Board Game Geek’s game ratings are usually a pretty good barometer for measuring the general quality of a game. My tastes generally align with the wider board game community, but now and then, everyone else gets it wrong. In this list, I’m going to preset the 5 games that the BGG community seems to think are are great, but I think are subjectively awful.
1. Terraforming Mars
BGG Rank: #7
Terraforming Mars looks great on paper. You’re building a corporate engine to terraform the red planet, managing resources and planning projects in a shared environment. But in my experience, it’s a frustrating exercise in deck lottery.
The deck of cards is enormous, and your ability to draw cards is brutally limited. Earning the benefit of drawing a single card is huge, which makes it expensive, or highly sought after. This shouldn’t be that be much of a problem, except that the corporation you start the game with often suggests a strategic path, but there’s no guarantee the necessary cards to synergize with your corporation will ever show up. Even when you’re playing with the drafting variant, meaning you’ll see much more cards, you’re still at the mercy of the deck.
Photo Credit: Gábor Zehetmayer @zgabor via BGG
My other main complaint, those cards that are so hard to come by, often have prerequisites, such as needing to be played before the oxygen level crosses a certain threshold. While I love the prerequisites thematically, they can show up long after they’re playable, making your limited draw feel even more useless. I cannot tell you how often I’ve held onto a card because I’m just one tag short, only for that tag to not show up for me for the rest of the game.
Terraforming Mars has its fans, but for me, it’s a hard pass.
2. Great Western Trail
BGG Rank: #17
Alexander Pfister is a well respected designer. But I am not a fan of most of his output.
In Great Western Trail, you’re herding cows, building up your deck, and placing buildings, as you run your meeple around and around a looping trail. There’s a fair amount going on, but little of it feels satisfying. It’s a flat, emotionless grind of getting your cows to the train, and then, doing it all over again.
GWT technically offers variety, you can pursue getting the train father, cull the low value cows out of your deck, or focus on building the buildings. But none of those routes feel especially dynamic or interesting. It’s a slow experience that overstays its welcome, especially at higher player counts. There’s no tension, no narrative, and no reason to return to the trail.
3. Grand Austria Hotel
BGG Rank: #67
At first glance, Grand Austria Hotel is a charming euro with elegant mechanics. You’re serving guests cake, strudel, and coffee, managing getting the rooms ready, all while dealing with the emperor’s whims. But when you start playing, you’ll discover that the dice system, which controls what actions you can take, is terribly arbitrary and restrictive, and the guest market can stagnate with no good options. The limited dice pool and scarcity of room-building options can make turns feel frustratingly out of your control.
What’s even worse, massive player downtime and analysis paralysis makes Grand Austria Hotel an absolute slog at four players. You can’t even really plan for your turn, because what the dice the other players take on their turn will dramatically affect what you’ll be able to do. The snake draft at 4 players means that if you were first player in a round, every other player will take two turns until it’s your turn again. It’s just a brutal amount of downtime.
My real sour grapes come from the last time I played this with Otter. He managed to roll the benefits from completing guests into the next guest, and the next guest, and the next. He was taking turn after turn, completing objective after objective, while I struggled to get a single strudel. Absolutely frustrating.
I like the Klemmens Franz artwork, though. And seeing characters from a bunch of different board games show up as guests is a nice treat.
4. Maracaibo
BGG Rank: #77
Hey, look! Another Alexander Pfister game. I really wanted to like Maracaibo. It has a rondel system similar to GWT, multi-use cards, and a pirate theme! But I felt that the experience was bloated, convoluted, and shockingly dull.
To evoke the feeling and imagery of pirates is a disservice to the players. There’s no tension, no risk, no high-stakes raiding, nothing to make you feel like pirates had anything to do with the game. Maracaibo is a swirl of disconnected mechanisms and tracks to progress as you fly around the islands, a la Great Western Trail.
I do not understand the appeal of Maracaibo. I felt nothing but frustration while playing it. None of the theme comes through, all of the fun things on your board are covered up and need to be unlocked, ‘combat’ is just comparing a track, and the game ends up being several hours long, every single time. At the very least, I’m very thankful that one player kinda can “rush” the endgame, so I can put myself out of my misery sooner.
5. Rajas of the Ganges
BGG Rank: #160
As I’ve already said in my full review: Rajas of the Ganges is pleasant. It’s colourful and has a unique “two types of points” scoring system (at least, it was unique until Ark Nova came along and stole it). But for all its charm, there’s not that much game underneath.
Once your engine gets going, Rajas of the Ganges plays itself. Once you get your income rolling in, the best action is obvious, every time. I get frustrated with how many of the worker placement spots are “trade one dice in for two”. A net gain of one dice means you may spend a whole round of actions just gathering dice so you can actually do something meaningful. And that’s just not my idea of fun.
It’s not a bad game. It’s just kinda forgettable. And given the sheer number of stronger euro games out there, like Castles of Burgundy, Orléans, or The Voyages of Marco Polo, I’m not sure why I’d ever choose to play Rajas of the Ganges again.
It’s OK to Disagree
If you love these games, that’s fine! More power to you. But for me, these titles don’t live up to their BGG hype. Each one of these have left me either apathetic after a play, or actually downright angry. And you’re not allowed to tell me that my feelings aren’t valid.
Do you have an overrated favourite game of your own? Let me know which wildly popular game you think is kinda garbage. And now that I have all this negativity out of my system, next week I’ll be much more positive. I promise.
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