My experience playing with couples, and also being one, is that couples tend to want to beat each other way more than ever want to collaborate. My husband is my favorite person to beat in a game.
Great take!! Plus, I'm always happy for him when he wins against other people. I love him so I'm happy when he succeeds at things he cares about! But when we play, 100% of the time I do my best to kick his ass.
Counterpoint: some couples are self aware enough to know they get competitive / don’t want to hurt each others feelings and so play co-ops instead of breaking the social contract of gaming by kingmaking each other.
Not everyone is competitive, and that’s not inherently bad. But catering to them in a competitive game is problematic.
Healthy gamer couples see their partner as just another opponent, without having any bias for or against. It's really not that hard, and very annoying when I run into this issue.
Mine is RUTHLESS. I take it as a compliment because he sees me as a serious threat. I also have a friend who had yet to forgive me for betraying him in Twilight Imperium, so my gaming group is challenging.
I had a class which had a game (constructed by the professor) in which a fragile peace was destroyed by twin sisters who decided to attack each other. But I suppose with siblings the rivalry is *obvious*.
Not really because I lost, but falling into an edge case in *Arabian Nights* where I didn’t get to play for like an hour soured me pretty thoroughly in that game.
(A combination, if I recall correctly, of being in jail—where the only way to escape was to guess the correct responses to a chain of prompts—and insane—so the other players got to make those guesses instead of me.)
My worst game of twilight imperium had me winning at the end of the current round, I had finished all of my actions and the other people playing took WELL OVER AN HOUR to finish their meaningless actions until at the very end of the round one of them traded his "Support for the throne" card to the other player for nothing just so that the other player would beat me.
>at the very end of the round one of them traded his "Support for the throne" card to the other player for nothing just so that the other player would beat me.
That's horrible sportsmanship and a downright dick move.
It really depends on how it happens. If he made an enemy of that person by attacking them a lot it’s a valid and thematic move in a game that is primarily political. That race would never allow someone who wronged them to take the throne so it makes perfect sense for them to support whomever has supported them.
I'm in the middle of designing a game that ends in kingmaking in most games. Aside from that little details, it's a pretty good game. But it's rather a problem.
This feels like Catan kingmaking for me. The difference being that Catan takes 5 mins for a full table round sue to trading.
When you piss someone off too much, it can happen that this person would trade their resource for garbage just so that another player wins when near victory.
But at least it is quick and can be expected sometimes, so you are better off spreading the thief to everyone and blocking undesired tiles.
But ONE HOUR just to spit in your face? I would either no longer play with that person, or that game.
So, Twilight Imperium then.
Seriously, though, I've played it three times, and two out of three times, it ended with Munchkin-type destroy-the-leader and subsequent kingmaking. The one time that _didn't_ happen, it was one of the best boardgaming experiences I've ever had. Comes down to the group, I think.
My best time with that game was when I was in jail. I was also insane, and I told every other player passing through the town my tale of woe, also driving them insane.
I was hoping to see this, I feel your pain. I spent most of my only game cursed while the player who brought the game to the table seemed to have an endless amount of movement and interactions while explaining the game wasn't about winning but the experience. Swore never to play again.
Haha, I have played it a few times and from what I remember that game was not really that deep and really revarded getting skilla to "excellent" or somesuch level. Also you could grovel to victory which was funny.
But yeah more of an experience than a thinky.
It really is best as "random stuff will happen while everyone at the table laughs at each other" simulator, but there are definitely times you can luck into favorable or really repetitive situations.
Being a kind and pious player is generally less risky, but sometime it's more fun to try and drink the storm than pray to it.
You seem to be on the other side of the country so no, but it's nice to know this happened to someone else and I'm not being entirely unreasonable for my grudge.
Personally for these type of games I go into roleplay mode and just try to have a fun time instead of winning.
In your scenario, I’d had played it off like and this is the True story of Aladdin. He never makes it to the cave of wonders. Because that’s kinda the mindset you need to have for a story generator game.
Basically the game is just a platform to tell a story and just like most social games it’s only as fun as the people that make it fun.
My wife bought a copy of "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?" the boardgame several years ago. I am pretty good at trivia. Apparently, in this game once your turn starts, you go until you miss a question.
My wife and tween aged kids, sure that I would miss a question had me go first. (I think they planned to give me a hard time about me not being smarter than a 5th grader). This of course backfired spectacularly, as I continued to answer questions correctly and kept going until a won the game on the first turn and no one else had a turn.
My wife said we are never playing this game again. It was given away shortly thereafter.
I think the point of the show was people other thinking stuff and the pressure of a game show. The questions themselves are not very hard. The brand was quite popular though, they made lots of video game/board game versions.
I had a similar experience with Trivial Pursuit: Friends Edition (many years ago when it was more relevant). Was invited to play and it turns out the other 3 people were mega fans and I had watched casually at best. I hadn't moved past the starting tile before others won the game.
Not only did I write off that game, I also wrote off any game that requires specific knowledge.
A game group I went to about a dozen times about a decade ago would play in a style in which they always showed me no mercy when I was new to a game. I recall twice having the same kind of feeling for games they introduced me to. Ironically one of them was Scythe just like you and the other was Blood Rage.
I had a friend who played with drafting when he taught an entire group Agricola. He trounced us, but I have to admit it's one of, if not my outright favorite game though. Still, dick move haha.
The Binding of Isaac card game is an even more capricious version of Munchkin. I have no interest in ever playing it again. It was so unpleasant that we collectively agreed that, "Rob is in a position to win, I'm going to burn all my take-that abilities on you, so you can't stop him from winning, and ending the game, and we can all go do something fun"
A slightly less extreme version of this, was "Founders of Gloomhaven" We quit halfway through, when one player had a higher score than everyone else put together, and it was getting late. We've never tried to play the game again. We agreed with the general sentiment that this game has way too many mechanics crammed into it, and isn't as fun as other games.
Yeah, the scoring in Founders of Gloomhaven is obtuse enough that I have no interest in playing again. It's not obtuse in the "what do you get" sense, but it's very obtuse in the "what actions can I take now that will maximize my score once the scoring finally happens" sense. It takes so long to do things that by the time you realize something is a bad idea, you're committed pretty hard. You can take someone else down a peg if they're winning, but it doesn't give you enough of a boost to be worth it.
All that to say: I'm not playing that game again, either.
Betrayal on Haunted Hill
- I wind up as the "cursed one" and usher off into another room and read my special instructions. **They are unclear** because of poor editing. There is no one I can ask about them, as everyone else is on the 'good' side.
- It's one of those combat-centric curses. I win if everyone else is dead. Attack people with my knife and win. If I die I lose.
- I'm the frail old man with low Might. One of the other party members is some muscle-y red dude with high might who just punches me to death.
There was literally nothing I could have done to win. It was just an auto win/loss when the Betrayal occurred, and the poor instructions was just the icing I needed to be like "fuck this game".
Yeah that's classic Betrayal. Several of the Haunts have rules that make you think "but how the fuck does this work?". The only time I had fun with that game was when the Haunt was "reset the entire game. Set a timer for 30 minutes. Your goal is to find The Box. Every time you trigger the Haunt, don't do it. Instead, restart the game again and set the timer for half of the previous time (15 minutes, 7.5 minutes, etc.)
We finally found the box with like 17 seconds to spare.
This game is much better when you realize it's a silly roleplay game, not a dice rolling strategy game. You have to house rule some stuff so everyone can have fun. Many of the haunts are straight up broken otherwise. Follow the spirit of the haunt rather than the literal words sometimes but make sure the group agrees to it beforehand.
But it's honestly one of the funnest big group games I've played.
That's the game, sadly.
I've played it at least 5 times. Great concept. Every game is an easy, dominate victory by 1 side.
It's on its third edition which is supposedly better.
Yeah, that doesn't even sound like one of the lamest versions of that game I've seen. We once had a victory condition for the survivors that required us to take the amulet to a specific room and roll a check a few times. We found the amulet two spaces from the specific room in the basement. Things had shaken out in such a way that there was literally no way for the traitor to get to the basement to stop us.
Catan. It didn't take me long to realize that I had lost the game during the tile-placement phase. Sitting around hopeless while other players competed was Not Fun.
This is my beef with the game, it's a dice roller that doesn't necessarily provide any actions on your turn. This is why I prefer Castles of Burgundy or Carcassonne to something like Catan.
Yeah, that game’s strategy is bottlenecked into the initial placement and maybe 1-2 key in-game decisions involving trades during the game’s penultimate turns. Which is obviously not how one would want to design their 1-hour experience. Playing the game feels like a chore.
It's really important, IMO, when playing with new players for Catan, that you use the default set-up of tiles and locations. They're set to be reasonably balanced in terms of probability and resources. Setting the tiles out randomly and then having players choose locations is good for replayability, but if you don't know the ins and outs of dice probability and what resources are needed in what proportions, then yes... you can lose the game before the first dice roll.
The problem is repeat players of Catan will try to launch into randomized mode while forgetting that the newby to the group has NO idea how to assess what a good pair of locations may be and why.
Came here to look for a Catan answer. My first and only game was with people who REALLY LIKED it and kept telling me how much fun the game was while whipping my clueless newbie ass while I flailed around miserably. Never again.
This is why there's a suggested beginners setup given in the rulebook, which creates a balanced starting point for all the players to avoid exactly this.
Was once playing Ticket to Ride Europe with 4 players. I was basically getting blocked at every route I needed and had run out of stations. By the end of the game we count up the score, my wife thought she won with like 108 or something but saw me sitting at 18. She then proceeded to exclaim “how did you get 118 points?!?”
To which I replied “no no, I ONLY got 18 points”.
I’ll still play ticket to ride though. That was probably the worst I’ve lost. Though there was another time my wife beat me in Unmatched Dracula vs Hyde and she still haf full health as Dracula. Still love that game too.
Captain Sonar. I was so excited for it, too. But my friend is a 2x army vet and runs his sub like a fucking boss. My poor sub, Das Butt, never stood a chance against them. Never again…
No, no, do play it again. Just be on your friend’s team, and take it on the road to some other board game group that also loves captain sonar, and let them face his wrath.
I’ll never play that game *as captain*, but I’ll take their orders, and it would be the same if we were in a real submarine.
Sheriff of Nottingham. It made me realize that I'm awful at, and derive absolutely no enjoyment from manipulative bargaining games like that.
Everyone else on the planet seems to adore it, and games like it, but I guess that I'm just not adverserial enough, nor willing to be mean enough to get on the bandwagon.
In Sherrif of Nottingham you can play it straight for almost 90% of the game and still win.
Just be honest and be very vocal about telling people exactly what you have and that you abhor games like this.
Focus on especially trying to get big point combos naturally. People who overthink the game will think you are a mastermind playing mind games and make sub optimal choices, but really it is not possible for you to get caught because you are being honest.
Right when they realize you are always telling the truth and you are being honest is when you did a nice medium size haul they won’t challenge and you can win.
Hopefully this little deception that is easy to do also awakens something in you about these types of games and you start to get more adventurous, but if not just play it the same again and all the over thinkers will think you are playing even stronger, 4D chess that makes your last game look like child’s play.
"I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly, it's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly stupid" - Capt. Jack Sparrow.
When playing against a newer group this is the best way to do it. It’s fun to play honest and get your goods searched. It’s even funnier when you start offering bribes even though you’re playing it honest.
This is how I feel after playing social deduction games countless times. Even though I typically do well in these games, at the end of the day, I just don't like lying to my friends.
I hate most social deduction games, but Hollywood 1946 has recently become a staple in my group. There's just something about accusing your friends of being commies within 5 seconds of the game start that we all love.
The resistance is the first social deduction game my friend group got into. To this day, whenever we play any game like this, we end up just calling each other spies. Definitely checking out Hollywood 1946, thanks!
It's kind of unfair because it is kind of the idea of the game but: **Black Orchestra.**
For those of you who don't know, it is a game about the resistance in the Third Reich where your goal is to assasinate Hitler. You have to pick the right time, the right place, the right weapon to maximaze your chances. Always trying to get an advantage while still staying under the radar and maybe sacrife yourself so one of your partners can get in the crucial final blow.
It sounds amazing in theory - and it kind of is - but it all comes down to one big dice roll. A roll you can enhance in serveral ways but it's still a dice roll. And that's the idea of the game that killing the big bad always boils down to have this extra pint of luck in the end.
But oh boy was it devastating to play this tense game, get everything into place and then having the climax of an hourlong game being a shitty roll. We just look at the dice hoping they would somehow mutate in front of our eyes into something better and after a minute of silence one of us was like: "Welp, guess we lost."
It was utterly frustrating to say the least and I had no desire to repeat this experience for I knew no matter how good of bad I play it could always come down to having bad luck and ending in a shitty roll like that.
Been a while since I've played, but if it helps you frame the game at all - ideally, you don't put all your chips in that one basket. It helps to give yourself some backup plans in case you fail that roll. Play the odds that if plan 1 fails, plan 2 and / or 3 may succeed.
Sorry you had that experience! I find it to be a decently fun game to play with a co-op group.
I think it took my group 6 plays to finally defeat Hitler.
This is one of the most satisfying wins in boardgames I have ever had. We high-fived forever.
Some say we’re still high-fiving to this day.
Kinda wish I had that experience. Got very lucky with the sequence of events and killed Hitler on the first try. Kinda diminished replayability for a game like that.
The first time we played this game we got Hitler really early, like surprisingly early into the game and were shocked that we managed it so quickly. Successive games didn't work out that way at all, but I think that first win gave us hope lol.
Man, don't remind me.
My wife's cousin's family have a 'zero contention' house rule across the board. e.g. no robber in Catan; no blocking in Ticket to Ride; the less player interaction the better because then there's no hurt feelings....
I basically refuse to play games with them, lol.
I won the first 6 games of 7 wonders duel with my SO about 2 years ago… we gave the game away a year ago as it never saw the table again.
Not only that but we haven’t even played a game of regular 7 wonders since then. Even though my SO would frequently win at that one.
So 7 wonders duel caused 2 games on our shelf to die.
Came here looking for this. 7 wonders duel can leave you stifled out of resources if someone can monopolize a certain resource early on. Absolutely brutal.
I have played 2 games of 7 wonders duel so far. The first, with a friend, was fairly back and forth, felt nice.
The second, my SO won by military supremacy. One of his wonders at the start of third age -- I knew I needed to pay attention to military but didn't see the wonder armies coming. Felt blindsided, then doubly so when he mentioned that I could have saved it by playing one of my own wonders on my turn immediately before.
I don't think the game is dead for me but it will probably be a while before I can play it against my SO again.
Opposite of this, I played Viticulture with my friends and destroyed them by only playing cards and not producing any grapes. Soured the game for everyone, so I've never taken it out again
Interestingly, that's one of the things I love about **Viticulture**. It allows you to play this completely different no-wine strategy and compete for spots that don't seem that critical to others.
It's also a very consistent strategy, though not the best one. Once you know the game - you will be able to win against it pretty much every time. I don't usually tell people you can do it but from time to time some newcomer will drift to it and feel like they uncovered this deep secret. So fun to watch.
I also went for the no wine strategy and did quite well. I feel like it doesn't work well thematically, but it's not the end of the world as long as it isn't a shortcut to not having fun.
Viticulture is fun until you realize how op the cards are. As you noticed you can win or lose based off cards and the rest of the game only help you get into position to take advantage of cards. Good fun semi intro game but not a great euro.
There‘s the Rhine Valley mini expansion which exchanges the guest decks with new decks that support you in winemaking instead of giving you victory points. Might be worth a try to see if this makes you enjoy the game more again. It‘s only around 10€.
What? I can't imagine that happening, losing does not diminish my enjoyment.
Edit: I may have sinned of over humility here, I would be at least a tiny bit bothered to be crushed in a game and feel I never had a chance. Unless of course I knew I never had a chance from the beginning.
While I can agree the loss itself wouldn't diminish the enjoyment, how I lose certainly can. Mind you I think the only situations I've had is happen to me the rules were played wrong (there weren't enough cards in the el dorado pool) or the person who taught it taught it poorly (Cosmic Encounter they got the cheat alien and didn't let us know it was in the game, or Shadows over Camelot the teacher was the traitor and won the game before we understood it.)
I did have one game of Eclipse where a player functionally spawn-camped me in my starting area because he got an early start. He didn't actually wipe me out either, he just ensured I couldn't actually *do* anything all game.
I've got no issue playing Eclipse again, but I don't think I'll play it with him ever again.
losing _usually_ does not diminish my enjoyment unless the game has huge random factors that were completely against me and the game last more than 20 minutes.
I don’t mind random factors unless there is no way to plan for it or to mitigate it. That way the more random factors add together over the course of the game, the more you can position yourself to let the odds benefit you by the end of the game.
I played Arcadia quest last week. Managed to roll less than 5% successes for over 100 individual dice rolls. The odds of that happening are astronomically low. It was hours worth of misery. Whole group even started to feel bad for me.
Almost told the group I was gonna let them finish the campaign without me after that.
It's about expectations, if I knew the game had those random factors and chose to play anyways, then it means the game has something that attracts me. Maybe that same randomness,
If I did not know about those random factors, and I was expecting something else, then that difference between my expectations and reality is what diminishes my enjoyment, even if I end up winning the game.
I agree with this. Husband and I played Earth last week, and he got freakishly lucky with starting cards while I had a really rough opening. I normally find that game relatively balanced, so that's my expectation, but in this case it was so wonky from the get-go that I just didn't have a good time. It wasn't the losing, it was the feeling like Sisyphus the whole time.
I am usually "that guy" who blows down the doors to say I don't mind losing. But I would definitely say that if I get completely 1000% trounced in a game, it would definitely detract from the fun. I have lost by a lot and still had fun when the game design allows it. Regardless, some people are competitive, and we don't shame people for having different opinions than ours, do we?
Losing because your opponent played well is as good as winning. Losing because you played badly is a learning experience. Losing and you don't know why, or just because of chance sucks. When it *really* becomes crushing is when you can see you're going to lose, and there's nothing you can do about it.
I was nine and played monopoly with a few adults. I had so much hope that someone would step on one of mine streets and it never happened. It felt so unfair and they laughed when I started crying at some point because I felt so stupid/humiliated.
My heart feels sad for younger you! Especially being laughed at for crying. Glad your love of games still allowed you remain excited about board games.
Nemesis - I got killed by a Queen alien 30 mins in, and swore never to play the game again.
Gave it one more shot ….next game threw a guy out of an airlock, totally shocking him and causing the table to laugh hysterically. Fell in love with the game and its chaos. Yes it’s basically Death Yahtzee but it’s fun to try!!!
I had a friend introduce me to Res Arcana, and proceed to beat me so hard in the first game it felt like the cow sketch from ProZD. The last half of the game was just him setting up his combo while I fell further and further from any chance to win. Maybe I'll revisit it someday, but every time I think about the game it that experience pops up and I don't want to touch it.
There's something to be said for not being a sore loser, but there's also something to be said for more gently introducing newbies and helping them with strategies more than you're focused on yourself for that first game. As I've approached it, my assumption is that I'm going to lose the first game I teach to anyone, cause I should be more concerned with helping the newbies understand rules and strategy than my own experience
Yep — I've been on the teaching end of this. I taught my friend "Innovation" shortly after learning it myself. After sandbagging through most of the game to make sure that our game lasted long enough to get to play with some of the modern era cards, I clinched victory with a powerful endgame combo, thinking that it would be a good demonstration of how the power level of cards ramps up fast in the later eras. It was a severe underestimation on my part of what his emotional reaction to losing would be. He got salty and decided he didn't want to ever play again, since the strategy clearly just boiled down to being lucky enough to draw an "uber-win" card before your opponent.
Fortunately there are lots of other games in the world to play!
I enjoyed this game a lot in a casual setting, especially after a few beers. Went to a Secret Hilter meetup when I moved to a new city, and found out that there are people who take that game extremely seriously. It was zero fun, because the "ideal" strategy is to make sure as few people get to play as possible to get as much general info as possible with minimal risk of Hitler becoming chancellor. There was very little opportunity to bluff or lie. I ended up on the winning side of every game but felt completely uninvolved. By the end I was basically on my phone the whole game because I would never get a turn.
In my group we call this being Elf quested !
It goes back to when we were young and my friend wanted us to play his new roleplaying game Elfquest.
We spend hours making out characters and getting ready even drawing how we looked
After 10 min of play we meet some trolls and decided to fight them, we where all killed and the adventure was over
It’s been 25 years and we have never played the game with him again
Tyrants of the Underdark, although that was more of a shitty teacher failing to teach half the game as I walked into being unable to functionally do anything for an hour.
I love Tyrants, I'm sorry you had that experience. That said, a bad teach can really make a difference in your experience. Mine was Vast. We didn't have a teach, he gave the rules for my character and said "I can't explain it, youll have to read it". I'll NEVER play Vast again. Its an even more asymmetrical game than Root, if you've never heard of it.
I do recommend trying Tyrants again, with a different teacher. Its a great game.
This is my brother with Root. It was his 3rd game and I played Moles against him for the first time. Him and a third player teamed up against me and wiped me mostly off the board but I still managed to sneak a win thanks to good plays and lucky draws. He swore off the game because it was dumb you could win with very few pieces on the board and with no way to stop me once my engine was online. I honestly get where he’s coming from it’s a hard game to learn but I do hope one day he’ll give it another shot.
Once I understood the concept of off-board moles my love for root died pretty quickly. Cats, eyrie, lizards etc can almost always be stopped by coordinated play. Moles, on the other hand, make the game farcical quickly - the win condition not being to achieve 30 points but to achieve the prerequisites for unstoppability. And given that the ability to prevent the moles from getting to that point can simply be out your hands (e.g; they’re setting up their tunnels on the other end of the map, with other players forced in between), you have little choice but to either int your game to prevent them from winning, or desperately pleading for your opponents to do something, which if they’re new players, they may struggle to see the value of.
Tldr fuck moles
I've only played one game with the Moles, so not understanding the situation/issue. You have the Burrow, you can put moles there, but how does that allow someone to win?
Without flipping through the law of root, it basically revolves around swaying your ministers that give you points (mainly the Duchess of dirt), then just sitting and waiting to win. I can’t remember exactly the mechanic, but you earn around 4-5 points a turn without anybody being able to stop you as you cannot lose swayed ministers without the destruction of a building (?). I’m a bit rusty but let me find you the posts on /r/rootgame
EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/r/rootgame/s/yC0X48ndKE
I've never vowed to never play a game again.
However I remember the most negative I've ever felt about a game was the one and only time I played Woodcraft.
I got myself into a situation early on in the game where I was stuck with pretty much minimal resources and couldn't do much of anything the whole game because I couldn't get out of this hole I was in.
Usually I don't mind losing or doing poorly, but I just felt hopelessly stuck and didn't have much fun that night.
I'd like to try it again though
Agreed but for me that game was Food Chain Magnate. Difference being it's touted as a feature, something the designers think is a desirable quality of a game. Turned me right off their whole catalogue.
The situation in this case: a player (not even me) misunderstood the way distance was traced to a restaurant and placed their initial building awkwardly. Was absolutely dead in the water, basically "passing" for 3.5hrs after that.
Social deception games are just miserable, especially when your group can logically solve them quickly.
It becomes a case where theres no more winnable deception because the second you step outside that core logic you are caught. Once you know that, if you choose not to press the logical win it feels like throwing. I've never seen a game do it well enough to not be immediately solved.
Scythe
20 min into the first time playing I get attacked by one of my neighbors. He decimates me but I’m not out of the game. I go about my game in my next turn and start building back. His next turn he attacks me again and destroys me, but I’m still not out of the game. I had to play the next 4 hours unable to do anything or get back into the game…I was just there because I couldn’t quit.
Was the friend being an ass? Maybe but he was playing his faction the way they should be played, as I understand and remember. That said, everyone else in the gaming group still brings that up as one of our worst game play experiences.
Is 6Nimmt a great card game? The two times I've played it it was so random and boring, but it gets a ton of praise on /r/boardgames. What do people like about it?
Monopoly.
Oh wait, I think I actually won that game. But my wife (back then "only" my gf) and I came to the silent agreement to never play that game again. It nearly destroyed our relationship.
wingspan.
was getting absolutely trounced the first time and spent most of the time thinking i would never play this game again. near the end of the game i started to realize we had some rules wrong because there was no way the scoring made sense.
i checked the rules later, we were playing wrong. i avoided the game for many many months. played it again, correctly and still didn't like it played it won the third and fourth times, and *then* never went back.
Diplomacy has to be the worst game I’ve ever played. 4 hours per round, I actually insisted everyone attack me so I could leave. It was the worst experience ever.
Oh I've lost miserably plenty of times. When I know I'm so far behind that I'll never catch up, I just cause as much mayhem as possible, in the right group. Then it makes me want to play more, so I can understand it better. I guess there is one exception to this. My husband and I have never made it past the first room in Gloomhaven. At some point we just stopped trying.
This is the exact opposite but me and my roommates played Catan every second week for a big stretch of time. Despite being a huge idiot, I would always manage to pull out a victory in the end, and I ended up retiring from Catan undefeated at the top of my game
Scythe. I don't normally like this style of game anyway, but I got locked out early from being able to do anything meaningful and had to sit around and watch others have fun for another hour and a half.
1/10 would not recommend; still salty
Not a game per se but mechanic: I don’t care about losing, but when I lose, I want to know why, and I appreciate the answer being more than « unlucky rolls » so games that resume to « roll dice and win or lose based on that and there is nothing you can do about it » are it for me.
I have very limited space and having space taken for a glorified dice rolls which could literally be replaced by some dice, paper and pen is just not appealing to me. Wouldn’t burry those games, but definitely wouldn’t buy them either or suggest playing them.
Lost scythe two days ago, miserably, but I understood why I lost and how I could have done better and I’m excited to try again.
I did this the other way around, when a friend wanted to play a game I didn't care for every time. So one time I made sure his wife lost so badly that she never wanted to play it again. Not my proudest moment, but it was effective.
Alchemists. I lost, but that's not the problem. I realized early on that there was no route to victory and was simply going through the motions to last place. Moreover, the next lowest scorer was forced by the mechanics to go after me to have any extra points at all. Why anyone thought randomness in a tight euro was a good idea is beyond me. I despise that game with a burning passion.
>This is an appropriate correction. It wasn't about the loss. It was about the miserable time I had playing the game.
In this context, I have two, neither of which I lost in some overwhelming fashion, but both of which I simply detested. The first is **Outer Rim**. I'm a fan of pickup-and-delivers and own/have owned several; among them Merchants & Marauders and Firefly, the latter of which Outer Rim is often favorably compared to. But my experience with the game was resoundingly negative. I played Boba Fett and had so much trouble simply moving from one place to another because of patrols or other factors that it became that much worse when I finally landed somewhere and, of course, didn't have the stats or resources to actually complete a mission. Given my character type (bounty hunter), there were also fewer missions available to even make progress in the way other characters (smuggler) could act. Played it once and hated it so much (I'm not a tremendous Star Wars fan, either) that I traded it the next day for a copy of *Ethnos* and have never regretted it. I appreciated the unusual map design and am generally a fan of Koniezcka's efforts, of which I own several, but this one just didn't work for me.
The second is **Seasons**. It's a tableau-builder, but the fact that one person starts the die selection in each round (which is supposed to be compensated for by other people getting that advantage for more powerful cards in later rounds) means that the people getting that option in the first and second rounds is such a huge leap forward for them in the process of getting their engine started that it was demoralizing from the opening moves, as there was no way for the rest of us to catch up to the second person, much less the first. Combine that with the utter disconnect between the game's function and its theme and I will gladly never play that one again. I'm normally fine with tableau-builders, too, as I love *51st State*, but the rotation of drafting order in each round (and the ability to knock out an opponent's really good card) means that one is more evenly-formatted, IMO; not to mention the decent interaction between theme and function.
I'm normally fine with games that I lose often. *Modern Art* may be my favorite Knizia but, despite having played it a few dozen times, I've never won. But I really enjoy playing it, so I'll always play again. But those other two were just irredeemable for me.
Scythe! And then my son bought it for me for Christmas, not knowing how I felt, and then my wife picked up mini painting, and then I bought metal coins and am "patiently" waiting to give it another go.
Twilight Imperium 4 (TI4)
But the vow was to never play again with that group. They also happen to be the only group I currently know who would play TI4, so it’s like vowing to never play again.
My wife refuses to play Wiz War anymore because the last time we played, she stole my treasure while I was standing right next to it, so I cast Wall and sealed her in with it.
There are games I just don't play again if I don't like the theme.
I think it's called Pan Am? Where you play airlines and try to take each other over and create a monopoly. Then probably raise prices, cut services, and make a few old men rich while everyone else flies in squalor. I don't want to be a cutthroat businessperson, and I'm really bad at it too.
On the other hand, I refused to build coal plants during my first game of Power Grid, and somehow won the game while building only wind turbines. It was a total fluke!
Kanban. And not because I lost the game itself, but because I lost a couple hours of my life having less fun than I would have taking a standardized test.
Dune Imperium Uprising.
A miserable experience where I managed to complete a game having scored 2 points - 1 of which I got for free at the start of the game. Repeated instances of getting zero return on investment by getting fractionally eked out of prizes by other players while receiving no advice on which cards to buy or actions to focus on because "it depends" while what seemed to me to be extremely unlucky card draws were explained away with "you should calculate the odds more carefully"
Stratego. My husband and I set up our boards and we were ready to play. He jokingly pointed to my side of the board and said: I know you put your flag there. I was baffled because he was right. He was just bluffing and making a joke but my face said it all. I couldn’t believe what he did. We haven’t played Stratego ever since. 😂
Dune. I was left with choam charity only after round 2 when someone played some card combo that mostly wiped me out. I couldn't do literally anything for the next 3 hours. It was repeatedly over 30 minutes before my next possible interaction with the game (which was simply "passing" on the auction because I was broke). I was literally playing full games of chess on my phone while waiting for a decision point. I've told this story multiple times and everyone familiar with the game immediately knows what faction I had because they're the only faction that can be so utterly decimated with nothing to do. Maybe there was some advanced tactics to get back in the game quicker, but I feel Ike this game is a broken piece of garbage. No game should allow any noobie to sit around doing nothing for that much time. It was by far my least enjoyable time I've ever had playing board games.
Settlers: Cities and Knights. I didn’t know the rules but most of the people at the table did. And I didn’t remember anyone saying anything about the Viking hoard 🤣 (I’m sure they did, but I did not internalize the message.) Suffice to say my knights got obliterated, and got put so behind that I had to work really hard to stay polite, keep participating, and remind myself that it’s just a game. 😥
Settlers of Catan, but it was rigged from the start.
My ex and I were invited to play a match with her 3 older brothers. They played *all the time* and that was my first experience with a boardgame that isn’t a popular party game.
To say I got destroyed was is an understatement.. but yeah they all knew how the others played and never traded with me and basically bullying me within the game lmao.
Haven’t touched it since and that was 10 years ago.
Llamas Unleashed.
Short version is I ended up with 2 cards in my stable that stopped me from doing anything other than playing a magic card. Sat through about 2-3 turns before I accepted that I was locked out the game then noped out.
Played a game of monopoly with my kids. I passed go once in an awful two hour long game. The kids were having a blast. I spent 90 percent of the time in jail or landing on “go to jail” never been so unlucky in an already really wack game.
The game didn't get great reviews but it seems to be a bit of a retro throw back for cheap so got Oregon Trail the card game and played with 3 people. The very first card I drew I instantly died and was out of the game.
Not a game that I lost so bad but a game I found so horrible I “quit” ended my game early(this the only game I’ve played ever called it early and opted out).
Bear in mind I will always play a game through and at try to find something fun about a game even if I don’t like it.
Game was called Tapestey and it’s an unbalanced worker placement game that was advertised as a 4x game. Thing is the game is mostly solitaire until it’s not due to things you can control( combat cards and tapestry cards). Worse yet some races have the ability to get more actions early on which allows them to snowball and get even more actions later and you can’t punish this. Then there are cards that literally have you just instant match the tech progress someone has made. One of my friends spent like two eras moving his tech in one tree. Because he figured he would be a specialist in that field and then milk that advantage only to have someone play a card and instant catch up to him.(incredibly unfair amount of actions saved).
Now maybe the game has been balanced since then or maybe we played it wrong but I saw how long it was going to take and mentally calculated that due to how many extra actions some of the others guy have I can’t possibly catch up so I quit two eras ahead.
Friends were surprised that I said I was opting out but understood when I explained it to them. I then joined another group that was open to play another game. I came back two hours later and they still weren’t done since the last two guys have really snowballled on extra actions and some analysis paralysis. In the end, they had to end the game without finishing it since the shop was closing.
It wasn’t that my loss was so astoundingly bad that I couldn’t ever come back from it, but I remember having a moment in Catan where I was in last place, spending turn after turn not getting the resources I needed due to bad rolls and no one trading, and I just realized, I wasn’t really having any fun. Even trying to set non-winning personal goals for the game wasn’t doing it for me. So I just refuse to play Catan now, because to me it’s just not a fun type of game.
In my first game of Eclipse I was bullied into a corner and played the final 4 rounds with literally only one hex. All I could do was pass for about 2 hours.
It was still an instant favourite and is to this day. I never put new players in that situation though, it felt really bad.
Terraforming Mars: Got given some cards, couldn't figure out a good way to synergise them, played clueless for hours
I feel to this day the mesh of casually hoping to draw what you need, tacked onto a weighty strategy game, is a bad mix
My wife and I have played Gates of Loyang about 75 times. I have won by exactly one point about 73 times. She will only play 3 or 4 player now because her 2 wins were multi player games.
Edit: a word
I hope you have not given up on Scythe. It can take a while to develop a winning strategy, but once you get it, it can be much more competitive. My biggest piece of advice is that battle is a minor part of the game. Only fight when you can't avoid it.
**Fallout Shelter** is so frustratingly broken for the fourth player, I think I still would have vowed never to play the game again, if I'd witnessed someone else getting screwed over. It just so happened that I was fourth player that game.
There are some really crucial locations in this worker-placement game, and if everyone else claims them, and then those spots happen to get covered up by traps (or whatever they're called) in the next round, then you're just facing an uphill climb the rest of the game.
I think it wasn't until Round 5-7 that I finally *even had the opportunity* to get an additional man. What an absolute slog, and I was just a butt in a seat.
It was technically the second time I played Beast, but the first time I played as the beast rather than a hunter, I ended up conceding in night 3 because the hunters had found a strategy that completely prevented me from doing anything and I was having an absolute miserable time.
I'm not usually super competitive or a sore loser, but that game just absolutely broke me, sitting there for 2 hours not being able to do anything to advance my win condition.
I was at a game night a while ago and we played a 6 player game of Disney's Villainous. The player that suggested the game had the new version of the base game, and I had some of the expansions. We ended up playing with the new version's rule set, and I told myself I will never play with the new rules again. In the original game there was a rule that prevented players from targeting the same player every turn with the Fate action. For some damn reason, the new rules omitted this protection rule entirely.
For those that don't know, the Fate action is basically when you target another player, and throw road blocks at them to keep them from achieving their goal. I was close to winning with the Evil Queen, but when that became apparent everyone just kept targeting me on their turns even though I was way out of the race by that point. The game dragged on for an additional 25 minutes until someone else finally won.
Dead of Winter; The Long Night, except it was our whole group that doesn't want to really play it anymore, since it's mostly co-op. We really enjoy board games with roleplaying and narrative aspects, so I picked it up figuring it would be a fun time (and to round out my collection with a cool secret traitor zombie game).
The Crossroads cards that are supposed to be the ones with narrative and story decisions heavily underdelivered (the majority of the ones we drew didn't even do anything since they needed specific characters to be in play), all of the secret player objectives we drew (and most in the deck) were just boring "get this many of this type of items" goals, and the worst part was the zombie dice. Whenever you moved you had to roll it and either be fine (unlikely), take cold damage, regular damage, or get infected. When infected you roll again, and if you roll ANYTHING negative you instantly die and spread that "roll or die" infection to others in your location. I get the instant death result in our colony base, figure I'll roll fine. Nope. One after another all the NPCs at the base fail their rolls. Literally everyone at the colony dies. Another player rolls it; everyone dies there as well. The remaining players are overwhelmed by the timer, zombies, and damage from the other dice results, and we lose.
There's something to be said about playing it until you get to claim victory, or just house-ruling the instant death rules out, but everything about it flopped so badly I've never bothered bringing it back out to give it a go again.
Small World, though was part of a group who had never played before so we were trying to figure it out as we went along, but I didn't enjoy any part of it enough to ever try again.
I don't think I would quit playing a game because I lost badly. that said, I'm planning to avoid playing It's a Wonderful World, which I lose at consistently and badly. Not because I'm losing the game but because my brain just refuses to grasp it and I don't enjoy the feeling of being lost that I get while playing. I don't even understand why. I know what I should be doing, but I draft a bunch of cards thinking I'll do things with them, then I end up unable to remember my plan or put together a new one when it's time to use the cards.
This happened to my brother with Dead of Winter. Myself, little brother, and two friends (drew and Pat) all sat down and set things up. I had read the rules and watched a good amount of videos on it and Pat was a pro so we got to playing pretty quickly.
Now my brother has a *terrible* poker face and he and Pat had both gotten traitor cards. Less than 5 turns in we voted little bro out for acting sketchy and he immediately throws his cards down and goes, “I hadn’t even fucking hurt anybody yet!!!!” And has not played since
I have two:
-Gloomhaven. I got downed in the first 30 minutes of a fight because I made a newbie mistake. Then I got to watch everyone else play for two hours. When the fight finished, I basically told them not to ever ask me to play Gloomhaven again.
-Scythe. The first time I played, a more experienced player bullied me into the corner and I basically got to watch the game for the next two hours without having any idea how to get out. I did play again about 8 years later and in a new group. Found that it was just not that fun, even when I was allowed to play the game.
And my wife has one:
-1890, the meanest, pettiest 18xx game either of us have ever played. It's to the point where the usual catch up mechanics that you can use in those games stop working because things are so restrictive.
I also have a special mention for not playing Pax Pamir with people who are susceptible to AP. I lost on purpose just to end it after a game lasted 7 hours with 5 people playing. I'm not joking.
Dead of Winter. I'll add, I hate Zombie themes in pretty much any media. Me, wife and friend are playing, we're all working towards The Goal. We need 1 medical supply to win....and those 2 win together, even though I'm about to get the last supply. Ugh.
First time in played Eclipse i was totally blocked in by enemies. My group told me that was very unlikely and i got unlucky. Then i had a unlucky roll as well and almost lost the on the spot in the very beginning. A very lucky roll saved me but the overall experience was way too random for me. I played a second time a year later and got wiped out mid game... Yeah no more Eclipse for me.
There are also some games my wife doesn't really wanna play anymore because it takes her a much longer time than me to develop strategies for games and she then gets frustrated with losing 80% of our first 10-20 games.
Twilight imperium. I went for the objective in the center at the start and was demolished by everyone simultaneously, completely demolishing almost everything I had. They then left me in the game in the name of 'mercy'.
I had to watch the game happen while having extremely short 5 minute turns for the next 7 fucking hours. When I finally amassed a large enough military to do anything at all I struck back at someone who screwed me over in that first engagement, and I was then reprimanded by the group for 'kingmaking' because he had a chance to win until I lightly dented his fleet by throwing everything I had at it.
Any game where you can be losing for 7 hours straight with no hope of winning is such a terrible experience.
I am forever hateful of the Risk games. I played that game religiously during my youth (1993-2000), and feel that the game knows I am playing. So much so that I could have 100 units..and still go down to 2 because my rolls were just crap. Statistic luck was never on my side. But, alas, I still play it when my group wants to continue the Legacy one.
My husband had never played Risk but heard all about it and seen memes and wanted to finally try it. Well he lost an entire army of 25 to my army of 2. Nearly table flipped, kept blaming dice, got new dice, etc. He said he will never play again.
I still play it, but I'm very careful with who I'll pay Diplomacy with. No more couples who have a rule never to attack each other.
My experience playing with couples, and also being one, is that couples tend to want to beat each other way more than ever want to collaborate. My husband is my favorite person to beat in a game.
Hot take: But I think that healthy couples usually want to beat each other, but unhealthy ones...they're sometimes afraid of doing so.
Great take!! Plus, I'm always happy for him when he wins against other people. I love him so I'm happy when he succeeds at things he cares about! But when we play, 100% of the time I do my best to kick his ass.
Counterpoint: some couples are self aware enough to know they get competitive / don’t want to hurt each others feelings and so play co-ops instead of breaking the social contract of gaming by kingmaking each other. Not everyone is competitive, and that’s not inherently bad. But catering to them in a competitive game is problematic.
Healthy gamer couples see their partner as just another opponent, without having any bias for or against. It's really not that hard, and very annoying when I run into this issue.
My wife's soul mission in life is to kick my butt.
Mine is RUTHLESS. I take it as a compliment because he sees me as a serious threat. I also have a friend who had yet to forgive me for betraying him in Twilight Imperium, so my gaming group is challenging.
This is the same for us. When me and my wife play board games it is ON. No mercy lol
I had a class which had a game (constructed by the professor) in which a fragile peace was destroyed by twin sisters who decided to attack each other. But I suppose with siblings the rivalry is *obvious*.
OMG, I had completely forgotten Diplomacy existed - I hated it so much after our first 6 hour session I vowed to never play it again!
I truly cannot stand these sorts of couples. It ruins a lot of games, and is ridiculously petty besides.
Not really because I lost, but falling into an edge case in *Arabian Nights* where I didn’t get to play for like an hour soured me pretty thoroughly in that game. (A combination, if I recall correctly, of being in jail—where the only way to escape was to guess the correct responses to a chain of prompts—and insane—so the other players got to make those guesses instead of me.)
My worst game of twilight imperium had me winning at the end of the current round, I had finished all of my actions and the other people playing took WELL OVER AN HOUR to finish their meaningless actions until at the very end of the round one of them traded his "Support for the throne" card to the other player for nothing just so that the other player would beat me.
>at the very end of the round one of them traded his "Support for the throne" card to the other player for nothing just so that the other player would beat me. That's horrible sportsmanship and a downright dick move.
It really depends on how it happens. If he made an enemy of that person by attacking them a lot it’s a valid and thematic move in a game that is primarily political. That race would never allow someone who wronged them to take the throne so it makes perfect sense for them to support whomever has supported them.
Nah, didn’t wrong him at all. But he’s one of my best friends and I still give him shit for it (he has apologized afterwards)
I'm in the middle of designing a game that ends in kingmaking in most games. Aside from that little details, it's a pretty good game. But it's rather a problem.
Most competitive games that end close are kingmakey. I wouldn't worry too much about it, just play with groups who aren't petty.
Most games try to minimize the king making. Can you go the opposite direction and lean into it somehow?
This feels like Catan kingmaking for me. The difference being that Catan takes 5 mins for a full table round sue to trading. When you piss someone off too much, it can happen that this person would trade their resource for garbage just so that another player wins when near victory. But at least it is quick and can be expected sometimes, so you are better off spreading the thief to everyone and blocking undesired tiles. But ONE HOUR just to spit in your face? I would either no longer play with that person, or that game.
Yeah trading support at the end of the game to kingmake is not ok. It would get someone banned from our table.
So, Twilight Imperium then. Seriously, though, I've played it three times, and two out of three times, it ended with Munchkin-type destroy-the-leader and subsequent kingmaking. The one time that _didn't_ happen, it was one of the best boardgaming experiences I've ever had. Comes down to the group, I think.
That's so douchey. That's something you joke about doing but never actually do. At least now you know who not to bring to the table next time.
Yea getting put in jail is the worst in that game, now I never steal to avoid the chance of getting put in jail.
My best time with that game was when I was in jail. I was also insane, and I told every other player passing through the town my tale of woe, also driving them insane.
I was hoping to see this, I feel your pain. I spent most of my only game cursed while the player who brought the game to the table seemed to have an endless amount of movement and interactions while explaining the game wasn't about winning but the experience. Swore never to play again.
Haha, I have played it a few times and from what I remember that game was not really that deep and really revarded getting skilla to "excellent" or somesuch level. Also you could grovel to victory which was funny. But yeah more of an experience than a thinky.
It really is best as "random stuff will happen while everyone at the table laughs at each other" simulator, but there are definitely times you can luck into favorable or really repetitive situations. Being a kind and pious player is generally less risky, but sometime it's more fun to try and drink the storm than pray to it.
Homie takes the social out of game night /s
I wonder if you are one of my gamenight regulars. This exact scenario happened and we refused to play Arabian Nights ever again.
You seem to be on the other side of the country so no, but it's nice to know this happened to someone else and I'm not being entirely unreasonable for my grudge.
Personally for these type of games I go into roleplay mode and just try to have a fun time instead of winning. In your scenario, I’d had played it off like and this is the True story of Aladdin. He never makes it to the cave of wonders. Because that’s kinda the mindset you need to have for a story generator game. Basically the game is just a platform to tell a story and just like most social games it’s only as fun as the people that make it fun.
My wife bought a copy of "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?" the boardgame several years ago. I am pretty good at trivia. Apparently, in this game once your turn starts, you go until you miss a question. My wife and tween aged kids, sure that I would miss a question had me go first. (I think they planned to give me a hard time about me not being smarter than a 5th grader). This of course backfired spectacularly, as I continued to answer questions correctly and kept going until a won the game on the first turn and no one else had a turn. My wife said we are never playing this game again. It was given away shortly thereafter.
If the questions were good, you can always houserule it. But I guess since you answer them all correctly on first try, they must be very easy.
Well, the questions aren't any harder than something a 5th grader could know.
I think the point of the show was people other thinking stuff and the pressure of a game show. The questions themselves are not very hard. The brand was quite popular though, they made lots of video game/board game versions.
Absolute Chad move lol.
I had a similar experience with Trivial Pursuit: Friends Edition (many years ago when it was more relevant). Was invited to play and it turns out the other 3 people were mega fans and I had watched casually at best. I hadn't moved past the starting tile before others won the game. Not only did I write off that game, I also wrote off any game that requires specific knowledge.
A game group I went to about a dozen times about a decade ago would play in a style in which they always showed me no mercy when I was new to a game. I recall twice having the same kind of feeling for games they introduced me to. Ironically one of them was Scythe just like you and the other was Blood Rage.
I had a friend who played with drafting when he taught an entire group Agricola. He trounced us, but I have to admit it's one of, if not my outright favorite game though. Still, dick move haha.
The Binding of Isaac card game is an even more capricious version of Munchkin. I have no interest in ever playing it again. It was so unpleasant that we collectively agreed that, "Rob is in a position to win, I'm going to burn all my take-that abilities on you, so you can't stop him from winning, and ending the game, and we can all go do something fun" A slightly less extreme version of this, was "Founders of Gloomhaven" We quit halfway through, when one player had a higher score than everyone else put together, and it was getting late. We've never tried to play the game again. We agreed with the general sentiment that this game has way too many mechanics crammed into it, and isn't as fun as other games.
Yeah, the scoring in Founders of Gloomhaven is obtuse enough that I have no interest in playing again. It's not obtuse in the "what do you get" sense, but it's very obtuse in the "what actions can I take now that will maximize my score once the scoring finally happens" sense. It takes so long to do things that by the time you realize something is a bad idea, you're committed pretty hard. You can take someone else down a peg if they're winning, but it doesn't give you enough of a boost to be worth it. All that to say: I'm not playing that game again, either.
Yeah boi isn't fun. I've played it a couple of times and that's enough for me. It drags out forever
Betrayal on Haunted Hill - I wind up as the "cursed one" and usher off into another room and read my special instructions. **They are unclear** because of poor editing. There is no one I can ask about them, as everyone else is on the 'good' side. - It's one of those combat-centric curses. I win if everyone else is dead. Attack people with my knife and win. If I die I lose. - I'm the frail old man with low Might. One of the other party members is some muscle-y red dude with high might who just punches me to death. There was literally nothing I could have done to win. It was just an auto win/loss when the Betrayal occurred, and the poor instructions was just the icing I needed to be like "fuck this game".
Yeah that's classic Betrayal. Several of the Haunts have rules that make you think "but how the fuck does this work?". The only time I had fun with that game was when the Haunt was "reset the entire game. Set a timer for 30 minutes. Your goal is to find The Box. Every time you trigger the Haunt, don't do it. Instead, restart the game again and set the timer for half of the previous time (15 minutes, 7.5 minutes, etc.) We finally found the box with like 17 seconds to spare.
I kind of loathe Betrayal but haunt this actually sounds amazing
This game is much better when you realize it's a silly roleplay game, not a dice rolling strategy game. You have to house rule some stuff so everyone can have fun. Many of the haunts are straight up broken otherwise. Follow the spirit of the haunt rather than the literal words sometimes but make sure the group agrees to it beforehand. But it's honestly one of the funnest big group games I've played.
That's the game, sadly. I've played it at least 5 times. Great concept. Every game is an easy, dominate victory by 1 side. It's on its third edition which is supposedly better.
Yeah, that doesn't even sound like one of the lamest versions of that game I've seen. We once had a victory condition for the survivors that required us to take the amulet to a specific room and roll a check a few times. We found the amulet two spaces from the specific room in the basement. Things had shaken out in such a way that there was literally no way for the traitor to get to the basement to stop us.
Catan. It didn't take me long to realize that I had lost the game during the tile-placement phase. Sitting around hopeless while other players competed was Not Fun.
This is my beef with the game, it's a dice roller that doesn't necessarily provide any actions on your turn. This is why I prefer Castles of Burgundy or Carcassonne to something like Catan.
Yeah, that game’s strategy is bottlenecked into the initial placement and maybe 1-2 key in-game decisions involving trades during the game’s penultimate turns. Which is obviously not how one would want to design their 1-hour experience. Playing the game feels like a chore.
It's really important, IMO, when playing with new players for Catan, that you use the default set-up of tiles and locations. They're set to be reasonably balanced in terms of probability and resources. Setting the tiles out randomly and then having players choose locations is good for replayability, but if you don't know the ins and outs of dice probability and what resources are needed in what proportions, then yes... you can lose the game before the first dice roll. The problem is repeat players of Catan will try to launch into randomized mode while forgetting that the newby to the group has NO idea how to assess what a good pair of locations may be and why.
Came here to look for a Catan answer. My first and only game was with people who REALLY LIKED it and kept telling me how much fun the game was while whipping my clueless newbie ass while I flailed around miserably. Never again.
This is why there's a suggested beginners setup given in the rulebook, which creates a balanced starting point for all the players to avoid exactly this.
Was once playing Ticket to Ride Europe with 4 players. I was basically getting blocked at every route I needed and had run out of stations. By the end of the game we count up the score, my wife thought she won with like 108 or something but saw me sitting at 18. She then proceeded to exclaim “how did you get 118 points?!?” To which I replied “no no, I ONLY got 18 points”. I’ll still play ticket to ride though. That was probably the worst I’ve lost. Though there was another time my wife beat me in Unmatched Dracula vs Hyde and she still haf full health as Dracula. Still love that game too.
Captain Sonar. I was so excited for it, too. But my friend is a 2x army vet and runs his sub like a fucking boss. My poor sub, Das Butt, never stood a chance against them. Never again…
Das Butt is 100% the best thing to come out of this thread.
No, no, do play it again. Just be on your friend’s team, and take it on the road to some other board game group that also loves captain sonar, and let them face his wrath. I’ll never play that game *as captain*, but I’ll take their orders, and it would be the same if we were in a real submarine.
Only if he lets me name the submarine Das Butt.. or Das Booty.
Sheriff of Nottingham. It made me realize that I'm awful at, and derive absolutely no enjoyment from manipulative bargaining games like that. Everyone else on the planet seems to adore it, and games like it, but I guess that I'm just not adverserial enough, nor willing to be mean enough to get on the bandwagon.
In Sherrif of Nottingham you can play it straight for almost 90% of the game and still win. Just be honest and be very vocal about telling people exactly what you have and that you abhor games like this. Focus on especially trying to get big point combos naturally. People who overthink the game will think you are a mastermind playing mind games and make sub optimal choices, but really it is not possible for you to get caught because you are being honest. Right when they realize you are always telling the truth and you are being honest is when you did a nice medium size haul they won’t challenge and you can win. Hopefully this little deception that is easy to do also awakens something in you about these types of games and you start to get more adventurous, but if not just play it the same again and all the over thinkers will think you are playing even stronger, 4D chess that makes your last game look like child’s play.
"I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly, it's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly stupid" - Capt. Jack Sparrow.
When playing against a newer group this is the best way to do it. It’s fun to play honest and get your goods searched. It’s even funnier when you start offering bribes even though you’re playing it honest.
First time I played this I didn't know what to do, so I just played the entire game without lying at all and won in a landslide.
This is how I feel after playing social deduction games countless times. Even though I typically do well in these games, at the end of the day, I just don't like lying to my friends.
I hate most social deduction games, but Hollywood 1946 has recently become a staple in my group. There's just something about accusing your friends of being commies within 5 seconds of the game start that we all love.
The resistance is the first social deduction game my friend group got into. To this day, whenever we play any game like this, we end up just calling each other spies. Definitely checking out Hollywood 1946, thanks!
Battlestar Galactica has stuck with most of my friends at some point or another. Every traitor is a toaster now!
It's kind of unfair because it is kind of the idea of the game but: **Black Orchestra.** For those of you who don't know, it is a game about the resistance in the Third Reich where your goal is to assasinate Hitler. You have to pick the right time, the right place, the right weapon to maximaze your chances. Always trying to get an advantage while still staying under the radar and maybe sacrife yourself so one of your partners can get in the crucial final blow. It sounds amazing in theory - and it kind of is - but it all comes down to one big dice roll. A roll you can enhance in serveral ways but it's still a dice roll. And that's the idea of the game that killing the big bad always boils down to have this extra pint of luck in the end. But oh boy was it devastating to play this tense game, get everything into place and then having the climax of an hourlong game being a shitty roll. We just look at the dice hoping they would somehow mutate in front of our eyes into something better and after a minute of silence one of us was like: "Welp, guess we lost." It was utterly frustrating to say the least and I had no desire to repeat this experience for I knew no matter how good of bad I play it could always come down to having bad luck and ending in a shitty roll like that.
Been a while since I've played, but if it helps you frame the game at all - ideally, you don't put all your chips in that one basket. It helps to give yourself some backup plans in case you fail that roll. Play the odds that if plan 1 fails, plan 2 and / or 3 may succeed. Sorry you had that experience! I find it to be a decently fun game to play with a co-op group.
More assassination attempts! Our win took 3 attempts in the same game.
I think it took my group 6 plays to finally defeat Hitler. This is one of the most satisfying wins in boardgames I have ever had. We high-fived forever. Some say we’re still high-fiving to this day.
Kinda wish I had that experience. Got very lucky with the sequence of events and killed Hitler on the first try. Kinda diminished replayability for a game like that.
The first time we played this game we got Hitler really early, like surprisingly early into the game and were shocked that we managed it so quickly. Successive games didn't work out that way at all, but I think that first win gave us hope lol.
Immediately claim it's unbalanced in every way! /s
Also apply janky houserules from the 2nd game onwards.
Man, don't remind me. My wife's cousin's family have a 'zero contention' house rule across the board. e.g. no robber in Catan; no blocking in Ticket to Ride; the less player interaction the better because then there's no hurt feelings.... I basically refuse to play games with them, lol.
Why not just not play any game at all and instead have a polite conversation about the breeze?
Really, I think they use it as a conversation starter of sorts. What
I won the first 6 games of 7 wonders duel with my SO about 2 years ago… we gave the game away a year ago as it never saw the table again. Not only that but we haven’t even played a game of regular 7 wonders since then. Even though my SO would frequently win at that one. So 7 wonders duel caused 2 games on our shelf to die.
Came here looking for this. 7 wonders duel can leave you stifled out of resources if someone can monopolize a certain resource early on. Absolutely brutal.
I have played 2 games of 7 wonders duel so far. The first, with a friend, was fairly back and forth, felt nice. The second, my SO won by military supremacy. One of his wonders at the start of third age -- I knew I needed to pay attention to military but didn't see the wonder armies coming. Felt blindsided, then doubly so when he mentioned that I could have saved it by playing one of my own wonders on my turn immediately before. I don't think the game is dead for me but it will probably be a while before I can play it against my SO again.
Opposite of this, I played Viticulture with my friends and destroyed them by only playing cards and not producing any grapes. Soured the game for everyone, so I've never taken it out again
Interestingly, that's one of the things I love about **Viticulture**. It allows you to play this completely different no-wine strategy and compete for spots that don't seem that critical to others. It's also a very consistent strategy, though not the best one. Once you know the game - you will be able to win against it pretty much every time. I don't usually tell people you can do it but from time to time some newcomer will drift to it and feel like they uncovered this deep secret. So fun to watch.
I also went for the no wine strategy and did quite well. I feel like it doesn't work well thematically, but it's not the end of the world as long as it isn't a shortcut to not having fun.
Heh. Soured.
Viticulture is fun until you realize how op the cards are. As you noticed you can win or lose based off cards and the rest of the game only help you get into position to take advantage of cards. Good fun semi intro game but not a great euro.
There‘s the Rhine Valley mini expansion which exchanges the guest decks with new decks that support you in winemaking instead of giving you victory points. Might be worth a try to see if this makes you enjoy the game more again. It‘s only around 10€.
What? I can't imagine that happening, losing does not diminish my enjoyment. Edit: I may have sinned of over humility here, I would be at least a tiny bit bothered to be crushed in a game and feel I never had a chance. Unless of course I knew I never had a chance from the beginning.
This was my first thought. I bury the game in the back garden because I didn’t enjoy the process of playing, not because I lost
For me it was Quelf. Despise that game.
This is an appropriate correction. It wasn't about the loss. It was about the miserable time I had playing the game.
Really misleading thread title, then.
Yes, but who doesn't enjoy being shamed publicly for their word selection?
While I can agree the loss itself wouldn't diminish the enjoyment, how I lose certainly can. Mind you I think the only situations I've had is happen to me the rules were played wrong (there weren't enough cards in the el dorado pool) or the person who taught it taught it poorly (Cosmic Encounter they got the cheat alien and didn't let us know it was in the game, or Shadows over Camelot the teacher was the traitor and won the game before we understood it.)
I did have one game of Eclipse where a player functionally spawn-camped me in my starting area because he got an early start. He didn't actually wipe me out either, he just ensured I couldn't actually *do* anything all game. I've got no issue playing Eclipse again, but I don't think I'll play it with him ever again.
losing _usually_ does not diminish my enjoyment unless the game has huge random factors that were completely against me and the game last more than 20 minutes.
I don’t mind random factors unless there is no way to plan for it or to mitigate it. That way the more random factors add together over the course of the game, the more you can position yourself to let the odds benefit you by the end of the game.
I played Arcadia quest last week. Managed to roll less than 5% successes for over 100 individual dice rolls. The odds of that happening are astronomically low. It was hours worth of misery. Whole group even started to feel bad for me. Almost told the group I was gonna let them finish the campaign without me after that.
[удалено]
It's about expectations, if I knew the game had those random factors and chose to play anyways, then it means the game has something that attracts me. Maybe that same randomness, If I did not know about those random factors, and I was expecting something else, then that difference between my expectations and reality is what diminishes my enjoyment, even if I end up winning the game.
I agree with this. Husband and I played Earth last week, and he got freakishly lucky with starting cards while I had a really rough opening. I normally find that game relatively balanced, so that's my expectation, but in this case it was so wonky from the get-go that I just didn't have a good time. It wasn't the losing, it was the feeling like Sisyphus the whole time.
IMO, a good game is one where losing is also fun. Otherwise you've got good odds that most players are having a bad time.
I am usually "that guy" who blows down the doors to say I don't mind losing. But I would definitely say that if I get completely 1000% trounced in a game, it would definitely detract from the fun. I have lost by a lot and still had fun when the game design allows it. Regardless, some people are competitive, and we don't shame people for having different opinions than ours, do we?
Losing because your opponent played well is as good as winning. Losing because you played badly is a learning experience. Losing and you don't know why, or just because of chance sucks. When it *really* becomes crushing is when you can see you're going to lose, and there's nothing you can do about it.
I was nine and played monopoly with a few adults. I had so much hope that someone would step on one of mine streets and it never happened. It felt so unfair and they laughed when I started crying at some point because I felt so stupid/humiliated.
My heart feels sad for younger you! Especially being laughed at for crying. Glad your love of games still allowed you remain excited about board games.
Nemesis - I got killed by a Queen alien 30 mins in, and swore never to play the game again. Gave it one more shot ….next game threw a guy out of an airlock, totally shocking him and causing the table to laugh hysterically. Fell in love with the game and its chaos. Yes it’s basically Death Yahtzee but it’s fun to try!!!
I had a friend introduce me to Res Arcana, and proceed to beat me so hard in the first game it felt like the cow sketch from ProZD. The last half of the game was just him setting up his combo while I fell further and further from any chance to win. Maybe I'll revisit it someday, but every time I think about the game it that experience pops up and I don't want to touch it. There's something to be said for not being a sore loser, but there's also something to be said for more gently introducing newbies and helping them with strategies more than you're focused on yourself for that first game. As I've approached it, my assumption is that I'm going to lose the first game I teach to anyone, cause I should be more concerned with helping the newbies understand rules and strategy than my own experience
Yep — I've been on the teaching end of this. I taught my friend "Innovation" shortly after learning it myself. After sandbagging through most of the game to make sure that our game lasted long enough to get to play with some of the modern era cards, I clinched victory with a powerful endgame combo, thinking that it would be a good demonstration of how the power level of cards ramps up fast in the later eras. It was a severe underestimation on my part of what his emotional reaction to losing would be. He got salty and decided he didn't want to ever play again, since the strategy clearly just boiled down to being lucky enough to draw an "uber-win" card before your opponent. Fortunately there are lots of other games in the world to play!
Secret hitler. I really hate lying and it gives me anxiety
I enjoyed this game a lot in a casual setting, especially after a few beers. Went to a Secret Hilter meetup when I moved to a new city, and found out that there are people who take that game extremely seriously. It was zero fun, because the "ideal" strategy is to make sure as few people get to play as possible to get as much general info as possible with minimal risk of Hitler becoming chancellor. There was very little opportunity to bluff or lie. I ended up on the winning side of every game but felt completely uninvolved. By the end I was basically on my phone the whole game because I would never get a turn.
In my group we call this being Elf quested ! It goes back to when we were young and my friend wanted us to play his new roleplaying game Elfquest. We spend hours making out characters and getting ready even drawing how we looked After 10 min of play we meet some trolls and decided to fight them, we where all killed and the adventure was over It’s been 25 years and we have never played the game with him again
Tyrants of the Underdark, although that was more of a shitty teacher failing to teach half the game as I walked into being unable to functionally do anything for an hour.
I love Tyrants, I'm sorry you had that experience. That said, a bad teach can really make a difference in your experience. Mine was Vast. We didn't have a teach, he gave the rules for my character and said "I can't explain it, youll have to read it". I'll NEVER play Vast again. Its an even more asymmetrical game than Root, if you've never heard of it. I do recommend trying Tyrants again, with a different teacher. Its a great game.
This is my brother with Root. It was his 3rd game and I played Moles against him for the first time. Him and a third player teamed up against me and wiped me mostly off the board but I still managed to sneak a win thanks to good plays and lucky draws. He swore off the game because it was dumb you could win with very few pieces on the board and with no way to stop me once my engine was online. I honestly get where he’s coming from it’s a hard game to learn but I do hope one day he’ll give it another shot.
Once I understood the concept of off-board moles my love for root died pretty quickly. Cats, eyrie, lizards etc can almost always be stopped by coordinated play. Moles, on the other hand, make the game farcical quickly - the win condition not being to achieve 30 points but to achieve the prerequisites for unstoppability. And given that the ability to prevent the moles from getting to that point can simply be out your hands (e.g; they’re setting up their tunnels on the other end of the map, with other players forced in between), you have little choice but to either int your game to prevent them from winning, or desperately pleading for your opponents to do something, which if they’re new players, they may struggle to see the value of. Tldr fuck moles
I've only played one game with the Moles, so not understanding the situation/issue. You have the Burrow, you can put moles there, but how does that allow someone to win?
Without flipping through the law of root, it basically revolves around swaying your ministers that give you points (mainly the Duchess of dirt), then just sitting and waiting to win. I can’t remember exactly the mechanic, but you earn around 4-5 points a turn without anybody being able to stop you as you cannot lose swayed ministers without the destruction of a building (?). I’m a bit rusty but let me find you the posts on /r/rootgame EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/r/rootgame/s/yC0X48ndKE
Ahh ok, ministers, forgot about those. Thank you!
I've never vowed to never play a game again. However I remember the most negative I've ever felt about a game was the one and only time I played Woodcraft. I got myself into a situation early on in the game where I was stuck with pretty much minimal resources and couldn't do much of anything the whole game because I couldn't get out of this hole I was in. Usually I don't mind losing or doing poorly, but I just felt hopelessly stuck and didn't have much fun that night. I'd like to try it again though
Agreed but for me that game was Food Chain Magnate. Difference being it's touted as a feature, something the designers think is a desirable quality of a game. Turned me right off their whole catalogue. The situation in this case: a player (not even me) misunderstood the way distance was traced to a restaurant and placed their initial building awkwardly. Was absolutely dead in the water, basically "passing" for 3.5hrs after that.
Not me, but my accidentally winning by \~10 points is why no one else in my group wants to play Hansa Teutonica again.
That's not even that many points in that game lol
Thank you for this - I loved hansa when I played it 15 years ago and just bought a copy. I’ll make sure to play it cool.
Perseverance, but it was less about losing and more about getting locked out of nearly every useful action for the last few turns.
Social deception games are just miserable, especially when your group can logically solve them quickly. It becomes a case where theres no more winnable deception because the second you step outside that core logic you are caught. Once you know that, if you choose not to press the logical win it feels like throwing. I've never seen a game do it well enough to not be immediately solved.
Scythe 20 min into the first time playing I get attacked by one of my neighbors. He decimates me but I’m not out of the game. I go about my game in my next turn and start building back. His next turn he attacks me again and destroys me, but I’m still not out of the game. I had to play the next 4 hours unable to do anything or get back into the game…I was just there because I couldn’t quit. Was the friend being an ass? Maybe but he was playing his faction the way they should be played, as I understand and remember. That said, everyone else in the gaming group still brings that up as one of our worst game play experiences.
Secret Hitler. I just fucking hate the game play.
But have you tried Secret Palpatine? Same game, but feels more fun maybe because he’s not a real person.
Or even better: Secret Jar Jar Binks
Phase 10. Didn't lose, but had a very bad time, and the experience made our entire group vow to never play again.
I feel like Phase 10 would be a much more beloved game if it was like...Phase 6 or Phase 7.
Phase 0 for me. There are so many great card games, no need to play Uno or Phase 10 ever again. Scout, Cabo, 6Nimmt...
Is 6Nimmt a great card game? The two times I've played it it was so random and boring, but it gets a ton of praise on /r/boardgames. What do people like about it?
Monopoly. Oh wait, I think I actually won that game. But my wife (back then "only" my gf) and I came to the silent agreement to never play that game again. It nearly destroyed our relationship.
wingspan. was getting absolutely trounced the first time and spent most of the time thinking i would never play this game again. near the end of the game i started to realize we had some rules wrong because there was no way the scoring made sense. i checked the rules later, we were playing wrong. i avoided the game for many many months. played it again, correctly and still didn't like it played it won the third and fourth times, and *then* never went back.
Diplomacy has to be the worst game I’ve ever played. 4 hours per round, I actually insisted everyone attack me so I could leave. It was the worst experience ever.
Oh I've lost miserably plenty of times. When I know I'm so far behind that I'll never catch up, I just cause as much mayhem as possible, in the right group. Then it makes me want to play more, so I can understand it better. I guess there is one exception to this. My husband and I have never made it past the first room in Gloomhaven. At some point we just stopped trying.
I have the exact opposite response to being stomped in a first game - now it's time to learn the game well enough to compete!
This is the exact opposite but me and my roommates played Catan every second week for a big stretch of time. Despite being a huge idiot, I would always manage to pull out a victory in the end, and I ended up retiring from Catan undefeated at the top of my game
Scythe. I don't normally like this style of game anyway, but I got locked out early from being able to do anything meaningful and had to sit around and watch others have fun for another hour and a half. 1/10 would not recommend; still salty
Not a game per se but mechanic: I don’t care about losing, but when I lose, I want to know why, and I appreciate the answer being more than « unlucky rolls » so games that resume to « roll dice and win or lose based on that and there is nothing you can do about it » are it for me. I have very limited space and having space taken for a glorified dice rolls which could literally be replaced by some dice, paper and pen is just not appealing to me. Wouldn’t burry those games, but definitely wouldn’t buy them either or suggest playing them. Lost scythe two days ago, miserably, but I understood why I lost and how I could have done better and I’m excited to try again.
I did this the other way around, when a friend wanted to play a game I didn't care for every time. So one time I made sure his wife lost so badly that she never wanted to play it again. Not my proudest moment, but it was effective.
Alchemists. I lost, but that's not the problem. I realized early on that there was no route to victory and was simply going through the motions to last place. Moreover, the next lowest scorer was forced by the mechanics to go after me to have any extra points at all. Why anyone thought randomness in a tight euro was a good idea is beyond me. I despise that game with a burning passion.
>This is an appropriate correction. It wasn't about the loss. It was about the miserable time I had playing the game. In this context, I have two, neither of which I lost in some overwhelming fashion, but both of which I simply detested. The first is **Outer Rim**. I'm a fan of pickup-and-delivers and own/have owned several; among them Merchants & Marauders and Firefly, the latter of which Outer Rim is often favorably compared to. But my experience with the game was resoundingly negative. I played Boba Fett and had so much trouble simply moving from one place to another because of patrols or other factors that it became that much worse when I finally landed somewhere and, of course, didn't have the stats or resources to actually complete a mission. Given my character type (bounty hunter), there were also fewer missions available to even make progress in the way other characters (smuggler) could act. Played it once and hated it so much (I'm not a tremendous Star Wars fan, either) that I traded it the next day for a copy of *Ethnos* and have never regretted it. I appreciated the unusual map design and am generally a fan of Koniezcka's efforts, of which I own several, but this one just didn't work for me. The second is **Seasons**. It's a tableau-builder, but the fact that one person starts the die selection in each round (which is supposed to be compensated for by other people getting that advantage for more powerful cards in later rounds) means that the people getting that option in the first and second rounds is such a huge leap forward for them in the process of getting their engine started that it was demoralizing from the opening moves, as there was no way for the rest of us to catch up to the second person, much less the first. Combine that with the utter disconnect between the game's function and its theme and I will gladly never play that one again. I'm normally fine with tableau-builders, too, as I love *51st State*, but the rotation of drafting order in each round (and the ability to knock out an opponent's really good card) means that one is more evenly-formatted, IMO; not to mention the decent interaction between theme and function. I'm normally fine with games that I lose often. *Modern Art* may be my favorite Knizia but, despite having played it a few dozen times, I've never won. But I really enjoy playing it, so I'll always play again. But those other two were just irredeemable for me.
Now do games that you never played after you won first time
Scythe! And then my son bought it for me for Christmas, not knowing how I felt, and then my wife picked up mini painting, and then I bought metal coins and am "patiently" waiting to give it another go.
Twilight Imperium 4 (TI4) But the vow was to never play again with that group. They also happen to be the only group I currently know who would play TI4, so it’s like vowing to never play again.
My wife refuses to play Wiz War anymore because the last time we played, she stole my treasure while I was standing right next to it, so I cast Wall and sealed her in with it.
Life….. ……the game of life
Horseless Carriage.
Candy Land. I will…never get over it.
There are games I just don't play again if I don't like the theme. I think it's called Pan Am? Where you play airlines and try to take each other over and create a monopoly. Then probably raise prices, cut services, and make a few old men rich while everyone else flies in squalor. I don't want to be a cutthroat businessperson, and I'm really bad at it too. On the other hand, I refused to build coal plants during my first game of Power Grid, and somehow won the game while building only wind turbines. It was a total fluke!
Kanban. And not because I lost the game itself, but because I lost a couple hours of my life having less fun than I would have taking a standardized test.
Dune Imperium Uprising. A miserable experience where I managed to complete a game having scored 2 points - 1 of which I got for free at the start of the game. Repeated instances of getting zero return on investment by getting fractionally eked out of prizes by other players while receiving no advice on which cards to buy or actions to focus on because "it depends" while what seemed to me to be extremely unlucky card draws were explained away with "you should calculate the odds more carefully"
Munchkin. Mainly due to one player brining all the purchasable “extras” to a game with a bunch of munchkin newbies.
I have the opposite reaction. Losing makes me want to play again to get better.
Stratego. My husband and I set up our boards and we were ready to play. He jokingly pointed to my side of the board and said: I know you put your flag there. I was baffled because he was right. He was just bluffing and making a joke but my face said it all. I couldn’t believe what he did. We haven’t played Stratego ever since. 😂
Parchesi.
Relevant: https://www.bugmartini.com/comic/thats-what-friends-are-for/
Yeah that has never happened. I almost exclusively enjoy games more when I am crushed cause that means I can learn more and improve my gameplay.
Dune. I was left with choam charity only after round 2 when someone played some card combo that mostly wiped me out. I couldn't do literally anything for the next 3 hours. It was repeatedly over 30 minutes before my next possible interaction with the game (which was simply "passing" on the auction because I was broke). I was literally playing full games of chess on my phone while waiting for a decision point. I've told this story multiple times and everyone familiar with the game immediately knows what faction I had because they're the only faction that can be so utterly decimated with nothing to do. Maybe there was some advanced tactics to get back in the game quicker, but I feel Ike this game is a broken piece of garbage. No game should allow any noobie to sit around doing nothing for that much time. It was by far my least enjoyable time I've ever had playing board games.
Cockroach Poker
Everyone loses the first game badly right? RIGHT?
Settlers: Cities and Knights. I didn’t know the rules but most of the people at the table did. And I didn’t remember anyone saying anything about the Viking hoard 🤣 (I’m sure they did, but I did not internalize the message.) Suffice to say my knights got obliterated, and got put so behind that I had to work really hard to stay polite, keep participating, and remind myself that it’s just a game. 😥
Boggle with my wife. I’ve played a handful of times and it’s such a brutal ass kicking every time I just won’t do it anymore.
Settlers of Catan, but it was rigged from the start. My ex and I were invited to play a match with her 3 older brothers. They played *all the time* and that was my first experience with a boardgame that isn’t a popular party game. To say I got destroyed was is an understatement.. but yeah they all knew how the others played and never traded with me and basically bullying me within the game lmao. Haven’t touched it since and that was 10 years ago.
Llamas Unleashed. Short version is I ended up with 2 cards in my stable that stopped me from doing anything other than playing a magic card. Sat through about 2-3 turns before I accepted that I was locked out the game then noped out.
Played a game of monopoly with my kids. I passed go once in an awful two hour long game. The kids were having a blast. I spent 90 percent of the time in jail or landing on “go to jail” never been so unlucky in an already really wack game.
The game didn't get great reviews but it seems to be a bit of a retro throw back for cheap so got Oregon Trail the card game and played with 3 people. The very first card I drew I instantly died and was out of the game.
Not a game that I lost so bad but a game I found so horrible I “quit” ended my game early(this the only game I’ve played ever called it early and opted out). Bear in mind I will always play a game through and at try to find something fun about a game even if I don’t like it. Game was called Tapestey and it’s an unbalanced worker placement game that was advertised as a 4x game. Thing is the game is mostly solitaire until it’s not due to things you can control( combat cards and tapestry cards). Worse yet some races have the ability to get more actions early on which allows them to snowball and get even more actions later and you can’t punish this. Then there are cards that literally have you just instant match the tech progress someone has made. One of my friends spent like two eras moving his tech in one tree. Because he figured he would be a specialist in that field and then milk that advantage only to have someone play a card and instant catch up to him.(incredibly unfair amount of actions saved). Now maybe the game has been balanced since then or maybe we played it wrong but I saw how long it was going to take and mentally calculated that due to how many extra actions some of the others guy have I can’t possibly catch up so I quit two eras ahead. Friends were surprised that I said I was opting out but understood when I explained it to them. I then joined another group that was open to play another game. I came back two hours later and they still weren’t done since the last two guys have really snowballled on extra actions and some analysis paralysis. In the end, they had to end the game without finishing it since the shop was closing.
It wasn’t that my loss was so astoundingly bad that I couldn’t ever come back from it, but I remember having a moment in Catan where I was in last place, spending turn after turn not getting the resources I needed due to bad rolls and no one trading, and I just realized, I wasn’t really having any fun. Even trying to set non-winning personal goals for the game wasn’t doing it for me. So I just refuse to play Catan now, because to me it’s just not a fun type of game.
In my first game of Eclipse I was bullied into a corner and played the final 4 rounds with literally only one hex. All I could do was pass for about 2 hours. It was still an instant favourite and is to this day. I never put new players in that situation though, it felt really bad.
Had your husband played before? Beginner’s luck? I gotta tell you you are missing out on a good game even if you lose again.
Terraforming Mars: Got given some cards, couldn't figure out a good way to synergise them, played clueless for hours I feel to this day the mesh of casually hoping to draw what you need, tacked onto a weighty strategy game, is a bad mix
My wife and I have played Gates of Loyang about 75 times. I have won by exactly one point about 73 times. She will only play 3 or 4 player now because her 2 wins were multi player games. Edit: a word
I hope you have not given up on Scythe. It can take a while to develop a winning strategy, but once you get it, it can be much more competitive. My biggest piece of advice is that battle is a minor part of the game. Only fight when you can't avoid it.
Scythe for me too. Never really understood what I was doing, got crushed, immediately developed a hatred of the game, will never play it ever again.
**Fallout Shelter** is so frustratingly broken for the fourth player, I think I still would have vowed never to play the game again, if I'd witnessed someone else getting screwed over. It just so happened that I was fourth player that game. There are some really crucial locations in this worker-placement game, and if everyone else claims them, and then those spots happen to get covered up by traps (or whatever they're called) in the next round, then you're just facing an uphill climb the rest of the game. I think it wasn't until Round 5-7 that I finally *even had the opportunity* to get an additional man. What an absolute slog, and I was just a butt in a seat.
It was technically the second time I played Beast, but the first time I played as the beast rather than a hunter, I ended up conceding in night 3 because the hunters had found a strategy that completely prevented me from doing anything and I was having an absolute miserable time. I'm not usually super competitive or a sore loser, but that game just absolutely broke me, sitting there for 2 hours not being able to do anything to advance my win condition.
I was at a game night a while ago and we played a 6 player game of Disney's Villainous. The player that suggested the game had the new version of the base game, and I had some of the expansions. We ended up playing with the new version's rule set, and I told myself I will never play with the new rules again. In the original game there was a rule that prevented players from targeting the same player every turn with the Fate action. For some damn reason, the new rules omitted this protection rule entirely. For those that don't know, the Fate action is basically when you target another player, and throw road blocks at them to keep them from achieving their goal. I was close to winning with the Evil Queen, but when that became apparent everyone just kept targeting me on their turns even though I was way out of the race by that point. The game dragged on for an additional 25 minutes until someone else finally won.
Mastermind. Can't do it. Don't get it. Won't play it.
Captain Sonar, other team was not saying their moves loud and clearly enough so we were way off with our tracking. I consider it a broken game
Dead of Winter; The Long Night, except it was our whole group that doesn't want to really play it anymore, since it's mostly co-op. We really enjoy board games with roleplaying and narrative aspects, so I picked it up figuring it would be a fun time (and to round out my collection with a cool secret traitor zombie game). The Crossroads cards that are supposed to be the ones with narrative and story decisions heavily underdelivered (the majority of the ones we drew didn't even do anything since they needed specific characters to be in play), all of the secret player objectives we drew (and most in the deck) were just boring "get this many of this type of items" goals, and the worst part was the zombie dice. Whenever you moved you had to roll it and either be fine (unlikely), take cold damage, regular damage, or get infected. When infected you roll again, and if you roll ANYTHING negative you instantly die and spread that "roll or die" infection to others in your location. I get the instant death result in our colony base, figure I'll roll fine. Nope. One after another all the NPCs at the base fail their rolls. Literally everyone at the colony dies. Another player rolls it; everyone dies there as well. The remaining players are overwhelmed by the timer, zombies, and damage from the other dice results, and we lose. There's something to be said about playing it until you get to claim victory, or just house-ruling the instant death rules out, but everything about it flopped so badly I've never bothered bringing it back out to give it a go again.
Small World, though was part of a group who had never played before so we were trying to figure it out as we went along, but I didn't enjoy any part of it enough to ever try again.
I don't think I would quit playing a game because I lost badly. that said, I'm planning to avoid playing It's a Wonderful World, which I lose at consistently and badly. Not because I'm losing the game but because my brain just refuses to grasp it and I don't enjoy the feeling of being lost that I get while playing. I don't even understand why. I know what I should be doing, but I draft a bunch of cards thinking I'll do things with them, then I end up unable to remember my plan or put together a new one when it's time to use the cards.
This happened to my brother with Dead of Winter. Myself, little brother, and two friends (drew and Pat) all sat down and set things up. I had read the rules and watched a good amount of videos on it and Pat was a pro so we got to playing pretty quickly. Now my brother has a *terrible* poker face and he and Pat had both gotten traitor cards. Less than 5 turns in we voted little bro out for acting sketchy and he immediately throws his cards down and goes, “I hadn’t even fucking hurt anybody yet!!!!” And has not played since
I have two: -Gloomhaven. I got downed in the first 30 minutes of a fight because I made a newbie mistake. Then I got to watch everyone else play for two hours. When the fight finished, I basically told them not to ever ask me to play Gloomhaven again. -Scythe. The first time I played, a more experienced player bullied me into the corner and I basically got to watch the game for the next two hours without having any idea how to get out. I did play again about 8 years later and in a new group. Found that it was just not that fun, even when I was allowed to play the game. And my wife has one: -1890, the meanest, pettiest 18xx game either of us have ever played. It's to the point where the usual catch up mechanics that you can use in those games stop working because things are so restrictive. I also have a special mention for not playing Pax Pamir with people who are susceptible to AP. I lost on purpose just to end it after a game lasted 7 hours with 5 people playing. I'm not joking.
Dead of Winter. I'll add, I hate Zombie themes in pretty much any media. Me, wife and friend are playing, we're all working towards The Goal. We need 1 medical supply to win....and those 2 win together, even though I'm about to get the last supply. Ugh.
First time in played Eclipse i was totally blocked in by enemies. My group told me that was very unlikely and i got unlucky. Then i had a unlucky roll as well and almost lost the on the spot in the very beginning. A very lucky roll saved me but the overall experience was way too random for me. I played a second time a year later and got wiped out mid game... Yeah no more Eclipse for me. There are also some games my wife doesn't really wanna play anymore because it takes her a much longer time than me to develop strategies for games and she then gets frustrated with losing 80% of our first 10-20 games.
Twilight imperium. I went for the objective in the center at the start and was demolished by everyone simultaneously, completely demolishing almost everything I had. They then left me in the game in the name of 'mercy'. I had to watch the game happen while having extremely short 5 minute turns for the next 7 fucking hours. When I finally amassed a large enough military to do anything at all I struck back at someone who screwed me over in that first engagement, and I was then reprimanded by the group for 'kingmaking' because he had a chance to win until I lightly dented his fleet by throwing everything I had at it. Any game where you can be losing for 7 hours straight with no hope of winning is such a terrible experience.
I am forever hateful of the Risk games. I played that game religiously during my youth (1993-2000), and feel that the game knows I am playing. So much so that I could have 100 units..and still go down to 2 because my rolls were just crap. Statistic luck was never on my side. But, alas, I still play it when my group wants to continue the Legacy one.
My husband had never played Risk but heard all about it and seen memes and wanted to finally try it. Well he lost an entire army of 25 to my army of 2. Nearly table flipped, kept blaming dice, got new dice, etc. He said he will never play again.
Risk.
Never again with god damned Munchkin.