Imagine this scenario. You’re at your friendly local game store. You’ve just picked up a hot new game off the shelf. You flip it over to check out the back, as if you don’t already know everything about the game from the media blitz on BGG/social media, let alone your own research. You feel an overwhelming urge to buy the game, add it to your collection. Just think how excited your game group will be when they hear you’ve picked up a brand new game! But in the back of your mind, something’s itching. Do you really need a new game? Don’t you have 7 other games on your shelf of shame/opportunity? Never mind the dozens of games you bought, punched, learned, and played only once.
You love board games. You’ve played hundreds. You’ve backed dozens of Kickstarters, you read rules just for fun, you’ve joined online board game communities to talk about your favourite games… And yet… there they are. The games you genuinely liked, experiences you enjoy, just, sitting on your shelf. Unfinished legacy campaigns, half-explored systems. Expansions you’ve folded into the base box that you never got around to actually playing.
My question is: Why do board gamers keep abandoning games they actually like?
Or perhaps more bluntly: Why are we always chasing the cult of the new?
Allow me to pontificate.
Completion Bias
Humans hate unfinished things. This isn’t a gamer problem, it’s a brain problem. Psychologists have known for nearly a century that we remember unfinished tasks more vividly than completed ones. It’s why a half finished campaign nags at you more than the game you’ve already “got your money’s worth” from.
Board games are especially good at triggering this completion bias:
Campaigns with branching paths
Expansions that promise to “fix” or “deepen” the base game
Modular content you haven’t tried yet
Fan expansions or community made variants
Expert strategies that only become clear after 10+ plays
The completion bias gets cranked up to 11 when companies like Queen Games put numbers on the sides of their boxes. It’s brutally unsatisfying to look at a shelf of games and see the spines labelled “1…2…4…”. Where’s 3? You have to get number 3!!
Some gamers aspire to acquire the entire catalogue of their favourite designer. I fell into this trap for a while, seeking out every Vladimir Suchy game possible. But in the end, I had 8 different games and only really enjoyed playing 2 of them.
Loss aversion is absolutely at play here. You’ve put in the initial investment to acquire a game or a series, so adding the latest game or an expansion is comparatively cheap. In the worst scenario, a game or expansion doesn’t get reprinted so you need to add it to your collection now before it disappears, as if it’s a rare Pokemon in the Safari Zone.
The Infinite Release Problem
There are more board games coming out now than at any other point in the hobby’s history. Crowdfunding, print-on-demand, small and indie publishers, solo designers, anyone and everyone can put a game out into the world. Which is great! But it’s also overwhelming. It feels like every single week there’s a “must-play” new game, two hot new Kickstarter games, and a massively popular designer releasing a new game that has the whole board game media sphere in a tizzy.
And board gaming is a social hobby, even when you mostly play solo. We want to be part of the conversation or cultural zeitgeist. We want to know what everyone else is talking about. We might want to avoid spoilers, hot takes, and the creeping sense that we’re falling behind. So you shelve your old favourites, or any unplayed games you already own temporarily so you can “just try” the new thing. You buy the hot game, post a picture of it on social media or to your board game groups chat, and say to yourself “I’ll definitely learn how to play this before next game day”
Unfortunately, the act of buying a game and posting on social media gave your brain a sweet, sweet dopamine hit, and if we’re being honest, learning rules is pretty boring. What’s even more boring is going back to that old game that you promised yourself to play last week.
Novelty Is a Hell of a Drug
On the subject of sweet dopamine hits, new games are front-loaded with dopamine. The first play is full of discovery, learning the systems, discovering the strategies, talking about what you can do better next time! This feeling is powerful, but it doesn’t last forever. And when you compare a game that you like, with a whole new game, it’s so easy to pick the new game. After all, the new game might be your new favourite game of all time! The new game can be anything and everything, while the old game… you already know what the old game has to offer.
Another frustration point is if one player at your table is particularly good at a game. Do you want to spend your one game night a week struggling against someone who’s probably going to win anyway? A new game offers a level playing field, with everyone at the table discovering strategies at the same time.
Too Much Content Can Kill Love
Here’s where this really hits modern board gaming. Big games now feel designed to be endless. This is more of a problem with crowdfunded games where the all-in tier is $800 and is shipped in 3 waves. I’m talking Final Girl, or Bloodborne, or Marvel United, or any of those big crowdfunding projects. With modules, expansions, campaigns, and just piles and piles of content. So much that you could play this game for every game night and still have fresh stuff to play when the expansion hits Kickstarter the following year!
Sometimes having too much content can push players away. When you have so many different permutations of how a game can be played, with interlocking modules or optional expansions, you can become paralyzed. Which module should you start with, which combination is the optimal way to play? Does character X play well against mission Y? This turns a game night into homework. And my high school grades should tell you, I hate homework.
The Fantasy of the Perfect Play
Another quiet trap: holding games off for the “right moment.” Maybe you don’t want to play Zoo Vadis until you have at least 5 players, or Tainted Grail is best at one or two players, so you need to wait for a game night that suits that. Maybe you don’t want to play a deduction game while you’re tired, or start a complex game when you only have 2 hours before one of your players HAS to leave. You don’t want to play a certain game until the conditions are ideal.
Postponing games you’re excited about cools your enthusiasm. And while your enthusiasm is cooling-off on one game, there’s a shiny new game right around the corner, begging you for your time and money.
Why Do We Chase the New?
At the end of the day, I think it’s important to state that abandoning games doesn’t make you an irresponsible person. Board games are not obligations, they’re not self-improvement tools. You don’t owe a game anything just because you bought it. I do think it’s worth noticing how often we confuse starting something new with doing something meaningful.
The cult of the new always keeps us moving, keeps us active and engaged in our favourite hobby, but it’s not always engaging in a deeper or more meaningful way. If you’re like me, once the dopamine of buying a new game, watching the shipping tracker inch closer to your door every day, then pulling off the shrink wrap and punching the pieces out while imagining what it’s going to be like to play this game wears off, you just feel vaguely unsatisfied. Some of the arguments above might be why.
If you’ve been feeling disconnected with your hobby, or missing the joy you once held with cardboard, I think the trick to reinvigorating your hobby time isn’t by buying a new game, but it’s getting back to the classics. Playing the games that made you fall in love with board games in the first place. When was the last time you played Carcassonne, Pandemic, or Agricola? Those are still amazing games! You can plop them onto the table and have a great night with them, right now!
I think cult of the new isn’t really about games, but about feeling connected. When the media we consume is always showing us a new thing, it’s pretty natural to want to be a part of that conversation. But in the end, if you aren’t playing games, then you’re just engaging in wanton consumerism, and that’s not very fun at all.
Perhaps this is a byproduct of playing entirely too many games on Board Game Arena, or maybe I’ve just become more sensitive to it since having kids and watching my sleep health deteriorate entirely, but I hate hidden trackable information in board games.
First, a definition.
Hidden Trackable Information (HTI) refers to information that everyone at the table could be tracking and therefore knows with 100% certainty, but which is deliberately hidden. I’m not talking about drawing cards into your hand in Ticket to Ride, even if you use the public market every turn, because you could still be drawing blindly from the deck, and that information is hidden.
What I mean is something more like Puerto Rico, where scores are completely trackable, but for some reason the scores are told to be hidden. Or For Sale, where you can, and probably should, be tracking how much money each player is paying at each auction, and therefore how much money they have left for future bids, but the rules insist on keeping your bank accounts private.
Here’s my real problem with hidden trackable information: I’m dumb. And I play games with really smart people.
I don’t mind losing because I made tactical errors, or because randomness bit me in the ass. I can handle that just fine. But when I lose because I wasn’t able to keep every piece of data in my head while my opponents were successfully counting cards or tracking points, it feels incredibly discouraging.
A good example is El Grande. Players drop cubes into the castle, and when it’s time to score, the cubes are revealed and whoever has the majority scores the points. I find it deeply frustrating to sit there trying to remember who put cubes in and how many. Should I commit three cubes because I think that puts me into the majority? Should I commit four just to be safe? If I had been writing this down as players added cubes, I’d be able to make an informed decision instead of guessing based on vibes and vibes alone.
As most parents do, I’m going to blame my children.
Over the past five years, my sleep has been constantly interrupted by rugrats. Unfortunately for me, no one else in my game group has kids. They usually show up to game night well rested and emotionally stable, ready for a long game of cold calculations. Meanwhile, I’m crawling in on four hours of sleep because my five-year-old was awake for three hours from 1am to 4am, terrified she was going to swallow her first loose tooth (true story).
Some people have very strong opinions about hidden trackable information. I’m always surprised by the ferocity with which people will defend games that use HTI, and rail against the mere idea of someone using a memory aid or taking notes.
“It makes games so much less enjoyable!” “memory is a skill! That’s part of playing the game!”
In furtherance of me being dumb, playing a lot of board games online has absolutely made my brain lazy. The Yucata version of El Grande shows you exactly what’s in the castle at all times, because, ostensibly, you could be tracking that information yourself. BGA has a notes feature built right into the interface, allowing you to jot things down at any time. Somewhat ironically, I almost never use it, but I’m glad it’s there, especially for those async games that stretch over weeks.
The most common defences of HTI seem to be that it reduces analysis paralysis and prevents king making. If everyone knows exactly who’s winning, the table will pile on the leader. If all information is open, players might spend far more time puzzling out the optimal move instead of trusting their gut and just playing the game. To me, this sounds like the defence of well rested players relying on their more simple compatriots making mistakes to cement their victory.
So where is the line? When is hidden trackable information okay?
Would you allow someone to look through a discard pile to check whether a card had already been played, and they just missed it? Would you allow a player to look into their bag in Orléans or Automobiles to confirm what cubes they even have available to them?
If you let someone shift through their discard pile, would you let them look through the previously played tricks to see if that jack of hearts had already been played? Some games like Cat in the Box are very friendly to players like me, because they include a whole board for everyone to track what cards have already been played.
Now, I will concede that playing El Grande with perfect information makes the reveal much less exciting. Sometimes imperfect information really does create a different, and occasionally better, experience. I’ll also concede that taking this argument to its logical extreme is annoying. I absolutely don’t want to play with someone who’s maintaining a full spreadsheet of which cards have appeared and which ones I’ve drafted while playing Star Realms. As with most things, nuance matters.
Some games only work with HTI. Trio, for instance, should be a simple game of memory, but for some reason it makes me feel like my brain is melting out of my ears. But the game only really shines when players are making mistakes and struggling to remember if they already know what someone’s lowest card is. The ever shifting information of players hands helps facilitate that feeling as well. Similarly, Wandering Towers would be really boring if those towers were clear.
As with all things, context matters. I’m generally pretty against HTI in economic euro games, because the purpose or goal of those games are to be the most efficient, and obscuring some information goes against the spirit of the game. In other, less mathematical games, where the purpose of the game is to evoke specific feelings, then HTI makes sense.
But in my opinion, someone who insists on preserving HTI and then wins because of my poor memory is no better than someone winning a game because their opponent forgot a rule and had a critical turn derailed. I’d much rather win or lose with everyone playing at their best, rather than because someone couldn’t remember how many cubes were dropped into a tower.
All of this said, I’m speaking from a place of privilege. No one at my table suffers from serious analysis paralysis. No one quarterbacks co-op games. No one is deliberately exploiting information asymmetry to bully less confident players. I’m not arguing that HTI is always bad, or that it should be purged from game design entirely.
But I am saying this: if the deciding factor in a strategy game is who remembered better, or who was able to silently run a second game in their head while also playing the first one, then that’s not a test of strategy I find especially compelling anymore.
I want to win or lose because I made better decisions with the information in front of me. I want my mistakes to be tactical, not neurological. When a game rewards someone for tracking numbers in their head while pretending they aren’t there, it doesn’t feel clever to me, it feels exclusionary.
Maybe that’s the sleep deprivation talking. Maybe it’s too many games on BGA. Or maybe it’s just that, at this stage of my life, I’m less interested in proving I can remember how many cubes went into a tower three rounds ago, and more interested in making interesting choices right now. If that means occasionally letting players look into their bag and confirm the information that was available to them all along? I’m fine with that. I’d rather play a game where everyone can see the whole picture, than one where the real contest is who forgot the least.
It’s hard to argue with the idea that board gaming is in a golden age right now. Walk into almost any game store, browse an online retailer, or sit down at a local café, and you’re spoiled for choice in a way that simply didn’t exist 15 or 20 years ago. Some people may argue that the real golden age of board games was 10 years ago, when some of the best games of all time were being released, but I’d argue that the reason why the previous decade seemed better than now has more to do with our overconsumption of media and increased awareness of the average game coming out now, rather than an actual quality difference. It’s not unlike when someone says “movies used to be so much better”, and then list only the best movies from a decade. All the chaff has been lost to time, it’s not that the movies used to be better, but we just remember the good ones.
So many games, so much better
I’ll obviously concede that the raw number of new games has increased dramatically over the past 20 years, but I honestly believe that the average game has gotten better. Designers have spent decades iterating, seeing the mechanisms that work, discarding the bits that don’t, and “firing” older designs with cleaner, more engaging versions that make it hard to go back.
Production quality has quietly reset expectations: distinct art styles, thoughtful graphic design, and gorgeous components that almost always meet a solid baseline of quality. The average game released today would be considered an ultra deluxe edition 15 years ago. Just look at Agricola’s original printing, where all the animals are just coloured discs. No stickers, no ani-meeples, no screen printing. Just piles of wooden discs and cubes.
Behold my sheep pen
That is why this era feels like a golden age: you can pick almost any weight or genre and find multiple polished options that didn’t exist 15 years ago. Even mid‑tier releases tend to be well-developed, thoroughly playtested, and perhaps most importantly, look amazing.
I think one of the concepts that people who say that the golden age of board gaming is over needs to reconcile, is the fact that anyone who joined the board game hobby in the last 5 or 10 years, had a period of explosive interest. Every game mechanic was new and interesting, and you had two decades of great titles to plumb. But once you’ve discovered all the greats, your attention naturally shifts to what’s coming out now, and you’re seeing a lot more of the average game, that will eventually be forgotten to time. For example, around 2008 saw the release of Pandemic, Brass, and Agricola. But for all their acclaim, how many people even remember some of the mid-range releases, such as Steel Driver, Shanghaien, or Comuni?
Crowdfunding: fuel and friction
I’d argue that Crowdfunding is the single biggest accelerant behind the glut of new titles, but it also embodies many of the hobby’s current risks. For established publishers, it has morphed from a funding lifeline for games that wouldn’t exist otherwise, into a marketing and pre‑pay/pre-order machine, complete with built‑in hype, and moving the risk from the publisher onto the customers.
The “indie dream” of Kickstarter is shrinking, as players are increasingly less likely to pay attention to, and more importantly, less likely to contribute their dollars to projects that aren’t 1) fully conceptualized and ready to produce, and 2) from a known designer or publisher. Players instead concentrate on the brands that have massive advertising budgets, recognizable designers, and more commonly, a licensed IP. All this leaves unknown designers struggling to fund without already having a platform and/or a huge following.
At the same time, crowdfunding has enabled some amazing projects that might never have existed in a purely traditional system. Games that the designer believed in when no publisher was willing to take on the risk of producing it. The hard question is whether a few unicorns justify a culture of compulsive backing when there are already thousands of proven games on shelves today. Why should you as a consumer take the risk on a Crowdfunded game and put your money down months if not years in advance, when you could pop into your friendly local game store today and buy dozens of known, great games?
Culture, venues, and the next wave of players
On the subject of FLGS, outside the bubble that is this hobby’s media sphere, board games are more visible and normal than they used to be. Wingspan shows up at family gatherings for people who have never heard the phrase “hobby board game,” Ticket to Ride appeared on Saturday Night Live, and big‑box retailers are stocking titles that you used to have to special order.
The small city where I live has grown to support 3 separate board game cafés, and each one is frequently full. Almost every pub around me has a game shelf, and more often than not I see someone plopping one of those games onto the table to have a good time while enjoying their beverages. Libraries are getting in on the action, allowing players to take games home to explore, spreading the board gaming joy to a dozen families at a time. While anecdotal, all of this showcases that board gaming is becoming much more normalized as a default night‑out option rather than a niche pastime.
The most important shift may be generational. Many of the people entering the hobby now are in high school, college, or young adulthood, and they are growing up with modern designs as a normal social activity rather than a discovery. That cohort is likely to carry board gaming forward as one of their default ways to spend time together, and eventually to introduce their own kids to it.
Real risks: AI art, waste, and buying instead of playing
For all of my optimism, there are genuine threats that could flatten or sour the current board game trajectory if left unchecked.
AI art creep: Generative art is cheap and fast, which makes it tempting for publishers looking to cut costs or hit tight schedules. Over time, that will sand off the unique voices that made modern board game art so exciting, replacing distinctive illustrators with a bland, derivative style.
Wasteful production: Giant boxes full of plastic minis and single‑use packaging represent real environmental and storage costs, especially when many of those games see only a handful of plays before being sold or shelved. Every time I feel like this trend is starting to wane, another massive crowdfunding campaign shows up, earns 8 million bucks, and proves me wrong.
Volume over depth: There is a strong temptation, for players and publishers, to treat games as collectibles first and experiences second. Case in point being Queen Games’ Stefan Feld City Collection. When shelves fill faster than tables, good designs get buried, and the market rewards hype cycles and derivative games based on existing products more than replayable, unique and interesting systems.
None of these risks are inevitable outcomes. They are responses to incentives, and incentives can change.
How this golden age becomes a foundation, not a peak
If there is a single lever that would improve the hobby from here, it’s a shift in how players relate to their collections. I want to see more playing, less impulse buying. I feel like higher prices that reflect real development and production costs would likely slow down mindless accumulation and make each purchase feel more like a deliberate commitment to something that will actually hit the table, but we’ve all see the discourse around Food Chain Magnate, and how it’s art and components don’t justify it’s $120 price tag, despite it being one of the best games ever made.
I think it looks beautiful, just the way it is.
Proselytize tactfully: invite people in, show them genuinely great games on their first contact, and normalize board gaming the way golf or live music is normalized. Don’t trick someone into coming to your place only to slam down Arcsand trap them in an hour-long rule tutorial ahead of a 4-hour play time.
Vote with your wallet: reward publishers who pay human artists, design thoughtful, replayable games, and avoid wasteful components; starve the projects that lean on AI shortcuts, plastic bloat, and shallow design. Even if they’re using your favourite IP as a vehicle to suck money out of your wallet.
From that vantage point, this moment or golden age, is less “the top” and more of a mature plateau. This is a time when the board game hobby is big enough to be visible, diverse enough to satisfy nearly any taste, but still flexible enough to be shaped by the people who care about it.
What does it mean to be a board game collector? I think most of us in the board game hobby refer to the selection of games that we own as “our collection”, I often wonder how much thought is put into curating a collection, versus having an excuse for wanton consumerism.
Wile reading Sir Terry Pratchett’s 2004 novel Going Postal, a character by the name of Stanley Howler describes his hobby, which is pin collecting.
“While most ‘pinheads’ do indeed begin with a casually acquired flashy novelty pin, followed by the contents of their grandmothers’ pincushion, haha, the path to a truly worthwhile collection lies not in the simple disbursement of money in the nearest pin emporium, oh no. Any dilettante can become ‘kingpin’ with enough expenditure, but for the true ‘pinhead’ the real pleasure is in the joy of the chase, the pin fairs, the house clearances, and, who knows, a casual glint in the gutter that turns out to be a well-preserved Doublefast or an unbroken two-pointer. Well is it said: ‘See a pin and pick it up, and all day long you’ll have a pin.”
The line about the thrill of the chase really resonated with me. Aside from board games, one of my other main hobbies is reading. I have at least 6 book cases in my house, full of books. As my kids get older, their books take up more and more of my bookshelves, which means the remaining shelves have started to get double stacked. I’ve culled half a dozen boxes of books of my shelf, and yet, I still have hundreds of books that I just can’t bare the thought of parting with. Even though the vast majority of my book consumption these days is through my local library (either by borrowing the physical book, or the audio book and ebooks through Libby), I still dedicate a significant portion of my wall space to my books.
I’ve gotten a bit off track, though. When I was a teenager, I fell in love with a book. The Book of Flying by Keith Miller. I bought it on for $2 on heavy discount from a clearance table at Coles. The story is about Pico, a boy born without wings in a city of winged people. He falls in love with a winged girl after he rescues her from the sea, but their love is forbidden. He goes on a journey to find his wings, or perish in the attempt. I adored The Book of Flying, reading it over and over again. Unfortunately, I lost it when I broke up with a girlfriend, and she absconded with most of my books. For the next 8 years, it was my journey to find a copy of The Book of Flying. It was what I searched for whenever I visited a used book store, and visiting used book stores became a pastime for me and my wife when we visited new towns.
Yes, I know I could have just ordered the book on Amazon. But the point was having something to look for, a reason to go into all those used book stores and crawl through the dusty stacks.
Then one day I found it. High on a shelf in Victoria, B.C. I instantly bought it for $8, and felt complete and whole. The major downside was that now I had no real reason to visit used bookstores. I still do, but I miss having something to chase. And the high I felt after I finally acquired my grail book, is something I’m still searching for to this day.
So how does this relate to board games? As per Stanley Howler, any dilettante can become ‘kingpin’ with enough expenditure. Simply spending money recklessly does not make a collector, nor does simply having an obscene amount of games. You don’t need to own everything for a product line. Just because your favourite game released a new expansion, such as a new Phoenixborn & Chimera expansion for Ashes Reborn, or yet another scenario pack for Arkham Horror: The Card Game, or even another heroine pack for Bullet, no matter how much fun that game is, doesn’t mean you have to buy it to maintain your ‘complete collection’. The real joy and charm in a collection, is the personal story you have for every entry. How boring is the conversation when someone asks you how you got a game and your answer is just “bought it online”. The much more interesting tale is when you tell someone you bought a copy of Istanbul while you were in Turkey, or you found an out of print expansion for Five Tribes in a bookshop while on vacation in Nova Scotia. Or even the time my friend Bigfoot found a complete copy of Shogun for $4 at our local Value Village. To me, being a board game collector isn’t about volume or completion, it’s about stories and the chase.
I think we’ve all felt the “completionist” inside of us swell up when games get released as part of a set or series. Shut Up & Sit Down did a video review of the first four games in the Stefan Feld’s City Collection, where they struggle with the idea of owning only part of a series. This ‘problem’ does get exacerbated when publishers put sequential numbers on the sides of their boxes, making things look really awkward when you choose to only own the games that you enjoy. But purchasing games you don’t enjoy simply so your boxes have friends on their shelf sounds like a pretty silly pastime to me.
I always meant to pick up Scott Pilgrim 4 & 5. It’s never been a priority, though.
At the end of the day, I don’t think a board game collection is measured in numbers, or in whether the shelf looks “complete.” It’s measured in the stories those boxes carry with them. The hunt through used game stores, finding hidden gems at a thrift store, or even the strange scenarios that we found yourself in ownership of a new game. It’s these moments that give a board game collection a real value.
Being a collector isn’t about owning everything. It’s about owning something that matters. A collection should be a reflection of who you are, not just a representation of money you threw at an online retailer. So the next time you’re tempted by a hot new game, or are feeling the sting of FOMO when a hot kickstarter game is fulfilling, consider changing your tactic. Find something to really care about, a gem that no one else can easily find, and embark on a epic hunt.
I love listening/watching the videos by Tea and Games. Her enthusiasm for board games is so genuine and her joy is infectious. So when she posted her mid year Tabletop Challenge video, I was interested in playing along. Then when Kovray posted their video, I knew I had to get in on this action.
The midyear challenge has been initiated for the past 3 years by Rolling Reggie on his social media channels, so if you want to see what other creators have gotten in on this challenge, be sure to give Rolling Reggie a follow! Without further ado, let’s do this!
What is your favourite game so far this year?
Slay the Spire is the one that springs to mind. Now granted, I’ve played the living hell out of the video game, and I even played the TTS mod when STS was on crowdfunding. But actually sitting down and playing a 4 player game was probably the most fun I’ve had all year.
What is your most played game?
Technically, Solar Storm has been my most played game, but that’s just from sheer tenacity of my Board Game Arena group bashing our heads against the wall of the cooperative challenge. My most played game on the table so far in 2025 has been The Gang.
For those who haven’t played The Gang yet, it’s cooperative Poker. You deal out cards, Texas Hold’em style, and between each card reveal, you silently take chips to determine who has the best hand. When the final card is revealed, all players reveal their hands. If you managed to sort yourselves properly, you win!
It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s surprisingly engaging, and has been a hit with everyone I’ve introduced it to. I think I’m the least enthuastic amongst my friends about it, but even I still have a great time when The Gang hits the table.
What was your biggest surprise?
I think Bomb Busters was the biggest surprise. After reading the rulebook and playing the first introductory game, I was sure it was going to be Minesweeper, but boring. A baby game for babies, the options were either going to be obtuse, or obvious.
Well if it’s recent Spiel des Jahres win hadn’t convinced me, actually sitting down and playing the game turned me into a fan. I loved the experience, and I can’t wait to keep playing through the 60+ missions that come in the box.
What game’s production/art has impressed you the most?
I think most recently Vladamir Suchy’s Shipyard surprised me with its sheer amount of cardboard engineering, from assembling a crane to hold all the tiles, to stickering parts of the cardboard sprue to the player board to simulate a dual layered experience.
Beyond that, Re;Act: The Arts of War had gorgeous anime artwork and stunning acrylic standees for it’s grid based tactical duel game that left me totally charmed.
What has been your most reliable introductory board game?
Cockroach Poker has been a huge hit with me this year, and I’ve been successful in getting my aunt and cousin to sit down and enjoy a game. It’s so simple to deal out the whole deck of cards, explain the concept of lying, and then just letting the drama unfold.
What game do you want to get off of your Shelf of Shame in the second half of the year?
I have two that I’ve been been eyeing for a while now. Tragedy Looper by BakaFire is a 1 vs many scenario based deduction game that looks to be unique and exciting, but I’m just haven’t been in the mood to essentially GM a game for my friends. The other one is Argent: The Consortiumby Level 99 Games. This one is a competitive worker placement game, and the only thing holding me back from this one is its sheer complexity. At a weight of 3.77, it’s generally more than I’m willing to commit to on a Wednesday night. Perhaps when I host my annual birthday board game day I’ll break the seal on both of these games.
Which game from 10+ years ago did you discover this year?
Mountain Goats is the one that comes to mind, thanks to the new edition by AllPlay, but if we want to talk about OLD GAMES, then in Janurary I was introduced to Evo. This was a charming little dinosaur evolution game. In Evo, you spend rounds evolving a dinosaur species, roaming your tribe through the ecosystems to content with global warming and cooling. The art is whimsical and charming in the 2001 edition, and I felt like it held up surprisingly well for being published around 24 years ago.
Which anticipated releases are you most excited about for the second half of the year?
As someone who doesn’t look forward very much, this is a hard question to answer. I’m intrigued by Recall, simply to see what the designers of Revive (another one of my most played games this year) have cooked up this time. Burgle Bros. 3is somewhere on the horizon, and I implicitly trust Tim Fowers to put out great games. Vantageby Jamey Stegmier is currently delivering, and I feel the deep pangs of regret for not pre-ordering it months ago.
Bonus: What’s your personal favourite video that you’ve posted to your channel?
It’s not board game related, but I’ve been most proud of the work I put into my Final Fantasy Project, where I play through all the single player mainline Final Fantasy games. I’m almost finished playing through Final Fantasy VII, which is the first time I’ve ever even made it out of Midgar before. It’s been a fascinating journey, playing video games from 1987, and seeing how the series has evolved over each of its entries.
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.
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.
GWTtechnically 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.
