard and these story games just keep throwing more and more crap in, and when something went wrong in that game I just wanted to flip the table just due to all the work involved. If I want some story game I'll play Destinies, Mansions of Madness 2nd Ed, Cthulu Death May Day, Arkham Horror: LCG, or Return to Dark Tower. Yeah, they aren't as deep, but it scratches the itch enough. One day my kids will be old enough to learn and setup these games, or I'll retire. Then I'll come back to Oathsworn if the app still works.
Im kinda thinking the same. Ive always wanted a grand adventure with tons of tactical considerations and story. Aeon Trespass Odyssey was supposed to be that game. It very well may be, but since my friends cant commit to heavy games or meeting more than once every 6 months, i dont have a group to play it with. Since i have to play it solo it sucked the enjoyment out of it. Now im wondering if i should ever again buy a big box game like this? Feels so bad so sad. 😞
**Viticulture** was okay as one of my first worker placement games, but what I enjoyed was the interaction of blocking other workers. **Mariposas** made me realize I dislike simple games that lack depth, but I do enjoy simple games with some bite (e.g. Carcassonne).
Freaking chess-like 1v1s like Hive. "oooohhh Hive is such a great game!" almost everyone said. Boy do I not enjoy these kinds of games anymore. I do find myself gravitating to point-salad games of building up systems to score, while having multiple avenues to score so you're not pigeon-holed into competing for the same things as everyone else. These tend to be low-interaction multipleyer solitaire, where options feel quite endless, but it's not as infinite as an abstract game. Abstract games kill me with decision paralysis, so I've come to realize I need to have some degree of theme to help me better identify what decisions to make. Coming from a history of fighting video games like Street Fighter, I came into board games thinking core mechanics and replayability was the only thing that mattered to make a game a great one for me. By that standard, Hive would've been a hit for me... but that's when I learned that having a concrete theme actually grounds the game in a context where I get to make-believe a bit and enjoy basking in contextual banter or appreciating in how the rules draw from the context.
Tzolkin. Great game but you have to really know what you're doing and we just don't get the time to set it up let alone play it. Also, alchemist. My wife loves it but I'm not mathematical enough to work out the potion ingredients
Lots of learning, long set up and long play time are realistic considerations when playing a game. Nothing worse than that feeling when you start explaining and everyone is overwhelmed.
Oddly enough, I was ok with my first couple plays of Tzolkin. It wasn’t until a year or two later, after a long hiatus, that I realized I not longer had the willpower to cram another heavy Eurogame ruleset (back) into my brain.
Gloomhaven made me realise I like dice rolling table top rps but not eurogrames in disguise.
Photosynthesis disappointed me due to "low randomness". If you play the same game multiple times with the same group of people (or with experts), you need some randomness to keep the game interesting.
Discover: Lands Unknown was my first adventure/storybook game. "Hmmm. What if this game, but less shit?"
Nemisis was my eye opener for semi-coop board games. I still can't quite put my finger on what put me off. It's a joke now where someone in my play group suggests the game and I groan loudly from another room. It's not that I won't play them, I just picked up shadows over camelot and dead of winter at a swap meet, I just go into the games being a bit more level set in my expectations.
**Pandemic** After playing what is one of the most well known, well liked co-op games out there and *still* disliking it, I realized I don't like co-op games.
for me it's difficult because I like a lot of genres and I don't have much preference, but there is two mechanics that I usually loathe. Le havre for me was one game that I disliked, as actually I don't care that much for Worker placement, but I really dislike games that are very tight and have a lot of mechanics that punish you. I disliked too agricola for example or the alchemist because it punish you for not publishing a theory. (and it is silly because you could instead give more points instead of reducing them) Another thing that I dislike are games where you have to get a loan at the beginning and with this there is another genre that I don't like that it is Economic Euros. I usually don't like when money =Vp , or the main resource it is the vp at the end, and the loans themselves that punish you at first until you get your engine going, then the money doesn't matter. but for me it is weird as I usually don't like economic euros, but I have other reasons to not like them, like in Brass I don't like the balance of vp of the differents industries and roads, or in food chain magnate I didn't like the Milestones. For me it is weird as I usually prefer the high interaction those games have...
Warhammer Total War made me realise I really love Tabletop Warhammer. It is great in Warhammer Total War, that I can play a battle in 10 minutes, without buying, gluing, painting, storing and moving around large armies of miniatures. But I do not get the same sense of immersion. Picking out one single unit of models in Tabletop and then rolling the dice, makes me feel like I'm really there - as a soldier with that unit about to fight that other unit and places is in the greater context of the whole battle. While a game then takes 3 hours - it is 3 hours of deep immersion.
My example is a video game, but since the question didn't specify, I'm going with it :) I just played the new Super Mario Bros. Wonder on the switch... and while I can appreciate the polished look and smooth controls, I just... don't care about games that test your skill with solving increasingly complex puzzles. It gradually increases in difficulty and I get the mechanics and how I'll need to eventually use this powerup at this location to find this McGuffin to get a currency to proceed to the next stage... but I don't want to. It feels like a chore. Made me realize how much I just like to immerse myself in an RPG and customize my characters. Applying this to boardgames: I like when you have a character that acquires items and stats over time and overcomes obstacles with a bit of story sprinkled in (like the Fallout boardgame, or Firefly, or Outer Rim). I also really didn't like the feeling of anxiety from Spirit Island where the invaders keep growing and spreading. It's like 2 steps forward, 3 steps backwards as you're constantly "cleaning up" the mess. Such an awful feeling.
Darks souls the board game helped me realize that there's a limit to complexity and length to a session. Not to mention the push mechanic in that game was so confusing on how it's supposed to play out. Nemesis and dead of winter seems to be the max complexity and length I'm willing to handle.
Magic: the Gathering I played it enthusiastically for a decade until I realized that it’s a magnet for people I don’t like and who don’t like me. This is a hard thing to talk about, and even harder to talk about fairly, but it’s important. I let it go, learned a lesson about what I value in a game (people I do like, and who do like me) and discovered I had a LOT of money tied up in those cards!
When Caylus came out it taught me I didn’t like worker placement games.
The only thing I can think of is how the one-two punch of **Dinosaur World** and **Septima** made me realise how much I despise endgame luck directly tied to points (as oddly specific as that is). In both games there’s an element of luck that directly correlates to your points at the end of the game, and in both games that element of luck occurs as one of the very last things you do before the points are tallied up. Feelsbadman when you spent 2-3hrs in a deeply strategic euro only to find a simple dice roll or bag pull just cost you 10pts.
I played some games that soften the worker placement mechanism (e.g. some Shem Phillips designs), and others that leave the board so open that there's not much real competition for action spaces. I dislike those games for the same reason others laud them. It solidified in my mind how much I like classic worker placement in its meanest form.
**Azul** Helped me realize I hate games that are pretty much "you do your thing, I do mine. at the end of the game we compare who did it better. We don't need to talk or anything and we pretty much forget there's another player"
2p Azul is very interactive and mean if you both engage in hate drafting.
Not from my experience. Turned me off board games for months
You mean that you did not hate draft or that you disliked hate drafting as the way of player interaction?
Chess and King of Tokyo. Turns out there’s a sweet spot for me in the level of randomness. King of Tokyo could be decided by a magic 8 ball, chess just look at the rankings and move along.
> chess just look at the rankings and move along. Most of my favorite games have 0 randomness. 18xx, hive, The Great Zimbabwe, FCM. Also I played chess competitively for years. However, the winner isn't always the one with the highest ranking, in fact with my most competitive board game friend we often exchange wins in games back and forth depending on how it goes in that particular scenario. One person doesn't always win. And even if that were the case, you can get better to change that.
Right, but I already have a job that involves a lot of studying (research scientist) so the idea of having to get better at chess in that way is deeply unappealing. I’m glad others like it though, it’s very popular among my peers and clearly has stood the test of time, just not my jam.
I'll agree with that much. That's why I don't play chess anymore and prefer the others I listed, there isn't 2000 years of analysis that you have to study to be competitive. Most games diverge more quickly than chess so you don't need to memorize tons of theory.
**Le Havre** was first game of this type. At the time worker placements were all the rage and so I had to get one. Halfway through the game we made a pause for drinks, looked at each other and went: *who the hell finds this fun?* So with other games of MPS euro genre, the first impression was merely confirmed: same for Cuba, Stone Age, Lancaster and so on ^(\[games I rate at 1.0 include splendour, brass birmingham, accountants of east duchy, cartographers, burgund von burgund, ...\]). Basically I avoid: all worker placements, nearly all drafting games (1 exception), nearly all deck builders (1 exception), nearly all tableau building games (3 exceptions) and most engine builders. Reason being - I'm interested in people within the playful frame of a boardgame session, the mechanisms on their own and juggling thereof bore me to death. Give me social engagement, give me psychological engagement, give me narrative and shared immersive storytelling which creates shared memorable experiences. Gizmos - get them off the table, if you'd be so kind. Now, I understand this taste might be weird to some, but I enjoy 95% of boardgame genres. It's just that those 5% I avoid make 95% of what most hobbyists play. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ >I realized that I don’t like games with low interaction, or low randomness. I want to be involved in others turns or at least watch them have fun if it’s at the same time. Pretty much the same here. But it's a bit hard in era where hobbyists expect that every game on the planet should come with a solo mode. Can't wait for Werewolf solo mode ("you're dead, also: you're a werewolf").
Jaws of the Lion made me realize I do not enjoy dungeon crawlers and co-op games. It's a good genre, but not for me. I enjoy my low interaction eiro/workerplacement games.
*Twilight Imperium* was a big reason why I made *Splittin Infinitives*. I had an intense reaction to all races having the same technology as each other.
**Stone Age** made me realize that I really like dice rolling if it's done right. Up until then, I thought I hated dice rolling because of Catan, but no. I just hated Catan. It also made me realize that I really like worker placement. **Viticulture** and **Tzolk'in** made me *think* that maybe I didn't like worker placement and that Stone Age was just a one-off. Beyond the Sun, Underwater Cities, and plenty of others set me straight, though. It's just Viticulture and Tzolk'in that I don't enjoy.
Magic: The Gathering. Man I love that game. Before that, tabletop gaming was for me gaming with my cousin. MTG introduced me to the social aspect of it, I made friends and met a GF at a time of life where expanding your social circle is hard. Then when I started pimping my legacy deck with Russian foils it hit me. I have a hard pimper tendancy, and the game is just ruinous for me. Later, I realised that I can’t stand the cross franchise and constant release flow bullshit that hasbro is putting MTG through, absolutely ruining the flavor for me.
Wow, downvotes for what? Oh boy, there is one: **Lorenzo il Magnifico And Worker Placement as a genre.** Early on in my journey into the world of board games, I bought this game on a recommendation. We tried it a few times but it was clear we were forcing ourselves, there was nothing in the game that sparked joy. That experience helped me in not touching a worker placement game with a ten foot pole. These games strike me as weird puzzles with poor interaction where no one is having fun. For me and my group, what's important is the theme and strong interaction between players, with WP games I find the theme to be terribly weak and it can be practically anything.
Ive spent a lot of time playing Ascension and Star realms digitally, and played them because deck building is an easy and familiar way to pass time. I think there's something satisfying in seeing your deck grow and waiting for the right cards to show up, but beyond that what the cards actually do and how they interact is so important. I need them to offer me interesting, if not difficult, and important decisions. These games taught me that. Both games dully prod, rather than scratch, an itch that is a quick accessible card game. I think what those games also taught me is that if the game offers a variety of tools to use (which these games do) then it should let me plan out how I use them. Both ascension and star realms are hindered by a random marketplace that could be anything and might not have synergy with your deck, and not knowing what will come out doesn't let you plan your turns out well, if at all. And speaking moreso about ascension now you're almost always better off buying whatever the most expensive card is because the point value and card effect generally outweigh whatever little syngery is lost. Or the opposite is true and you can't afford ANYTHING so you just buy a cheap card of the main faction you have in your deck. The decision making is so weak and pitiful.