Let's talk regrets! Specifically where games ended up too complex, too overloaded with gimmicks or too blinged out for your enjoyment
Let's talk regrets! Specifically where games ended up too complex, too overloaded with gimmicks or too blinged out for your enjoyment
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.
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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.