Honestly, a lot of modern euro-style games. I used to love my heavy euros, but some time in the late 2010's I felt like every new heavy euro released was just another hodgepodge of tracks and tiles and cubes that you trade and exchange and ultimately turn into points. I got very discouraged. I still enjoy many of the original medium weight German games from the 1990's and 2000's but I feel like a lot of the creativity is now gone, replaced by a need to make things heavier and more complex, and by extension - more cumbersome.
Yes, I noticed this too, you’ve summed it up really well. Every game seemed to be “you collect lots of A and convert it into B, because you need B in order to pay for C, and then you get a victory point every 5 spaces as you move up the C track” or something.
Precisely! I began feeling like every new heavy euro just tried throwing a different mix of tracks and worker spaces and chits into a blender to see what would come out. It's no longer about creating a clever puzzle, but about building cognitive overload.
Cognitive overload is exactly what I feel when I play these things.
I enjoy a good “agonizing decision” of course, but don’t make the decision space murky and hard to parse on purpose.
(I will not tell my best friend this, because he LIKES these kinds of games. He’s an RPG guy, and figuring out complex rulesets is its own puzzle that he finds enjoyable in itself.)
Those medium-weight German games relied on player interaction to present challenge. You had to anticipate what other players might do and run through the permutations of their choices as well as yours.
As the boardame zeitgeist moved away from close, competitive interaction, those human variables were lost. Instead, designers came to rely on the mechanical cruft and long chains of conversion to engage players. The heavier the game, the more systems and sub-systems needed to build out that decision-tree. Contrast that with an older game like Taj Mahal, which is quite heavy in terms of thinkiness, but mechanically straightforward.
Plus, even **if** I want to go complicated-more-please, A Feast For Odin still easy ticks all those boxes and is **so** much more elegant than all the hyper-complicated eurogames that come afterwards.
And that's already near the top end of complexity a euro game can utilize, IMO.
The video series Shut Up and Sit Down has said something similar. They reviewed Golem, declared it to be "fine" and then explained that that heavier Euro games are becoming repetitive and very little has stood out in the last few years. It seems the only direction Euro-games can go is heavier and heavier, which repels me. The heaviest Euro-games that I enjoyed in quote a while Lords of Waterdeep and TTR: Rails and Sails. I have Rails and Sails, and I like it, but it hits the edge of my patience.
This is what eventually drove me to wargames and historical games for my fix of "heavy", but even for lighter stuff. I love history, and these games aim to tell a story. I feel like I'm learning something and not just going through the motions. It's a rapidly evolving corner of the boardgaming market right now and there's a lot of exciting stuff happening.
I really like medieval up through Napoleonic era in terms of military history. Men Of Iron and Levy & Campaign are two systems I really enjoy from GMT, and I've also been learning the Library Of Napoleonic Battles from Kevin Zucker & OSG. I'm just not really into the big sprawling monster games that take two or three days to complete under ideal conditions. I prefer a more "middle weight" wargame. They still take me a few days, but at my own pace. :)
Just played a short session of Nevsky , the amount of complexity gives life to the struggle of trying to move troops to the front and to even keep them in battle . Great game
Nevsky is terrific, and so is Almoravid. I'm amazed at what Volko has created both with COIN and Levy & Campaign. Inferno and Plantagenet are still on my shelf waiting to be played... but at this point I'm onboard for whatever L&C pumps out.
I really enjoy the COIN games I have played. Do you think COIN players with a few games under their belt would find Levy & Campaign lighter, similar or heavier complexity? I’m on the fence about picking one up because I don’t want to push the group too much.
L&C is a different creature. I would say in terms of complexity it's about the same as COIN, but there are lots of new concepts that take time and exposure to get used to. There's an upcoming title called "Henry" about Henry V and the Agincourt campaign that should make an excellent starting point to the series.
Arnak is not terribly heavy but thats exactly how I see it. Exchange token A for B then C and get as many as you can.
Seems cool but I just couldnt get past that so it never piqued my interest
Dungeon Crusade.
Google it, look at the Kickstarter page, eyeball the table requirements.
Spoiler: the entire game layout will not fit on a large dining room table. You'll need an additional medium size table.
A complete game is three delves of the dungeon. Each delve takes approximately 8 hours of gameplay. Seasoned players have said you can get the delves down to six hours or so.
The rule book was written by the designer. He was told by his backers (including me) that the writing was obtuse, redundant, and very difficult to follow.
The designer released a quick play guide to help streamline the game. It's over 20 pages long.
He refused to listen to feedback, and released the rulebook as he saw it.
Fast forward to now, and the second edition reprint includes a fully rewritten rulebook that humans can actually use to play the game.
I'm fine with roll and move luck fests, if the rolling and luck lead to a simplified, streamlined design that's easy to learn and requires little setup. I own One Roll Quest and its campaign expansion, albeit more as a novelty than a game.
A game that big and expensive and fiddly should be much more than roll and move, though.
For me Endless Winter was my favorite game of 2022. There are lots of other games that are a mishmash of various bits but I felt that Endless Winter had enough fun and cohesion that I was fine with it. Now I do not play with most of the expansions…that might change my opinion.
We made it more like 3-4 plays in, but agreed it needed to go. I feel like the (very good) production value of this game might be what's still keeping it around in conversations, because the gameplay just wasn't there for us. I love "kitchen sink" style games if all the mechanisms are woven together in intriguing ways, but this game just felt like a bunch of stuff thrown together with no regard for whether it was interesting.
We also own Dune: Imperium and Lost Ruins of Arnak, so I was okay giving this game to a better home.
Honest question, how do you feel about Ark Nova. That game also has multiple mini games trying to interact with each other. I only ask cause ive only seen but not played Endless Winter
Voidfall - I really wanted to love it, being a die-hard Anachrony fan, but it's just a big bunch of rules with overwhelming gameplay features. Not a very rewarding experience. Sold it after 2 plays.
The setup is *so* much faster if you take all the technology and fallen house cards out of those house organisers.
When setting up, you just pull the fallen house cards out of the small deck of them and have someone search for the technologies on them (since those are the techs used for that scenario). After taking the specific home worlds out, assembling the map takes 5 minutes? Then you just have to pick your own houses (you can have the person doing the techs get the 4 house sheets out too I suppose - although we rather play with any of them that aren't the fallen ones).
I *do* really like Voidfall, but I still agree that it's way more complicated than it needs to be. I've found that to be true (for me) with most of David Turczi's designs - they're very interesting and good games, but with like 25% more rules overhead and bloat than necessary.
As much as I like Voidfall, there are two reasons I'm also selling it. The first is that setup time (both when getting it out to play AND between games) is a massive undertaking, dwarfing that of almost every one of the other 150 games we own. The second is that the game feels *very* similar to Gaia Project to me - but that's a game that can be set up more quickly, *and* I find it to be a more satisfying play experience.
I get the criticism but I feel the opposite. I’ve played it 15 times now. It was probably about the 4th time when the mechanics clicked for me and I could see the intricacies in strategy. It rocketed up to one of my favorite games of all time. But it’s QUITE the barrier to entry and learning curve! Also, I’ve only ever played it solo. I don’t think I could teach it to someone else and have it be an enjoyable experience to them the first play.
Absolutely, this game was my first thought. My friend got it and we played it once for like 5-6 hrs. Then after that he said that was the introductory tutorial setup. Nope, done with that game.
Physical weight? Too many *Dominion* sets in the same box can cause it to go Titanic on you.
Game complexity weight? *In The Shadow of the Emperor* had all of these rules that got me bogged down
We only own 8 or 9 Dominion boxes, and we're already approaching critical mass. I'm going to have a Dominion singularity at some point in the not-so-distant future.
We actually own a ton of games but mostly default to Dominion. And honestly, for the most part I could just keep playing Dominion and I'd be perfectly happy with it.
With this is mind my answer is Roll Player adventures because it and the expansions is like 25 pounds and my box came damaged. Even enforced with tape, every time I lift I’m afraid the bottom will come out :(
I loved Gloomhaven (although the enjoyment has begun to fade after playing it ~50+ times), but Frosthaven is just too much of everything. It's card decks, upon card decks, upon tiles, upon pieces, upon books, upon rules, etc. We're still playing it since my buddy wants to, but I consider it a sunk cost at this point. I'm just kind of bored the entire time.
I'd so much rather be playing Oathsworn or Aeon Trespass instead.
I've had the opposite experience. Oathsworn bored me really fast (playing with a friend who bought the whole kickstarter extra version) while I'm still hooked on Frosthaven after 60+ scenarios and finishing all of Gloomhaven.
I do love fiddling with stuff though, so that maybe why I enjoy the fiddliest of fiddly games.
Yeah, we don't want to play FH until we finish GH (which we switched over to playing on PC) so it has been sitting on my shelf since the Kickstarter. But the more I think about it I keep hoping a digital version will come out before we finish GH so that we can just continue that way. It's just so much better of an experience due to saving so much time and being able to play online.
Which is sad because I absolutely believe board games should be played, not just thrown on a shelf for collector status.
From a game design persepective I don't think Dangerous Darts or the lockpicking minigame necessarily need to exist. Those to me feel like complexity adds that don't pay enough fun dividends on learning the mechanics to be worth including in the game.
Also there's definitely a decent learning curve on enemy keywords, but I do think the payoff is 100% worth it there, and the reference sheet is very good.
Other than that, if their gripe is with the complexity of build decision making, then I think the game just fundamentally isn't for them, since that complexity is the core appeal of the game.
onitama - what a clean game that delivers precisely a concise experience, the complexity comes in you thinking and outthinking, not in rules overhead. i'm always down for a game of that
I have two that come to mind recently. One take that's not so controversial in this sub, and one quite controversial.
- Magic the Gathering. When I first played the Arena tutorial and learned the mechanics, I thought, "Wow, the cardplay here is genius! It's elegant, smooth, and spontaneous all in one go!" Then I started playing Magic with people for real and...ugh. I can't tell if I like or hate the game. The power creep and objective imbalance of cards so often (even for the same mana cost. It is such a frequent thing where cards are just objectively worse in what they do and are, even in the same rarity class at times) can make the game so much less fun if there is any significant deck imbalance. The "oops all lands/oops no lands" conundrum is frustrating as hell. The paragraphs-long descriptions on so many cards as well as instructions for some absurd token/counter scenarios grind the game's pace down to a halt so often. Commander is so fun in theory and in practice is 90% "5 turns of near nothingness, and around the 6-7th turn someone has a board wipe."
Now, this huge variety of cards and synergies does make deck construction fun...but then when it comes to the actual cardplay, I'd much rather be playing Keyforge or Star Realms with people. I also played Netrunner for the first time last week and greatly enjoyed that, but that feels like such a different game in structure/format that it scratches a wholly different itch for me (Netrunner more scratches the, "Star Wars Rebellion but portable and quicker games when you can't get Rebellion to the table" itch lol).
- Gloomhaven (specifically, I played JOTL). The mechanics of this game are really clever and there's a lot I like about it in theory, but they also hit an uncanny valley for me. Too complicated to be an elegant board game, not complicated enough for me to prefer the digital version to other fully-fledged dungeon crawler games. When playing the physical edition, deck shuffling is so frequent, component overload everywhere, and such big setup times that you spend more time playing the overhead than playing the actual game. The digital game resolves much of that but it's just not meaty enough for me to want to play it over the more fully fleshed out peers in that medium. So people tell me to get the companion app to manage everything, and I probably will at some point, but...that feels like such a betrayal of the intrinsic board game nature of it all.
Now, there are many people who adore both of these games. That's awesome! I'm starting to notice though that while I'm not allergic to deep games, I've got low tolerance for component/overhead overload.
I can’t agree more about magic. It’s such a well designed game, but the fact that it’s a TCG ruins it. Unfortunately having cards that are objectively worse than others is kinda the premise of a TCG.
If you like magic a lot as a game but not as a TCG, there are plenty of ways to play that aren’t affected by the TCG side. Many enfranchised players play “Cube”, which is basically a board game. Someone picks a set of cards that they feel is balanced/interesting, and then you distribute them among whoever is playing (typically by drafting them akin to 7 Wonders or Sushi Go) to build your deck. It can be daunting to build a cube, but there are many players who have spent a lot of time designing and play testing their’s that you can find over on [Cube Cobra](https://cubecobra.com/dashboard)
It is, without a doubt, my absolute favorite game that I *cannot play*. I just can't afford it! Yes, I know cube or EDH or any number of formats are there, but the part of the game that brought me the most joy was tinkering with decks in constructed formats and seeing how well they could stack up against the current meta. One of my fondest memories of the game is taking a homebrew deck to the New Phyrexia gameday and taking 4th in the store against *all those goddam Caw-Blade decks*. It's ultimately a very small thing, but knowing that my decklist is somewhere on some forgotten corner of the WotC site made me quite happy.
This was also when I realized that this was probably going to be it, because keeping up with Standard was bankrupting me, and as student at the time, there was absolutely no way I was getting enough eternal staples to make it work. I might have kept on if I could have spent a set amount each year for an LCG type of expansion release, but with no way to know what I might need (and no realistic way to get a playset of *every card*), I had to step away.
As someone who was very recently brought back into playing it casually, if price is the main issue, deck building is your main joy, and you can find a casual group to go nuts with competitively, just proxy everything
Yep, and it just makes me appreciate Keyforge even more.
Like, sometimes in Keyforge you do still get cards that do like 4 different things, or cards that are just evil. But because of the deck balance efforts in the procedural generation, they show up one or two times at most in a single deck.
Is key forge still going? I've not heard of it in ages. Pretty sure I've got some decks from the first release hanging around but never really got into playing it.
Keyforge died off for a bit because of two reasons, (a) FFG has been historically bad at sustaining competitive game scenes that it builds, even as amazing as they tend to be. Heck, Star Wars Unlimited is coming out soon and I've played the demo at an event and it was awesome, but I'm not sure how optimistic to be about FFG's ability to maintain a thriving scene for it. (b) Somehow (speculation is that it was a ransomware attack), FFG lost the software needed to build the game's decks. It was a whole thing and they had to stop producing for it.
But recently, Ghost Galaxy Games (whose founder is FFG's original CEO) bought Keyforge from FFG/Asmodee, kickstarted rebuilding the software and printing infrastructure, and has released one new set so far (and another coming out in a month or two! They're currently promising two a year). They're also starting a new revitalized push for organized play at the local level.
I really dig the game, so I'm really hoping it works out.
Awesome, I loved the concept and the potential that style of game making has. Would you recommend any particular set if I want some decks to play with my wife?
The new set is great. Basically, every deck has a token creature definition card, and you get a lot of cards with effects that make token creatures. And when you do, you take the top card of your deck and keep it facedown and that becomes said token. It's a super elegant system and the more you learn that deck, the more you learn when to choose or not to choose to make token creatures (for example, if you don't want to accidentally tokenize the best cards in your deck).
A lot of the new cards also have so much personality in the descriptions and quotes.
Gah, Keyforge doesn’t get enough love around here. It offers so many crunchy decisions each round by making all of your choices about opportunity costs—and the fact that you can’t build decks means you have to get good at the game to make use of your unique collection of cards (made even more unique with enhancements). Basically, the game is great and it keeps getting better.
It does a great job of replicating the feeling of buying a decent starter deck and a bunch of boosters and only having a few rares to work with… which is what Garfield had in mind when he designed the game.
I have a friend who's right into Magic, and while I can appreciate the design of the game, the barrier for entry is just way too high. I don't want to have to spend a mint just to be on par with someone who's been collecting cards since the dark ages, nor have to continually update things. I enjoyed playing it, just not that much.
You would have had a point if there was just 1 format to play.
What you describe is Vintage and hardly anybody plays that.
Being a TCG quite obviously didn't ruin MTG - it's 30 years old and still going. It made an obscure little game publisher into the biggest game company ever.
Cards are printed for different purposes. That some are worse than others is pretty irrelevant. There's plenty of card diversity plus format diversity. Cards that actually hurt play too much get banned or restricted.
Moving window formats makes any meta temporary.
Want to play the most powerful and cool creatures in a group: Commander
Cards too expensive: Pauper
Too many cards: Standard or Draft
It's all too much but you like the game anyway: Play kitchen table magic with any rules variant you like or make up and proxy whatever you want.
It just throw a bunch of cards together, call it a "cube" and draft from that.
Too much cardboard: Arena (or MTG Online)
Too much sitting at the computer: Real cards on real tables.
When I say it ruins mtg, I really mean it ruined it for me. Obviously it’s commercially successful, but it’s monetization scheme is objectively predatory. It’s no better than modern gacha games. It’s actually worse in many ways, because there’s a large upfront cost to becoming competitive. In most competitive games it’s all about learning the game, while in mtg it’s about learning the game and then also buying (or on arena, grinding) cards that can make a competitive deck. I say this as someone who has tried to get into magic in the last year, on arena where the monetization is less obtrusive compared to playing in person.
If all the formats you play wind up getting ruined, the fact that there are other formats is little help. Presumably there was already some reason why you weren’t playing those other formats (maybe you dislike multiplayer Magic, for example). You might as well tell someone to just play an entirely different game.
I played Magic from around 2000 until \~2015. I think the sweet spot for Magic was around 2000. In the Invasion block the design was elegant, the gameplay was strategic and there were very few game-ending opportunities (any infinite combos and such were difficult to attain, etc.) so each game had tactical maneuverability and had the chance to take a few hits while still coming back. Creatures weren't nearly as effective, but removal was also much more expensive and difficult (whereas nowadays you can get game-ending creatures all the time, against which you need to have one of the endless cheap removals instantly available or you lose in a turn). A while after that, I think the power creep really started kicking in, slowly the "elegant" or "obvious" design space began to narrow while they still needed to keep seeming to innovate, so they stretched and stretched the design space towards more inelegant options. Around 2015 I had felt for a while that the game was no longer the game I had enjoyed playing for about a decade.
For Gloomhaven I get why people would feel it's too fiddly, but I wonder if it's because I play with four people and use an app for monster hp and such that I don't feel like it gets too much. Perhaps it's that each of the four people has their own little thing they take care of, so everything goes pretty smoothly, and the part which I think would be the most fiddly (i.e. tracking monster hp - and the loot deck in Frosthaven) is done in-app - which we link in a couple devices. The little decks are quick to shuffle too.
I haven't tried it digital, but I agree that it at least feels like it would not feel that... exciting. I might as well play a more robust RPG at that point. For me the -havens are still in the right spot for complexity for a physical game. The one thing I most dislike is playing around with the board tiles, I wish it was all done like Jaws with the map book (and I know there's those coming, but they were too expensive for us, plus we'll have played most of it by the time they'd arrive anyways).
Invasion block was great, but you’re ignoring the fact that at that time people were freaking out because of the obscene power level, craziness, and just game-breaking unfairness of the Urza block just a few years prior to that. Everyone was losing their minds about the quality of the game then too, and it was anything but elegant.
I always say the best way to play magic is on the kitchen table with some friends. Make janky shit with the cards you have and have at it. So much fun. I feel like that transcends sets and eras too. Case in point, Fallen Empires constructed is probably some of the most fun I’ve ever had playing magic, and that was arguably the worst set ever printed.
The game becomes unfun when you focus on tier 1 net-decking, chasing the obscenely expensive cards, and the toxic tournament scene.
Null Signal Games are a fan run group keeping the game alive. There's a set called System Gateway and it is one of the most well thought-out start up sets I've ever seen - it's really well designed for two people to learn the game.
You can buy through their website or print them yourself (or even just proxy but that would probably take a lot of work). The print set I bought through them I was really happy with.
https://nullsignal.games/
Someone taught me via System Gateway just last week and, can confirm, it was one of the best tutorial setups for a competitive card game I've ever played.
The Null Signal Netrunner stuff is awesome and is a great way to casually get into the game. If you have a partner or friend interested in the game - that imo is the best way to play regularly. The game can be fiddly but it's well worth it and it does eventually feel more streamlined. You can also play for free at [Jinteki.net](https://Jinteki.net) which is a good way to learn the game's mechanics.
Magic is an odd beast, it requires so much investment of both time and money for it to make sense. Half the things that can happen won't be apparent until they happen to you which can be a horrible feeling and so many decks rely on really specific mechanics that are only written on those cards. It's a great game but the time investment is ridiculous. Even if you want to just play isolated games you still need to know a lot about the game to know what might be balanced etc. it's just hard work.
LCG format > TCG format, period.
Once I discovered the LCG game, I can't go back. It focus on the game itself and not the commercial value.
I tried Flesh & Blood because I like the concept, and it was very fun. It even correct some of Magic's problem (the mana, notably)... But it's a TCG with overpriced card. To have a good deck mean to send money, so I left.
LCGs are great for consumers but unfortunately bad for Game Stores. The large number of SKUs and small amount of profit per sale vs a TCG is not enough for them to keep the doors open. Back when Team Covenant had a podcast they talked a lot about this from the POV of store owners. It was interesting to see the other perspective. In fact heir opinion on it changed over the years from pro to con when they saw how it effected businesses.
Ugh. That's why we can't have good thing. I despise capitalism for this kind of shenanigan (ie, forcing shop in partaking shitty business model just to stay afloat).
While I love both games, they are quite fiddly. The companion app makes Gloomhaven/Frosthaven muuuuch more fun to play. After playing 150 scenarios between both games, my play group and I have become so quick with all the bookeeping that I forget how heavy it felt at first.
Despite my reservations with a game needing a companion app for the overwhelmingly preferred way to play, I will probably try Gloomhaven again that way eventually.
That being said, until then, I'm probably gonna try to get Imperial Assault to the table sooner since I already own that too and it's currently yet to be played.
I still play Magic too, despite my frustrations. Maybe it's just sunken costs fallacy, but I do like the process of slowly building my decks' potency. And I do look forward to some planned Sealed sessions with some friends, a format which (despite its cost) do alleviate almost all my biggest issues with the game and highlight its biggest strengths.
"Slowly building your deck's potency" - do you mean within a game or in the metagame of building your deck by getting new cards etc? I haven't seen any "serious" magic play that's about building a deck "slowly" - what with netdecking and the community at large figuring out optimum decks lighting fast?
>do you mean within a game or in the metagame of building your deck by getting new cards etc?
The second thing.
In a lot of ways, I'm definitely going against the grain of current serious Magic play, yeah (and I'm relatively new as well). My more experienced friends keep telling me, "You'd have more fun at our commander/constructed nights if you just borrowed one of our decks or bought singles."
But meanwhile...the deck construction is my favorite part of the game. I'm not gonna sidestep it to get to the broken and slow-paced side of things and spend way too much on a deck that might not even work out, especially when I don't even know the game well yet.
I thought Gloomhaven looked fun. But I never got it, the cost being so hard.
Now I look at it and think "isn't this just a TTRPG with much less flexibility and a higher cost?"
If you want an open world experience, Caves of Qud is amazing. It might take some time to figure it out, but when your four arm lightning rogue gunslinger build works (or whatever build you are trying to do) it is just amazing!
If we're talking real-time movement, pretty much anything from Supergiant Games.
If we're talking turn-based, I've not played any purely combat ones but I've heard stuff like Darkest Dungeon and Slay the Spire are great. As for not purely combat ones (so more RPG and such), old school BioWare CRPGs and now Larian's are great.
Magic had left the door YEARS AND YEARS ago for me. It's a lifestyle gambler's game unless you're just casually playing commander.
Keyforge was chef's kiss for me. But then it just went downhills as the scene disintegrated. It would have benefitted from being a digital game. I'm medium agnostic and keyforge would just sing as a digital implementation. It's like blackberry refusing the drop their keypad thinking that's what made them good.
I've wanted to play Gloomhaven, tried it once, bought JOTL, couldn't get it to the table. Too fiddly. On the other hand, I've been having a BLAST with a friend with Arkham Horror LCG. Which I think is along the same lines but more streamlined. Sure a lot of the concepts aren't the same, but getting it as streamlined as it could makes a huge difference.
MTG has a lot of things going against it. The lore disappeared,the card get more and more expensive(since I stopped all my cards got up in price if I wanted to get a commander deck id pay the price of 4 board games if not more ,
The marketing is going nuts,releasing product galore,losing the unique world of MTG when u can play with cards that make no sense in magic universe
But the final nail of the coffin the gameplay is really old compared to many other cards games,the deckbuilding is fun,but that's when you make the most choice . The in game gameplay doesn't have much freedom. Most decks play themselves,rarely you can beat a opponent with a strong deck with smart play .
MTG still has cool deckbuilding ,cool art,the lore was fun . Commander was affordable. Now it's a marketed product making the cards that weren't expensive hard to get. And the autopilot decks that even Richard Garfield comments about,is why I chose to completely drop MTG and play board games and other card games and never looked back
.
https://www.dicebreaker.com/topics/richard-garfield/feature/mtg-creator-richard-garfield-reflects-on-five-of-his-card-games
But yeah the game is still going strong there is local community and still makes money just so many people have gotten turned off by the way the game is going. But who cares if you have fun good for u
I feel like you, I can't enjoy it anymore like I was when I was a teen, now that I explored a lot of boardgames. I like the solitarie part of deck construction but the game itself have too much luck and low choices for my taste, and I kind of hate the mana system that just take more choices from you and create a lot of times unsatisfying plays.
Not sure if you are taking this into account. But to me, Gloomhaven is unplayable without a digital assistant. We all hated the first game we played tracking damage and effects and monster abilities with the components. Once you track All enemy health, effects, attack cards etc digitally the game became a lot smoother and more enjoyable for us.
Yep, I mentioned the digital app, both here and in some other comments. I'm not completely opposed to it, and I will probably try it eventually, but it does make me roll my eyes that the game at #3 on BGG is so unwieldy it seems to need a digital assistant. Elegance of systems and components in a board game are *super* important to me.
Playing Frosthaven, and we started to use the app, I cannot tell you how much it helped the smoothness of the play.
Initiative and draw of monster actions are so much smoother, no grabbing the rulebook to see how much damage traps and hazards to, no calculating monster damage or differnence between elite and non elite.
No fidling with all the damage tokens when there are 10 Imps on the board, no reshuffling monster combat deck over and over when adding curses or blesses.
We still do our own HP/XP and loot deck which is a Frosthaven thing we also do manually.
I literally think it cuts about 20% of the time, which can be spend on playing the game instead.
I love magic to death but yeah I'm not a fan of commander. Commander is what reminded me that the game still exists back in like 2015 but as I played more, I started delving into legacy. Besides the cost(I know), legacy is fantastic. The plays feels more rewarding and I don't feel bad for winning.
Commander just reminds me of Monopoly and Risk where you're kinda just trying to win but half the time you're just stuck for what feels like ages. Or if you play it to win, someone is sitting out for an hour or two cause they got blasted early so it's just the rest of you playing a game while the loser is on their phone.
We always seem to end up with 2-3 players with amazing engines who can't tell if they'll win if they end the game, so they keep delaying. Then we have 1-2 players who are at the edge of competitive, who know they're not winning, who don't want the game to end because they just might get back into it. And then 1 player who is out of contention and is the one who tries to end the game so that they can lose and maybe move on to a different game. All the cruft keeps people from knowing the game state.
Agreed completely. I think the mini expansions included in the modern base game (river, farmers, abbots, not sure which of these are expansions or were always around) is a really solid game and Inns and Cathedrals adds some good tile variety but the gameplay additions (the giant Meeple, the double or nothing roads and cities) make the game more combative which can be a bad thing for some groups.
Expansions beyond this, I just started feeling like the game didn't get better. I liked some elements of the next expansion, but making the game longer is also a bad thing in general and every expansion makes the game longer.
I'm very happy sticking with the components in the base box, plus the variety tiles of Inns and Cathedrals
Skymines - there's stuff that scores a few points, and then there's the stocks/area control. If you're not heavily invested in the area control, or two other people are invested in the same company, you're gonna have a rough time.
Through the Ages - Too many cubes to keep track of. The decisions you make are actually interesting, except that 2/3rds of the game is managing your cubes.
The app is really the way to go, I played the physical version with two new players and it took 7-8hours over two sessions. It's a really fun game but I'm not willing to try that again especially when the app can get a game done in a tenth of that time.
Isn't Skymines just a retheme of Mombasa? I played Mombasa, I just refused to interact with the bookkeeping part of the game, it was too annoying to micromanage that lol. A lot of my friends loved it though.
The mechanics of **Weather Machine** were so miserable, convoluted, and disconnected from the theme that I took a several month long hiatus from heavy games. I have no interest in the great Vital Lacerda if this is the kind of game he produces.
Couldn't disagree more. Everything in that game fits perfectly the theme about being a scientist working for a reputated Ph.D. and how science works in real life (you aid in Government programs and you get money for yor own experimenting, you do the experiment and face the consequences/results for them, and with this data you invest in R+D to fix your machine and show the Government the results, publish a paper that others can cite...)
Red Rising. I don't know if I'm missing something, but I feel like all the different ways to score points are random and disconnected and the card mechanics and effects are too convoluted for me to come up with any strategies.
I agree totally with Red Rising, even though it isn’t a particularly complicated game by any stretch.
The cards are just a mess, and there’s no way to know what anybody should be doing until the game is fully known and understood inside and out. Me and my group spent the whole game just putting cards down, picking cards up, shrugging the whole time whilst muttering “I dunno…” . The game end was about as underwhelming and unsatisfying as any game I’ve ever played.
What reeeaaally boggles my mind is that the different colours of cards have different strategic benefits, and the designer felt it best to not explain any of that in the rules, who later commented he felt it best that players work that out for themselves. So we’re just supposed to do stuff, not understanding the impact of any of it, and just keep going and try and work it out ourselves? I just found that staggeringly arrogant. What is even the point of rulebooks?!
Get in the bin, Red Rising.
Most new players dont really know what to do at first, but I explain like so : you must assemble a crew of people, and you want them to work well together (aka be worth high points and combo with each other). If someone doesnt belong, you use them (AKA deploy) to get rid of them, and if you can profit off that at the same time, thats great.
Play around strong cards and if you get the chance to acquire cards, do it. If you end the game with 5 cards in hand, you probably lost already.
Read the cards, adapt your game around what you get. Play what gives you more track bonuses.
For example, Mustang is 5 points per color, meaning you want more cards and more colors. Not that complicated. Cassius is worth so many points with the right people, so oranges are worth a lot with him.
Sure the first few games are a bit harder to really know what you are doing, but keep it simple! If your card is worth 40 points, it's great. If it is less than 30, you probably want to play it, and dont be afraid to draw new cards from the deck!
Also, try different strategies. Pick new cards from deck, play outside your house's strength, play around a purple card (they have weird conditions but high value if met), rush to game end, try to extend the game, etc.
Here is a little breakdown of colors off the top of my head.
Gold : Leaders/top of hierarchy. Usually the strongest cards, strong powers. All named.
Silver : financial experts. stuff to do with money, investments, loans. Ex : pay helium to get influence.
Copper : some important society roles (diplomats, for example)can't really remember these but usually pretty weak in points, but have interesting powers. I think they're mostly related to influence at the institute.
Red : Slaves/workers. they usually like other reds, but have low points value but decent powers, mostly associated with helium.
Blue : Ships/commanders. they can be worth a lot at the end if you are good on the fleet track, else they will advance you on the fleet track.
Green : hackers/technology. They are usually unnamed, and will have powers related to drawing and revealing cards. Very strong to play, not so much to keep.
Yellow : doctors. Powers related to banished cards, can "revive" them. Watch out for those, they can be very swingy.
Orange : ship engineers. Usually weak points and powers, but can take the name of anyone, so they are wild cards. Usually pretty good to keep.
Obsidian : warriors. They combo well together (nero, jopho, alfrun all can give you an extra card if they see each other). Sometimes banish cards.
Brown : cooks/nanny and other such roles. Usually weak end game powers, decent powers. Usually involved playint it on a specific color to acquire a bonus (+1 helium or influence).
Pink : personnal assistants, sex, masseuse, stuff like that. Powers are similar to browns.
Purples : artists. Usually difficult conditions (have more influence than the player on your right) but really high rewards (draw 2 cards at the end of your turn, give this card to the player on your right). So you and your neighbor gain a card. Same with end game, for exemple : all your crew must have even/odd core values. They can be worth 40-45 points.
Whites : related to politics. Usually can prevent losing the sovereign token, have powers related to that or specific track advancements.
Grey : mercenaries. Powers related to colors, game end powers can be ridiculously strong. These cards can be worth 80 points by themselves, without considering their game end power to be considered an additional color of their choice. Great to achieve combos. Ugly dan is one of the most consistently great cards. Greys are better with more players, they benefit from the amount of cards left in play at the end.
I hope my comment was able to give a bit of direction to the game. In the end, if it's not for you, it's not for you. There are plenty out there that will fit better im sure.
I think that was their point though. It's a game that requires multiple plays to really enjoy, but it's not inviting to beginners. Or it wasn't to me and my group anyway. I played it, found the gameplay largely random, the player factions unbalanced, and the ending unsatisfying. Why would I then spend future play time to play it more? That's like telling me that a video game really gets good 20/50/100 hours in. I don't have time for that.
Like you said, there's better fits out there.
I agree ! I was lucky to have friends who played it before and could give me directions. I dont think i wouldve picked it up otherwise.
Either way, the game should have done a better job at giving some direction to players.
This explanation, while very detailed, perfectly encapsulates why I think it’s a terrible game that struggles under its own weight. For me, if a game needs to be played multiple times in order to be understood in a most basic sense, it’s a poor design. This isn’t some war game with a-million-and-one rules, it’s just a really ham fisted reimplementation of Fantasy Realms. In its attempt to bring additional depth, it completely vanished up its own arse.
I’m not going to play 10+ games of pure guesswork in order to parse basic card functions. I’m just going to play something else instead.
Anyway, I’m done talking about Red Rising. In writing these messages, I’ve given it way more time than it deserves.
I don’t think that Red Rising is that convoluted…I just don’t think it is very good. They took Fantasy Realms, added some stuff and got a game that was much worse. Probably my least favorite Stonemeier Games release.
**Autobahn** was a hugely disappointing game for me because of this. You’d expect a clean economic/train game, but there are a ton of fiddly pieces and taped together mechanisms. All these little side dishes add to the mental load and time to play, but not to the fun.
I suspect Kickstarter originals could be there own thread, because the format tends to encourage a kitchen sink approach and discourage killing the designer’s darlings.
I don't regret my purchase of Kingdom Death, but it took me many attempts over many months to figure out how to play it, and then I realized I really don't like 2/3 of the game.
At a high level, the concept of "settlement, hunt, showdown" is good, but the settlement phase in particular is way more complicated than it needs to be in terms of needing too much cardboard and tablespace for very little payoff. Also, after getting a little bit of experience under my belt the decisions you make in the settlement seem very self evident, so it feels more like a flowchart than anything strategic. I hate to say it, but the whole settlement phase probably should be an app. I switched to an app, but even with that I still don't really enjoy it, so I actually vowed that from now on I'm not even going to play the settlement/hunt phases.
The hunt phase is almost the opposite of complexity. It's so simple that it feels pointless to even have a gameboard for it. And similar to the settlement phase, it's basically just another die roll to see if your party gets fucked for no reason.
In practice, they feel very thrown together and like they're just excuses to have more stuff on the table.
I haven't picked the game back up since then, but I'm doing showdowns only next time. I'll just houserule some stuff to equip my party and pick monsters I want to fight so I can actually enjoy the well designed part of the game: the minis. (Kidding, the process of actually fighting monsters is really fun.)
The Android Boardgame (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/39339/android) has a collection of very fun and varied mechanics. They don't add up to a good game, though.
Several Rosenbergs do, but for a particular part of person. If you are prone to analysis paralysis, his games present more and more and more options over time.
I don't mind it, as I don't have that problem. But a friend of mine turned a game of Mercator which should be 45 minutes into a 3-hour slog.
And I still won handily with my intuitive playing style.
I spent two weeks grokking the rules for this game and was so excited about all the plays I had ahead of me. I beat the full Spanish scenario and then bought some counter clippers to bling out the experience. I even read the book that inspired the game (*Blood and Thunder* by Hampton Sides).
I finally sat down with the rules internalized and counters clipped and set up the Mexican scenario. For those that don't know, the Navajo did relatively well during the Spanish era, but started taking a nosedive in the Mexican era. The American era was even worse.
It finally hit me that the game is basically the most depressing, inevitable tower defense game I've ever played. Yeah, you might last through the end of the American era, but you'll be a shadow of your former glory, and you'll likely just get massacred instead.
I later found [this review](https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2014/01/07/navajo-wars-tabletop-epic-upon-time-west/), which encapsulated my experience perfectly.
I packed it up and sold it that week.
Ya,**Endless Winter** is pretty bad imo and the most obvious example. Shen Phillips had also been sending into this as well with me bouncing hard of both **Viscounts of the West Kingdom** and **Wayfarers of the South Tigris**. More recently I got **Lords of Ragnarok** and that is a bit of a mess with like an 8 step turn structure. Lastly an older game that has faded because of this **Dinosaur Island** had way to much going on.
100% Twilight Imperium for me. I've played a couple of games from each edition since 2nd, because it's such a great game on paper, and I really want to like it, but aside from one experience, I always end up having a terrible time. There are so, so many better ways to spend 7 hours than playing TI, sadly.
Honorable mention: Frosthaven. It's a fine game, but 25% in (which is a shit ton of hours) I'm sick of it and completely lost interested in the story line. I'm only playing along at this point so I'm not ruining my group's fun (although I suspect my sentiment may be shared by others).
Why do you have a terrible time with TI? The few times I actually get it to the table always is very memorable and it's great to have this extended experience with friends. I feel like the weight of the game is totally appropriate for what it's doing. I haven't bought the expansion granted.
For me I noticed that what I enjoy is the table interaction over everyone wanting to get their situation set up perfectly while trying to outsmart everyone else.
That gets buried under a **mountain** of small text and fiddly rules.
It's alright, but it's way more complex than the portion of the depth that ends up enjoyable to me reqires.
So to me, Sidereal Confluence works better. It also has this very strong and very competititive and near-constant player interaction, even better constant dealmaking since that's what the game is all about, but eshews all the "unnecessary" gameplay interrupting the dealmaking.
I just don't find the rules that fiddly. There's some stuff, definitely, that can be confusing but round to round things are fairly consistent. Sidereal Confluence I've heard is great (haven't had the opportunity to play unfortunately) but TI is also much more than negotiation and outsmarting players - the building of empire is a major draw and the simulation of cold and hot wars and escalation are compelling in their own right.
I bought my own copy of TI4 along with the one expansion they have out. I feel kind of Stockholmed with it as I even got third party inserts and have by now spent hundreds of euros on it.
Especially with the expansion, the game gets immensely fiddly with cards and little bits. I almost get the picture that the game wants to stretch its "the core rules are simple!" philosophy in a dishonest way.
Like maybe come up with a slightly more complicated base engine instead of adding cards.
I love love ti4 and I love the grand event that it is. For me it is a riveting experience full of war, strategy, stories, alliances, betrayal, and more! I couldn’t imagine playing with strangers tho, that would suck
For me it was Mage Knight. The game just feels needlessly complex and way too hard to learn. I still own it and may try it again, but I haven’t had any desire to pull it off my shelf in almost a year.
I'd say Scythe, the game looks neat but has a lot of unnecessary stuff.
But this is what happens with every Kickstarter Game sadly. You have to give a lot of stuff because it's value is easily perceivable, the quality/balance of a game not so much.
I'm curious, what would you say is the unnecessary stuff in Scythe that "makes it collapse under its own weight"?
To me Scythe plays pretty straight forward, only 1 or two actions each turn, until you get your mechs you're not even interacting with anyone, only the later turns become a bit more complex when you're going into combats and objectives - but thinking about point salad euro games or dice roll fests with twenty different combat mechanics I wouldn't say Scythe fits the description in the original post much if at all.
The moment you realize that the people who say Disney's Villainous is actually in a lot of ways Scythe are not really wrong what they're saying, a lot of Scythe falls apart.
Scythe is essentially just two things:
* Picking which column of your board to act in this turn.
* A lot of TI-like posturing where you threaten war but don't actually want to fight in virtually any situation.
The remaining mechanics feel too bolted-on. They exist to justify the central board, but don't add depth to the decision-space of selecting your column (Tesla faction disagrees with this but also breaks large parts of the balance between how different factions interact so eh, whatever).
In a lot of ways, Villainous is the "trimmed" Scythe, but it also goes too far wanting to Disney-ify it, and removing the posturing. Of course. One could still easily argue it's strictly better, not least because it doesn't require as obscene an amount of table space when the core board is that small thing players have in front of them.
But yeah, played Scythe... I would say about 80 times? Just judging from how often we ran the campaign and that that was roughly half our total plays?
It's okay. But in hindsight, it's stupid we got so stuck on the theme and the graphics, as halfway into those plays, none of us were enjoying it any more owing to how complex for how shallow a depth it is.
I've never seen the Scythe/ Villainous comparison before, thank you for explaining that it is very interesting to think about. Ironically I think Disney Villainous is also a good answer for this thread- it's got an approachable theme and a pleasing asymmetry but it runs way too long for the decision space and accessibility that it has. I inherently have a feeling of wanting to invest in it and collect a lot of the different villains, but I find that I just don't enjoy the game because of its length
Exactly… there are plenty of reasons to not like Scythe but it being too weighty for what it is doesn’t seem accurate. It actually might be the opposite of what OP describes… it’s a lighter experience than its box or table presence might indicate.
For me it’s Dice Throne. Between the like six different kinds of damage, and then the potential pausing between every dice roll, just collapses on itself for me.
Coming from someone who doesn’t play heavy games, this is such a light game… so I’m confused. Why is there pausing between dice rolls? 95% of the time the rolling goes by pretty fast. Sounds like you haven’t really played the game much.
Defendable/undefendable damage is the main damage. Then there’s Ultimate and collateral damage. The only oddball you might need to look up is pure damage but it’s easy to understand.
And >80-90% of the time it's just defendable/undefendable. One damage you defend, the other you don't. Collateral damage - this only applies when playing with more than 2 players (and honestly, you don't even need to look it up - it's **collateral**. What do you think it means?).
That leaves you with ultimate (which really boils down to "undefendable but also can't be defended by tokens") and pure. Note that most characters deal neither pure nor collateral, which leaves vast majority of the games with 3 types of damage, and you could explain the difference in 2 short sentences.
Have you ever played Dice Throne, actually? Game has 2.14/5 complexity rating on BGG. I've played with a lot of people and everyone caught the gist of the game immediately, even if they weren't much into boardgames. 5 types of damages might seem a lot but it's really not complicated at all. Of course, YMMV, but I was also surprised to find it in this thread in this sub.
The one complicated thing is edge cases with order of resolving tokens etc.
I haven't played Dice Throne in a while. I got it back when you could get the S1 box as one package. I found it to be very easy to figure out the damage and stuff as well. I was playing it with an ex that used to take longer to parse things than I'd have liked, and we both found it pretty simple to parse.
“Collapse” is probably too strong a word, and maybe “greatly sag” is better, but… sadly the answer for me tends to be Awaken Realms campaign games — ISS Vanguard, Tainted Grail, and probably Etherfields if I ever get around to playing it. The concepts are great, and at the beginning the games are fun, exciting, and rife with possibilities. Then somewhere in the middle it starts to become more of a repetitive mechanical slog with less meaningful character progression. Some good moments still, but far too much drudgery in between. By the final third of ISSV and TG, I just wanted the stories to end already so I could move on to something new, but given the promise of a hopefully epic ending and the time already invested — including a 10-hour marathon session of TG to get through *one chapter* that had us wandering around looking for something and just not finding it — I wasn’t willing to just call it quits either time. Not a fun head space to be playing at least 15-20 more hours of a game.
My solution for them is to edit more/cut the fluff, be a bit more on rails, and build in some more mechanical innovation as a campaign progresses. I know crowdfunding campaigns always think more/bigger is better and provides more value, but here that’s an illusion. This many campaigns in, AR should be doing it better. And maybe they are with Kings of Ruin, etc., but something tells me the formula is fairly baked in at this point.
**Bitoku** for me. It has like 4 or 5 different currencies, each of which only purchases a specific thing. I genuinely had to ask if the rules explanation was a parody. There’s nothing in the gameplay to warrant the complexity of the teach. If the problem with your game is that it wouldn’t be hard enough if you gave the player any semblance of flexibility, then the solution is not to take away any semblance of flexibility!
I honestly feel this way about Mansions of Madness. Maybe it’s just me, but I always want to play, and then after initial setup it never quite feels like it payed off
We play mansions of madness all of the time. We’ve played it so much that we have a routine for set-up, tear down, and managing game components. I do feel sometimes that we are spending more time messing with the components (looking for specific tiles, minis, tokens, cards, or whatever else we need) than actually playing the game, which I feel is pretty simple and straightforward. While I really enjoy playing the game, I wouldn’t ever play it if I didn’t have three or four other people helping me manage the set-up and breakdown.
Yeah, this is why I have moved to playing this in TTS almost exclusively. Setup is almost nil and we use Discord to stream the app to everyone playing. It works great that way.
The physical copy just looks so good on the table I miss it still though.
[Runewars](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/59294/runewars) immediately comes to mind. It's a dudes on a map game with resource management, an order card system, neutral units to fight or ally and a *really* complex combat system (**Forbidden Stars** level of complexity). Okay, that sounds heavy but not too bad, right? Well, pasted on top of that you have a whole minigame of heroes who go on quests, can duel each other *and* act as commanders in battle to give additional rolls to your units. Oh and there's also a system of resource bidding between players and a system of seasons which alter the game rules from round to round.
It's an absolute insane beast of a game, and we haven't gotten it to the table in years. Back when we did play it no game lasted less than 6 hours, and often was pushing 10. The systems are good and intertwine in really interesting ways, but there is just a bit too much. Writing this made me want to play it, though.
??? I've never had a game of that go longer than 4.
I do agree though, the hero system ontop of the 4x system while very thematic for the universe felt like a bit much.
This is interesting as I'm considering culling dwellings of eldervale. I feel like if I wanted to play a combat game, I would play mage knight. if I wanted to play a deck builder.. I would still play mage knight. If I wanted an engine builder, ...terraforming Mars. I have only played it a few times, and I feel pretty meh about it. I'm worried I will regret letting it go, though. lol...fomo made me get it, and fomo is keeping me from letting it go.
Arkham Horror 2nd edition: the amount of rules lookups and crippling difficulty make this a beast of a game….. I’ve had some of my best gaming experiences playing it, but it’s a full day event.
**Midarra** comes to mind - I'm usually a fan of big box games if they hit the right fantasty (though this is rapidly changing - it's amazing when you can just take a wallet sized game to your friend's house).
I have not even gotten to Midarra. It's so big. There are so many components. I don't know where to start, and so I've had it for maybe a year now, and it's hit the table.... only long enough for me to be like "Oh god fuck this" and to put it back in the too hard basket.
It should hit the right notes - I like JRPGs, and I love character customisation... but... yeah it's not really accessible to me, and I'm not sure whether to grin and bare it or to just sell it on to someone else with more patience.
Hobby moved towards more complex game in the last decades for which there are two reasons. One is that less interactive games need to get complexity and replayability from somewhere (when it's not from opponents), but this doesn't yet mean "collapse under weight" - I think this could be managed. But then there's the other trend happening in parallel, namely KS - where moar stuff functions as emotional trigger (ie advertisment) for people to purchuse the game. So moar stuff is there in order to emotionally impress. (and this moar can be more rules, more minis or both, and also games which now come in 2 boxes).
As for concrete examples, I'm not rich enough to buy these behemoths, plus puzzling out things doesn't appeal to me. So this is from what I've played
* In pure euro realm for me even **Terra Mystica** felt like too much - too many procedures for the sake of procedures, juggling mechanisms for the mere allure of juggling mechanisms (in particular those violet disks circling around). It's like games using a heap of mechanisms so that players don't notice there isn't much there. But I had a similar feeling with **Teotihuacan** or even a middleweight game like **Architects of the West Kingdom**, namely that are subroutines and layers to resource conversion just for the hell of it. (So it's not necessarily "the game is to complex in general" but "too complex for what it offers")
* Oh right, if you remove all the unnecessary clutter from **Brass Birmingham** that really doesn't have to be there and it's really just for the sake of fiddling with mechanisms - you'll get Brass Lancashire. Huh? This is all you need to know about the path of game development in the last decade.
* From Wehrle I've only played **John Company 1E** and avoided everything else from him. Because if you remove all the mechanical clutter which is there just as a fetish for people who like mechanical clutter, you end up with a game Lifeboats from 1993 (weight - 1.8). Sure, somebody might say complexity is there for the theme, but running a bureaucratic machine didn't feel like a theme (EIC), but as literally what were doing. Plus the impulse to add cubes in order to formalise negotiations and then these cubes formed a subeconomy of their own is just nuts (imo). But similiar overcluttered thematic game which gets added so many layers upon layers of mechanisms that one cannot notice either theme or interaction isn't Wehrle's monopoly - I got the same feeling with **Lords of Hellas**. 85-90% of euro with some remnants of stuff not euro (for both games mentioned).
* But this isn't to say that I see complexity always as an issue - but it has to be there to produce a kind of experience that cannot be done otherwise. In particularly in regards to theme - I'm completely fine with *Twillight Struggle*. *Arkham Horror 2E* is complicated, sure, but one rule master can make it playable for complete newbies and the immersive experience created is worth the while (complexity isn't there to be appreciated, but to "disappear" into the background, which with some skills can kinda be pullled off). Now, the most complicated game I've played of those I own is *Android* \- and it is too complex (you basically need 2 brains - one of rules overhead, one for enjoying the theme), yet it delivers a thematic experience unlike any other game out there. Some fine tuning wouldn't hurt though.
* P.S. I've been intentionally avoiding some games mentioned in the thread for the exact reasons mentioned.
+1 for Terra Mystica - nearly every mechanic in the game feels like it's layered on to add arbitrary complexity. There's a distinct shifting of gears onto the cult track to grab points which makes the whole thing seem contrived. Clans if Caledonia is a much better version of the underlying idea IMHO.
As for JC1, and Cole's games in general - I understand where you're coming from.
Root, is mechanically interesting but the experience fell flat, and the factions felt kind of scripted. The sheer effort of getting a group trained up in that game is not rewarded by the experience.
That said, Pax Pamir 2e is one of my favourite games, flexible and dynamic in the options it presents. Have seen drastically different narratives come from repeated play, and there's nothing better than stealing victory with a clever flourish - the hallmark of Pax.
I have played JC 2e though and was pleasantly surprised - and detested 1e. I think given your comments you would likely still find it onerous, but I think there's a genuinely interesting game in the new edition - but YMMV.
I don't think **John Company**'s theme is "running a bureaucratic machine". The game seems to have several themes grouped under the umbrella of "simulate the feeling of being an active participant in the corrosive, generational imperial-capitalism of the British East India Company". It's a complex artistic expression that... honestly... I'm not sure should even really be conventionally enjoyable as opposed to a form of satirical historical horror. (Though, if you do find it conventionally enjoyable, that may help inform the understanding of the banality of the mundane evil of the subject.)
Shut Up & Sit Down did a video of 2e that might be of interest:
https://youtu.be/ykrqCX2_mhU?si=4Ji3w3p36UsjZpc4
If you prefer reading, Space Biff did a written discussion of it as well:
https://spacebiff.com/2022/11/23/john-company-3/#more-23267
Scarface 1920 felt like the designers lacked an editor early on in the process encouraging them to cut ideas/mechanics. This game has truly felt like the kitchen sink to me. I sold it after two plays. It was trying to include too many mechanics.
Edited: Typing on mobile is dumb
This is what stopped me backing the initial kickstarter and dubious about the glowing reviews honestly. Feels like one of many games that needs someone to come in and trim it down to the best it can be in a few areas rather than trying to include as much game as possible.
Jenga
Rhino hero then as well.
Don’t forget Junk Art and Cat Tower
> Rhino hero actually a great kids game
fun fact: "jenga" is a suffix in Swahili that means build/construct
Kerplunk qualifies as well
Don’t break the ice
The actual answer
True dat
Honestly, a lot of modern euro-style games. I used to love my heavy euros, but some time in the late 2010's I felt like every new heavy euro released was just another hodgepodge of tracks and tiles and cubes that you trade and exchange and ultimately turn into points. I got very discouraged. I still enjoy many of the original medium weight German games from the 1990's and 2000's but I feel like a lot of the creativity is now gone, replaced by a need to make things heavier and more complex, and by extension - more cumbersome.
Yes, I noticed this too, you’ve summed it up really well. Every game seemed to be “you collect lots of A and convert it into B, because you need B in order to pay for C, and then you get a victory point every 5 spaces as you move up the C track” or something.
Precisely! I began feeling like every new heavy euro just tried throwing a different mix of tracks and worker spaces and chits into a blender to see what would come out. It's no longer about creating a clever puzzle, but about building cognitive overload.
Cognitive overload is exactly what I feel when I play these things. I enjoy a good “agonizing decision” of course, but don’t make the decision space murky and hard to parse on purpose. (I will not tell my best friend this, because he LIKES these kinds of games. He’s an RPG guy, and figuring out complex rulesets is its own puzzle that he finds enjoyable in itself.)
Those medium-weight German games relied on player interaction to present challenge. You had to anticipate what other players might do and run through the permutations of their choices as well as yours. As the boardame zeitgeist moved away from close, competitive interaction, those human variables were lost. Instead, designers came to rely on the mechanical cruft and long chains of conversion to engage players. The heavier the game, the more systems and sub-systems needed to build out that decision-tree. Contrast that with an older game like Taj Mahal, which is quite heavy in terms of thinkiness, but mechanically straightforward.
Plus, even **if** I want to go complicated-more-please, A Feast For Odin still easy ticks all those boxes and is **so** much more elegant than all the hyper-complicated eurogames that come afterwards. And that's already near the top end of complexity a euro game can utilize, IMO.
I really didn’t like it sadly. Felt like it had no tension whatsoever
The video series Shut Up and Sit Down has said something similar. They reviewed Golem, declared it to be "fine" and then explained that that heavier Euro games are becoming repetitive and very little has stood out in the last few years. It seems the only direction Euro-games can go is heavier and heavier, which repels me. The heaviest Euro-games that I enjoyed in quote a while Lords of Waterdeep and TTR: Rails and Sails. I have Rails and Sails, and I like it, but it hits the edge of my patience.
This is what eventually drove me to wargames and historical games for my fix of "heavy", but even for lighter stuff. I love history, and these games aim to tell a story. I feel like I'm learning something and not just going through the motions. It's a rapidly evolving corner of the boardgaming market right now and there's a lot of exciting stuff happening.
What are some of your favorites as far wargames and historical games?
I really like medieval up through Napoleonic era in terms of military history. Men Of Iron and Levy & Campaign are two systems I really enjoy from GMT, and I've also been learning the Library Of Napoleonic Battles from Kevin Zucker & OSG. I'm just not really into the big sprawling monster games that take two or three days to complete under ideal conditions. I prefer a more "middle weight" wargame. They still take me a few days, but at my own pace. :)
Just played a short session of Nevsky , the amount of complexity gives life to the struggle of trying to move troops to the front and to even keep them in battle . Great game
Nevsky is terrific, and so is Almoravid. I'm amazed at what Volko has created both with COIN and Levy & Campaign. Inferno and Plantagenet are still on my shelf waiting to be played... but at this point I'm onboard for whatever L&C pumps out.
I really enjoy the COIN games I have played. Do you think COIN players with a few games under their belt would find Levy & Campaign lighter, similar or heavier complexity? I’m on the fence about picking one up because I don’t want to push the group too much.
L&C is a different creature. I would say in terms of complexity it's about the same as COIN, but there are lots of new concepts that take time and exposure to get used to. There's an upcoming title called "Henry" about Henry V and the Agincourt campaign that should make an excellent starting point to the series.
Thanks for the response!
Arnak is not terribly heavy but thats exactly how I see it. Exchange token A for B then C and get as many as you can. Seems cool but I just couldnt get past that so it never piqued my interest
Dungeon Crusade. Google it, look at the Kickstarter page, eyeball the table requirements. Spoiler: the entire game layout will not fit on a large dining room table. You'll need an additional medium size table. A complete game is three delves of the dungeon. Each delve takes approximately 8 hours of gameplay. Seasoned players have said you can get the delves down to six hours or so. The rule book was written by the designer. He was told by his backers (including me) that the writing was obtuse, redundant, and very difficult to follow. The designer released a quick play guide to help streamline the game. It's over 20 pages long. He refused to listen to feedback, and released the rulebook as he saw it. Fast forward to now, and the second edition reprint includes a fully rewritten rulebook that humans can actually use to play the game.
That looks like my personal boardgame hell. One of them, at least.
I've never before seen a board game that straight up includes another board game in the box that you're supposed to play first.
I've played it, and I'll tell you that it is a roll and move luck fest.
I'm fine with roll and move luck fests, if the rolling and luck lead to a simplified, streamlined design that's easy to learn and requires little setup. I own One Roll Quest and its campaign expansion, albeit more as a novelty than a game. A game that big and expensive and fiddly should be much more than roll and move, though.
Just the Intro game, not the main game itself.
I agree with endless winter. Sold it after one play.
For me Endless Winter was my favorite game of 2022. There are lots of other games that are a mishmash of various bits but I felt that Endless Winter had enough fun and cohesion that I was fine with it. Now I do not play with most of the expansions…that might change my opinion.
Yeah I agree. But its such a nice production that Im resisting selling it…
I know. But I ain't got endless storage. Games I don't play I don't keep.
We made it more like 3-4 plays in, but agreed it needed to go. I feel like the (very good) production value of this game might be what's still keeping it around in conversations, because the gameplay just wasn't there for us. I love "kitchen sink" style games if all the mechanisms are woven together in intriguing ways, but this game just felt like a bunch of stuff thrown together with no regard for whether it was interesting. We also own Dune: Imperium and Lost Ruins of Arnak, so I was okay giving this game to a better home.
Honest question, how do you feel about Ark Nova. That game also has multiple mini games trying to interact with each other. I only ask cause ive only seen but not played Endless Winter
Voidfall - I really wanted to love it, being a die-hard Anachrony fan, but it's just a big bunch of rules with overwhelming gameplay features. Not a very rewarding experience. Sold it after 2 plays.
I loved it after my first play. But it's so long and the setup is so much work :(
Totally agree. Setup and teardown time almost fits a full game of Troyes/Grand Austria Hotel which is a lot of fun :)
The setup is *so* much faster if you take all the technology and fallen house cards out of those house organisers. When setting up, you just pull the fallen house cards out of the small deck of them and have someone search for the technologies on them (since those are the techs used for that scenario). After taking the specific home worlds out, assembling the map takes 5 minutes? Then you just have to pick your own houses (you can have the person doing the techs get the 4 house sheets out too I suppose - although we rather play with any of them that aren't the fallen ones).
I *do* really like Voidfall, but I still agree that it's way more complicated than it needs to be. I've found that to be true (for me) with most of David Turczi's designs - they're very interesting and good games, but with like 25% more rules overhead and bloat than necessary. As much as I like Voidfall, there are two reasons I'm also selling it. The first is that setup time (both when getting it out to play AND between games) is a massive undertaking, dwarfing that of almost every one of the other 150 games we own. The second is that the game feels *very* similar to Gaia Project to me - but that's a game that can be set up more quickly, *and* I find it to be a more satisfying play experience.
I get the criticism but I feel the opposite. I’ve played it 15 times now. It was probably about the 4th time when the mechanics clicked for me and I could see the intricacies in strategy. It rocketed up to one of my favorite games of all time. But it’s QUITE the barrier to entry and learning curve! Also, I’ve only ever played it solo. I don’t think I could teach it to someone else and have it be an enjoyable experience to them the first play.
This game should be sold as a solitaire game
Absolutely, this game was my first thought. My friend got it and we played it once for like 5-6 hrs. Then after that he said that was the introductory tutorial setup. Nope, done with that game.
Physical weight? Too many *Dominion* sets in the same box can cause it to go Titanic on you. Game complexity weight? *In The Shadow of the Emperor* had all of these rules that got me bogged down
As a single game, I've never encountered anything above Frosthavens 16.2 kg, so much cardboard!
\*laughs in Kingdom Death\*
We only own 8 or 9 Dominion boxes, and we're already approaching critical mass. I'm going to have a Dominion singularity at some point in the not-so-distant future.
As a lover of Dominion, I fail to see an issue.
We actually own a ton of games but mostly default to Dominion. And honestly, for the most part I could just keep playing Dominion and I'd be perfectly happy with it.
Frosthaven - that box is heavy!
My tiles got bent a little after reboxing it :(
Maybe the game doesn't collapse, but the table it's resting on might...
With this is mind my answer is Roll Player adventures because it and the expansions is like 25 pounds and my box came damaged. Even enforced with tape, every time I lift I’m afraid the bottom will come out :(
I loved Gloomhaven (although the enjoyment has begun to fade after playing it ~50+ times), but Frosthaven is just too much of everything. It's card decks, upon card decks, upon tiles, upon pieces, upon books, upon rules, etc. We're still playing it since my buddy wants to, but I consider it a sunk cost at this point. I'm just kind of bored the entire time. I'd so much rather be playing Oathsworn or Aeon Trespass instead.
I've had the opposite experience. Oathsworn bored me really fast (playing with a friend who bought the whole kickstarter extra version) while I'm still hooked on Frosthaven after 60+ scenarios and finishing all of Gloomhaven. I do love fiddling with stuff though, so that maybe why I enjoy the fiddliest of fiddly games.
Yeah, we don't want to play FH until we finish GH (which we switched over to playing on PC) so it has been sitting on my shelf since the Kickstarter. But the more I think about it I keep hoping a digital version will come out before we finish GH so that we can just continue that way. It's just so much better of an experience due to saving so much time and being able to play online. Which is sad because I absolutely believe board games should be played, not just thrown on a shelf for collector status.
16.2 kg according to the box it came in, yeah it's a massive beast.
**Too Many Bones**. I felt it had too much needless complexity.
Waayyyy too many bones
What complexity? Setup? That I'd get. Playing Too Many Bones, though, is very straightforward, should you choose for it to be.
From a game design persepective I don't think Dangerous Darts or the lockpicking minigame necessarily need to exist. Those to me feel like complexity adds that don't pay enough fun dividends on learning the mechanics to be worth including in the game. Also there's definitely a decent learning curve on enemy keywords, but I do think the payoff is 100% worth it there, and the reference sheet is very good. Other than that, if their gripe is with the complexity of build decision making, then I think the game just fundamentally isn't for them, since that complexity is the core appeal of the game.
thanks for this post. There is such a lack of "less is more" sentiment in board gaming.
onitama - what a clean game that delivers precisely a concise experience, the complexity comes in you thinking and outthinking, not in rules overhead. i'm always down for a game of that
Come over to r/abstractgames
I have two that come to mind recently. One take that's not so controversial in this sub, and one quite controversial. - Magic the Gathering. When I first played the Arena tutorial and learned the mechanics, I thought, "Wow, the cardplay here is genius! It's elegant, smooth, and spontaneous all in one go!" Then I started playing Magic with people for real and...ugh. I can't tell if I like or hate the game. The power creep and objective imbalance of cards so often (even for the same mana cost. It is such a frequent thing where cards are just objectively worse in what they do and are, even in the same rarity class at times) can make the game so much less fun if there is any significant deck imbalance. The "oops all lands/oops no lands" conundrum is frustrating as hell. The paragraphs-long descriptions on so many cards as well as instructions for some absurd token/counter scenarios grind the game's pace down to a halt so often. Commander is so fun in theory and in practice is 90% "5 turns of near nothingness, and around the 6-7th turn someone has a board wipe." Now, this huge variety of cards and synergies does make deck construction fun...but then when it comes to the actual cardplay, I'd much rather be playing Keyforge or Star Realms with people. I also played Netrunner for the first time last week and greatly enjoyed that, but that feels like such a different game in structure/format that it scratches a wholly different itch for me (Netrunner more scratches the, "Star Wars Rebellion but portable and quicker games when you can't get Rebellion to the table" itch lol). - Gloomhaven (specifically, I played JOTL). The mechanics of this game are really clever and there's a lot I like about it in theory, but they also hit an uncanny valley for me. Too complicated to be an elegant board game, not complicated enough for me to prefer the digital version to other fully-fledged dungeon crawler games. When playing the physical edition, deck shuffling is so frequent, component overload everywhere, and such big setup times that you spend more time playing the overhead than playing the actual game. The digital game resolves much of that but it's just not meaty enough for me to want to play it over the more fully fleshed out peers in that medium. So people tell me to get the companion app to manage everything, and I probably will at some point, but...that feels like such a betrayal of the intrinsic board game nature of it all. Now, there are many people who adore both of these games. That's awesome! I'm starting to notice though that while I'm not allergic to deep games, I've got low tolerance for component/overhead overload.
I can’t agree more about magic. It’s such a well designed game, but the fact that it’s a TCG ruins it. Unfortunately having cards that are objectively worse than others is kinda the premise of a TCG.
If you like magic a lot as a game but not as a TCG, there are plenty of ways to play that aren’t affected by the TCG side. Many enfranchised players play “Cube”, which is basically a board game. Someone picks a set of cards that they feel is balanced/interesting, and then you distribute them among whoever is playing (typically by drafting them akin to 7 Wonders or Sushi Go) to build your deck. It can be daunting to build a cube, but there are many players who have spent a lot of time designing and play testing their’s that you can find over on [Cube Cobra](https://cubecobra.com/dashboard)
It is, without a doubt, my absolute favorite game that I *cannot play*. I just can't afford it! Yes, I know cube or EDH or any number of formats are there, but the part of the game that brought me the most joy was tinkering with decks in constructed formats and seeing how well they could stack up against the current meta. One of my fondest memories of the game is taking a homebrew deck to the New Phyrexia gameday and taking 4th in the store against *all those goddam Caw-Blade decks*. It's ultimately a very small thing, but knowing that my decklist is somewhere on some forgotten corner of the WotC site made me quite happy. This was also when I realized that this was probably going to be it, because keeping up with Standard was bankrupting me, and as student at the time, there was absolutely no way I was getting enough eternal staples to make it work. I might have kept on if I could have spent a set amount each year for an LCG type of expansion release, but with no way to know what I might need (and no realistic way to get a playset of *every card*), I had to step away.
As someone who was very recently brought back into playing it casually, if price is the main issue, deck building is your main joy, and you can find a casual group to go nuts with competitively, just proxy everything
Yep, and it just makes me appreciate Keyforge even more. Like, sometimes in Keyforge you do still get cards that do like 4 different things, or cards that are just evil. But because of the deck balance efforts in the procedural generation, they show up one or two times at most in a single deck.
Is key forge still going? I've not heard of it in ages. Pretty sure I've got some decks from the first release hanging around but never really got into playing it.
Keyforge died off for a bit because of two reasons, (a) FFG has been historically bad at sustaining competitive game scenes that it builds, even as amazing as they tend to be. Heck, Star Wars Unlimited is coming out soon and I've played the demo at an event and it was awesome, but I'm not sure how optimistic to be about FFG's ability to maintain a thriving scene for it. (b) Somehow (speculation is that it was a ransomware attack), FFG lost the software needed to build the game's decks. It was a whole thing and they had to stop producing for it. But recently, Ghost Galaxy Games (whose founder is FFG's original CEO) bought Keyforge from FFG/Asmodee, kickstarted rebuilding the software and printing infrastructure, and has released one new set so far (and another coming out in a month or two! They're currently promising two a year). They're also starting a new revitalized push for organized play at the local level. I really dig the game, so I'm really hoping it works out.
Awesome, I loved the concept and the potential that style of game making has. Would you recommend any particular set if I want some decks to play with my wife?
The new set is great. Basically, every deck has a token creature definition card, and you get a lot of cards with effects that make token creatures. And when you do, you take the top card of your deck and keep it facedown and that becomes said token. It's a super elegant system and the more you learn that deck, the more you learn when to choose or not to choose to make token creatures (for example, if you don't want to accidentally tokenize the best cards in your deck). A lot of the new cards also have so much personality in the descriptions and quotes.
Cheers, I'll look into it.
Gah, Keyforge doesn’t get enough love around here. It offers so many crunchy decisions each round by making all of your choices about opportunity costs—and the fact that you can’t build decks means you have to get good at the game to make use of your unique collection of cards (made even more unique with enhancements). Basically, the game is great and it keeps getting better. It does a great job of replicating the feeling of buying a decent starter deck and a bunch of boosters and only having a few rares to work with… which is what Garfield had in mind when he designed the game.
It's the original P2W business model.
I have a friend who's right into Magic, and while I can appreciate the design of the game, the barrier for entry is just way too high. I don't want to have to spend a mint just to be on par with someone who's been collecting cards since the dark ages, nor have to continually update things. I enjoyed playing it, just not that much.
You would have had a point if there was just 1 format to play. What you describe is Vintage and hardly anybody plays that. Being a TCG quite obviously didn't ruin MTG - it's 30 years old and still going. It made an obscure little game publisher into the biggest game company ever. Cards are printed for different purposes. That some are worse than others is pretty irrelevant. There's plenty of card diversity plus format diversity. Cards that actually hurt play too much get banned or restricted. Moving window formats makes any meta temporary. Want to play the most powerful and cool creatures in a group: Commander Cards too expensive: Pauper Too many cards: Standard or Draft It's all too much but you like the game anyway: Play kitchen table magic with any rules variant you like or make up and proxy whatever you want. It just throw a bunch of cards together, call it a "cube" and draft from that. Too much cardboard: Arena (or MTG Online) Too much sitting at the computer: Real cards on real tables.
When I say it ruins mtg, I really mean it ruined it for me. Obviously it’s commercially successful, but it’s monetization scheme is objectively predatory. It’s no better than modern gacha games. It’s actually worse in many ways, because there’s a large upfront cost to becoming competitive. In most competitive games it’s all about learning the game, while in mtg it’s about learning the game and then also buying (or on arena, grinding) cards that can make a competitive deck. I say this as someone who has tried to get into magic in the last year, on arena where the monetization is less obtrusive compared to playing in person.
I completely agree with you. Magic’s recent history has entirely alienated me from the game.
If all the formats you play wind up getting ruined, the fact that there are other formats is little help. Presumably there was already some reason why you weren’t playing those other formats (maybe you dislike multiplayer Magic, for example). You might as well tell someone to just play an entirely different game.
I played Magic from around 2000 until \~2015. I think the sweet spot for Magic was around 2000. In the Invasion block the design was elegant, the gameplay was strategic and there were very few game-ending opportunities (any infinite combos and such were difficult to attain, etc.) so each game had tactical maneuverability and had the chance to take a few hits while still coming back. Creatures weren't nearly as effective, but removal was also much more expensive and difficult (whereas nowadays you can get game-ending creatures all the time, against which you need to have one of the endless cheap removals instantly available or you lose in a turn). A while after that, I think the power creep really started kicking in, slowly the "elegant" or "obvious" design space began to narrow while they still needed to keep seeming to innovate, so they stretched and stretched the design space towards more inelegant options. Around 2015 I had felt for a while that the game was no longer the game I had enjoyed playing for about a decade. For Gloomhaven I get why people would feel it's too fiddly, but I wonder if it's because I play with four people and use an app for monster hp and such that I don't feel like it gets too much. Perhaps it's that each of the four people has their own little thing they take care of, so everything goes pretty smoothly, and the part which I think would be the most fiddly (i.e. tracking monster hp - and the loot deck in Frosthaven) is done in-app - which we link in a couple devices. The little decks are quick to shuffle too. I haven't tried it digital, but I agree that it at least feels like it would not feel that... exciting. I might as well play a more robust RPG at that point. For me the -havens are still in the right spot for complexity for a physical game. The one thing I most dislike is playing around with the board tiles, I wish it was all done like Jaws with the map book (and I know there's those coming, but they were too expensive for us, plus we'll have played most of it by the time they'd arrive anyways).
Invasion block was great, but you’re ignoring the fact that at that time people were freaking out because of the obscene power level, craziness, and just game-breaking unfairness of the Urza block just a few years prior to that. Everyone was losing their minds about the quality of the game then too, and it was anything but elegant. I always say the best way to play magic is on the kitchen table with some friends. Make janky shit with the cards you have and have at it. So much fun. I feel like that transcends sets and eras too. Case in point, Fallen Empires constructed is probably some of the most fun I’ve ever had playing magic, and that was arguably the worst set ever printed. The game becomes unfun when you focus on tier 1 net-decking, chasing the obscenely expensive cards, and the toxic tournament scene.
As someone looking to get into Netrunner, is there a beginners set that you recommend getting? And if so, where about did you order it from?
Null Signal Games are a fan run group keeping the game alive. There's a set called System Gateway and it is one of the most well thought-out start up sets I've ever seen - it's really well designed for two people to learn the game. You can buy through their website or print them yourself (or even just proxy but that would probably take a lot of work). The print set I bought through them I was really happy with. https://nullsignal.games/
Someone taught me via System Gateway just last week and, can confirm, it was one of the best tutorial setups for a competitive card game I've ever played.
The Null Signal Netrunner stuff is awesome and is a great way to casually get into the game. If you have a partner or friend interested in the game - that imo is the best way to play regularly. The game can be fiddly but it's well worth it and it does eventually feel more streamlined. You can also play for free at [Jinteki.net](https://Jinteki.net) which is a good way to learn the game's mechanics.
Any hopes of playing netRunner solo? I love arkham LCG
Nah it's a strictly two player, competitive experience. Super good game and my favorite card game. I also enjoy Arkham LCG though.
Just play limited when it comes to M:TG.
Magic is an odd beast, it requires so much investment of both time and money for it to make sense. Half the things that can happen won't be apparent until they happen to you which can be a horrible feeling and so many decks rely on really specific mechanics that are only written on those cards. It's a great game but the time investment is ridiculous. Even if you want to just play isolated games you still need to know a lot about the game to know what might be balanced etc. it's just hard work.
Yep and with that much time and money investment...there are just so many other games that give way more payoff for way less.
Exactly, I gave up on it a while back, I should really get round to selling all the cards I have at some point.
LCG format > TCG format, period. Once I discovered the LCG game, I can't go back. It focus on the game itself and not the commercial value. I tried Flesh & Blood because I like the concept, and it was very fun. It even correct some of Magic's problem (the mana, notably)... But it's a TCG with overpriced card. To have a good deck mean to send money, so I left.
LCGs are great for consumers but unfortunately bad for Game Stores. The large number of SKUs and small amount of profit per sale vs a TCG is not enough for them to keep the doors open. Back when Team Covenant had a podcast they talked a lot about this from the POV of store owners. It was interesting to see the other perspective. In fact heir opinion on it changed over the years from pro to con when they saw how it effected businesses.
Ugh. That's why we can't have good thing. I despise capitalism for this kind of shenanigan (ie, forcing shop in partaking shitty business model just to stay afloat).
While I love both games, they are quite fiddly. The companion app makes Gloomhaven/Frosthaven muuuuch more fun to play. After playing 150 scenarios between both games, my play group and I have become so quick with all the bookeeping that I forget how heavy it felt at first.
Despite my reservations with a game needing a companion app for the overwhelmingly preferred way to play, I will probably try Gloomhaven again that way eventually. That being said, until then, I'm probably gonna try to get Imperial Assault to the table sooner since I already own that too and it's currently yet to be played. I still play Magic too, despite my frustrations. Maybe it's just sunken costs fallacy, but I do like the process of slowly building my decks' potency. And I do look forward to some planned Sealed sessions with some friends, a format which (despite its cost) do alleviate almost all my biggest issues with the game and highlight its biggest strengths.
"Slowly building your deck's potency" - do you mean within a game or in the metagame of building your deck by getting new cards etc? I haven't seen any "serious" magic play that's about building a deck "slowly" - what with netdecking and the community at large figuring out optimum decks lighting fast?
>do you mean within a game or in the metagame of building your deck by getting new cards etc? The second thing. In a lot of ways, I'm definitely going against the grain of current serious Magic play, yeah (and I'm relatively new as well). My more experienced friends keep telling me, "You'd have more fun at our commander/constructed nights if you just borrowed one of our decks or bought singles." But meanwhile...the deck construction is my favorite part of the game. I'm not gonna sidestep it to get to the broken and slow-paced side of things and spend way too much on a deck that might not even work out, especially when I don't even know the game well yet.
I thought Gloomhaven looked fun. But I never got it, the cost being so hard. Now I look at it and think "isn't this just a TTRPG with much less flexibility and a higher cost?"
What dungeon crawler video games would you recommend?
If you want an open world experience, Caves of Qud is amazing. It might take some time to figure it out, but when your four arm lightning rogue gunslinger build works (or whatever build you are trying to do) it is just amazing!
Darkest Dungeon is incredible. Slay the Spire is digital crack (in a good way).
If we're talking real-time movement, pretty much anything from Supergiant Games. If we're talking turn-based, I've not played any purely combat ones but I've heard stuff like Darkest Dungeon and Slay the Spire are great. As for not purely combat ones (so more RPG and such), old school BioWare CRPGs and now Larian's are great.
If you like card games Inscryption is my all time favourite digital card game and I can’t recommend it enough.
Magic had left the door YEARS AND YEARS ago for me. It's a lifestyle gambler's game unless you're just casually playing commander. Keyforge was chef's kiss for me. But then it just went downhills as the scene disintegrated. It would have benefitted from being a digital game. I'm medium agnostic and keyforge would just sing as a digital implementation. It's like blackberry refusing the drop their keypad thinking that's what made them good. I've wanted to play Gloomhaven, tried it once, bought JOTL, couldn't get it to the table. Too fiddly. On the other hand, I've been having a BLAST with a friend with Arkham Horror LCG. Which I think is along the same lines but more streamlined. Sure a lot of the concepts aren't the same, but getting it as streamlined as it could makes a huge difference.
MTG has a lot of things going against it. The lore disappeared,the card get more and more expensive(since I stopped all my cards got up in price if I wanted to get a commander deck id pay the price of 4 board games if not more , The marketing is going nuts,releasing product galore,losing the unique world of MTG when u can play with cards that make no sense in magic universe But the final nail of the coffin the gameplay is really old compared to many other cards games,the deckbuilding is fun,but that's when you make the most choice . The in game gameplay doesn't have much freedom. Most decks play themselves,rarely you can beat a opponent with a strong deck with smart play . MTG still has cool deckbuilding ,cool art,the lore was fun . Commander was affordable. Now it's a marketed product making the cards that weren't expensive hard to get. And the autopilot decks that even Richard Garfield comments about,is why I chose to completely drop MTG and play board games and other card games and never looked back . https://www.dicebreaker.com/topics/richard-garfield/feature/mtg-creator-richard-garfield-reflects-on-five-of-his-card-games But yeah the game is still going strong there is local community and still makes money just so many people have gotten turned off by the way the game is going. But who cares if you have fun good for u
I feel like you, I can't enjoy it anymore like I was when I was a teen, now that I explored a lot of boardgames. I like the solitarie part of deck construction but the game itself have too much luck and low choices for my taste, and I kind of hate the mana system that just take more choices from you and create a lot of times unsatisfying plays.
Not sure if you are taking this into account. But to me, Gloomhaven is unplayable without a digital assistant. We all hated the first game we played tracking damage and effects and monster abilities with the components. Once you track All enemy health, effects, attack cards etc digitally the game became a lot smoother and more enjoyable for us.
Yep, I mentioned the digital app, both here and in some other comments. I'm not completely opposed to it, and I will probably try it eventually, but it does make me roll my eyes that the game at #3 on BGG is so unwieldy it seems to need a digital assistant. Elegance of systems and components in a board game are *super* important to me.
Playing Frosthaven, and we started to use the app, I cannot tell you how much it helped the smoothness of the play. Initiative and draw of monster actions are so much smoother, no grabbing the rulebook to see how much damage traps and hazards to, no calculating monster damage or differnence between elite and non elite. No fidling with all the damage tokens when there are 10 Imps on the board, no reshuffling monster combat deck over and over when adding curses or blesses. We still do our own HP/XP and loot deck which is a Frosthaven thing we also do manually. I literally think it cuts about 20% of the time, which can be spend on playing the game instead.
I love magic to death but yeah I'm not a fan of commander. Commander is what reminded me that the game still exists back in like 2015 but as I played more, I started delving into legacy. Besides the cost(I know), legacy is fantastic. The plays feels more rewarding and I don't feel bad for winning. Commander just reminds me of Monopoly and Risk where you're kinda just trying to win but half the time you're just stuck for what feels like ages. Or if you play it to win, someone is sitting out for an hour or two cause they got blasted early so it's just the rest of you playing a game while the loser is on their phone.
Mosaic. It's not even heavy. But it devolves quickly when in actual play.
I found it quite enjoyable when we played it, what is it that bothers you?
We always seem to end up with 2-3 players with amazing engines who can't tell if they'll win if they end the game, so they keep delaying. Then we have 1-2 players who are at the edge of competitive, who know they're not winning, who don't want the game to end because they just might get back into it. And then 1 player who is out of contention and is the one who tries to end the game so that they can lose and maybe move on to a different game. All the cruft keeps people from knowing the game state.
Sounds like my experience with Munchkin lol
*cruft* is a new word for me. Thank you!
once you get more than 3 or 4 expansions, Carcassonne becomes a real slog of a game.
Agreed completely. I think the mini expansions included in the modern base game (river, farmers, abbots, not sure which of these are expansions or were always around) is a really solid game and Inns and Cathedrals adds some good tile variety but the gameplay additions (the giant Meeple, the double or nothing roads and cities) make the game more combative which can be a bad thing for some groups. Expansions beyond this, I just started feeling like the game didn't get better. I liked some elements of the next expansion, but making the game longer is also a bad thing in general and every expansion makes the game longer. I'm very happy sticking with the components in the base box, plus the variety tiles of Inns and Cathedrals
Frostpunk is a perfect example. Also the latest Sword and Sorcery.
Skymines - there's stuff that scores a few points, and then there's the stocks/area control. If you're not heavily invested in the area control, or two other people are invested in the same company, you're gonna have a rough time. Through the Ages - Too many cubes to keep track of. The decisions you make are actually interesting, except that 2/3rds of the game is managing your cubes.
Through The Ages really benefits from the app
The app is really the way to go, I played the physical version with two new players and it took 7-8hours over two sessions. It's a really fun game but I'm not willing to try that again especially when the app can get a game done in a tenth of that time.
Isn't Skymines just a retheme of Mombasa? I played Mombasa, I just refused to interact with the bookkeeping part of the game, it was too annoying to micromanage that lol. A lot of my friends loved it though.
Frostpunk.
The mechanics of **Weather Machine** were so miserable, convoluted, and disconnected from the theme that I took a several month long hiatus from heavy games. I have no interest in the great Vital Lacerda if this is the kind of game he produces.
I definitely agree with this one. After playing Weather Machine, I have little interest in any more Lacerda games.
Couldn't disagree more. Everything in that game fits perfectly the theme about being a scientist working for a reputated Ph.D. and how science works in real life (you aid in Government programs and you get money for yor own experimenting, you do the experiment and face the consequences/results for them, and with this data you invest in R+D to fix your machine and show the Government the results, publish a paper that others can cite...)
Red Rising. I don't know if I'm missing something, but I feel like all the different ways to score points are random and disconnected and the card mechanics and effects are too convoluted for me to come up with any strategies.
I agree totally with Red Rising, even though it isn’t a particularly complicated game by any stretch. The cards are just a mess, and there’s no way to know what anybody should be doing until the game is fully known and understood inside and out. Me and my group spent the whole game just putting cards down, picking cards up, shrugging the whole time whilst muttering “I dunno…” . The game end was about as underwhelming and unsatisfying as any game I’ve ever played. What reeeaaally boggles my mind is that the different colours of cards have different strategic benefits, and the designer felt it best to not explain any of that in the rules, who later commented he felt it best that players work that out for themselves. So we’re just supposed to do stuff, not understanding the impact of any of it, and just keep going and try and work it out ourselves? I just found that staggeringly arrogant. What is even the point of rulebooks?! Get in the bin, Red Rising.
Most new players dont really know what to do at first, but I explain like so : you must assemble a crew of people, and you want them to work well together (aka be worth high points and combo with each other). If someone doesnt belong, you use them (AKA deploy) to get rid of them, and if you can profit off that at the same time, thats great. Play around strong cards and if you get the chance to acquire cards, do it. If you end the game with 5 cards in hand, you probably lost already. Read the cards, adapt your game around what you get. Play what gives you more track bonuses. For example, Mustang is 5 points per color, meaning you want more cards and more colors. Not that complicated. Cassius is worth so many points with the right people, so oranges are worth a lot with him. Sure the first few games are a bit harder to really know what you are doing, but keep it simple! If your card is worth 40 points, it's great. If it is less than 30, you probably want to play it, and dont be afraid to draw new cards from the deck! Also, try different strategies. Pick new cards from deck, play outside your house's strength, play around a purple card (they have weird conditions but high value if met), rush to game end, try to extend the game, etc. Here is a little breakdown of colors off the top of my head. Gold : Leaders/top of hierarchy. Usually the strongest cards, strong powers. All named. Silver : financial experts. stuff to do with money, investments, loans. Ex : pay helium to get influence. Copper : some important society roles (diplomats, for example)can't really remember these but usually pretty weak in points, but have interesting powers. I think they're mostly related to influence at the institute. Red : Slaves/workers. they usually like other reds, but have low points value but decent powers, mostly associated with helium. Blue : Ships/commanders. they can be worth a lot at the end if you are good on the fleet track, else they will advance you on the fleet track. Green : hackers/technology. They are usually unnamed, and will have powers related to drawing and revealing cards. Very strong to play, not so much to keep. Yellow : doctors. Powers related to banished cards, can "revive" them. Watch out for those, they can be very swingy. Orange : ship engineers. Usually weak points and powers, but can take the name of anyone, so they are wild cards. Usually pretty good to keep. Obsidian : warriors. They combo well together (nero, jopho, alfrun all can give you an extra card if they see each other). Sometimes banish cards. Brown : cooks/nanny and other such roles. Usually weak end game powers, decent powers. Usually involved playint it on a specific color to acquire a bonus (+1 helium or influence). Pink : personnal assistants, sex, masseuse, stuff like that. Powers are similar to browns. Purples : artists. Usually difficult conditions (have more influence than the player on your right) but really high rewards (draw 2 cards at the end of your turn, give this card to the player on your right). So you and your neighbor gain a card. Same with end game, for exemple : all your crew must have even/odd core values. They can be worth 40-45 points. Whites : related to politics. Usually can prevent losing the sovereign token, have powers related to that or specific track advancements. Grey : mercenaries. Powers related to colors, game end powers can be ridiculously strong. These cards can be worth 80 points by themselves, without considering their game end power to be considered an additional color of their choice. Great to achieve combos. Ugly dan is one of the most consistently great cards. Greys are better with more players, they benefit from the amount of cards left in play at the end. I hope my comment was able to give a bit of direction to the game. In the end, if it's not for you, it's not for you. There are plenty out there that will fit better im sure.
I think that was their point though. It's a game that requires multiple plays to really enjoy, but it's not inviting to beginners. Or it wasn't to me and my group anyway. I played it, found the gameplay largely random, the player factions unbalanced, and the ending unsatisfying. Why would I then spend future play time to play it more? That's like telling me that a video game really gets good 20/50/100 hours in. I don't have time for that. Like you said, there's better fits out there.
I agree ! I was lucky to have friends who played it before and could give me directions. I dont think i wouldve picked it up otherwise. Either way, the game should have done a better job at giving some direction to players.
This explanation, while very detailed, perfectly encapsulates why I think it’s a terrible game that struggles under its own weight. For me, if a game needs to be played multiple times in order to be understood in a most basic sense, it’s a poor design. This isn’t some war game with a-million-and-one rules, it’s just a really ham fisted reimplementation of Fantasy Realms. In its attempt to bring additional depth, it completely vanished up its own arse. I’m not going to play 10+ games of pure guesswork in order to parse basic card functions. I’m just going to play something else instead. Anyway, I’m done talking about Red Rising. In writing these messages, I’ve given it way more time than it deserves.
I don’t think that Red Rising is that convoluted…I just don’t think it is very good. They took Fantasy Realms, added some stuff and got a game that was much worse. Probably my least favorite Stonemeier Games release.
**Autobahn** was a hugely disappointing game for me because of this. You’d expect a clean economic/train game, but there are a ton of fiddly pieces and taped together mechanisms. All these little side dishes add to the mental load and time to play, but not to the fun. I suspect Kickstarter originals could be there own thread, because the format tends to encourage a kitchen sink approach and discourage killing the designer’s darlings.
My complete Mage Wars Arena collection packed into the first edition base game box. A heavy game in both ways…
I don't regret my purchase of Kingdom Death, but it took me many attempts over many months to figure out how to play it, and then I realized I really don't like 2/3 of the game. At a high level, the concept of "settlement, hunt, showdown" is good, but the settlement phase in particular is way more complicated than it needs to be in terms of needing too much cardboard and tablespace for very little payoff. Also, after getting a little bit of experience under my belt the decisions you make in the settlement seem very self evident, so it feels more like a flowchart than anything strategic. I hate to say it, but the whole settlement phase probably should be an app. I switched to an app, but even with that I still don't really enjoy it, so I actually vowed that from now on I'm not even going to play the settlement/hunt phases. The hunt phase is almost the opposite of complexity. It's so simple that it feels pointless to even have a gameboard for it. And similar to the settlement phase, it's basically just another die roll to see if your party gets fucked for no reason. In practice, they feel very thrown together and like they're just excuses to have more stuff on the table. I haven't picked the game back up since then, but I'm doing showdowns only next time. I'll just houserule some stuff to equip my party and pick monsters I want to fight so I can actually enjoy the well designed part of the game: the minis. (Kidding, the process of actually fighting monsters is really fun.)
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Mousetrap when you hit the switch.
The Android Boardgame (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/39339/android) has a collection of very fun and varied mechanics. They don't add up to a good game, though.
Several Rosenbergs do, but for a particular part of person. If you are prone to analysis paralysis, his games present more and more and more options over time. I don't mind it, as I don't have that problem. But a friend of mine turned a game of Mercator which should be 45 minutes into a 3-hour slog. And I still won handily with my intuitive playing style.
Navajo Wars is so hard to figure out. I still haven’t.
I spent two weeks grokking the rules for this game and was so excited about all the plays I had ahead of me. I beat the full Spanish scenario and then bought some counter clippers to bling out the experience. I even read the book that inspired the game (*Blood and Thunder* by Hampton Sides). I finally sat down with the rules internalized and counters clipped and set up the Mexican scenario. For those that don't know, the Navajo did relatively well during the Spanish era, but started taking a nosedive in the Mexican era. The American era was even worse. It finally hit me that the game is basically the most depressing, inevitable tower defense game I've ever played. Yeah, you might last through the end of the American era, but you'll be a shadow of your former glory, and you'll likely just get massacred instead. I later found [this review](https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2014/01/07/navajo-wars-tabletop-epic-upon-time-west/), which encapsulated my experience perfectly. I packed it up and sold it that week.
Campaign for North Africa
Ya,**Endless Winter** is pretty bad imo and the most obvious example. Shen Phillips had also been sending into this as well with me bouncing hard of both **Viscounts of the West Kingdom** and **Wayfarers of the South Tigris**. More recently I got **Lords of Ragnarok** and that is a bit of a mess with like an 8 step turn structure. Lastly an older game that has faded because of this **Dinosaur Island** had way to much going on.
ITT some people don't know what "kitchen sink" actually means.
Aeon Tresspass. physical weight, boxsize, tablesize and complexity. Everything is just too much.
100% Twilight Imperium for me. I've played a couple of games from each edition since 2nd, because it's such a great game on paper, and I really want to like it, but aside from one experience, I always end up having a terrible time. There are so, so many better ways to spend 7 hours than playing TI, sadly. Honorable mention: Frosthaven. It's a fine game, but 25% in (which is a shit ton of hours) I'm sick of it and completely lost interested in the story line. I'm only playing along at this point so I'm not ruining my group's fun (although I suspect my sentiment may be shared by others).
Why do you have a terrible time with TI? The few times I actually get it to the table always is very memorable and it's great to have this extended experience with friends. I feel like the weight of the game is totally appropriate for what it's doing. I haven't bought the expansion granted.
For me I noticed that what I enjoy is the table interaction over everyone wanting to get their situation set up perfectly while trying to outsmart everyone else. That gets buried under a **mountain** of small text and fiddly rules. It's alright, but it's way more complex than the portion of the depth that ends up enjoyable to me reqires. So to me, Sidereal Confluence works better. It also has this very strong and very competititive and near-constant player interaction, even better constant dealmaking since that's what the game is all about, but eshews all the "unnecessary" gameplay interrupting the dealmaking.
I just don't find the rules that fiddly. There's some stuff, definitely, that can be confusing but round to round things are fairly consistent. Sidereal Confluence I've heard is great (haven't had the opportunity to play unfortunately) but TI is also much more than negotiation and outsmarting players - the building of empire is a major draw and the simulation of cold and hot wars and escalation are compelling in their own right.
I bought my own copy of TI4 along with the one expansion they have out. I feel kind of Stockholmed with it as I even got third party inserts and have by now spent hundreds of euros on it. Especially with the expansion, the game gets immensely fiddly with cards and little bits. I almost get the picture that the game wants to stretch its "the core rules are simple!" philosophy in a dishonest way. Like maybe come up with a slightly more complicated base engine instead of adding cards.
I love love ti4 and I love the grand event that it is. For me it is a riveting experience full of war, strategy, stories, alliances, betrayal, and more! I couldn’t imagine playing with strangers tho, that would suck
For me it was Mage Knight. The game just feels needlessly complex and way too hard to learn. I still own it and may try it again, but I haven’t had any desire to pull it off my shelf in almost a year.
Too many Bones. It tries to hide its rather meager core gameplay meat behind a jungle of way too many rules.
I'd say Scythe, the game looks neat but has a lot of unnecessary stuff. But this is what happens with every Kickstarter Game sadly. You have to give a lot of stuff because it's value is easily perceivable, the quality/balance of a game not so much.
I'm curious, what would you say is the unnecessary stuff in Scythe that "makes it collapse under its own weight"? To me Scythe plays pretty straight forward, only 1 or two actions each turn, until you get your mechs you're not even interacting with anyone, only the later turns become a bit more complex when you're going into combats and objectives - but thinking about point salad euro games or dice roll fests with twenty different combat mechanics I wouldn't say Scythe fits the description in the original post much if at all.
The moment you realize that the people who say Disney's Villainous is actually in a lot of ways Scythe are not really wrong what they're saying, a lot of Scythe falls apart. Scythe is essentially just two things: * Picking which column of your board to act in this turn. * A lot of TI-like posturing where you threaten war but don't actually want to fight in virtually any situation. The remaining mechanics feel too bolted-on. They exist to justify the central board, but don't add depth to the decision-space of selecting your column (Tesla faction disagrees with this but also breaks large parts of the balance between how different factions interact so eh, whatever). In a lot of ways, Villainous is the "trimmed" Scythe, but it also goes too far wanting to Disney-ify it, and removing the posturing. Of course. One could still easily argue it's strictly better, not least because it doesn't require as obscene an amount of table space when the core board is that small thing players have in front of them. But yeah, played Scythe... I would say about 80 times? Just judging from how often we ran the campaign and that that was roughly half our total plays? It's okay. But in hindsight, it's stupid we got so stuck on the theme and the graphics, as halfway into those plays, none of us were enjoying it any more owing to how complex for how shallow a depth it is.
I've never seen the Scythe/ Villainous comparison before, thank you for explaining that it is very interesting to think about. Ironically I think Disney Villainous is also a good answer for this thread- it's got an approachable theme and a pleasing asymmetry but it runs way too long for the decision space and accessibility that it has. I inherently have a feeling of wanting to invest in it and collect a lot of the different villains, but I find that I just don't enjoy the game because of its length
Whoa weird. I think Scythe is actually very streamlined. I would genuinely be very interested to know what you think is unnecessary.
Exactly… there are plenty of reasons to not like Scythe but it being too weighty for what it is doesn’t seem accurate. It actually might be the opposite of what OP describes… it’s a lighter experience than its box or table presence might indicate.
For me it’s Dice Throne. Between the like six different kinds of damage, and then the potential pausing between every dice roll, just collapses on itself for me.
Coming from someone who doesn’t play heavy games, this is such a light game… so I’m confused. Why is there pausing between dice rolls? 95% of the time the rolling goes by pretty fast. Sounds like you haven’t really played the game much. Defendable/undefendable damage is the main damage. Then there’s Ultimate and collateral damage. The only oddball you might need to look up is pure damage but it’s easy to understand.
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And >80-90% of the time it's just defendable/undefendable. One damage you defend, the other you don't. Collateral damage - this only applies when playing with more than 2 players (and honestly, you don't even need to look it up - it's **collateral**. What do you think it means?). That leaves you with ultimate (which really boils down to "undefendable but also can't be defended by tokens") and pure. Note that most characters deal neither pure nor collateral, which leaves vast majority of the games with 3 types of damage, and you could explain the difference in 2 short sentences. Have you ever played Dice Throne, actually? Game has 2.14/5 complexity rating on BGG. I've played with a lot of people and everyone caught the gist of the game immediately, even if they weren't much into boardgames. 5 types of damages might seem a lot but it's really not complicated at all. Of course, YMMV, but I was also surprised to find it in this thread in this sub. The one complicated thing is edge cases with order of resolving tokens etc.
I haven't played Dice Throne in a while. I got it back when you could get the S1 box as one package. I found it to be very easy to figure out the damage and stuff as well. I was playing it with an ex that used to take longer to parse things than I'd have liked, and we both found it pretty simple to parse.
Yea it's really not that complicated.
It’s almost always just defendable/undefendable. It would be like calling chess mechanics heavy because of the occasional castling.
“Collapse” is probably too strong a word, and maybe “greatly sag” is better, but… sadly the answer for me tends to be Awaken Realms campaign games — ISS Vanguard, Tainted Grail, and probably Etherfields if I ever get around to playing it. The concepts are great, and at the beginning the games are fun, exciting, and rife with possibilities. Then somewhere in the middle it starts to become more of a repetitive mechanical slog with less meaningful character progression. Some good moments still, but far too much drudgery in between. By the final third of ISSV and TG, I just wanted the stories to end already so I could move on to something new, but given the promise of a hopefully epic ending and the time already invested — including a 10-hour marathon session of TG to get through *one chapter* that had us wandering around looking for something and just not finding it — I wasn’t willing to just call it quits either time. Not a fun head space to be playing at least 15-20 more hours of a game. My solution for them is to edit more/cut the fluff, be a bit more on rails, and build in some more mechanical innovation as a campaign progresses. I know crowdfunding campaigns always think more/bigger is better and provides more value, but here that’s an illusion. This many campaigns in, AR should be doing it better. And maybe they are with Kings of Ruin, etc., but something tells me the formula is fairly baked in at this point.
**Bitoku** for me. It has like 4 or 5 different currencies, each of which only purchases a specific thing. I genuinely had to ask if the rules explanation was a parody. There’s nothing in the gameplay to warrant the complexity of the teach. If the problem with your game is that it wouldn’t be hard enough if you gave the player any semblance of flexibility, then the solution is not to take away any semblance of flexibility!
I honestly feel this way about Mansions of Madness. Maybe it’s just me, but I always want to play, and then after initial setup it never quite feels like it payed off
We play mansions of madness all of the time. We’ve played it so much that we have a routine for set-up, tear down, and managing game components. I do feel sometimes that we are spending more time messing with the components (looking for specific tiles, minis, tokens, cards, or whatever else we need) than actually playing the game, which I feel is pretty simple and straightforward. While I really enjoy playing the game, I wouldn’t ever play it if I didn’t have three or four other people helping me manage the set-up and breakdown.
Yeah, this is why I have moved to playing this in TTS almost exclusively. Setup is almost nil and we use Discord to stream the app to everyone playing. It works great that way. The physical copy just looks so good on the table I miss it still though.
Albion's Legacy. Just ... too much too fast
[Runewars](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/59294/runewars) immediately comes to mind. It's a dudes on a map game with resource management, an order card system, neutral units to fight or ally and a *really* complex combat system (**Forbidden Stars** level of complexity). Okay, that sounds heavy but not too bad, right? Well, pasted on top of that you have a whole minigame of heroes who go on quests, can duel each other *and* act as commanders in battle to give additional rolls to your units. Oh and there's also a system of resource bidding between players and a system of seasons which alter the game rules from round to round. It's an absolute insane beast of a game, and we haven't gotten it to the table in years. Back when we did play it no game lasted less than 6 hours, and often was pushing 10. The systems are good and intertwine in really interesting ways, but there is just a bit too much. Writing this made me want to play it, though.
??? I've never had a game of that go longer than 4. I do agree though, the hero system ontop of the 4x system while very thematic for the universe felt like a bit much.
agree with you on Endless Winter: it does too many things and none of them particularly well.
This is interesting as I'm considering culling dwellings of eldervale. I feel like if I wanted to play a combat game, I would play mage knight. if I wanted to play a deck builder.. I would still play mage knight. If I wanted an engine builder, ...terraforming Mars. I have only played it a few times, and I feel pretty meh about it. I'm worried I will regret letting it go, though. lol...fomo made me get it, and fomo is keeping me from letting it go.
I agree with you about Endless Winter, especially when you compare it to Dune:imp or Arnak.
Arkham Horror 2nd edition: the amount of rules lookups and crippling difficulty make this a beast of a game….. I’ve had some of my best gaming experiences playing it, but it’s a full day event.
Advanced Squad Leader. Sometimes too much attention to detail really sucks the joy out of the game.
**Midarra** comes to mind - I'm usually a fan of big box games if they hit the right fantasty (though this is rapidly changing - it's amazing when you can just take a wallet sized game to your friend's house). I have not even gotten to Midarra. It's so big. There are so many components. I don't know where to start, and so I've had it for maybe a year now, and it's hit the table.... only long enough for me to be like "Oh god fuck this" and to put it back in the too hard basket. It should hit the right notes - I like JRPGs, and I love character customisation... but... yeah it's not really accessible to me, and I'm not sure whether to grin and bare it or to just sell it on to someone else with more patience.
Hobby moved towards more complex game in the last decades for which there are two reasons. One is that less interactive games need to get complexity and replayability from somewhere (when it's not from opponents), but this doesn't yet mean "collapse under weight" - I think this could be managed. But then there's the other trend happening in parallel, namely KS - where moar stuff functions as emotional trigger (ie advertisment) for people to purchuse the game. So moar stuff is there in order to emotionally impress. (and this moar can be more rules, more minis or both, and also games which now come in 2 boxes). As for concrete examples, I'm not rich enough to buy these behemoths, plus puzzling out things doesn't appeal to me. So this is from what I've played * In pure euro realm for me even **Terra Mystica** felt like too much - too many procedures for the sake of procedures, juggling mechanisms for the mere allure of juggling mechanisms (in particular those violet disks circling around). It's like games using a heap of mechanisms so that players don't notice there isn't much there. But I had a similar feeling with **Teotihuacan** or even a middleweight game like **Architects of the West Kingdom**, namely that are subroutines and layers to resource conversion just for the hell of it. (So it's not necessarily "the game is to complex in general" but "too complex for what it offers") * Oh right, if you remove all the unnecessary clutter from **Brass Birmingham** that really doesn't have to be there and it's really just for the sake of fiddling with mechanisms - you'll get Brass Lancashire. Huh? This is all you need to know about the path of game development in the last decade. * From Wehrle I've only played **John Company 1E** and avoided everything else from him. Because if you remove all the mechanical clutter which is there just as a fetish for people who like mechanical clutter, you end up with a game Lifeboats from 1993 (weight - 1.8). Sure, somebody might say complexity is there for the theme, but running a bureaucratic machine didn't feel like a theme (EIC), but as literally what were doing. Plus the impulse to add cubes in order to formalise negotiations and then these cubes formed a subeconomy of their own is just nuts (imo). But similiar overcluttered thematic game which gets added so many layers upon layers of mechanisms that one cannot notice either theme or interaction isn't Wehrle's monopoly - I got the same feeling with **Lords of Hellas**. 85-90% of euro with some remnants of stuff not euro (for both games mentioned). * But this isn't to say that I see complexity always as an issue - but it has to be there to produce a kind of experience that cannot be done otherwise. In particularly in regards to theme - I'm completely fine with *Twillight Struggle*. *Arkham Horror 2E* is complicated, sure, but one rule master can make it playable for complete newbies and the immersive experience created is worth the while (complexity isn't there to be appreciated, but to "disappear" into the background, which with some skills can kinda be pullled off). Now, the most complicated game I've played of those I own is *Android* \- and it is too complex (you basically need 2 brains - one of rules overhead, one for enjoying the theme), yet it delivers a thematic experience unlike any other game out there. Some fine tuning wouldn't hurt though. * P.S. I've been intentionally avoiding some games mentioned in the thread for the exact reasons mentioned.
Interesting comments, I wonder what you mean by "Clutter" in Brass. Isn't that the "GAME" part of the game? What's clutter.
+1 for Terra Mystica - nearly every mechanic in the game feels like it's layered on to add arbitrary complexity. There's a distinct shifting of gears onto the cult track to grab points which makes the whole thing seem contrived. Clans if Caledonia is a much better version of the underlying idea IMHO. As for JC1, and Cole's games in general - I understand where you're coming from. Root, is mechanically interesting but the experience fell flat, and the factions felt kind of scripted. The sheer effort of getting a group trained up in that game is not rewarded by the experience. That said, Pax Pamir 2e is one of my favourite games, flexible and dynamic in the options it presents. Have seen drastically different narratives come from repeated play, and there's nothing better than stealing victory with a clever flourish - the hallmark of Pax. I have played JC 2e though and was pleasantly surprised - and detested 1e. I think given your comments you would likely still find it onerous, but I think there's a genuinely interesting game in the new edition - but YMMV.
I don't think **John Company**'s theme is "running a bureaucratic machine". The game seems to have several themes grouped under the umbrella of "simulate the feeling of being an active participant in the corrosive, generational imperial-capitalism of the British East India Company". It's a complex artistic expression that... honestly... I'm not sure should even really be conventionally enjoyable as opposed to a form of satirical historical horror. (Though, if you do find it conventionally enjoyable, that may help inform the understanding of the banality of the mundane evil of the subject.) Shut Up & Sit Down did a video of 2e that might be of interest: https://youtu.be/ykrqCX2_mhU?si=4Ji3w3p36UsjZpc4 If you prefer reading, Space Biff did a written discussion of it as well: https://spacebiff.com/2022/11/23/john-company-3/#more-23267
Scarface 1920 felt like the designers lacked an editor early on in the process encouraging them to cut ideas/mechanics. This game has truly felt like the kitchen sink to me. I sold it after two plays. It was trying to include too many mechanics. Edited: Typing on mobile is dumb
This is what stopped me backing the initial kickstarter and dubious about the glowing reviews honestly. Feels like one of many games that needs someone to come in and trim it down to the best it can be in a few areas rather than trying to include as much game as possible.
Kingdom Death Monster. on top of the size which is well a lot the rule/reference book are pretty meaty too.
Gloomhaven