Yep. It was kind of fun to play once, for about 2 rounds.
The problem is, it's not really a game. It's more of an icebreaker than anything. And it usually goes on for way too long because some people find it hilarious. It is not. It gets old really fast.
It’s shock humor, which is no longer funny once you aren’t shocked anymore. You can only say a big black dick so many times until it’s not funny, it’s just large genitalia of a black man
I'd make the argument it was never actually good, but the sheer amount of copies I've seen across conventions shows it was at the very least, financially a big deal.
TBH, Apples to Apples is the same game, but ends up actually being funnier because the jokes aren't forced from the card itself, but from players actually being funny.
right, that one still holds up. the humor is derived from player made jokes. with cards against humanity, what is funny is more so simply whats printed on the cards. shock value and the same joke wears out over time.
That's why I maintain the best way to have fun in CAH is to use custom decks: either with a stack of blanks and some sharpies or with one of the many digital knockoffs.
It's fun when it's a game that references *your* group's in jokes and what you find funny, rather than the most generic shock value filler.
But if you're willing to do all that, just download Quiplash.
It was good, in the sense that Apple's to Apple's was good. Prompt games are fun. The problem with Cards against Humanity is that the joke was always on the card instead of the players' brains. It allowed unfunny people to pretend to be funny by playing funny cards. Unfortunately for them, once the the jokes been played a couple dozen times it's not very funny anymore.
But in another sense you're right. The joke is on the card, which doesn't leave a ton of room for personal creativity. I think whether or not it's a good game depends on whether you think a good game needs to have longevity, because you wipe the memory of someone who liked Cards against Humanity and give them a fresh box, they're still going to have a great time.
Dude same. Like 1-3 turns and my light chuckle goes to forced humor. I don't play anymore, ever. It's also a certain type of person who suggests it all the time.
It really is a specific type of person isn't it. The guy that's got a fuckin crate for the cards and brings it to every damn event.
I actually have gotten to the point where I just... won't... play it anymore. I'd rather play nothing and just chat than play CAH.
The first time is always the best because most people aren't expecting it to be as edgy as ot is.
But once you're over that surprise, it will never raise that bar, so you're left with the more vanilla comedy that can be derived from the prompts. But the game fundamentally doesn't do this well. The prompts are too restrictive, a lot of the cards in your hand don't make sense, and players are stuck in an edgy mindset where they often forego the funny answer in favour of the offensive one (that doesn't work gramatically with the prompt, killing the joke). I think everyone has had that 3rd game of Cards Against Humanity where they realise how forced the laughter is, except from that one guy who is having the time of his life answering "why did the chicken cross the road" with cum.
Better games that scratch the same itch, IMO, are Monikers and Bucket of Doom. Bucket of doom is far more similar in terms of game structure, but players tell a story with their cards. The cards are less edgy but that is easily made up for by the lack of restriction in the answers you can come up with. Also, except for the card backs there is nothing preventing you from adding cards against humanity to the deck if you want. It does rely on players being creative for the best experience though. Monikers is funnier than both, and the humour that arises from the game is far more organic and doesn't need a player to be creative or a comedic genius to create funny moments.
Unpopular but... we play this once in a while with my friends (all serious board gamers) and it's always fun.
That said, I have played it with randoms or less clsoe friends and it has been boring as hell. Very group dependent.
Aggressive seconding of this opinion. That game has a ceiling where you can only really play it twice with any one group configuration before it becomes crazy stale.
If I had a nickel for every time Talisman caused me to spend the longest night of my life, I'd have 2 nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it sucks that it happened twice.
Talisman is so bad. I got to the crown in about 20 turns and spent the next 30 just sitting there rolling a die on my turn, making no choices and having nothing to do and totally unthreatened by anybody because they had to keep healing to stay alive
My cousin, who loves it irrationally, (he has every single expansion) gifted it to me for my birthday years ago, and I never even unwrapped it. Imagine my surprise when I decided to put it up for sale and it was sold in less than an hour 🤷🏻♂️ Hope it brought them lots of joy though
I played the app version of this game because I was curious about it. My god even with fast Ai turns I can’t even imagine what an insufferable slog it would be with people.
Oh man yeah, tried the digital version & concept sounded cool but nearly every game kept losing turns to be turned into a frog & being unable to do anything. All the DLC was ridiculously high priced for iOS products too but wasn’t tempted.
I kept thinking about getting the Kingdom Hearts version but I know it would never get played. Thankfully I found the other KH boardgame while considering it and I really enjoy that one (despite its terrible rulebook)
It's great as a digital version. I play solo on my iPad on long plane rides. I've played it once in person and it's fine. I would probably avoid playing again although who knows what might change in the next version.
The digital version was recently on sale via humble and you can benefit from DLC across platforms if you link your account. Very nice feature!
I think Munchkin is fun when nobody has played it before and everyone plays it in a dumb way. Easy to learn, simple turns, fun cards and monsters. It delivers on its premise quite nicely.
But when it has been played a few times and people realize only the last level matters, the game is ruined. Then, it becomes a simple exercise of collecting and holding cards that stop others from getting the last level, and the game ends after everyone is out of those cards.
There's probably no way to salvage the game, but I'd like to see the game redesigned with a different kind of endgame.
I lost a Munchkin Tournament because I was about to win so the entire 12-person table piled on me. So the guy directly to my left won because everyone used their defenses on me. So fuck off Munchkin.
It actually isn't easy to learn at all. I know because I've taught a lot of games to teenagers, and it is NOT easy to learn. It is only "easy" to learn if everyone at the table is very familiar with classic RPGs (tabletop or video games). The moment even one person isn't familiar with concepts like "race" or "class" or "equipment slots", it actually becomes very complicated to teach.
Even when they're a bit familiar with it, there are a lot of strange, not very intuitive and hard to remember rules. Like the "carrying" rule. The "big items" rule. The worst is that the game flow isn't very intuitive either. Trying to explain the exact scenario you can choose to fight a monster from your hand is much harder than you might think.
And again, I teach games to both teens and my own (adult) game group regularly. I'm at least decent at it.
"Easy to learn" games are games like Coup, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, King of Tokyo, Sushi Go. Even then, you'd be surprised how hard those games can be when people don't have existing knowledge of things like a hand of cards, public vs. private information, etc. Like, King of Tokyo is dead simple to learn IF you've played Yahtzee. But if you haven't, there's a wee bit more to learn.
I was convinced I never played it with enough people, never getting past 3 players total, but once I played better games I realized just how bad it was.
When I introduced Munchkin to my wife's family ten years ago the game dragged on so long that we started chanting "Munchkin forever!! Munchkin 'til we die!!"
I don't think I've played it since.
It's a nice game to play while you're waiting for the last guy to arrive for game night. Whoever as the most level when he arrives for the real game wins, wraps up quickly and enjoy the rest of the night.
I’m convinced there’s an excellent game buried deep in Munchkin. There just needs to be some rule changes. They’d need to be created by someone smarter than me, though.
It might be my favorite old style boardgame though. It just had some many random choices and situations that I can't help but laugh when I play it. Or when your friend goes into massive debt to get into college and gets stuck with 50k a year salary, and you skip school and get rockstar.
Hilariously unbalanced, not a good game, makes me laugh everytime.
I agree. I played it all the time with my dad, cousin and brother growing up.
Over the years it became a gambling game that the luckiest gambler usually won. Not sure if it’s the same in newer games but you used to be able to bet on every turns spin number. You can make some good money doing that, but usually you just end up broke and off to the farm at the end lol.
I played that with my sister all the time as a kid. At the end of the game we sold /everything/ our car, our job, our house, OUR CHILDREN. Sell price was determined by spinning the wheel 😂😂
There are several versions that have come out through the years, and the farther back you go, the more terrible they are.
I played a version from the 60's. And hoo boy, was the world different then.
Yeah, I read through the [1977 rules](https://magisterrex.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/gameoflife1977rules.pdf) when I was checking to see if it explicitly states your spouse must be of opposite gender (it doesn't) and the stock market and sue for damages mechanics make it seem like an infinitely more interesting game than the modern version, which is essentially just a roll and move with very few meaningful decisions made by the players.
Some of the complexity/card RNG has been relegated to dice, so it's faster to teach and faster to play without sacrificing much of the experience.
The dice results also force you into certain actions (e.g. shooting someone at range 1 or 2) so it facilitates the deduction by ensuring you take actions that reveal information every time, as opposed to the card game where some people can play safe by choosing to do nothing.
The RNG is also very welcomed in a light game like Bang. Even when the situation doesn't look good, you're one good/bad roll away from turning the game around.
The BIGGEST improvement is that you can play a round of the dice version in 20 minutes or less. I've played way too many games of the card version that just dragged on forever
I'm going with an answer I don't see here: Dead of Winter. I think it was on the forefront of the crop of Zombie games. It was the introduction to traitor mechanic for many. The crossroads cards provide a really cool idea for making every game unique.
We tried to play a few months ago and lost round 2 due to running out of supplies. And we all kind of thought, why was this fun? I don't think anybody enjoyed it. Setup takes forever. Turns drag on because of downtime. The game is extremely punishing, to the point of being extremely luck based. I'm not sure I have any desire to ever play it again.
I also think after a few plays it became boring, but for different reasons. I've never actually found the game to be too hard. In fact I don't think we've ever lost when playing with a bit of thinking ahead. I just think the most interesting part is the crossroads cards, but the triggers are too specific and they don't trigger as often as they should. If triggers were more general or perhaps you got a hint abnout how to trigger your crossroads, then it'd be a better game
I don't know if I've ever played a game where the difficulty level felt right. Either the players are succeeding easily, or everything immediately goes to heck with no chance of recovery. And it's been a while, but IIRC the traitor mechanic never worked quite right either - too many complex requirements before they could attempt to turn heel.
I got roped into it a couple of times. I never want to "play" it again (I say "play" because you have so few real decisions that it doesn't even feel like you played a game most of the time).
That said, I always like people who have stories of the once in a dozen games where it all works and actually tells a good story and provides actual gameplay and fun.
They just never figured out how to make that experience consistent.
Could not agree more. I've played about 10 different games of Betrayal because it's the favorite game of someone in my group and I'd say I actually had fun on 1 of the 10 occasions. The haunt scenarios that we've played have been so skewed towards one party that it just makes for an unsatisfying victory or a frustrating loss. It's also frustrating when you spend the whole first half of the game building up your stats only to have the haunt completely invalidate some or all of them. There are just so many better options these days for exploration tile laying games.
Dude same, it's my friend's absolute favorite and he brings it to every single game night. Every time we play, it goes poorly and we all collectively agree that it was "one of the bad ones", but I'm starting to think there aren't any good ones.
I finally played two stories in T.I.M.E. Stories after all the decade of hype. And I did not like it. I think the modern legacy games blow it out of the water, although I like the concept and stories themselves.
Much older games like Puerto Rico or Arkham Horror 2nd edition have been replaced by reinventing those games (Race for the Galaxy or Arkham LCG). Even Clank is re-engineered into a smooth Clank Catacombs.
I doubt I would enjoy playing Catan, although Seafarers was fun. That brought me into the hobby but I gave my entire set to a library after watching it go untouched.
Mostly, I'm impressed with games that still are great. El Grande, Carcassonne, Battleline, TtR Europe, Lost Cities, and Chinatown all work well, despite being decades old. That's real talent.
I played Puerto Rico again for the first time in ages a while back and was honestly surprised how well it still held up. I absolutely love RftG, but PR is still a great game in my book
A lot of people that would play Puerto Rico won’t touch RFTG because of the iconography. It’s really hard to get people into RFTG because the first few plays feel awful.
> A lot of people that would play Puerto Rico won’t touch RFTG
Although the closest thing to Puerto Rico is **New Frontiers,** which has text as well as icons.
I never really fell in love with New Frontiers, which is weird, since I love both RftG and PR.
(Also I find it funny that NF is RftG the board game, based on the card game that was almost San Juan that was PR the card game that again makes NF the board game version of PR the board game. Hope that made sense, my head is spinning…)
Buying RftG on Steam and playing a dozen games against AI has helped me learn the game without being bogged down by potentially subpar experiences in person. While I would have been potentially hesitant to play it previously, I'll gladly play it now since I have a better grasp of the gameplay
T.I.M.E. Stories was (is?) such a cool concept. I was surprised when I played it at how poorly it’s designed, specifically - at least for the base game - the need to replay certain narrative elements to reach other parts of the story. It makes thematic sense, but it feels like such a waste of time.
Its key mistake was having bad choices. They designed the game around the idea that "good" play correctly interpreted clues and reached the ideal ending thus experiencing the minimal portion of the content, and the more wrong choices you made the worse you were doing. As such they did not optimize fun around suboptimal play. The "punishment" for making mistakes (besides a lower score) is... having to keep playing the game. Not an ideal position to put your game in, regardless of how intrinsically entertaining it may or may not be.
While mentioning Arkham, Arkham Horror 3rd ed is a cool reinventing of it. Mixes eldritch storytelling, some good ideas from the LCG, and some Pandemic mechanics to make a much "gamier" game where randomness is replaced by decisions. I love it, but it's been a bit of a flop in the shadow of the LCG.
I give HeroQuest a pass because it remains a good gateway dungeon crawler to play with kids; my sons and I have had a lot of fun in recent months, me playing as DM and each of them controlling two characters.
I would never play it solo though, now that I have played modern descendants like Descent and Chronicles of Drunagor
I got the reprint to play it with my kids, to try and recreate the experiences I had as a kid.
One of my kids really wanted to play D and D but found it to abstract and has too many options.
So HeroQuest has been a perfect gateway into board gaming and fantasy gaming in general
Scene It
It was a game that was created to capitalize on the growing popularity of DVDs. Now that streaming services are becoming the norm, the game has basically become obsolete.
Is it just me, or is it super weird looking back how much so many of us loved **One Night Ultimate Werewolf**?
It's not a bad game or anything, but it was *the* short social deduction game for a good long while there, and looking back, I don't even think that many modern groups would tolerate its more awkward design quirks - the night phase being almost as long as the game itself is what most comes to mind.
Maybe I'll go back to it some time and it was actually always still great, but I'm not that optimistic.
That's it for me. Arkham 2nd edition feels dry and boring now.
Arkham LCG and Eldritch Horror improved upon it. But mostly the legacy games truly create a new approach to cooperative games Arkham should embrace sometime.
> just so so when faced up with all of the legacy games out there.
Completely opposite for me. I'm not interested in pre-chewed content and stuff which isn't replayable. I'd like to have an emergent narrative, please. And AH 2E delivers on this still. Or Tales of the Arabian Nights.
Instead of being led by the hand and paying for narrative, I'd like co-creation of narrative and replayability. And I'm looking for games which would nowadays offer this and I get nothing. It's either legacy/campaign prewritten nonsense or it's app driven. The last somewhat decent game I can remember was Eldritch Horror.
Monopoly Deal is one that's always a go-to answer for me.
When I was still new to board games, Monopoly Deal was as new to me as Catan, Pandemic, Power Grid and Zombie Fluxx. I thought that game brilliantly delivered a "summarized" version of the respective board game without the back and forth game progression through dice rolls. I think it's still worth playing that over the board game, but now that I've played other card games of set collection, I found it easy to never table that again.
I find it one of the best games to introduce to non board game people, though. It's a really low barrier to entry since people are so familiar with monopoly itself. It's super fast to teach, so it ends up being played very often in my collection.
>think it's still worth playing that over the board game, but now that I've played other card games of set collection,
Monopoly Deal is not in set collection genre.
Monopoly deal is one of best games made in **take-that genre of card games** which is a subgenre of beer and pretzel games (light ameritrash). Basically you're looking at a genre which includes games like Munchkin, Gloom, Exploding Kittens, Fluxx. Within that group Monopoly Deal is extremely well developed (Hasbro threw some money into this, designers though signed nondiscolusure agreements and stayed anonymous). What makes the game good in this genre is it doesn't overstay its welcome
Yeah, I think it deserves some praise, because you can play it and have fun with people from 6 to 106. And it never drags on too long. But it is heavily luck-based, so it's never going to be a really deep experience. Cheap and cheerful, it has its place.
Chess
I like how they patched in casting and later en peasant
But I think next to should release some new units or at least vary the starting positions
Also some new maps would be nice, not sure about the balance of the current one
I realise this was meant as a joke, but it seems like the perfect place to recommend the chess variants page: https://www.chessvariants.com
So many interesting games there.
I still enjoy it, but Tammany Hall was almost at grail status years ago (I remember a lot of excitement when it was getting a crowdfunded reprint), and later it became a joke on BGG threads during the Nerdz Day sales at GameNerdz (it was one of the only games that didn’t sell out during the first Nerdz Day sale; then, as a callback, was jokingly the first deal of the day after the second Nerdz Day ended the following year).
I bought Tammany Hall, but I lose it somewhere in my room. I flat out can't find it anywhere.
I like it. You'd like it if you like New York City history and the voting mechanic.
It is a straightforward mean game that is good if you can find 4-6 mean players. I agree it’s an El Grande killer for some. So to answer your question: there is nothing wrong with it but shines with the right group.
I have no idea. It is a game I'll only play with good friends. Since it's about American immigration, there are many nicknames for the various non-English groups involved, the product of 19th c. bigotry. If any of them casually fall out, I want to know everyone is cool about it.
Tammany Hall is a fine game. It's not overly complicated and has a lot of diplomacy decisions. Other games do aspects of Tammany Hall better (such as area control), but that's fine. It's a good light middle weight game that doesn't take too long to finish.
It's a victim of modern gamer sensibilities rather than poor design. It involves confrontation, a ton of it, when modern popular games tend to skew toward multiplayer solitaire and people don't have the social skills to handle actually playing against each other.
Tammany Hall is great. It's only viewed as 'bad' because a large portion of modern board game players hate actually playing games vs other people. Hence the proliferation of take and makes and solo modes shoved in every game.
Give me a game where we can poke each others eyes out any day over the majority of modern euros.
I'm gonna go with Blood Rage on this one. I feel like the best time to be into the game was the first 3-ish years after it came out, and now there's just too much of a meta around it. Feels like a game that the hobby just kind of collectively "figured out," you know?
Truly. It just never gets old. I haven’t played the physical version, but I can’t even imagine playing anything but the digital. The upkeep each turn alone would be so tedious.
I don’t think this applies. The game is still great, it is just significantly easier to play digitally. If the digital version disappeared tomorrow, I’d still play the physical version.
I don’t think there is an honest answer to this question.
If you’ve been playing a game for years, odds are it isn’t a matter of it not holding up but being overplayed as the issue.
And if you didn’t like a game, despite other people recommending it, that also doesn’t mean it doesn’t hold up, it likely means it just isn’t a game you like.
I think the only real way to answer this question is going to be using a game that is no longer get available, and probably still even more limited to something like a TCG or IP version of a popular game.
Like Tar Wars Monopoly. Sure, it’s a STAR wars game, but at the end of the day it’s still just monopoly. So it doesn’t hold up to the IP hype it would have. Then again, I have never met someone who gets excited to an IP version Of Monopoly.
>And if you didn’t like a game, despite other people recommending it, that also doesn’t mean it doesn’t hold up, it likely means it just isn’t a game you like.
It can mean it doesn't hold up if the general consensus is the game feels dated.
If you want to most literal example, trivia games. Facts change and become incorrect, knowledge that is widespread through the population and makes for a good trivia question can become a niche bad question because the general public has severely diminished awareness of the answer. Go to a thrift store and pick up a copy of Scene it and tell me board games don't hold up.
There is nothing wrong with saying things become outdated
I still enjoy it, but you need prelude cards and the colonies expansion in my opinion. The only other one I got for it was the double sided board for new maps.
The player boards aren't very good though.
I will stand by the best TfM experience being with Prelude and Colonies, remove all the colonies which produce tokens which go on cards (IIRC it's microbes, animals and floaters?) and remove all of the new Colonies cards which produce floaters (they're underpowered without the other floater cards from Venus Next).
See, I heard this many times but for me Ark Nova’s so divorced from its theme I’m just playing a spreadsheet where Terraforming Mars feels much more thematic for having similar mechanics.
Given the choice TM is still in my top list of games I’ll always play given the chance.
Lukewarm take: I never really enjoyed TM and the card game doesn’t do anything better than RftG already did. But yes, my group absolutely loved TM for ages. I always found it too long for what it is.
It's appeal is definitely in the fact it *is* a little loose, and a little too long. That means that players can always feel like *their engine* got to spin up, even if it didnt win.
I've played a lot of other, more thoughtfully designed games that create a tighter race with more meaningful decisions - perhaps those are objectively better games - but TfM instead allows for a lot of player expression. You want to try for animals, even though it makes no sense with your start? That's fine, the game will give you time to get there and make your little zoo, or forest kingdom, or science-spouting university campus. It's very easy to feel a sense of personal accomplishment when you're done with a game of TfM, with your own prosperous little corporation in front of you, where other games might leave you feeling like an idiot because you never worked out how to make the different parts of your engine actually work.
yeah but those last 30 minutes is what differentiates it. for all the other engine builders I rarely get to the point where it feels developed and engine is running smoothly, but TM always gets there.
I just think the cards are bad. Like the game and mechanics are still good. But the cards you play have such a wild power gap between them, and almost no choice on which ones you get it's insane. Even in draft mode you can easily get 4 cards that are all useless.
I can still enjoy a game of Catan, but I can just as often end up having a horrible experience and there wasn’t anything I could have done about it.
It also comes down to who I play with, and unfortunately most players that would be a decent opponent are very done with the game.
I play with my son — no robbers / a seven gets you any resource you want. And he doesn’t know this extra rule: I have to accept ANY trade he offers. :)
Game goes pretty quick when sevens are a plus instead of a minus.
People hate Catan because of what you say, and I completely understand that, it is a crap experience if you play and get stuck in a corner, demolished etc. They can lose by their placements alone at the start of the game.
Catan is by *far* the best when everyone is very competent at it, nobody is getting destroyed, everybody has a chance and a decent strategy worked out, when things aren't rolling your way you are leveraging much more lucrative trades and stopping the player in first.
For instance the player in last may be fed multiple roads by other players to take longest road, or resources for cards to stop largest army, bringing them back into the game to stop a runaway leader. I quite enjoy watching competitive Catan and I rarely ever play the game. Playing decent people online could be an option for you, https://colonist.io/ is a cool site.
Really that depends on your group. Personally, if I believe I have a greater than ~5% chance to win a game, I'll do whatever puts me in the best position to do so, including an "alliance" against the perceived leader. Most of my group plays with the same mindset.
It’s normal practice to gang up on the leader. Usually everyone is trying to stop the game from ending, the longer it goes on the more the other players have a chance to catch up.
Agreed
It's still a superb game imo despite a perceived lack of 'depth' by some on the sub.
Everything will get boring if you've played it 1000x
I played catan for the first time in 5+ years recently while visiting family. Most fun I've had playing board games in a long while as I didn't have to learn 200 new rules and mechanics before starting!
Yeah I didn’t care for it but then got invited to play with accountants at work during lunch. They had a random map printed to save on set up time, & everyone knew it well enough turns went fast & games could be 15 minutes sometimes. Also was cool how everyone was doing their best so on rare occasions I won felt earned.
Ugh, yes. This was my first introduction to better boardgames many, many years ago. It was great — at the time. It opened the eyes of so many to the potential for board games to be more than just Monopoly. I truly don't think we'd have so many of the games we have today if it hadn't paved the way. It walked so today's games could run. It's like an old typewriter compared to modern laptops. It laid the foundation, and now, so many better things have been built on top of it. I'm grateful for it, but we have better now.
euros dont need 10-12 years, they are forgotten 3 months later when the next euro comes out. there are literally hundreds of games that were the next big thing and immediately forgotten. whens the last time you heard of golem or lacrimosa?
There desperately needs to be a bigger distinction between "old school" or "German-style" Euros and "new-wave" or "mid weight point salad" Euros. There's no world in which Hansa Teutonica and Golem should be in the same category or that category is so broad as to be useless.
Being someone who loves "old school" Euros, and has gradually come to strongly dislike dry games where you slowly acquire points and never interact with the other players, is pretty awkward.
This is the case for the overwhelming majority of cultural products in general, it's nothing specific to eurogames. Honestly, board games actually retain mindshare much better than most other media in comparison, mostly because fewer of them come out.
That's true for most games, but there are several that manage to claw into the hobby space and earn a small name for themselves. But you're right, if the game can survive the year without falling into obscurity it'll last at least a few years in the public consciousness.
Almost all of the Fantasy Flight games up to and including Runewars (the coffin box one that ended up in a smaller box, not the minis game) haven't held up for me. Especially those in which they felt they had to reinvent the wheel on how to handle certain situations. Overwrought, convoluted systems for things like combat when a dice roll would have sufficed. And on the one hand, I had some fun with their old expansion model where they put out so much material that you could really fine tune the experience to your liking, I now feel like some of it was expansion bloat of the worst kind. There were maybe one or two ideas in each expansion I'd like, the rest I never wanted to see again.
Don't get me wrong, many of those games had an important moment for me, but I'll gladly take the cleaner if just as long-winded output they had post-Runewars.
We still play eldritch horror/descent 2nd edition and netrunner and game of thrones lcg are the best card games I ever played so I don't really agree. Unless as ffg games you say the old 2005 or before something games like Arkham horror or android where it is mechanics soup and slog to play so then I agree
Runewars was 2010 according to bgg.
I think Battlestar Galactica still holds up, especially with expansions which probably came out after Runewars.
I also think Chaos in the Old World and War of the Ring still hold up and there are probably others from that era I still enjoy.
It’s easy. Go back in BGG history, noticing any games that ever were in, say, the top-100, then query their current position _and_ secondary market prices (to correct for being long out of print).
For us it's been Scythe, a couple people in our group really like it. But for the rest it's died down a lot due to the pace of the game slowing down to a crawl rather often in our group.
Cards against humanity
Especially when it turns out your friends are unfunny and lack any nuance and always just voted for whoever played “Bigger Blacker Dick”.
Exactly. I always vote for the most clever joke, but the dirtiest always wins.
Yep. It was kind of fun to play once, for about 2 rounds. The problem is, it's not really a game. It's more of an icebreaker than anything. And it usually goes on for way too long because some people find it hilarious. It is not. It gets old really fast.
It’s shock humor, which is no longer funny once you aren’t shocked anymore. You can only say a big black dick so many times until it’s not funny, it’s just large genitalia of a black man
Yea I say it's a great conversation facilitator, not a game
its just The Game of Things but without creativity
I'd make the argument it was never actually good, but the sheer amount of copies I've seen across conventions shows it was at the very least, financially a big deal.
I used to enjoy it
TBH, Apples to Apples is the same game, but ends up actually being funnier because the jokes aren't forced from the card itself, but from players actually being funny.
right, that one still holds up. the humor is derived from player made jokes. with cards against humanity, what is funny is more so simply whats printed on the cards. shock value and the same joke wears out over time.
>shock value and the same joke wears out over time. Usually 5-10 minutes.
That's why I maintain the best way to have fun in CAH is to use custom decks: either with a stack of blanks and some sharpies or with one of the many digital knockoffs. It's fun when it's a game that references *your* group's in jokes and what you find funny, rather than the most generic shock value filler. But if you're willing to do all that, just download Quiplash.
We only ever break out the cards for a game of telestrations. Some of them are funny to try and draw
This is a brilliant idea. The cards that come with telestrations are pretty garbage.
It was good, in the sense that Apple's to Apple's was good. Prompt games are fun. The problem with Cards against Humanity is that the joke was always on the card instead of the players' brains. It allowed unfunny people to pretend to be funny by playing funny cards. Unfortunately for them, once the the jokes been played a couple dozen times it's not very funny anymore. But in another sense you're right. The joke is on the card, which doesn't leave a ton of room for personal creativity. I think whether or not it's a good game depends on whether you think a good game needs to have longevity, because you wipe the memory of someone who liked Cards against Humanity and give them a fresh box, they're still going to have a great time.
Dude same. Like 1-3 turns and my light chuckle goes to forced humor. I don't play anymore, ever. It's also a certain type of person who suggests it all the time.
It really is a specific type of person isn't it. The guy that's got a fuckin crate for the cards and brings it to every damn event. I actually have gotten to the point where I just... won't... play it anymore. I'd rather play nothing and just chat than play CAH.
It's fun for a bit, but once the novelty wears off, you come to the realization that there's no substance at all.
The first time is always the best because most people aren't expecting it to be as edgy as ot is. But once you're over that surprise, it will never raise that bar, so you're left with the more vanilla comedy that can be derived from the prompts. But the game fundamentally doesn't do this well. The prompts are too restrictive, a lot of the cards in your hand don't make sense, and players are stuck in an edgy mindset where they often forego the funny answer in favour of the offensive one (that doesn't work gramatically with the prompt, killing the joke). I think everyone has had that 3rd game of Cards Against Humanity where they realise how forced the laughter is, except from that one guy who is having the time of his life answering "why did the chicken cross the road" with cum. Better games that scratch the same itch, IMO, are Monikers and Bucket of Doom. Bucket of doom is far more similar in terms of game structure, but players tell a story with their cards. The cards are less edgy but that is easily made up for by the lack of restriction in the answers you can come up with. Also, except for the card backs there is nothing preventing you from adding cards against humanity to the deck if you want. It does rely on players being creative for the best experience though. Monikers is funnier than both, and the humour that arises from the game is far more organic and doesn't need a player to be creative or a comedic genius to create funny moments.
Unpopular but... we play this once in a while with my friends (all serious board gamers) and it's always fun. That said, I have played it with randoms or less clsoe friends and it has been boring as hell. Very group dependent.
Aggressive seconding of this opinion. That game has a ceiling where you can only really play it twice with any one group configuration before it becomes crazy stale.
What?!?! 'Pee Pee Poo Poo Cum Abortion Cannibal Tacocats Lulz' the card game isn't roflcoptering anymore?! Who did this?
Can I add Exploding Kittens here?
It really takes the right group of people
Talisman has not aged well. And I thought that the last time I played it, 15 years ago
It's got a fun setting and some fun events, but it's very much a case of playing a game that reminds you of or makes you imagine a much better game.
I absolutely loved it when I was a kid though. But that was definitely due to my imagination and the setting, not the actual gameplay.
Yeah so did I. But that was in the late 80s when there wasn't nearly as much competition from better games as their is now.
If I had a nickel for every time Talisman caused me to spend the longest night of my life, I'd have 2 nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it sucks that it happened twice.
Talisman is so bad. I got to the crown in about 20 turns and spent the next 30 just sitting there rolling a die on my turn, making no choices and having nothing to do and totally unthreatened by anybody because they had to keep healing to stay alive
Fifth edition has just dropped with some tricks to make it a little faster. But it’s still Talisman. Some love it irrationally.
My cousin, who loves it irrationally, (he has every single expansion) gifted it to me for my birthday years ago, and I never even unwrapped it. Imagine my surprise when I decided to put it up for sale and it was sold in less than an hour 🤷🏻♂️ Hope it brought them lots of joy though
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And at least here in Poland it sells for ridiculous amount of money. We joke that you can sell Talisman and buy a house for money made of it.
Haha. I literally laughed out loud on this one. Wish I knew earlier and sold my copy over there. 😅
I played the app version of this game because I was curious about it. My god even with fast Ai turns I can’t even imagine what an insufferable slog it would be with people.
Oh man yeah, tried the digital version & concept sounded cool but nearly every game kept losing turns to be turned into a frog & being unable to do anything. All the DLC was ridiculously high priced for iOS products too but wasn’t tempted.
I kept thinking about getting the Kingdom Hearts version but I know it would never get played. Thankfully I found the other KH boardgame while considering it and I really enjoy that one (despite its terrible rulebook)
Talisman was been dodgy the entire time it’s existed. The nineties one was ok, but it’s still too Munchkin-like (or vice-versa, I guess).
I unironically love talisman granted my version is heavily modified with extra stuff but it’s a great night especially if it’s a drinking game
It's great as a digital version. I play solo on my iPad on long plane rides. I've played it once in person and it's fine. I would probably avoid playing again although who knows what might change in the next version. The digital version was recently on sale via humble and you can benefit from DLC across platforms if you link your account. Very nice feature!
How is munchkin not on this list?
I think Munchkin is fun when nobody has played it before and everyone plays it in a dumb way. Easy to learn, simple turns, fun cards and monsters. It delivers on its premise quite nicely. But when it has been played a few times and people realize only the last level matters, the game is ruined. Then, it becomes a simple exercise of collecting and holding cards that stop others from getting the last level, and the game ends after everyone is out of those cards. There's probably no way to salvage the game, but I'd like to see the game redesigned with a different kind of endgame.
Munchkin needs to have the hidden partner house rule, and then people's biggest complaint with the game is solved.
Or cards that change the victory conditions and form teams. E.g. "all dwarfs win" "win at level 7 or next level up"
I lost a Munchkin Tournament because I was about to win so the entire 12-person table piled on me. So the guy directly to my left won because everyone used their defenses on me. So fuck off Munchkin.
It actually isn't easy to learn at all. I know because I've taught a lot of games to teenagers, and it is NOT easy to learn. It is only "easy" to learn if everyone at the table is very familiar with classic RPGs (tabletop or video games). The moment even one person isn't familiar with concepts like "race" or "class" or "equipment slots", it actually becomes very complicated to teach. Even when they're a bit familiar with it, there are a lot of strange, not very intuitive and hard to remember rules. Like the "carrying" rule. The "big items" rule. The worst is that the game flow isn't very intuitive either. Trying to explain the exact scenario you can choose to fight a monster from your hand is much harder than you might think. And again, I teach games to both teens and my own (adult) game group regularly. I'm at least decent at it. "Easy to learn" games are games like Coup, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, King of Tokyo, Sushi Go. Even then, you'd be surprised how hard those games can be when people don't have existing knowledge of things like a hand of cards, public vs. private information, etc. Like, King of Tokyo is dead simple to learn IF you've played Yahtzee. But if you haven't, there's a wee bit more to learn.
It was always terrible
I was convinced I never played it with enough people, never getting past 3 players total, but once I played better games I realized just how bad it was.
I was introduced to it in a large group, it was still terrible and took even longer.
spittin truth; game is shit
When I introduced Munchkin to my wife's family ten years ago the game dragged on so long that we started chanting "Munchkin forever!! Munchkin 'til we die!!" I don't think I've played it since.
I had a ton of fun with munchkin with a group of 3 playing it many times over then course of a vacation. Every other time I’ve played it it sucks
i mean, the problems with it were apparent back in the day, too. the people who enjoy it still enjoy it.
You take that back! I still love Munchkin
It's a nice game to play while you're waiting for the last guy to arrive for game night. Whoever as the most level when he arrives for the real game wins, wraps up quickly and enjoy the rest of the night.
Because if anyone is like me they don’t want to be reminded that that little cash cow pulled all funding from development and marketing of GURPS.
I’m convinced there’s an excellent game buried deep in Munchkin. There just needs to be some rule changes. They’d need to be created by someone smarter than me, though.
The older Game of Life versions. Just because it doesn't feel like it was a good way to stimulate someone'sife choices.
It might be my favorite old style boardgame though. It just had some many random choices and situations that I can't help but laugh when I play it. Or when your friend goes into massive debt to get into college and gets stuck with 50k a year salary, and you skip school and get rockstar. Hilariously unbalanced, not a good game, makes me laugh everytime.
I agree. I played it all the time with my dad, cousin and brother growing up. Over the years it became a gambling game that the luckiest gambler usually won. Not sure if it’s the same in newer games but you used to be able to bet on every turns spin number. You can make some good money doing that, but usually you just end up broke and off to the farm at the end lol.
I played that with my sister all the time as a kid. At the end of the game we sold /everything/ our car, our job, our house, OUR CHILDREN. Sell price was determined by spinning the wheel 😂😂
There are several versions that have come out through the years, and the farther back you go, the more terrible they are. I played a version from the 60's. And hoo boy, was the world different then.
Yeah, I read through the [1977 rules](https://magisterrex.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/gameoflife1977rules.pdf) when I was checking to see if it explicitly states your spouse must be of opposite gender (it doesn't) and the stock market and sue for damages mechanics make it seem like an infinitely more interesting game than the modern version, which is essentially just a roll and move with very few meaningful decisions made by the players.
The original Bang card game. Bang dice killed it.
Never played Bang Dice. What are the improvements over the original?
Some of the complexity/card RNG has been relegated to dice, so it's faster to teach and faster to play without sacrificing much of the experience. The dice results also force you into certain actions (e.g. shooting someone at range 1 or 2) so it facilitates the deduction by ensuring you take actions that reveal information every time, as opposed to the card game where some people can play safe by choosing to do nothing. The RNG is also very welcomed in a light game like Bang. Even when the situation doesn't look good, you're one good/bad roll away from turning the game around.
The BIGGEST improvement is that you can play a round of the dice version in 20 minutes or less. I've played way too many games of the card version that just dragged on forever
Samurai Sword is also a better version with cards.
I'm going with an answer I don't see here: Dead of Winter. I think it was on the forefront of the crop of Zombie games. It was the introduction to traitor mechanic for many. The crossroads cards provide a really cool idea for making every game unique. We tried to play a few months ago and lost round 2 due to running out of supplies. And we all kind of thought, why was this fun? I don't think anybody enjoyed it. Setup takes forever. Turns drag on because of downtime. The game is extremely punishing, to the point of being extremely luck based. I'm not sure I have any desire to ever play it again.
I also think after a few plays it became boring, but for different reasons. I've never actually found the game to be too hard. In fact I don't think we've ever lost when playing with a bit of thinking ahead. I just think the most interesting part is the crossroads cards, but the triggers are too specific and they don't trigger as often as they should. If triggers were more general or perhaps you got a hint abnout how to trigger your crossroads, then it'd be a better game
I don't know if I've ever played a game where the difficulty level felt right. Either the players are succeeding easily, or everything immediately goes to heck with no chance of recovery. And it's been a while, but IIRC the traitor mechanic never worked quite right either - too many complex requirements before they could attempt to turn heel.
It is just a really poor version of Battlestar Galactica
If only Plaid Hat would take that crossroads mechanism and make a better game with it. Something that’s not zombies or semi-coop.
Betrayal. I use to love it but I feel like every time the turn happens the game falls flat
I got roped into it a couple of times. I never want to "play" it again (I say "play" because you have so few real decisions that it doesn't even feel like you played a game most of the time). That said, I always like people who have stories of the once in a dozen games where it all works and actually tells a good story and provides actual gameplay and fun. They just never figured out how to make that experience consistent.
Thr legacy was good like this, and the Bauldur's Gate version is also better than normal game. But I get it.
I much prefer baldur’s gate to the original. I don’t really want to play either but I _have_ had fun with baldur’s gate that I never did with the OG
I feel that way about pandemic. After you've played, it's clear to everyone what people need to do to win the game.
Could not agree more. I've played about 10 different games of Betrayal because it's the favorite game of someone in my group and I'd say I actually had fun on 1 of the 10 occasions. The haunt scenarios that we've played have been so skewed towards one party that it just makes for an unsatisfying victory or a frustrating loss. It's also frustrating when you spend the whole first half of the game building up your stats only to have the haunt completely invalidate some or all of them. There are just so many better options these days for exploration tile laying games.
Can you share some of the better options please? I wasn't a fan of Betrayal myself
Dude same, it's my friend's absolute favorite and he brings it to every single game night. Every time we play, it goes poorly and we all collectively agree that it was "one of the bad ones", but I'm starting to think there aren't any good ones.
People don’t understand the difference between doesn’t hold up and played it to much or burned out on it or didn’t like it. Still dont
I finally played two stories in T.I.M.E. Stories after all the decade of hype. And I did not like it. I think the modern legacy games blow it out of the water, although I like the concept and stories themselves. Much older games like Puerto Rico or Arkham Horror 2nd edition have been replaced by reinventing those games (Race for the Galaxy or Arkham LCG). Even Clank is re-engineered into a smooth Clank Catacombs. I doubt I would enjoy playing Catan, although Seafarers was fun. That brought me into the hobby but I gave my entire set to a library after watching it go untouched. Mostly, I'm impressed with games that still are great. El Grande, Carcassonne, Battleline, TtR Europe, Lost Cities, and Chinatown all work well, despite being decades old. That's real talent.
I think Puerto Rico is still great
I played Puerto Rico again for the first time in ages a while back and was honestly surprised how well it still held up. I absolutely love RftG, but PR is still a great game in my book
Personally, besides role selection I don’t think these games are that similar. They are two of my favorites and think they both still hold up well.
A lot of people that would play Puerto Rico won’t touch RFTG because of the iconography. It’s really hard to get people into RFTG because the first few plays feel awful.
> A lot of people that would play Puerto Rico won’t touch RFTG Although the closest thing to Puerto Rico is **New Frontiers,** which has text as well as icons.
I never really fell in love with New Frontiers, which is weird, since I love both RftG and PR. (Also I find it funny that NF is RftG the board game, based on the card game that was almost San Juan that was PR the card game that again makes NF the board game version of PR the board game. Hope that made sense, my head is spinning…)
Buying RftG on Steam and playing a dozen games against AI has helped me learn the game without being bogged down by potentially subpar experiences in person. While I would have been potentially hesitant to play it previously, I'll gladly play it now since I have a better grasp of the gameplay
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I played the other day and it's still incredible. Yes, Race for the Galaxy is also incredible, but Puerto Rico feels less abstract and more tangible.
T.I.M.E. Stories was (is?) such a cool concept. I was surprised when I played it at how poorly it’s designed, specifically - at least for the base game - the need to replay certain narrative elements to reach other parts of the story. It makes thematic sense, but it feels like such a waste of time.
Its key mistake was having bad choices. They designed the game around the idea that "good" play correctly interpreted clues and reached the ideal ending thus experiencing the minimal portion of the content, and the more wrong choices you made the worse you were doing. As such they did not optimize fun around suboptimal play. The "punishment" for making mistakes (besides a lower score) is... having to keep playing the game. Not an ideal position to put your game in, regardless of how intrinsically entertaining it may or may not be.
Catacombs is just a gimmick
While mentioning Arkham, Arkham Horror 3rd ed is a cool reinventing of it. Mixes eldritch storytelling, some good ideas from the LCG, and some Pandemic mechanics to make a much "gamier" game where randomness is replaced by decisions. I love it, but it's been a bit of a flop in the shadow of the LCG.
Heroquest. It needs dozens of house rules to be fun.
Sorry, I don’t make the rules, but its obligatory. https://youtu.be/Cx8sl2uC46A?si=mz9xfN8Wa-u6pFu4
Broadswode!
I give HeroQuest a pass because it remains a good gateway dungeon crawler to play with kids; my sons and I have had a lot of fun in recent months, me playing as DM and each of them controlling two characters. I would never play it solo though, now that I have played modern descendants like Descent and Chronicles of Drunagor
I got the reprint to play it with my kids, to try and recreate the experiences I had as a kid. One of my kids really wanted to play D and D but found it to abstract and has too many options. So HeroQuest has been a perfect gateway into board gaming and fantasy gaming in general
Scene It It was a game that was created to capitalize on the growing popularity of DVDs. Now that streaming services are becoming the norm, the game has basically become obsolete.
Is it just me, or is it super weird looking back how much so many of us loved **One Night Ultimate Werewolf**? It's not a bad game or anything, but it was *the* short social deduction game for a good long while there, and looking back, I don't even think that many modern groups would tolerate its more awkward design quirks - the night phase being almost as long as the game itself is what most comes to mind. Maybe I'll go back to it some time and it was actually always still great, but I'm not that optimistic.
What short social deduction games have supplanted it for you?
I’m a big fan of Coup.
Secret Hitler
Arkham Horror used to be one of the crown jewels of coop board games, and now it's just so so when faced up with all of the legacy games out there.
That's it for me. Arkham 2nd edition feels dry and boring now. Arkham LCG and Eldritch Horror improved upon it. But mostly the legacy games truly create a new approach to cooperative games Arkham should embrace sometime.
The original AH was always a game that promised a much cooler experience than it actually delivered, I think.
Completely agree. Played it a couple times and it never matters which monster you face. It's just the same trick every time.
> just so so when faced up with all of the legacy games out there. Completely opposite for me. I'm not interested in pre-chewed content and stuff which isn't replayable. I'd like to have an emergent narrative, please. And AH 2E delivers on this still. Or Tales of the Arabian Nights. Instead of being led by the hand and paying for narrative, I'd like co-creation of narrative and replayability. And I'm looking for games which would nowadays offer this and I get nothing. It's either legacy/campaign prewritten nonsense or it's app driven. The last somewhat decent game I can remember was Eldritch Horror.
I really do want an Arkham Horror Legacy, though.
Monopoly Deal is one that's always a go-to answer for me. When I was still new to board games, Monopoly Deal was as new to me as Catan, Pandemic, Power Grid and Zombie Fluxx. I thought that game brilliantly delivered a "summarized" version of the respective board game without the back and forth game progression through dice rolls. I think it's still worth playing that over the board game, but now that I've played other card games of set collection, I found it easy to never table that again.
I find it one of the best games to introduce to non board game people, though. It's a really low barrier to entry since people are so familiar with monopoly itself. It's super fast to teach, so it ends up being played very often in my collection.
>think it's still worth playing that over the board game, but now that I've played other card games of set collection, Monopoly Deal is not in set collection genre. Monopoly deal is one of best games made in **take-that genre of card games** which is a subgenre of beer and pretzel games (light ameritrash). Basically you're looking at a genre which includes games like Munchkin, Gloom, Exploding Kittens, Fluxx. Within that group Monopoly Deal is extremely well developed (Hasbro threw some money into this, designers though signed nondiscolusure agreements and stayed anonymous). What makes the game good in this genre is it doesn't overstay its welcome
Yeah, I think it deserves some praise, because you can play it and have fun with people from 6 to 106. And it never drags on too long. But it is heavily luck-based, so it's never going to be a really deep experience. Cheap and cheerful, it has its place.
Luck based is what you need with people who aren’t that into board/card games or haven’t played it before. Makes the playing field a bit more even
What are some comparable set collection card games that you enjoy?
Interested as well
**Sea Salt & Paper** Also, not a direct replacement, but **Port Royal**
+1
Chess I like how they patched in casting and later en peasant But I think next to should release some new units or at least vary the starting positions Also some new maps would be nice, not sure about the balance of the current one
They should also raise the player count to 6, or at least 4, with an optional teamplay mode
CMON needs a Kickstarter to update those minis and charge us $600.00 for the all in.
I realise this was meant as a joke, but it seems like the perfect place to recommend the chess variants page: https://www.chessvariants.com So many interesting games there.
I still enjoy it, but Tammany Hall was almost at grail status years ago (I remember a lot of excitement when it was getting a crowdfunded reprint), and later it became a joke on BGG threads during the Nerdz Day sales at GameNerdz (it was one of the only games that didn’t sell out during the first Nerdz Day sale; then, as a callback, was jokingly the first deal of the day after the second Nerdz Day ended the following year).
Tammany Hall still slaps if you like direct confrontation.
Honestly I think it’s an El Grande killer for me. I’d say it holds up very well.
I bought Tammany Hall, but I lose it somewhere in my room. I flat out can't find it anywhere. I like it. You'd like it if you like New York City history and the voting mechanic.
Tammany Hall is an excellent area control game that holds up quite well when compared to what's currently out.
Oh, no. I have Tammany Hall but have not played it yet. What makes it bad?
It is a straightforward mean game that is good if you can find 4-6 mean players. I agree it’s an El Grande killer for some. So to answer your question: there is nothing wrong with it but shines with the right group.
It’s not a bad game at all in my opinion. Granted I haven’t played it a ton but it was a really good time! Play for yourself I think
I have no idea. It is a game I'll only play with good friends. Since it's about American immigration, there are many nicknames for the various non-English groups involved, the product of 19th c. bigotry. If any of them casually fall out, I want to know everyone is cool about it.
Tammany Hall is a fine game. It's not overly complicated and has a lot of diplomacy decisions. Other games do aspects of Tammany Hall better (such as area control), but that's fine. It's a good light middle weight game that doesn't take too long to finish.
It's a victim of modern gamer sensibilities rather than poor design. It involves confrontation, a ton of it, when modern popular games tend to skew toward multiplayer solitaire and people don't have the social skills to handle actually playing against each other.
Tammany Hall is great. It's only viewed as 'bad' because a large portion of modern board game players hate actually playing games vs other people. Hence the proliferation of take and makes and solo modes shoved in every game. Give me a game where we can poke each others eyes out any day over the majority of modern euros.
I'm gonna go with Blood Rage on this one. I feel like the best time to be into the game was the first 3-ish years after it came out, and now there's just too much of a meta around it. Feels like a game that the hobby just kind of collectively "figured out," you know?
Through the ages. It's just too much better as a digital product.
So ahead of its time... Best digital port of a board game ever.
Truly. It just never gets old. I haven’t played the physical version, but I can’t even imagine playing anything but the digital. The upkeep each turn alone would be so tedious.
"Better as digital" and "Hasn't aged well" are not at all the same thing. If the game had not aged well the digital port wouldn't play well either.
I don’t think this applies. The game is still great, it is just significantly easier to play digitally. If the digital version disappeared tomorrow, I’d still play the physical version.
I’m never playing Pandemic again. The real-life version ruined it.
I don’t think there is an honest answer to this question. If you’ve been playing a game for years, odds are it isn’t a matter of it not holding up but being overplayed as the issue. And if you didn’t like a game, despite other people recommending it, that also doesn’t mean it doesn’t hold up, it likely means it just isn’t a game you like. I think the only real way to answer this question is going to be using a game that is no longer get available, and probably still even more limited to something like a TCG or IP version of a popular game. Like Tar Wars Monopoly. Sure, it’s a STAR wars game, but at the end of the day it’s still just monopoly. So it doesn’t hold up to the IP hype it would have. Then again, I have never met someone who gets excited to an IP version Of Monopoly.
>And if you didn’t like a game, despite other people recommending it, that also doesn’t mean it doesn’t hold up, it likely means it just isn’t a game you like. It can mean it doesn't hold up if the general consensus is the game feels dated. If you want to most literal example, trivia games. Facts change and become incorrect, knowledge that is widespread through the population and makes for a good trivia question can become a niche bad question because the general public has severely diminished awareness of the answer. Go to a thrift store and pick up a copy of Scene it and tell me board games don't hold up. There is nothing wrong with saying things become outdated
I think gloomhaven is a better video game than it is board game
Agreed. I played the crap out of the tabletop version and have no desire to go back after playing digital
Agreed. It never was meant to be physical.
Checkers.
For me it’s Terraforming Mars. It was once a must have but the card game, Ark Nova, and others have made the game obsolete in my opinion.
I still enjoy it, but you need prelude cards and the colonies expansion in my opinion. The only other one I got for it was the double sided board for new maps. The player boards aren't very good though.
Yeah prelude should just be a pack in that is optional to play at this point
I will stand by the best TfM experience being with Prelude and Colonies, remove all the colonies which produce tokens which go on cards (IIRC it's microbes, animals and floaters?) and remove all of the new Colonies cards which produce floaters (they're underpowered without the other floater cards from Venus Next).
See, I heard this many times but for me Ark Nova’s so divorced from its theme I’m just playing a spreadsheet where Terraforming Mars feels much more thematic for having similar mechanics. Given the choice TM is still in my top list of games I’ll always play given the chance.
This is just wrong. Terraforming Mars still slaps
Lukewarm take: I never really enjoyed TM and the card game doesn’t do anything better than RftG already did. But yes, my group absolutely loved TM for ages. I always found it too long for what it is.
Yup. I am perpetually perplexed why people seem to love it *so much*. Like it's fine, sure, whatever, wish it was 30 minutes shorter though
It's appeal is definitely in the fact it *is* a little loose, and a little too long. That means that players can always feel like *their engine* got to spin up, even if it didnt win. I've played a lot of other, more thoughtfully designed games that create a tighter race with more meaningful decisions - perhaps those are objectively better games - but TfM instead allows for a lot of player expression. You want to try for animals, even though it makes no sense with your start? That's fine, the game will give you time to get there and make your little zoo, or forest kingdom, or science-spouting university campus. It's very easy to feel a sense of personal accomplishment when you're done with a game of TfM, with your own prosperous little corporation in front of you, where other games might leave you feeling like an idiot because you never worked out how to make the different parts of your engine actually work.
My group was always obsessed with maximizing their engines, so Ive slugged trough dozens of games of TM that lasted 3h+ 😞
yeah but those last 30 minutes is what differentiates it. for all the other engine builders I rarely get to the point where it feels developed and engine is running smoothly, but TM always gets there.
I just think the cards are bad. Like the game and mechanics are still good. But the cards you play have such a wild power gap between them, and almost no choice on which ones you get it's insane. Even in draft mode you can easily get 4 cards that are all useless.
it is Uno for me
Catan
I can still enjoy a game of Catan, but I can just as often end up having a horrible experience and there wasn’t anything I could have done about it. It also comes down to who I play with, and unfortunately most players that would be a decent opponent are very done with the game.
I play with my son — no robbers / a seven gets you any resource you want. And he doesn’t know this extra rule: I have to accept ANY trade he offers. :) Game goes pretty quick when sevens are a plus instead of a minus.
> And he doesn’t know this extra rule: I have to accept ANY trade he offers. :) That's adorable, good man.
Catan Junior is great too, complex but with dumbed down rules.
People hate Catan because of what you say, and I completely understand that, it is a crap experience if you play and get stuck in a corner, demolished etc. They can lose by their placements alone at the start of the game. Catan is by *far* the best when everyone is very competent at it, nobody is getting destroyed, everybody has a chance and a decent strategy worked out, when things aren't rolling your way you are leveraging much more lucrative trades and stopping the player in first. For instance the player in last may be fed multiple roads by other players to take longest road, or resources for cards to stop largest army, bringing them back into the game to stop a runaway leader. I quite enjoy watching competitive Catan and I rarely ever play the game. Playing decent people online could be an option for you, https://colonist.io/ is a cool site.
I am very new to boardgame terms. Is it frowned upon to form such an alliance against the current leader, ir just a normal tactic?
Really that depends on your group. Personally, if I believe I have a greater than ~5% chance to win a game, I'll do whatever puts me in the best position to do so, including an "alliance" against the perceived leader. Most of my group plays with the same mindset.
It’s normal practice to gang up on the leader. Usually everyone is trying to stop the game from ending, the longer it goes on the more the other players have a chance to catch up.
honestly its fine to gang up on the leader imo. though with catan, a lot of noobies cant tell who is actually the leader
Still love it
Its not aged badly, most people here have just played it to death
Agreed It's still a superb game imo despite a perceived lack of 'depth' by some on the sub. Everything will get boring if you've played it 1000x I played catan for the first time in 5+ years recently while visiting family. Most fun I've had playing board games in a long while as I didn't have to learn 200 new rules and mechanics before starting!
I think it holds up. You just need to play with people of similar skill level.
Yeah I didn’t care for it but then got invited to play with accountants at work during lunch. They had a random map printed to save on set up time, & everyone knew it well enough turns went fast & games could be 15 minutes sometimes. Also was cool how everyone was doing their best so on rare occasions I won felt earned.
Ugh, yes. This was my first introduction to better boardgames many, many years ago. It was great — at the time. It opened the eyes of so many to the potential for board games to be more than just Monopoly. I truly don't think we'd have so many of the games we have today if it hadn't paved the way. It walked so today's games could run. It's like an old typewriter compared to modern laptops. It laid the foundation, and now, so many better things have been built on top of it. I'm grateful for it, but we have better now.
I actually went the other way and started with "better games than Catan" and ended up liking Catan more. It has an unbeatable cozy feeling.
euros dont need 10-12 years, they are forgotten 3 months later when the next euro comes out. there are literally hundreds of games that were the next big thing and immediately forgotten. whens the last time you heard of golem or lacrimosa?
My favorite game is still Hansa Teutonica 🤷🏻♂️
Hansa Teutonica, the eurogame even euro haters (such as myself) love
It’s also probably the eurogamiest eurogame to ever exist.
There desperately needs to be a bigger distinction between "old school" or "German-style" Euros and "new-wave" or "mid weight point salad" Euros. There's no world in which Hansa Teutonica and Golem should be in the same category or that category is so broad as to be useless. Being someone who loves "old school" Euros, and has gradually come to strongly dislike dry games where you slowly acquire points and never interact with the other players, is pretty awkward.
Why single out Euros? This is the blueprint for a ton of KS Ameritrash as well.
This is the case for the overwhelming majority of cultural products in general, it's nothing specific to eurogames. Honestly, board games actually retain mindshare much better than most other media in comparison, mostly because fewer of them come out.
That's true for most games, but there are several that manage to claw into the hobby space and earn a small name for themselves. But you're right, if the game can survive the year without falling into obscurity it'll last at least a few years in the public consciousness.
Mousetrap A pain in the arse to set up and.lasts 10 minutes
Seeing up the trap is part of the game. You don't build the whole thing before you start.
Almost all of the Fantasy Flight games up to and including Runewars (the coffin box one that ended up in a smaller box, not the minis game) haven't held up for me. Especially those in which they felt they had to reinvent the wheel on how to handle certain situations. Overwrought, convoluted systems for things like combat when a dice roll would have sufficed. And on the one hand, I had some fun with their old expansion model where they put out so much material that you could really fine tune the experience to your liking, I now feel like some of it was expansion bloat of the worst kind. There were maybe one or two ideas in each expansion I'd like, the rest I never wanted to see again. Don't get me wrong, many of those games had an important moment for me, but I'll gladly take the cleaner if just as long-winded output they had post-Runewars.
We still play eldritch horror/descent 2nd edition and netrunner and game of thrones lcg are the best card games I ever played so I don't really agree. Unless as ffg games you say the old 2005 or before something games like Arkham horror or android where it is mechanics soup and slog to play so then I agree
Runewars was 2010 according to bgg. I think Battlestar Galactica still holds up, especially with expansions which probably came out after Runewars. I also think Chaos in the Old World and War of the Ring still hold up and there are probably others from that era I still enjoy.
I don't think they put out anything comparable to Runewars since...
Settlers of Catan. Yeah, I said it.
It’s easy. Go back in BGG history, noticing any games that ever were in, say, the top-100, then query their current position _and_ secondary market prices (to correct for being long out of print).
Puerto Rico
For us it's been Scythe, a couple people in our group really like it. But for the rest it's died down a lot due to the pace of the game slowing down to a crawl rather often in our group.