I frequently read that people at the time said the plastic minis in Nemesis can detract as much as they can add to the atmosphere, hiding important parts of the board space owing to their sheer size.
TI is often lambasted for taking an entire weekend.
Rosenberg’s euro games are the bane of many a player trying to keep all possible actions in their mind.
Modern kickstarters can arrive in shipping crates worth of stuff, making you rent a lorry just to get your 25 minute party game to a meet-up.
What’s your biggest regret purchase you can readily recall where a game was just “too much”. No matter what specifically it was too much of.
For me personally, my big one was Android: Netrunner. I was excited to jump back into 2-player competitive deckbuilding after I quit Magic The Gathering early in the fourth edition. And it seemed so perfect. No luck involved, known spaces of cards, multiple factions, asymmetry which I nearly always love, it’s all perfect!
On paper…
In reality I found out, yes, for me this is a strictly superior MtG. No downsides. Except that I’m no longer 16, and I no longer want to spend forever creating decks, collecting cards even if they’re not random, or engage with sifting through hundreds or thousands of cards when working on decks. The exact things that made me excited to play MtG-but-better and brought me to buy Netrunner were the very things turning me away from it now.
Still got to sell it, oddly attached to my first-run box + all expansions now that it’s no longer available. But played it like 6 times and that was it. 0 enjoyment. Gave actual MtG a try, even less enjoyment. Tried Keyforge, also even worse. I feel that the entire genre is just a goner for me, and I regret investing so much money into Netrunner. A lot.
I am lucky if I can organize 2 TI4 games in one year but I love it when it happens. I think Mansions of Madness is the answer for me personally. The app runs like shit and either crashes or audio doesn’t work, then we end up frustrated when the scenario ended up requiring you to pull some hidden lever first and you didn’t do it soon enough and now it’s a hard fail state. I bought all the expansions and have shit tons of content for it and don’t want to play it :(
Nemesis! I have heard how amazingly good the game is, but I have yet to play because by the time I have set up everything i am spent and no longer feel like playing.
Frosthaven ended up being really complex. My partner and I got through Gloomhaven just fine. Maybe I forgot how much of a struggle it is in the beginning or it was trying to keep track of everything after an exhausting scenario, but we petered out after a handful of scenarios. Using apps has helped, especially with tracking combat, but we ended up fudging a bunch of stuff so we didn’t have to re setup and replay whole scenarios that came down to a single card draw.
Plus organizing everything meant it doesn’t fit in just one box. It is a home-only game.
Man, I bounced off Gloomhaven hard, which was disappointing because the rest of my friend group really enjoys it. The whole mechanic around burning cards each time you shuffle / when you use powerful ones really turned me off. It’s set up like a tactical game, and that makes me want to take my time and approach it strategically, but the time pressure of running out of cards and losing made me feel like I had to rush all the time. After the second or so time we lost a lengthy run due to running out of cards, I was about done with it.
I am an old curmudgeonly man who declares all games that end when you reach an arbitrary number of points are bleh. Give me simple rules with simple win conditions, and emergent complexity. Like, if the rules can’t fit on one or two pages, I’m checking out something else.
No, I do not want to play Twilight Imperium this weekend. Thx ;)
I make an exception for D&D, or similar, because the presence of a rules arbitrator keeps the game moving.
A secondary rant, related to the above. Any game where you are doing nothing while the other players take their turns in succession, sucks. All games need interrupt rules once there is more than three players. At least with Catan, you’re collecting resources, and with enough players you can declare a “special building project” out of turn.
Weirdly I find Catan suffers exactly from this, and you have the added problem of if you fall behind you’re just waiting for your turn so you can offer a trade nobody wants and then do nothing. Hour after hour, doing nothing. But you can’t leave the game because that would throw everybody else off.
I won’t play Catan any longer.
if you fall behind you’re just waiting for your turn so you can offer a trade nobody wants and then do nothing.
easy fix: don’t fall behind, then.
Jokes aside, I don’t like Catan for the exact same reason. It often feels very unbalanced, it’s very common for at least one player to have such bad luck, that it’s not fun for them any more, but they have to hold out for the end of the game.
Whenever we play board games and someone suggests we could play Catan, i’ll tell them i’d rather not, we have so many other good games to play.
I’ll almost rather play UNO, even.I’m rarely in that position in Catan, so perhaps I have a biased view of the game. That said, the snowball effect is a feature of many many games. Once you’re winning, you’re rewarded with feature or abilities that help you win even faster. Monopoly is a good example, where once a strong position is established, it’s just waiting out a foregone conclusion. Risk is a great example, where owning whole continents reinforces your armies faster. Hell, even poker, where having a large stack allows you to use your position to bet aggressively…
Catan really did remind me of Monopoly in this regard. Once you pull ahead you stay ahead and move further ahead faster and faster. And if you’re trailing, you trail further and further. With all the tedium that involves since you can’t leave.
I have no people to play Scythe with :(
Not a purchase, but I once spent hours making a “corrected” Risk board with an updated and complete map of all 190-something countries and their borders. We tried it once, found it tedious to play, and haven’t used it since. Making it was kind of fun though, so I’m not sure I have any regrets.
I was really disappointed with Maglev Metro. One of my favorite games of all time is Bus, and I was hoping for something a bit more modern and the transparent tiles in Maglev Metro were the perfect amount of gimmicky for me.
But after playing it with my board game group, it felt like it was only 75% of a game. There was almost zero player interaction and I was not expecting it to be multiplayer solitaire.
I enjoyed Ride the Rails but that’s the only game of yours that I’ve played as far as I can recall. Our group has Age of Steam coming to the table at some point.
I haven’t gotten into train games too much, but it seems like a crowded space, with lot’s of games trying to recreate / perfect the magic of older games. Sort of like pirate games and Merchants and Marauders.
@Cargon Age of Steam is fantastic. Really highly recommended. Might have dislodged Brass Birmingham as my favorite game.
Of the cubes, I’d recommend giving at least 2007’s Chicago Express a try (also called Wabash Cannonball). It’s extremely interactive between players, and I can teach it in about 10 minutes. It’s on BGA now, but I know that doesn’t work for everybody.
If the interaction is what you’re digging, I think you may dig it.
Star Fleet Battles. On paper it was a gateway game for me to get into wargames (a genre of game I’d always found tedious and lacking any fun of any sort) because it was a subject matter I was interested in. My SO introduced me to it because I liked old school Star Trek and he was a fanatic player of the game.
Four hours later and we were on, like, turn three. The game systems were inconsistent and incoherent. Planning out your moves made the game into a career bureaucrat’s wet dream of paperwork. And when, finally, the two ships actually REACHED each other, there was about two minutes of dice rolling and … while the game wasn’t formally over, it was clear that there was no point in continuing; the victor was a foregone conclusion.
But we still played another two hours before the game ended.
So not only did I hate the game, I also had my hatred of wargames in general hardened.
Final Girl. Seems perfect for me: solo, dice chucker, horror theme. Yes, yes, and hells yes. But after a dozen plays of multiple features, I just didn’t connect with it and I really wanted to. Such a disappointing experience.
I played Void and Camp and excitedly went out and got Creech and Station one (sorry, can’t remember names). Looking forward to trying those two then mix and matching but definitely concerned it’ll disappoint as well.
I’ve only played it once but: Frostpunk. It is absolutely gorgeous, thematically well done, but damn it felt like we played wrong because we just failed so hard. I think ultimately I walked away saying, “was that supposed to be fun?” – and Robinson Crusoe is one of my favorites so I don’t mind difficulty.
