Every year I encourage the members of my regular game group to create a top 100 games of all time. Today I’m finishing the series in which I explore my friends favourite games and specifically look at the games they chose to put onto their top 100 that I dislike.
Hate is a very strong word, and most of these games I would still play. These are games that I would call ‘fine’ and would play if Bear was really keen, but are not games I would ever suggest playing on our game nights.
Todays victim is Bear. He swings much further over to the thematic and direct conflict sides of the spectrum than the other members of my game group. He’s probably the person whos tastes differs the most from mine. He agrees that Food Chain Magnate is a fantastic game, but he detests Galaxy Trucker. All things shake out I suppose.
Terraforming Mars #2
Sometimes I wonder if my distaste for Terraforming Mars stems from a series of poor experiences. Every time I sit down to play Terraforming Mars I struggle to get anything done. More than once I’ve been given a starting corporation that suggests a direction to follow, only to have that direction be a red herring (like starting with the corporation that benefits Jovian tags, only to never see a single Jovian card, even with the drafting variant). The deck of cards is massive, and the number of cards that I see in the game is low and fixed. It’s prohibitively expensive to chase milling the deck. It’s frustrating to be dealt an initial hand of cards, pick a strategy to chase, only for that strategy to be neutered by the luck of the draw.
Further to luck of the draw, many cards have prerequisites that must be met before the card can be played. Thematically, these cards are great! The planet needs to have a certain amount of oxygen before life can be sustained, or it needs to be cold enough for glaciers to still exist so you can melt them, But in a gameplay sense, drawing cards that have already had their conditions surpassed feels lame. You only get 4 cards per turn, and now one of those cards is dead on arrival.
Terraforming Mars is also entirely too long. In my experience, two of the three terraforming requirements rocket up their tracks, completing within a few generations. Then the third one drags along at a glacial pace. I’ve heard that people can finish a game in under two hours, but that has not been my experience. In a game where luck is a significant factor and someone falling behind in an engine building game means catching up feels neigh impossible.
I also complain about the component quality, the player boards are woefully thin, and horribly susceptible to being jostled. It sucks to have to chase down an aftermarket tray to keep everything in it’s place. The cubes have a nice shiny metallic paint, but they’re easily scratched and dinged showing their wear very prominently.
When Terraforming Mars comes together, it absolutely sings. It feels good to get an engine running and to take turn after turn, triggering combos and converting resources to realize your objective. I like the tempo considerations, biding your time with actions waiting to see if someone is going to pass or make a run on one of the objectives you have your eye on, and I enjoy the thematic of the game. I love the narrative of bringing Deimos down to massively increase the temperature of the planet at the mild sacrifice of your neighbour’s tree farm. Unfortunately it’s a song I’ve only heard other people talk about.
I don’t begrudge anyone who loves Terraforming Mars, but it’s not a game I enjoy playing, and would opt to play something else that gives me similar feels, such as Earth, Ark Nova, or even Race for the Galaxy (which has a lot of the same complaints, but plays in less than an hour).
Twilight Struggle #5
I can see the brilliant design work that lies within Twilight Struggle by Anada Gupta and Jason Matthews. A Cold War game where one player assumes the role of the USA, while the other leads USSR. The cards take players through the decades with various events and major political upheavals within the time frame. Like many two player only games, I can see how Twilight Struggle can rocket up someone’s favourite game list if you have a willing and eager partner to play over and over with, especially if you’re both exploring and growing at the same pace.
Twilight Struggle‘s multi-use cards are exciting and brutal if you’re caught flat-footed. Knowing which cards can come up is a major part of playing Twilight Struggle well, which makes it a frustrating learning experience. Cards can be played as events or operations, and cards can be ‘associated’ with the USSR or the US, which means if you play a card that’s associated with your opponent’s nation for the operation points, the event still occurs. An aspect of the game is recognizing how to best play the worst cards in your hand, which is painful. I don’t like treading water, or winning wars of attrition.
It feels like a lot of the game is exploiting your opponent’s weaknesses, or push them into making a bad decision. Controlling Defcon, mitigating your opponent’s events, and spreading your nation’s influence across the map are all subjects worthy of their own strategy guides, and getting into each of those systems is a challenge. There are 4 ways for the agme to end, if someone has 20 VP, if either side controls Europe when the Europe scoring card is played, or, if your opponent causes the DEFCON level to reach 1. If none of those three events happen, then there is a final scoring. I’ve only played Twilight Struggle 4 times, but I’ve never seen a game reach the end game scoring phase.
Twilight Squabble reduces Twilight Struggle into a very short rock-paper-scissors game about trying to push your opponent into DEFCON that I enjoy more (mostly because no matter how badly I’m doing, it’s over in a matter of moments. Root is another asymmetric war game that I enjoy more, mostly due to the cutesy woodland aesthetic.
Dominion #28
The grand-daddy of deck builders, Dominion is a game that spawned a new genre of games. Donald X. Vaccarino’s game of buying cards from a central market to put into your discard pile, then re-shuffling the discard pile to become your draw deck was my absolute favourite game mechanic for a long while. Unfortunately for Dominion, I started playing board games in 2014 and games like Clank!, Star Realms, Super Motherload, Paperback, and Concordia hit my table first. By the time I finally got the opportunity to play Dominion, it felt like a step backwards. Also, the people who are willing to play Dominion now are the people who fell into it HARD. With custom storage solutions, half a dozen expansions, and arguments over how to set the initial seed, it simultaneously feels like too much (in terms of variability) and not enough (in terms of complexity).
I’m also not a fan of how static the game state feels. Once the seed is set, you can more or less plan out your strategy from turn one. Unless you’re playing with cards that affect other players, it’s more just you against your deck. I do love the combos the game can generate, and nailing a massive turn is immensely satisfying, but I feel the sun has set on Dominion and I missed the glory days.
As I said before, Most of the deck builders I really enjoy have a board component that gives me something to do with my cards, like Super Motherload, and Clank!. If I want a pure deck builder, Paperback or Hardback are my go-tos, but only if I want to get stomped on by my partner who is crazy good at both those games.
Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game #33
I’ve only just watched the Battlestar Galactica TV series, solely because the first time I played Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game (hereby referred to as BSG:TBG) all the other players were making references to the plot lines, spouting quotes from the show, and making thematic decisions. I had chosen to play Lee Adama (Apollo), and was playing him like a chaotic warmonger with a death wish, which the other players told me was ‘wrong’ and didn’t fit the characters profile
As a game, BSG:TBG is fine. It’s long, fairly complex, and difficult. In BSG:TBG, it not about building an unstoppable force, and more about limping across the finish line. Add to that, I’ve never been a fan of bluffing games, as I feel guilt when I accuse someone and they fire back, offended that I would dare cast suspicion their way, even if it turns out I was right all along. The gameplay of BSG:TBG is mediocre and random. You spend cards to test skills, draw more cards, and try to make your way to Earth. If someone cast suspicion on you, you may just be thrown into the brig, which saps the fun out of the experience. Also, this is a long experience, 3 – 4 hours total. And it’s somewhat deflating when you spend 2 hours as a human, trying to do your very best only to become a cylon halfway through and now need to sabatoge the last two hours of work you’ve put into the experience.
I’m a fairly conservative person (in temperament, not politically). I’m content to sit in my chair for two hours and quietly contemplate our choices with rational discussion. A victory is celebrated with a muted “sweet” and a betrayal is greeted with a quiet “dang”. Having several people of my temperament does not make for a good social deduction game. We have a fried who lovesBSG:TBG, and has the perfect temperament to play. My enjoyment doesn’t come from the game mechanics, but from watching this loose cannon fire off accusations from turn one, boisterously proclaim that everyone is a Cylon, and hoot and holler when a big moment happens. It’s the other players that create the fun in BSG:TBG, not the game itself.
What do I enjoy that’s similar to BSG:TBG? Eclipse is a space war game, but no cooperative. I enjoy the Pandemic spin-off games or Burgle Bros. if I’m looking for a cooperative experience, but they don’t t have any hidden traitors (although I can’t think of a single game that I enjoy that has a hidden traitor element).
Backgammon #39
It’s roll and move. Come on. It’s not that intresting.
Actually, my mom and I play Backgammon every now and then and it’s surprisingly enjoyable, but only because we razz each other. Bear swears up and down that Backgammon is best when playing with stakes and using the doubling die to make a single game count for more. Being risk-adverse, I’d rather not put anything other than the time it takes to play a game on the line. It can be exhilarating when all hope is lost but a lucky double 6’s roll cinches a come-from-behind victory. But over-all, it’s a game about rolling dice and moving your discs. The player who rolls better will win, unless they do something reckless like leaving their single pawn unprotected in their opponents house, in which case, they deserve the loss.
Every year I encourage the members of my regular game group to create a top 100 games of all time. Today I’m continuing the series in which I trash on my friends favourite games, because apparently, I hate fun.
Hate is a very strong word, and most of these games I would still play. These are games that I would call ‘fine’ and would play if Bigfoot was really keen, but they are not games I would ever suggest playing on our game nights.
Today I’m picking on Bigfoot. He would identify himself as a euro gamer, while not specifically some who delights in trading cubes, he does seem to excel at it. Bigfoot is generally ‘the person to beat’ and more than once we’ve finished a game only to find his score is more than the rest of ours combined. While he’s not totally against the odd direct conflict game, his preferences are firmly in the economic side of the spectrum. For each of the games on this list, I’ve included where in his top 100 each of these games sit
Gaia Project #2 & Terra Mystica #14
My dislike for Gaia Project stems more from my dislike of its spiritual prequel Terra Mystica than anything else. While Gaia Project does address some of the more common complaints from its predecessor, such as helping prevent getting pinned in the corner and unable to do anything, It doesn’t do enough different to make me enjoy it.
I find the actions in Gaia Project to be prohibitively expensive. My biggest complaint is that I don’t like having to manage four different resources (Ore, Knowledge, Credits, and Power), to do anything, and that I always seem to be short on at least one of the resources, grinding my progress to a halt. I also complain about runaway leaders, It’s tough to watch one player pass early because they ran out of a resource, and watch another player take action after action, rush up a technology track, gain more benefits and start the next round in a much better position. I know this can be resolved if you ‘git gud’, but I’m just a scrub.
Gaia Project and Terra Mystica both reward players who plan out far ahead, and are able to squeeze efficiency out of every last action, and I’m jealous of those who have cracked the puzzle and able to score more than 50 points in every game. I can see that Gaia Project and Terra Mystica are very deep games that reward those who put the time and effort into learning the system.
Somewhat ironically, I really enjoy Clans of Caledonia. It shares the resource generating buildings of Terra Mystica, but combines everything into one resource (gold). It also has a fluctuating market a-la Navagador, which is one of my favourite Mac Gerdts games.
Gloomhaven #6
My first experience with Gloomhaven wasn’t great. The other three people I was playing with were not exactly the best at learning and remembering all the rules to a game, so it fell to me to learn and run the game’s system for the group. We played 12 times over the course of a couple of months with 6 losses before we as a group decided not to continue with the campaign.
Flash forward to just a couple of weeks ago, I gave Gloomhaven another shot via the video game on Steam. This experience helped me figure out why Gloomhaven always left a sour taste in my mouth. My fundamental problem with Gloomhaven is I don’t like the core of the game, the card burning mechanic.
If you haven’t played, the core of the game is that you have a hand of cards – between 8 and 12, depending on your character. Every card has a top half and bottom half. On your turn, you pick two cards from your hand, and you do the top action on one card and the bottom action on another card. After you play those cards, they go into your discard pile. To get your cards back, you need to rest, which will “burn” one of your cards, removing it from your supply for the rest of the mission. If your entire hand of cards is burned and/or you can’t play 2 cards on your turn, you’re ‘exhausted’ and you’re out off the game for the rest of the mission
This means your hand is functionally your timer for the game, your options will dwindle as the game goes on, feeling like a noose tightening around your neck. Your hand is being depleted quicker and quicker, and you need to complete the objective.
Most of your strongest actions will burn the card instead of sending it to the discard pile, which means to do a big cool thing, you just straight-up burn the card. It’s that fundamental aspect that I dislike, I feel like I’m being punished for doing the big cool thing, and that’s not how I like my games to feel. If I’m playing a combat-centric game, I want to be a big damn hero, not a rag-tag adventurer just barely making it out of each encounter alive.
All that said, I can see why Gloomhaven is so beloved. It’s a tight and clever puzzle with lots and lots AND LOTS of good, tough decisions to make. When you manage to survive the encounter with a sliver of health left, it feels great! But I don’t derive joy from that kind of game. I don’t enjoy feeling powerless during a battle. I tend to swing more towards the Massive Darkness end of the spectrum. A big dumb dungeon crawl where I’m chucking handfuls of dice and slaying a Elite monster in a single blow.
There aren’t many dungeon crawl games that I enjoy, but I have had a bunch of fun playing Massive Darkness (Raphaël Guiton, Jean-Baptiste Lullien and Nicolas Raoult), and Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth (Nathan I. Hajek and Grace Holdinghaus)
Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar #26
Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar by Simone Luciani and Daniele Tascini is a game that absolutely has depth and the capacity for mastery. Tzolk’in‘s main hook is how it simulates the passage of time. In the centre of the board is a large gear, and connected to that gear are five other smaller gears with spaces to place workers. Every round, the centre gear will turn one space, moving all the workers one spot up their tracks. On a player’s turn, they can either play workers from their supply (costing corn if they play more than one) or take works off the gears and preforming the associated actions.
Tzolk’in absolutely rewards mastery and forward planning. It’s not enough to take Tzolk’in one turn at a time, you need to be making plans and moves several turns in advance. While it is satisfying when all your place can come together, I struggle with Tzolk’in in that I just cannot seem to balance long term strategies with short term goals. I can place a worker down knowing that I want to pull him off in four turns, but in just two turns I find myself up the creek with no corn and no workers and required to pull my workers off early only to have something to do!
Tzolk’in a neat game, and I appreciate that some will enjoy its strategic offerings more than I have. It’s fine, and I wouldn’t deny playing it again, but it’s not one that I’ll ever suggest to play.
El Grande #60
This one is easy, I simply don’t like area control/area majority as a mechanic. I don’t find it fun or interesting. El Grande is a pure distillation of area control, that’s all there really is to this game. If you enjoy area control games, look no further because this one will serve you well. It’s just not my cup of tea. You go and enjoy your gerrymandering, I’ll be over here playing dexterity games.
Every year I encourage the members of my regular game group to create a list of their top 100 games of all time. Today I’m starting a new series in which I explore my friends’ favourite games and specifically look at the games they chose to put onto their top 100 that I hate.
Hate is a very strong word. To be honest, most of these games I would still play. These are games that I would call ‘fine’ and would play if someone was really keen, but are not games I would ever suggest playing on our game nights.
The first person I’m picking on today has chosen his alias to be Otter. He would identify himself as a classic Euro gamer; someone who enjoys trading cubes and deterministic gameplay over luck and dice. While not totally against the odd direct conflict game, his preferences are firmly in the economic side of the spectrum.
I’ve ordered this list, starting with the games at the very top of his list, not in the order of how much I dislike each one.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 – #1
Ooooh boy coming right out of the gate with a spicy take. I’m not a big fan of Pandemic Legacy: Season 1. There are a lot of aspects that could be contributing to my opinion, such as the fact that I haven’t finished the campaign yet, or the fact that I’ve only played it two players. I’ve purposefully hidden the paragraph below for those who may be sensitive to spoilers. Highlight the text if you want to read some of my reasons for not liking Pandemic Legacy: Season 1
Some of the reasons I don’t like Pandemic Legacy are very arbitrary. I don’t like that one of the viruses turns people into ‘faded figures’, which is very reminiscent of zombies, which is just a concept that I’m extremely tired of. I also don’t like that in a 2 player game it feels like we HAVE to use a certain subset of characters or we have no chance of containing the virus or even winning. I also don’t really like the consequences of a bad game, if a city (or cities) falls because of a unlucky card flip, that city is now harder to deal with and more likely to be a pain in the butt in subsequent games. Further to that we are disincentivised to branch out and try new characters; the ones we’ve been using all game have gotten several improvements and until they’re lost forever, there’s no real reason to deviate.
The paragraph above is white text with a white background. Highlight to read, but be aware there are spoilers.
In the end, I would so much rather play base Pandemic, which is an excellent experience beginning to end. Sometimes when I want to shake up my co-op game experience, I’ll pull out one of the alternate Pandemic versions, such as Fall of Rome, Rising Tide, or even The Cure (if I want to roll a lot of dice). That offers much more variety for me, and I don’t need to bring the same group of people back together again and again to play through a campaign.
Side bar, that last complaint, bringing the same group of people back together again and again is the crux of most of my complaints with all Legacy and campaign games. If someone is dedicated enough to return regularly to play Pandemic Legacy again and again with me, I’d almost certainly rather be introducing them to the wider world of board games. I know this speaks to my own need for discovery, but Pandemic is such a great introduction to cooperative games that once I’ve gotten someone hooked with it, there’s so many other experiences I’m keen to share with them.
Alchemists #10
Alchemists designed by Matúš Kotry and published by CGE in 2014 was pitched to me as a Clue-style deduction game, but much more interesting and ‘gamey’. This pitch didn’t particularly excite me as I hadn’t played Clue since I was 9 or 10 years old and didn’t have particularly fond memories attached to that game.
What Alchemists actually is, is a worker placement game with a deduction element. The deduction either needs to be managed by an app, or have a player act the role of a moderator and manage the deduction element. Alchemists features 8 different ingredients all of which have a positive or negative value in 3 aspects (confusing, I know). The goal of the game is to deduce the aspects of each of these ingredients and publish theories proving you are the smartest Alchemist at the table. It’s entirely possible to publish false theories in an effort to rush your opponents into also publishing their half-baked theories, after which you and the scientific community at large can mock them mercilessly.
What I don’t like about Alchemists is that the system is opaque and obtuse, and you can get really unlucky. The method for gathering information is you first need to take an action spot, which may cost you money if someone mixed a red potion before you did. Then, you mix two ingredients into a caldron and they’ll pop out a result, consuming the two resources. The result you can use to deduce some information, and once you have enough information, you can figure out the individual properties of each ingredient. In one of my games I matched 3 different pairs of ingredients together and every time they turned out to be the the equal and opposite of each other, giving me almost no information I could work with and leaving me far behind everyone else. Eventually I was able to use that information to figure out each of the ingredient’s aspects, but it was too little too late. Everyone else had already published their papers and sold their potions to eager explorers.
Other things that rub me wrong are the lengthy playtime. Alchemists is easily a 2 hour game, longer if you’re learning how to play. It’s also difficult for new players, as they can’t really ask clarifying questions lest they give away some of their secret information. Hopefully whoever teaches this game can clearly impart the logic puzzle, or the new players will be left feelings stuck for a very long time. It’s also fairly punishing, making a mistake or missing timing your moves can dearly cost you, which feels particularly bad in a long game.
On a more positive note, I really love the art and production of Alchemists, and the rulebook was hilarious. If everyone is of an equal skill level, Alchemists can be a fun afternoon, but high academia is just not for me.
Stockpile #12
Sometimes it’s hard to discern where a heavily random game is good, and where it’s bad. Why do I love Galaxy Trucker, but despise Stockpile?
Stockpile is a stock market manipulation game where players each have a small amount of hidden information. Each round players will seed portfolios with shares in a company, then bid on which portfoliton you want to acquire. After acquiring a portfolio, you have the option to sell some stocks, then the market moves. Each of the 6 companies will move either up or down. If the stock hits the top of the track, it splits, doubling your stake in the company. If it goes bankrupt, all those stocks in your portfolio have become worthless.
Stockpile feels very random and unfair. The player who knows if a stock is going to go bankrupt due to a massive -3 movement has such a better piece of information than the player who knows that another stock is just going to go up by one. Often, you’ll have information about a stock, but then never have the opportunity to take action on that information. If you know American Automotive is going to go up 2, but you never see those shares, that information is essentially worthless. Sure, you could try to barter or psyche out your opponents, but that pales in comparison to actually knowing the hidden information and using it to your advantage. You can know that if the Automotive company is going up by 2 then the odds of the other stocks going down are marginally higher, but it’s just not enough to make meaningful decisions.
I do like the asymmetric player powers, and the expansion turns up the randomness even further by including dice that dictate how the market will move, making it even more volatile. If I’m going to play a game where I feel like I have no control, it may as well be extra random and I can make my own points by going heavily into bonds.
Grand Austria Hotel #13
I really wanted to love Grand Austria Hotel by Simone Luciani and Virginio Gigli. With my hospitality background I adore the theme of serving coffee and cake to guests before seeing them to their rooms. In practice, however, Grand Austria Hotel feels plodding and tedious. Most of the decisions feels dictated by the dice, which somehow always seem to be exactly wrong. I’ve had instances where I look at the dice and think “This is awful! I can’t do anything with this!”, re-roll the dice, only to find that the re-roll is somehow worse than the original state!
Perhaps it’s foolish of me to expect something exciting when strudel is one of the main resources. I find myself frustrated every time I play, especially as I see my opponents racking up combos and hiring staff that cascade into dozens of filled rooms and fully progressed on the emperor track thanks to a well timed pull of a guest, or a perfectly timed dice roll. What makes Grand Austria Hotel even worse is the snake draft, which somehow seems to elongate the downtime in-between turns. “GAH” is all I can really say about this one…
The Oracle of Delphi #24
A Stefan Feld race game, I was so excited when I first sat down to play The Oracle of Delphi. I was on a bit of a Feldian kick, having just played The Castles of Burgundy and Trajan, so I was very excited to see what this new, colourful box had in store for me.
Unfortunately what I found was a race to complete three sets of four different objectives. At the start of the game you’re weak and trying to get anything done feels like a chore. As you complete some objectives you get benefits that make you stronger, but you’re also taking on penalty cards. If you get too many penalties, you have to skip a whole turn which feels AWFUL in a race game.
Two of the four tasks you’re trying to complete are pick-up and deliver, and the entire board is seeded from the start. The first player to go can end up with a huge advantage by being able to pick up and drop off resources directly next to the start while others need to cart their goods clear across the sea. The objectives that aren’t pick-up and deliver are entirely random, either rolling dice and hoping you clear the threshold or flipping a face down tile and hoping it’s your colour. These objectives just don’t make for an interesting game in my opinion.
Finale
There are a few other games on Otter’s list that I’m not the biggest fan of, including Lorenzo il Magnifico, Teotihuacan: City of the Gods, Ticket to Ride, and Mombasa, but I’ll leave roasting those games to another day.
Feel free to tell me I’m wrong in the comments; lambast my opinions and accuse me of being uncultured swine! I dare you to write 2,000 words slamming 5 of my favourite games of all time, which you can read about by clicking here.
