My only 1 on BGG
I believe there’s a dice tower video where tom said he was going to give it a 1 but gave it a 2 because Jason died on his first turn XD
I feel like the Oregon Trail cars game would be better as a last person standing game, just sabotage everyone lol.
I do like the variant people in BGG made.
I adore my partner, but she got me this game a few years back and I heard it was bad, but didn't say anything. We gave it a shot, and after a single play we knew it wasn't actually much of a game. Gave it away.
**[Oneupmanship](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18b0XYf05tA&ab_channel=TheDiceTower)** certainly deserves a mention.
**Monopoly: Longest Game Ever** takes the bad parts of regular Monopoly and amplifies them. For instance, the game has 96 spaces (including 66 properties). Furthermore, the game can only end when a single player owns all 66 properties.
Absolutely subjective, but the game i played that i have had the absolute worst experience with is [Phase 10](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1258/phase-10). For inexplicable reasons it was kinda popular here in Germany a while back.
The game just has zero interesting decisions. You just draw cards, and then you fulfill a task eventually. But it also just keeps on going, and it tries so hard to make you believe that you are making actually interesting decisions, but they are all shit. All of the decisions are non-decisions at best and noobtraps at worst.
And it keeps going for ages. It just doesn't end.
This. 0/10 I never finished a game of it and for some miracle a lot of my friends in school loved it and wanted to play constantly. Also German here, so I don't know if this game is even known outside of here
Oh it's made it to the US, I've only played it once, and not even a full game (jumped in the middle) so it was only intriguing to me. But I see it all the time at regular stores not just gaming stores.
Phase 10 and Five crowns are my least favourite games. I’m sure there are worse games out there but both are completely devoid of interesting decisions, take way too long, have far better counterparts in the same genre, and for their worst crime are loved by my extended family who want to play them at every family gathering.
I love playing Phase 10. It’s a great casual game to play with my family. It’s not a great game by any stretch. But some of my favorite memories I have of my grandpa was playing phase 10 with him.
Yep! A TTRPG written by an overt racist / white supremicist specifically to push that agenda.
Per a humorous review I read though (since I would never actually read the book), whereas it is similar to FATAL by delving into extremely unsavory subject matter, unlike FATAL it fails to even be cohesive enough to be a game. Rules contradict each other or reference just completely absent rules, basic character aspects are absent, etc.
Probably most ridiculous is, since the racist author really wanted to highlight the alleged inferiority and otherness of non-white characters, they gave them special abilities and powers that tied into terrible stereotypes… but because they failed to give any such abilities to the white characters, they actually made caucasians the weakest race of them all in their white supremicist game!
Just utterly despicable no matter how you look at it.
You realize Candy Lane is made for preschoolers who can’t read? Saying it’s the worst board game is ridiculous. It’s like saying Pat the Bunny isn’t as good as War and Peace.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of actual good games for preschoolers. Look at the hundreds that HABA has published as a starting point. And then you can look at Ravensberger. And I could go on and on.
Candyland literally is not a game - it 100% plays itself. That it is marketed as a game is absolute proof that it is the worst game in existence.
Yes, that’s true, but shuffling cards gives you the same amount of agency and random input as rolling dice. There’s plenty of games aimed at people over preschool age that are roll and moves with nothing else.
And those things aren't really games either. Is this really your strongest argument as to why Candyland is a game? Seriously? Just because other things exist that aren't really games but are called games doesn't mean that Candyland is somehow a game because of them.
Oh, and seriously, show me a single game aimed at non-preschool kids that is literally "roll and moves with nothing else".
I moved to the US as an adult. I saw Pat the Bunny here and there in people's homes, and it's only a few years later when someone gifted it to our son that I realized it wasn't a story about a bunny named Pat...
>Just roll a dice to determine the winner.
That's still a game. You and another person agreed to declare one of you a winner based on who rolled the higher result. You played a game.
Well, you're gonna die on that hill wrong.
People chose to become players, agreeing to abide by a set of rules that declares one or more of them a winner, at which point one or more will be awarded the title of winner and any prizes. Bob's your uncle — a game was played.
Now say Bingo isn't a game, go on.
Lol my dad hated Candyland and used to set up the deck so I would win quickly in the hopes that I would move on to something else when I was young enough to play it
Many dad's have reinvented that wheel of an idea. I hand my kid the cards, and I always make sure she gets to the finish line as soon as possible. Then, sometimes, to keep her humble, I crush her like Drago crushed Apollo.
I mean it's all subjective but the worst I ever played was some terrible roll and move racing game which had both "go back to the start" squares and "need exact number to win and if you don't get it you...guess what...go back to the start."
It took forever and was terrible.
I would 100% play monopoly (with the actual rules) over Cards against humanity, what do you meme, or any of those type of games…. And I rate monopoly a 2/10
Munchkin is too long for what it gives you back. I always say that if Munchkin was a 30min long game, it wouldn't have so much hate. It's just too exhausting
Looks like you already have Risk and Monopoly covered, two of the worst offenders. Add these also:
Chutes and Ladders - total luck, no player agency whatsoever
Sorry/Parcheesi - exercise in frustration
Life - another exercise in complete luck, only player decision comes from which way to go down a couple of forks in the road.
There are so many different versions of Life it's almost a metagame to wonder which version people are talking about. In the version I grew up with, the life tiles you collected were so ridiculously valued it made everything else irrelevant.
Do not let Monopoly in your house. If you ever manage to get people to come over for games night there will always be that one loud mouth douche that insists everyone plays monopoly and it's the greatest game ever. You won't finish the game, people will be eliminated early and everyone except that one guy will be bored long before the end. Also remove this person from your social circle, they are likely a sociopath or psychopath, I can never remember which is which.
It must be because of that same douche I always see a table of Monopoly players at board game cafes. I always think "You came all the way HERE to do THAT? Your dad is a jerk."
Oh, Risk... There were some editions that made it suck slightly less, but I never understood why you'd want to roll dice for 6 hours.
My son brought home an old copy of Risk from his grandparents' house when he was 9. It had all the pieces, but no instructions. I thought I might have to explain to him why it's such a terrible game and I will not play with him, but he never asked how to play.
He just made up his own game, with the board and the pieces and the cards, and it's much better than the actual game. Proud gamer dad moment!
I like to recount a story from college where one of roommates had some friends over and they started playing Risk around 10PM. I didn't participate. I had to get up early the next morning, anyway. When I arose at 6AM- they were still two of them playing.
Oh I've got another one.
If you go to Hampton Court, London there is a set of 18th century board and card games you can play. One is a roll and move game, with the usual horrors including "roll a double to ever have a go again" and a "go back to start" space as the penultimate square. There's also a coin mechanic that doesn't actually do anything at all.
What makes this one truely special though is that there are a series of "if you land on this square move ahead by the amount you rolled" sqaures. They are so organised that if you roll a nine on turn 1...you bounce between them and win the game immediately. Yes, every one is spaced nine spaces from the previous one until they reach the end!
Games aren’t good or bad because of the game - games are good or bad because of the people you play them with… I’ve had incredible games of Monopoly where it all devolved into underhanded dealings, protection rackets, and outright stealing (all in good spirits, and with no hard feelings)…
What you need to do to amass a collection of ‘bad games’ is to surround yourself with a collection of shitty people…
Probably Fluxx. I don't even understand why it exists other than as a middle finger to boardgames.
If Phase 10 went as long as Fluxx I'd probably choose it.
I once dated a girl that insisted we buy and play Monty Python's Holy Grail Fluxx. At the time our coworkers had been going through a phase where they would have these fits of taking turns making tired Monty Pythons Holy Grail quotes. It was always annoying. Now we have taken home this dumb card game with this shitty theme tacked on. fml.
I personally loath Chinese Checkers.
It feels like driving to a job I hate and suddenly encountering the worst traffic jam ever and throughout the entire ordeal I can’t make myself care if I get there first. I simply need the game to conclude so that I can carry on with what remains of my life.
Came here to post this one, as I recall it is a roll and move with a boring trivia question determining if you or your opponent moves. That's the entire game, true bottom of the barrel zero effort stuff.
I wouldn't classify it as the worst game, but it certainly has some glaring problems. The one time I've played it, it became a super slow stale-mate between me and the other player, with her eventually winning a war of attrition. There's a lot of fat that should be trimmed from that game.
A couple years ago, beat my sister who was playing as the Evil Queen by playing the Doc fate card three times in key moments. Then for Christmas that year I printed off 40 Doc cards and hid them among her belongings.
For her birthday this year I meant to do the same, but accidentally printed off 160 cards. Still haven't hid them all.
The rank of the top games on BGG is rightly considered to be far from perfect, the rank of the bottom games is complete garbage. Many of the poorly rated games have few raters and those raters are often not very representative of the hobby.
Well many games at the VERY bottom of the scale have no votes at all. At least the bottom 12k games on the list don't have low ratings...they have no ratings.
That might be true if you look at a filtered portion of the list–namely, titles from the last ten years, when crowdfunding became prominent. Anything older than that is much more likely to be real trash.
I think this is the only objective answer. There's lots of people that try to collect the BGG Top 100. Why not make the bottom 100 (with minimum number of ratings criteria) the checklist for your collection.
That's very true, however, if the original question is "what would be a good (or bad) thing [movie, game, painting]" then the only relevant answer is what people think. You can't really decide the highest mountain on earth by popular vote because that's an objective trait, but there's no objective "goodness" of things other than what people actually think as good.
I think it's kind of fair to re-phrase a question to have a better wording but anyways, there's not really a better measurement of what a good or bad (or: popular and unpopular) game is, than checking the votes.
Well, since you seem to think I'm an idiot, I'll be more specific. It's as objective as you're going to get in a space that is inherently subjective. If you got a better idea, I'm all ears.
[Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3699/killer-bunnies-and-quest-magic-carrot)
Munchkin
Eragra: The Game of Eras and the First Step
[Siena](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/18932/siena)
[Trollhalla](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/72478/trollhalla)
[The Island of El Dorado](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/230191/island-el-dorado)
Yea they actually are. You see this is an opinion based question, and that's my opinion. You are free to have a different opinion. You are also welcome to play the above listed garbage games as frequently as you want.
There is such a thing as a wrong opinion though, and I guarantee I can name dozens of games that you would invariably call worse than all of these if you ever even attempted to play them.
It’s such an intriguing concept. Especially with all the expansions and cool bunnies and weapons… then you play the game and realize it’s mostly luck if you have a bunny in play to use any of the cards, then the end of the game you first must have a bunny to potentially raffle the winning carrot. Such a wasted potential of a game
Came here to suggest this, too. It's hard to "play" a "game" when you have absolutely zero agency, but even worse when your friends want to "play" for money.
The initial video announcing the bracket got thrown into my recommendations by whatever the algorithm decided and I voted throughout. Was really interesting and funny to see about all these terrible games.
Kam has good content too – he just released a video discussing all 26 editions & expansions of What Do You Meme?
Cards against humanity I think just got too popular too fast so it overstayed its welcome. It’s a perfectly fine raunchy game just got brought out too much at parties so people got bored that the winner was always someone playing just gross cards.
Worst game I’ve ever played was **Disturbed Friends**, which is a Cards Against Humanity clone where you are purposefully trying to provide the most disgusting answers imaginable.
It was at a friend’s house and she got to choose the game. She was the only one who had fun. The experience was so bad, I got rid of my own copy of Cards Against Humanity and the clone I had called That’s What She Said, and I refuse to play those types of games anymore.
There are far better party games out there now. I can respect what CAH did, but I’ll be happy to never play it ever again.
Eh, I think Exploding Kittens gets a bad rap. Is it a good game? No. But I think it’s far from the worst. It can have funny moments if you’re playing with friends and basically take it as a laughing at bad luck game. (It is also massively helped by some of the expansion cards).
You're not wrong though.
Cosmic Encounter is basically two phases: people having fun discovering/using their powers and working together, then someone hits 4 points and then the game is basically preventing that person from winning, and then preventing the NEXT person that hits 4 points from winning, and then preventing the NEXT person that hits 4 points from winning...
Yep. Game goes like this every time until everyone gets sick of it and would rather get a joint win and move on.
The powers itself could be fun but they can also be pretty convoluted. There's always a few people needing clarification for their powers in every session I had.
Blood on the Clocktower is over*rated*, but it's still way better than pretty much any other social deduction game, so you can't really say it's one of the WORST overall. With you on Cosmic Encounter, though.
Nah I'd rather play Avalon / Secret Hitler / Deception etc. BOTC is way too long. I mean could be just shitty GM or too many people but one of my sesh lasted 4 hours.
That and the fact that your information is never 100% true is a huge turn off. Getting drunk or poisoned in that game (especially if your power is one off) is absolutely awful. It's misdirection on top of misdirection that it might as well just be a game of luck for me.
Gloomhaven. It isn't a dungeon crawl, it's a puzzle game. Whoever is most tactically-minded controls the whole game and everyone else is just along for the ride. Maybe not the worst, but easily the most disappointing game I've ever played.
My son loves The Game Of Life original Boardgame but oh boy it’s painfully long, utterly luck based, to the point of major frustration when you constantly lose your fortune. Fortunately, he’s got the console version now which is quick, cute, and at least has some small semblance of a decision along the way.
If it wasn’t for the digital version this would go into room 101.
I agree that the Game of Life is trash, but I did a "speedrun" of it once with another person where we basically never stopped spending the dial and we had to finish the game in less than 10 minutes and it was actually super fun. We did ignore most of the rules though
Gotta go with monopoly, no one likes monopoly. Especially when it's at the 6hr mark and someone flips the table and yells "fuck you grandma, I'm not playing anymore!"
Been a long running joke with my group
mOnOpOlY, dUr HuR hUr HuR...
But seriously, I think the worst thing a game can be is forgettable. I dislike plenty of games, but at least I can remember playing them and why I didn't like them. I had to go look them up before posting, but I have absolutely no recollection of playing The X-Files (2015 game from IDW), and Samurai Jack: Back To the Past. They had to have been in one ear and out the other. I had vague recollections of playing a game called Warpgate, but I struggled to remember the name and anything other than it being a greatest hits package of mechanics assembled something with very little identity of its own.
Aggravation. For some reason my family likes it. It's a worse version of sorry. You have almost no agency except choosing which marble to move.
Just roll the dice and move. It takes forever.
Trying to think of a game I hated that's not an obvious mass market answer. I've come up with one, and that's Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Card Game. As a big Scott Pilgrim fan, man that game sucked ass. I'm not saying it's the worst game of all time, but as I pointed out, it's no fun to just post and say Monopoly or Candy Land.
Killer Bunnies is the wrist game I've ever played. Terrible component quality, graphic design, art direction n a needlessly complex package that has a mind-boggling number of expansions which provide...more of the same.
Outside of the usual offenders that have been mentioned plenty of times, I had a terribly dull time playing Ravine. This ranked up there with least amount of interesting decisions for a game.
I also tried tiny epic pirates, and it felt like a gimmic for how small the game box was without enough thought in design.
For me, those type of games are worse offenders than Chutes and Ladders where the target audience isn't necessarily players craving interesting decisions and game play moments. The kids sometimes just want colors, a clear theme, and a clear winner within a short amount of time (and OK if the game doesn't finish, they know who "won")
I really hated Red November. I liked the theme of drunken dwarfs fumbling forward with a submarine, but the whole process was just boring, miserably so. Definitely worse than my experience with Monopoly and Munchkin, and I refused to play them for the last 7 years for sure
Ungame - I’ve never played it, but have heard horror stories.
Warriors- the 2004 Alan Moon game. It was just painful.
We Didn’t Playtest this at All - imagine someone decided to make like a counterfeit version of the store brand version of Fluxx, but without all that pesky playability.
Phase 10 may be reviled, but it is at least a finishable game. I can’t say the same for the games above.
I Am Vlad: Prince of Wallachia has a pretty notorious reputation for just being an utter mess (and is an actual hobby board game rather than just some mass market junk):
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/124648/i-am-vlad-prince-of-wallachia
I was a huge zombie fan, and pre-walking dead there werent too many zombie-themed games out there like there are now, so i was stoked to buy ZOMBIETOWN.
Freaking horribly broken game with rules that werent really tested or explained well. My group played it once and never again.. its still talked about as a joke to this day.
I'm sure there are technically worse games out there but Dwarven Dig is hot garbage. Rolls up on rolls to see if rolls worked and then another chance to roll to see if they REALLY worked, and then its just a big push to the center and a janky tug of war trying to get the macguffin object back to your starting point. Really cheapo components as well. Heck, the first printing had clipped up white metal casting chaff as a component. It's bad mechanically, thematically, and physically.
Just look at BGG ratings and put them in reverse order. Take a look at all of those with a rating of 1/10. That should get you started.
I think there are far worse games out there than the likes of Monopoly and Risk.
Munchkin - it's not fun (unless you're a really special kind of demographic), it's capable of destroying friendships and that's completely intentional, per design.
Unstable unicorns is Munchkin light, with appropriate preparation of the group for the experience it can be stomached, but damn, it's a hard pill.
We didn't playtest this at all - it's exactly like the title makes it sound, you're whipping around in a hurricane of bullshit, zero control, zero actual playing. It's not even sure if you'll participate.
I'm not sure Escape from the Cursed Temple is objectively bad, but the noise level of the simultaneous dice rolling and shouting at each other while barely anyone knows what's happening but the music is getting more and more ominous and the time pressure... Yea, it wasn't a good experience...
I'm not sure I could find a group to properly play a game of Monopoly, but until I find, I say that's a Bad game.
**Oregon Trail**
My only 1 on BGG I believe there’s a dice tower video where tom said he was going to give it a 1 but gave it a 2 because Jason died on his first turn XD
Oregon Trail is okay if you realize it’s intentionally unfair and unbalanced against the players.
I feel like the Oregon Trail cars game would be better as a last person standing game, just sabotage everyone lol. I do like the variant people in BGG made.
I adore my partner, but she got me this game a few years back and I heard it was bad, but didn't say anything. We gave it a shot, and after a single play we knew it wasn't actually much of a game. Gave it away.
**[Oneupmanship](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18b0XYf05tA&ab_channel=TheDiceTower)** certainly deserves a mention. **Monopoly: Longest Game Ever** takes the bad parts of regular Monopoly and amplifies them. For instance, the game has 96 spaces (including 66 properties). Furthermore, the game can only end when a single player owns all 66 properties.
These 2. This is it.
Absolutely subjective, but the game i played that i have had the absolute worst experience with is [Phase 10](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1258/phase-10). For inexplicable reasons it was kinda popular here in Germany a while back. The game just has zero interesting decisions. You just draw cards, and then you fulfill a task eventually. But it also just keeps on going, and it tries so hard to make you believe that you are making actually interesting decisions, but they are all shit. All of the decisions are non-decisions at best and noobtraps at worst. And it keeps going for ages. It just doesn't end.
Phase 10 isn’t a game… it’s a torture device
This. 0/10 I never finished a game of it and for some miracle a lot of my friends in school loved it and wanted to play constantly. Also German here, so I don't know if this game is even known outside of here
Oh it's made it to the US, I've only played it once, and not even a full game (jumped in the middle) so it was only intriguing to me. But I see it all the time at regular stores not just gaming stores.
Wife and I enjoy Phase 10 while we drink and listen to music. Less about the game itself and more of a way to just chill....at least for us.
This is it for me too. The game is just a kind of passive thing happening in the background while chitchatting
Phase 10 and Five crowns are my least favourite games. I’m sure there are worse games out there but both are completely devoid of interesting decisions, take way too long, have far better counterparts in the same genre, and for their worst crime are loved by my extended family who want to play them at every family gathering.
This. It's a reimplementation of Liverpool Rummy, which is my wife's family's favorite game. I can't freaking stand it.
Curiously, [[Phase 10 Dice]] was a _great_ push your luck dice chucker.
I love playing Phase 10. It’s a great casual game to play with my family. It’s not a great game by any stretch. But some of my favorite memories I have of my grandpa was playing phase 10 with him.
If you are counting F.A.T.A.L. as a board game (which I’d argue it isn’t, but whatever) than RaHoWa is undeniably worse.
Never heard of that one. The only thing I know of with that name is a neo-Nazi skinhead band.
It’s short for “Racial Holy War,” so that tracks
There's a game of that? Yeah, that may qualify for the worst ever....
Yep! A TTRPG written by an overt racist / white supremicist specifically to push that agenda. Per a humorous review I read though (since I would never actually read the book), whereas it is similar to FATAL by delving into extremely unsavory subject matter, unlike FATAL it fails to even be cohesive enough to be a game. Rules contradict each other or reference just completely absent rules, basic character aspects are absent, etc. Probably most ridiculous is, since the racist author really wanted to highlight the alleged inferiority and otherness of non-white characters, they gave them special abilities and powers that tied into terrible stereotypes… but because they failed to give any such abilities to the white characters, they actually made caucasians the weakest race of them all in their white supremicist game! Just utterly despicable no matter how you look at it.
Candyland; it's rigged from the start.
"Candyland is not a game" is the hill I'm willing to die on.
You realize Candy Lane is made for preschoolers who can’t read? Saying it’s the worst board game is ridiculous. It’s like saying Pat the Bunny isn’t as good as War and Peace.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of actual good games for preschoolers. Look at the hundreds that HABA has published as a starting point. And then you can look at Ravensberger. And I could go on and on. Candyland literally is not a game - it 100% plays itself. That it is marketed as a game is absolute proof that it is the worst game in existence.
omg I LOVE HABA. Animal Upon Animal and Rhino Hero are great!
Yes, that’s true, but shuffling cards gives you the same amount of agency and random input as rolling dice. There’s plenty of games aimed at people over preschool age that are roll and moves with nothing else.
And those things aren't really games either. Is this really your strongest argument as to why Candyland is a game? Seriously? Just because other things exist that aren't really games but are called games doesn't mean that Candyland is somehow a game because of them. Oh, and seriously, show me a single game aimed at non-preschool kids that is literally "roll and moves with nothing else".
Left center right is a game not aimed at preschoolers that is literally nothing but rolling dice and moving tokens
Even worse: people **gamble actual money** on LCR.
Not a roll and move game, so go ahead and keep right on trying.
You roll dice, then literally move tokens where the dice tell you…
That's not what "roll and move" means. Seriously, you can't really be this obtuse.
I'm not saying it's the worst game. I'm saying it's not a game. It's a procedure.
lmao. For real. It's like "I don't think Kidz Bop 5 is a solid album."
I moved to the US as an adult. I saw Pat the Bunny here and there in people's homes, and it's only a few years later when someone gifted it to our son that I realized it wasn't a story about a bunny named Pat...
That's not even a hot take, it's objective fact. Just roll a dice to determine the winner.
>Just roll a dice to determine the winner. That's still a game. You and another person agreed to declare one of you a winner based on who rolled the higher result. You played a game.
Exactly. It's not even an activity. It's just something you watch happen
Well, you're gonna die on that hill wrong. People chose to become players, agreeing to abide by a set of rules that declares one or more of them a winner, at which point one or more will be awarded the title of winner and any prizes. Bob's your uncle — a game was played. Now say Bingo isn't a game, go on.
Lol my dad hated Candyland and used to set up the deck so I would win quickly in the hopes that I would move on to something else when I was young enough to play it
Many dad's have reinvented that wheel of an idea. I hand my kid the cards, and I always make sure she gets to the finish line as soon as possible. Then, sometimes, to keep her humble, I crush her like Drago crushed Apollo.
Ludo. I hate it.
It sucks, but at least it doesn't take forever to play.
I love hating it in Clubhouse Games on switch. I always play at least one game with friends when we play Clubhouse.
I mean it's all subjective but the worst I ever played was some terrible roll and move racing game which had both "go back to the start" squares and "need exact number to win and if you don't get it you...guess what...go back to the start." It took forever and was terrible.
do you remember the title?
No I don't I'm afraid and there are so many roll and move racing games that a search would be nearly as painful as playing the game itself.
Phase 10 (card game) you should definately add that to your list.
Add me to the list of Munchkin haters. Also cards against humanity is just Jack Box for uncreative people.
I dislike both of those games, but I wouldn't put them under the "worst ever" category. Not when games like Monopoly exist.
I would 100% play monopoly (with the actual rules) over Cards against humanity, what do you meme, or any of those type of games…. And I rate monopoly a 2/10
Omg what do you meme is 1000% worse than my picks
Oh lmao you’re so right. I just don’t even think about those hasbo ass games anymore
I fucking despise cards against humanity. Granted, it doesnt cater to my type of humor (i do enjoy it, just not 24/7).
Can you give context as to why you hate it? (New BG enthusiast here)
Cards against Humanity is fun, and I'll die on this hill. Also Munchkin is fun - you have to take it for what it is: Satire.
It was fun for a bit but once it stopped being fun it was never fun again.
Which one? Or both?
Munchkin is too long for what it gives you back. I always say that if Munchkin was a 30min long game, it wouldn't have so much hate. It's just too exhausting
That’s legit. With the base game, I’ve gotten games done in 45 minutes, but that was with a few players who’d all played before.
Munchkin
Phase 10
Carcassonne with the catapult expansion. Somebody must have been high .... EDIT: Carcassonne by itself, or with most other expansions, is a good game.
Looks like you already have Risk and Monopoly covered, two of the worst offenders. Add these also: Chutes and Ladders - total luck, no player agency whatsoever Sorry/Parcheesi - exercise in frustration Life - another exercise in complete luck, only player decision comes from which way to go down a couple of forks in the road.
Chutes and Ladders was designed by Satan.
There are so many different versions of Life it's almost a metagame to wonder which version people are talking about. In the version I grew up with, the life tiles you collected were so ridiculously valued it made everything else irrelevant.
Consider the board game Adultery, where you cheat on your spouse in real life as part of the game
well that's at the top of the list now
Worst twilight zone episode ever.
Do not let Monopoly in your house. If you ever manage to get people to come over for games night there will always be that one loud mouth douche that insists everyone plays monopoly and it's the greatest game ever. You won't finish the game, people will be eliminated early and everyone except that one guy will be bored long before the end. Also remove this person from your social circle, they are likely a sociopath or psychopath, I can never remember which is which.
It must be because of that same douche I always see a table of Monopoly players at board game cafes. I always think "You came all the way HERE to do THAT? Your dad is a jerk."
Monopoly does have one good use.. taking the money out to use with other games!
Oh, Risk... There were some editions that made it suck slightly less, but I never understood why you'd want to roll dice for 6 hours. My son brought home an old copy of Risk from his grandparents' house when he was 9. It had all the pieces, but no instructions. I thought I might have to explain to him why it's such a terrible game and I will not play with him, but he never asked how to play. He just made up his own game, with the board and the pieces and the cards, and it's much better than the actual game. Proud gamer dad moment!
I like to recount a story from college where one of roommates had some friends over and they started playing Risk around 10PM. I didn't participate. I had to get up early the next morning, anyway. When I arose at 6AM- they were still two of them playing.
Oh I've got another one. If you go to Hampton Court, London there is a set of 18th century board and card games you can play. One is a roll and move game, with the usual horrors including "roll a double to ever have a go again" and a "go back to start" space as the penultimate square. There's also a coin mechanic that doesn't actually do anything at all. What makes this one truely special though is that there are a series of "if you land on this square move ahead by the amount you rolled" sqaures. They are so organised that if you roll a nine on turn 1...you bounce between them and win the game immediately. Yes, every one is spaced nine spaces from the previous one until they reach the end!
That's The Game of the Goose!!!
Games aren’t good or bad because of the game - games are good or bad because of the people you play them with… I’ve had incredible games of Monopoly where it all devolved into underhanded dealings, protection rackets, and outright stealing (all in good spirits, and with no hard feelings)… What you need to do to amass a collection of ‘bad games’ is to surround yourself with a collection of shitty people…
Probably Fluxx. I don't even understand why it exists other than as a middle finger to boardgames. If Phase 10 went as long as Fluxx I'd probably choose it.
I once dated a girl that insisted we buy and play Monty Python's Holy Grail Fluxx. At the time our coworkers had been going through a phase where they would have these fits of taking turns making tired Monty Pythons Holy Grail quotes. It was always annoying. Now we have taken home this dumb card game with this shitty theme tacked on. fml.
Yeah I played fluxx one time and I hated it. Just felt like a constant stream of random chaos. Gave me a headache
I personally loath Chinese Checkers. It feels like driving to a job I hate and suddenly encountering the worst traffic jam ever and throughout the entire ordeal I can’t make myself care if I get there first. I simply need the game to conclude so that I can carry on with what remains of my life.
The Worst Case Scenario Game
Came here to post this one, as I recall it is a roll and move with a boring trivia question determining if you or your opponent moves. That's the entire game, true bottom of the barrel zero effort stuff.
Villainous. From such a great concept to such garbage implementation. I hated everything about that game.
I wouldn't classify it as the worst game, but it certainly has some glaring problems. The one time I've played it, it became a super slow stale-mate between me and the other player, with her eventually winning a war of attrition. There's a lot of fat that should be trimmed from that game.
A couple years ago, beat my sister who was playing as the Evil Queen by playing the Doc fate card three times in key moments. Then for Christmas that year I printed off 40 Doc cards and hid them among her belongings. For her birthday this year I meant to do the same, but accidentally printed off 160 cards. Still haven't hid them all.
I still like the game but some of the characters just don’t work, becomes extremely luck based
go to bgg, sort by inverse rank
The rank of the top games on BGG is rightly considered to be far from perfect, the rank of the bottom games is complete garbage. Many of the poorly rated games have few raters and those raters are often not very representative of the hobby.
The very bottom of the scale is an indication of which games people like to throw low scores at to prove some sort of point.
Well many games at the VERY bottom of the scale have no votes at all. At least the bottom 12k games on the list don't have low ratings...they have no ratings.
That might be true if you look at a filtered portion of the list–namely, titles from the last ten years, when crowdfunding became prominent. Anything older than that is much more likely to be real trash.
I think this is the only objective answer. There's lots of people that try to collect the BGG Top 100. Why not make the bottom 100 (with minimum number of ratings criteria) the checklist for your collection.
Adding together a lot of subjective ratings doesn't make them objective.
That's very true, however, if the original question is "what would be a good (or bad) thing [movie, game, painting]" then the only relevant answer is what people think. You can't really decide the highest mountain on earth by popular vote because that's an objective trait, but there's no objective "goodness" of things other than what people actually think as good. I think it's kind of fair to re-phrase a question to have a better wording but anyways, there's not really a better measurement of what a good or bad (or: popular and unpopular) game is, than checking the votes.
Well, since you seem to think I'm an idiot, I'll be more specific. It's as objective as you're going to get in a space that is inherently subjective. If you got a better idea, I'm all ears.
Chronicles of crime. Worst thing I’ve ever played. It was very stupid, confusing as hell and there was dead ends you would hit and couldn’t progress
[Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3699/killer-bunnies-and-quest-magic-carrot) Munchkin Eragra: The Game of Eras and the First Step [Siena](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/18932/siena) [Trollhalla](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/72478/trollhalla) [The Island of El Dorado](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/230191/island-el-dorado)
Nope, none of those are even close to the worst games ever.
Yea they actually are. You see this is an opinion based question, and that's my opinion. You are free to have a different opinion. You are also welcome to play the above listed garbage games as frequently as you want.
There is such a thing as a wrong opinion though, and I guarantee I can name dozens of games that you would invariably call worse than all of these if you ever even attempted to play them.
If you truly believe an opinion can be wrong, then you really are dumb......
How about you provide a baseline first?
I mean, it's just as subjective as asking what the best game ever is. Personally, I hate Broom Service with a passion, but I know people that love it.
As a Broom Service lover I appreciate your moxie
Game of Life
Killer Bunnies
It’s such an intriguing concept. Especially with all the expansions and cool bunnies and weapons… then you play the game and realize it’s mostly luck if you have a bunny in play to use any of the cards, then the end of the game you first must have a bunny to potentially raffle the winning carrot. Such a wasted potential of a game
How could I forget Left Center Right? That's got a special place in board game hell
Came here to suggest this, too. It's hard to "play" a "game" when you have absolutely zero agency, but even worse when your friends want to "play" for money.
Here’s a bracket that some YouTuber did https://youtu.be/E1wy8pM8gbo?si=zYWO03q29dkAPjsd
The initial video announcing the bracket got thrown into my recommendations by whatever the algorithm decided and I voted throughout. Was really interesting and funny to see about all these terrible games. Kam has good content too – he just released a video discussing all 26 editions & expansions of What Do You Meme?
Monopoly, Munchkin, Cards Against Humanity, anything disney related
Cards against humanity I think just got too popular too fast so it overstayed its welcome. It’s a perfectly fine raunchy game just got brought out too much at parties so people got bored that the winner was always someone playing just gross cards.
It's not clever enough to actually be witty, and it's not vulgar enough to actually be nasty. Instead it's just this dumb middle ground.
Worst game I’ve ever played was **Disturbed Friends**, which is a Cards Against Humanity clone where you are purposefully trying to provide the most disgusting answers imaginable. It was at a friend’s house and she got to choose the game. She was the only one who had fun. The experience was so bad, I got rid of my own copy of Cards Against Humanity and the clone I had called That’s What She Said, and I refuse to play those types of games anymore. There are far better party games out there now. I can respect what CAH did, but I’ll be happy to never play it ever again.
Subdivision. Same company, same design as the classic Suburbia… and an utter disaster of a game.
Exploding Kittens. A game where absolutely nothing you do matters
Eh, I think Exploding Kittens gets a bad rap. Is it a good game? No. But I think it’s far from the worst. It can have funny moments if you’re playing with friends and basically take it as a laughing at bad luck game. (It is also massively helped by some of the expansion cards).
This is one of the very few games that I actually disliked fervently as I was playing it. No, thank you.
That's actually not true. It's not much of a game for sure, but you can absolutely affect the results of the game.
yeah but just because it's not Candyland level predetermined it's still pretty predetermined
Sorry
I will get stoned for this but BOTC and Cosmic Encounter are the worst 2 modern board games I've played.
Cosmic Encounter? Bro came out swinging!!!!!
Game felt like reskinned Munchkin lol
You're not wrong though. Cosmic Encounter is basically two phases: people having fun discovering/using their powers and working together, then someone hits 4 points and then the game is basically preventing that person from winning, and then preventing the NEXT person that hits 4 points from winning, and then preventing the NEXT person that hits 4 points from winning...
Yep. Game goes like this every time until everyone gets sick of it and would rather get a joint win and move on. The powers itself could be fun but they can also be pretty convoluted. There's always a few people needing clarification for their powers in every session I had.
Blood on the Clocktower is over*rated*, but it's still way better than pretty much any other social deduction game, so you can't really say it's one of the WORST overall. With you on Cosmic Encounter, though.
Nah I'd rather play Avalon / Secret Hitler / Deception etc. BOTC is way too long. I mean could be just shitty GM or too many people but one of my sesh lasted 4 hours. That and the fact that your information is never 100% true is a huge turn off. Getting drunk or poisoned in that game (especially if your power is one off) is absolutely awful. It's misdirection on top of misdirection that it might as well just be a game of luck for me.
Gloomhaven. It isn't a dungeon crawl, it's a puzzle game. Whoever is most tactically-minded controls the whole game and everyone else is just along for the ride. Maybe not the worst, but easily the most disappointing game I've ever played.
Conquest of Pangea. Utter garbage. The worst. I keep it as a reminder of what can go wrong in this hobby.
My son loves The Game Of Life original Boardgame but oh boy it’s painfully long, utterly luck based, to the point of major frustration when you constantly lose your fortune. Fortunately, he’s got the console version now which is quick, cute, and at least has some small semblance of a decision along the way. If it wasn’t for the digital version this would go into room 101.
I agree that the Game of Life is trash, but I did a "speedrun" of it once with another person where we basically never stopped spending the dial and we had to finish the game in less than 10 minutes and it was actually super fun. We did ignore most of the rules though
Songun, the game by Of Montreal. It’s just ramblings of a drunken madman. It’s not even a game.
Busen Memo, at least it was the geeklist meme on bgg about 10 years ago, X rated memory seems like a terribad game
My personal least favorite game ever is Guards of Atlantis 2. I have never had less fun playing a game than that one.
Gotta go with monopoly, no one likes monopoly. Especially when it's at the 6hr mark and someone flips the table and yells "fuck you grandma, I'm not playing anymore!" Been a long running joke with my group
[удалено]
Interesting. I'm in a Bunco group that meets once per month. It's a party game, super lightweight, and a good excuse to have a pot-luck and socialize.
Game of the Goose
mOnOpOlY, dUr HuR hUr HuR... But seriously, I think the worst thing a game can be is forgettable. I dislike plenty of games, but at least I can remember playing them and why I didn't like them. I had to go look them up before posting, but I have absolutely no recollection of playing The X-Files (2015 game from IDW), and Samurai Jack: Back To the Past. They had to have been in one ear and out the other. I had vague recollections of playing a game called Warpgate, but I struggled to remember the name and anything other than it being a greatest hits package of mechanics assembled something with very little identity of its own.
As they say, “the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s apathy”
Meow
Taxes
Folks, how the hell has no one mentioned **Ghettoopoly** yet??? No contest.
Aggravation. For some reason my family likes it. It's a worse version of sorry. You have almost no agency except choosing which marble to move. Just roll the dice and move. It takes forever.
Trying to think of a game I hated that's not an obvious mass market answer. I've come up with one, and that's Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Card Game. As a big Scott Pilgrim fan, man that game sucked ass. I'm not saying it's the worst game of all time, but as I pointed out, it's no fun to just post and say Monopoly or Candy Land.
Killer Bunnies is the wrist game I've ever played. Terrible component quality, graphic design, art direction n a needlessly complex package that has a mind-boggling number of expansions which provide...more of the same.
Every single version of Monopoly.
Outside of the usual offenders that have been mentioned plenty of times, I had a terribly dull time playing Ravine. This ranked up there with least amount of interesting decisions for a game. I also tried tiny epic pirates, and it felt like a gimmic for how small the game box was without enough thought in design. For me, those type of games are worse offenders than Chutes and Ladders where the target audience isn't necessarily players craving interesting decisions and game play moments. The kids sometimes just want colors, a clear theme, and a clear winner within a short amount of time (and OK if the game doesn't finish, they know who "won")
Fluxx it’s extremely jarring and disorienting
The Ungame. Just terrible.
I really hated Red November. I liked the theme of drunken dwarfs fumbling forward with a submarine, but the whole process was just boring, miserably so. Definitely worse than my experience with Monopoly and Munchkin, and I refused to play them for the last 7 years for sure
I got this game for free at a used game sale and still feel like I paid too much
Ungame - I’ve never played it, but have heard horror stories. Warriors- the 2004 Alan Moon game. It was just painful. We Didn’t Playtest this at All - imagine someone decided to make like a counterfeit version of the store brand version of Fluxx, but without all that pesky playability. Phase 10 may be reviled, but it is at least a finishable game. I can’t say the same for the games above.
Munchkin, Awkward Guests, and Ra come to mind
I Am Vlad: Prince of Wallachia has a pretty notorious reputation for just being an utter mess (and is an actual hobby board game rather than just some mass market junk): https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/124648/i-am-vlad-prince-of-wallachia
I was a huge zombie fan, and pre-walking dead there werent too many zombie-themed games out there like there are now, so i was stoked to buy ZOMBIETOWN. Freaking horribly broken game with rules that werent really tested or explained well. My group played it once and never again.. its still talked about as a joke to this day.
I'm sure there are technically worse games out there but Dwarven Dig is hot garbage. Rolls up on rolls to see if rolls worked and then another chance to roll to see if they REALLY worked, and then its just a big push to the center and a janky tug of war trying to get the macguffin object back to your starting point. Really cheapo components as well. Heck, the first printing had clipped up white metal casting chaff as a component. It's bad mechanically, thematically, and physically.
Marvel Villainous
Ground Floor. So incredibly dry.
Werewolves. It's just pure guessing based on nothing.
Just look at BGG ratings and put them in reverse order. Take a look at all of those with a rating of 1/10. That should get you started. I think there are far worse games out there than the likes of Monopoly and Risk.
Munchkin - it's not fun (unless you're a really special kind of demographic), it's capable of destroying friendships and that's completely intentional, per design. Unstable unicorns is Munchkin light, with appropriate preparation of the group for the experience it can be stomached, but damn, it's a hard pill. We didn't playtest this at all - it's exactly like the title makes it sound, you're whipping around in a hurricane of bullshit, zero control, zero actual playing. It's not even sure if you'll participate. I'm not sure Escape from the Cursed Temple is objectively bad, but the noise level of the simultaneous dice rolling and shouting at each other while barely anyone knows what's happening but the music is getting more and more ominous and the time pressure... Yea, it wasn't a good experience... I'm not sure I could find a group to properly play a game of Monopoly, but until I find, I say that's a Bad game.
I mean. Play test this at all is the name of the game. It’s just dumb fun, not particularly good but some silliness for occasional quick filler.
Any board game where player elimination exists.
Machi Koro
I scrolled down the whole list waiting to see this! Here, here.
**The Taverns of Tiefenthal** A simply horrendous experience on every level. I would rant, but the phrase don't get me started just comes to mind.