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Some of the most popular games get the least respect from game enthusiasts

37 points by mudil 11y ago

facepalm 11y ago
I don't see why a factor of chance makes a game unworthy. We want to learn for real life from games, and real life is full of chance. And there are strategies for dealing with chance, like hedging your bets. For Monopoly, mathematicians have worked out winning strategies. I think it has to do with a high chance of people landing in jail and the odds of landing on fields when starting from jail.
- DanBC 11y ago
  Monopoly's lack of fun isn't because it uses dice. Monopoly's lack of fun comes from the player elimination, which is a crucial part of the game. People dislike player elimination (because it feels mean), and include stuff to avoid it, (fines go in the middle and are collected if you land on free parking, for example). These house rules turn a 1 hour game into an interminable 5 hour slog. If you have a group of people who are happy with the concept of player elimination, and who play to win, and you avoid the house rules, Monopoly becomes somewhat fun. But there are very many much better games.
  - drostie 11y ago
    So much this. The last game of Monopoly I played with my girlfriend, she was in the lead. She eventually started on the "well, it costs this much, but you don't have to pay if you don't want to..." No. The game is, just kill me and win. Stop trying to prolong it.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  "A factor of chance" does not make a game "unworthy". Particularly, you're looking at this as a binary decision of worthy or unworthy. What makes a game interesting to most people is how much randomness there is. Human brains are built to dole out reward hormones when they make predictions and, followed by a period of uncertainty/expectation, their predictions come true; OR fail in such a way that they gain enough information to improve future predictions. Having too little randomness can (if there is little complexity) mean that predictions always come trivially true, which does not trigger the reward mechanism. Having too much randomness disables the triggering by way of a "teaching failure". (Though it still leaves the way open for the success trigger, thus addictions to gambling.) So in order for a game to be good, it needs to strike a certain balance between simplicity/complexity and determinism/randomness.
  - Zikes 11y ago
    Some of my favorite games have a large amount of chance. There's a variety of dice games called "press your luck" where you can roll a set of dice and accept the results as they are, or roll again and again hoping for better results, but also increasing the odds that you'll "bust" and lose your turn entirely. I've played a few games where someone managed to win after only a couple of turns, or I just roll busts over and over, but there are still plenty of opportunities for strategy in between those wild swings of good and bad luck.
- sago 11y ago
  > I don't see why a factor of chance makes a game unworthy. Because it often makes it unfun. Not always, of course, many of the highest rated games on the Geek also have random elements. But in the case of, say, Chutes and Ladders, the entire outcome is random. Might as well flip a coin and call it. Why spend the time going up and down the board? For monopoly, a big crime is that it takes a long time to lose. You can spend an hour with no chance of winning, kept alive only by random chance. These are not 'unworthy', they are just boring in comparison to many other games. I think people avoid the 'other' games not because they have some deep subtle appreciation for the merits of the 'bad' games, but because they haven't come across better options. It is rare to find someone who likes Monopoly who can describe another game with the same theme (not counting Star Wars Monopoly!).
  - kqr 11y ago
    > For monopoly, a big crime is that it takes a long time to lose. You can spend an hour with no chance of winning, kept alive only by random chance. ...and when the first player loses, they have to sit by and idly watch while one player gains a larger and larger advantage, only waiting for the rest to lose.
  - facepalm 11y ago
    I guess it is true that the time it takes to lose is the real issue. Still, I played a lot of Monopoly as a kid. Nowadays it wouldn't be my first choice for a game evening, but I have brought it out occasionally for my preschool kid. I make him calculate change money, which he doesn't always like. Even Chutes and Ladders can be great fun for kids, and they can practice counting. I think the boardgame geek top list is a bit biased, because it was made by gaming geeks who might tend to prefer complicated game mechanics.
    - sago 11y ago
      I don't think so, a game like Werewolf, say is very simple, and has a lot of love on the Geek. A game like Ticket to Ride, or the Resistance, or Forbidden Island is much less complex than Monopoly, but are routinely in top lists of game fans. Okay, you have to be into heavier games to be into Brass, but heavy Euros are hardly the be-all of board gaming. [edit: Yeah, I take back the 'I don't think so' - on reflection - there is a bias towards heavy games at the top, but I don't think that's why Monopoly, Parcheesi et al are low]
- babarock 11y ago
  There are many things I dislike about Monopoly but the randomness isn't one of them. A good deal of games I love have a big chunk of luck/randomness and I'm fine with it. The things I dislike about Monopoly: * Not too much strategy involved. The player who wins is usually the one who buys a lot of lands early. * It's long. Even the shortest games last over 90 minutes. However the winner is decided much earlier in the game. There's very little you can do to prevent an early leader from taking the game, and you have to sit there watching them bully you slowly for several hours. * The theme sucks. "Buy land, make more money". I don't find that particularly fun. * The good elements of monopoly are often found in other games that don't share the same bad elements (I'm thinking of Settlers, but there are others too).
  - onion2k 11y ago
    The player who wins is usually the one who buys a lot of lands early. That's testable. Simulate a few tens of thousands of games based on some criteria (players always buy properties they land on if they can afford them, players will mortgage their portfolio to buy properties if it blocks another player, etc) and see if the person winning on round n where n is an early round is the same as the person who's winning at the end of the game. It certainly sounds like it's true. It'd be interesting to see how early you can abandon a game and still know who'd have won.
- lmm 11y ago
  An element of chance is fine, if it allows interesting decision making. Good games of chance indeed involve strategies like hedging your bets. But with Monopoly, 90% of turns involve literally no decision-making - you roll, move along, and pay out or not. Occasionally you have a tough call to make about whether to buy a property, or how many houses to buy - but those are the exception rather than the rule. 90% of the game is essentially you doing bookkeeping for the game.
Zikes 11y ago
Someone recently posited a theory that really stood out to me: when a better version of a board game comes along, the old one simply becomes obsolete. The game that they were referring to in particular was Secret Hitler, which they felt obsoleted Werewolf and The Resistance. When I have an opportunity to play board games with people I will always want to play something that I think is fun, exciting, or new. Monopoly is none of those things to me. For some people it probably endures primarily out of nostalgia, or a lack of interest in other options, but there are so many better options for new board game players.
- anywhichway 11y ago
  There is a huge list of games that "fired" other games like this on boardgame geek: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/50286/games-fired-other-games/page/1 https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/50286/games-fired-other-g...?
- jclos 11y ago
  That's one of the things these articles don't really take into account: games, much like movies, tv shows, music, etc. evolve and crossbreed. Some good games could become virtually unplayed because they were so great that the following generation of game designers took the mechanics they liked in them and used them to create new games.
- cableshaft 11y ago
  I was kind of thinking that about Resistance also recently (that it's pretty much obsolete), but after playing "Deception: Murder in Hong Kong". It still has the bad guys of Resistance, but there's a silent moderator giving clues for the good guys to figure out who they are, and there are actual murder weapons and clue cards that the good guys can use to help make their decisions. It's more interesting than "okay he voted this way this round, he must be a bad guy!"
kqr 11y ago
I think this article blows past several important points – perhaps unknowingly. 1. Sure, tic-tac-toe is a fantastic game for someone who needs to learn the "rewards of thinking ahead and taking the opponent’s strategy into account". Game enthusiasts (or indeed anyone above the age of 12) are very unlikely to need this lesson. 1> However, there is an interesting variant of tic-tac-toe[1] so disregarding the game completely isn't fair either. 2. People don't dislike Monopoly because it has dice. Risk has dice, and is incredibly popular. People dislike Monopoly because it is designed to be a game that is not fun to play for all but one player. 2> The game was designed as an anti-capitalist, anti-monopolist lesson.[2] When the rules are set up just right, only one person will be the winner and the other people will spiral into a negative feedback loop and quickly run out of all their money. That's the entire premise of the game: if you have a lot of money you can easily get more. Of course a game which is designed to distress 3/4 people playing in a session is not going to be very highly rated. That said, I do think there is one popular game that gets very little respect from (at least western) game enthusiasts: go[3]! Probably known in these circles as "the game computers can't yet beat top humans in" it's an abstract strategy game for two players (like chess) – with incredibly simple rules. You can learn the rules in a few minutes (literally) but it will take you weeks to even start feeling like you know what you are doing, and years before you're competent. The strategic and tactical depth is vast, much deeper than any other game I've tried. [1]: http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/06/16/ultimate-tic-tac-toe/ http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/06/16/ultimate-tic-tac-t... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_board_game_Monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_board_game_Mono... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)
- thraxil 11y ago
  > That said, I do think there is one popular game that gets very little respect from (at least western) game enthusiasts: go I guess I would have to disagree with your characterization of go as not respected. I've never heard any of the game enthusiasts I know talk about go in anything but the same reverent tone you use to explain why you like it. Who are you hanging out with?
chipsy 11y ago
Art is at its best when it presents questions. If our games declare random winners, or can be played perfectly to a predictable conclusion, they have stated a definite answer about strategy, and lack room for further investigation, which is distasteful to enthusiasts. That said, games also say something about the societies that play them. Monopoly's popularity in spite of its unfairness speaks to that. Playing it, and winning, reinforces a certain fantasy about becoming a property owner. The casual player believes: "This is how life works."
VLM 11y ago
"Complexity can be the result of elegant design" LOL its always the opposite. More detail below: The second to last paragraph is a direct analogy with programming where outsiders think the best programmer is the one generating infinitely complex code, but for people actually in the field the criteria is the reverse and the best programmer solves the problem with the least complex code. Of course this is somewhat political and some lisp-ish functional-ish languages are more aerospace "simplicate and add lightness" than other more grindy languages (java, cobol, whats the difference...) A gaming insider's view of the last paragraph is the lead story in the latest "C3I Magazine" is by the COIN series designer explaining the virtue, measurement, and minimization of complexity as a series of games develop. On a slightly tangential topic, C3I Magazine has an interesting although probably unscalable solution to the magazine industry crisis.
VLM 11y ago
An interesting aspect of Monopoly hate not discussed so far is the analogy with computer graphics / VR "uncanny valley". Much like a CGI face can approximate a human closely enough to be just far enough off to be repellent, an individual board game can approximate the ideal of a really good game yet end up so far off the mark that it lands in the uncanny valley of dislike. Most of the general public doesn't like political activism, and the game being invented as a piece of propaganda, more or less, it not going to appeal to most people because its propaganda, and even worse, some of why the game sucks might have been required for propaganda purposes. And that circularizes the argument for the general public, see why political propaganda is bad, it made the Monopoly game suck by dumping to the bottom of the uncanny valley therefore propaganda is bad. In summary I'd theorize that game appeal follows an uncanny valley curve and unfortunately right at the bottom of the trench is where you'll find Monopoly.
muzani 11y ago
Monopoly is such an underrated game. It's about negotiation and alliances. I think their biggest mistake is calling it Monopoly, implying it was one person killing off everyone else. It might be more interesting if it was called Balance of Power. It has to be played with around 4+ people. They need to trade favors along with their land. With enough players, the favors owed last long enough to make a difference. The randomness simply makes negotiation power the main focus of the game. E.g. if you land on a rival's hotel and go broke, a rich ally can pay you premium on your land. You'll realize early on that everyone is either going to be doomed or super-rich, so it's worth being diplomatic really early on. When someone starts to snowball into a monopoly, they have to start laying low, while the others have to encourage the others to pile pressure. The players have to notice this trend early, at the point where it makes sense to 'blacklist' certain players. It's a game with about as much depth as Settlers of Catan, without having to worry about too much complexity.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > Monopoly is such an underrated game. It's about negotiation and alliances. I think their biggest mistake is calling it Monopoly, implying it was one person killing off everyone else. It might be more interesting if it was called Balance of Power. Ironically, Balance of Power is an actual game, and it's single-player. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)
- colejohnson66 11y ago
  Monopoly was originally created to show the dangers of letting a business become a "monopoly". That is until the Parker Brothers started making it and marketing it as a game. From Wikipedia[0]: > The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903,[1][4] when American anti-monopolist Elizabeth (Lizzie) J. Magie Phillips, created a game through which she hoped to be able to explain the single tax theory of Henry George. It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)#Early_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)#Early_history
- lmm 11y ago
purpled_haze 11y ago
The comment about chess is just astounding to me: "The queen, which can move horizontally, vertically or diagonally, is nothing more than a combination of the rook and the bishop, making it an inelegant redundancy." Whoever stated that has never played chess to the level they should before even attempting to comment on the game. Chess would seem to me to be one of the ultimate games for humans; it's simple enough to teach a child, but few adults can come close to mastering it. Even the term "chess master" is a bit of a lie. To be a "chess master", you'd have to know the perfect solution move for every board configuration- forget openings, gambits, tactics- that's child's play compared to truly mastering the game. People called "masters" are just really damn good- not perfect. In comparison, I am a "tic tac toe" master. I know that I can fail to lose at the game if I try.
- heydenberk 11y ago
  The rules of chess are, in fact, complicated and inelegant compared to the rules of Go.
  - kqr 11y ago
    Especially with the modern variants in play in competitive games, such as en passant capture and the like. Many fairly enthusiastic chess players aren't exactly sure what all the rules are.
    - hollerith 11y ago
      Not counting online games, I've played many 100s of games of chess with many dozens of people, mostly strangers, incl 12-year-olds (when I was 12) and not once did a dispute or difference of opinion arise about the legality of any move (incl en-passant moves). What is the name of this strange country where players who are not just starting out don't know the rules of chess?
      - lmm 11y ago
        Here in the UK I have had to call a referee over during a tournament because my opponent didn't know about en passant. And it turned out said referee didn't know either (fortunately the other players backed me up).
vacri 11y ago
Weird article. "Why do games enthusiasts dislike these games? You know, the games that are great for teaching children some supposed lesson or other?". I expect other articles from the author to include "Why don't wine enthusiasts like $3 bottles of rotgut? I mean, it's really popular with winos" and "why do people like listening to musical bands? Toy xylophones are popular with kids, and teaches them hand-eye co-ordination, rhythm, and so forth." I mean, the author lionises tic-tac-toe as providing some deep life lesson, when in actuality, even the author's target demographic gets bored of it in very short order.
toothbrush 11y ago
Simply commenting on the title, but it struck me that you can probably say “Some of the most popular $X get the least respect from $X enthusiasts” — examples of X that come to mind are music, food, wine, ….
- joezydeco 11y ago
  ...Adam Sandler movies...
cwyers 11y ago
> Monopoly is neither simple nor random Well, it's not simple.
cognivore 11y ago
I think the proof is in the pudding. I've played hundreds of hours of chess in my life, and I set chess aside as a special case, but as for the rest of the traditional board games, they become boring once you've played highly rated games on boardgamegeek.com. Monopoly is a good example. It feels crushingly dull and random (yes, even with wheeling and dealing) to the point that I would call it an anti-game - it actually removes fun instead of creates it. A better title would be "Death March." I've spent that last thirty years playing and watching board games enter what seems to be their golden age, and have introduced scores of people to the games I love, and have had friends do so in kind. Almost universally people say something along the lines of, "Wow, that was fun. It's nothing like the games we played as a kid." Often followed up with "Where do we buy this?" They don't play the games from their childhood anymore because they're boring and they didn't know there were alternatives. Now they'll play board games as adults and enjoy themselves. Beats the Hell out of TV.
- agentultra 11y ago
  The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. And the rating system on that site is in question of late due to a presently controversial number 1 game: Pandemic: Legacy. The rating system is highly subjective and many suspect is prone to "flavor of the week," ratings by people who don't take time to read the scale and objectively rate the games they play. Monopoly could be rated so lowly because it is a popular opinion on the site that it's not a good game. That being said I don't think the classics are disappearing or that they're bad games. A game like Mancala is seeing a resurgence as a mechanic in many popular games today. I think we can learn something from what made these games endure for so long and are starting to incorporate them into new games. Don't let the rating system on boardgamegeek dictate what we think is a really good game until the objectivity problem gets sorted out. update: An example of a thread that comes up every now and again: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1512907/new-rating-system-needed-bgg https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1512907/new-rating-system-n...
  - cognivore 11y ago
    "The proof of the pudding is in the tasting" is certainly a statement I would agree with. Controversy around the rating system on boardgamegeek.com doesn't really invalidate that games that rank higher tend to be better. The same could be said of rottentomatoes.com, metacritic.com, and just about anything that rates anything. Use a large enough set of data and even subjective evaluations are useful. But I certainly wouldn't let a rating system dictate what I think is a good game.
kriro 11y ago
BGG rankings are essentially based on the idea of "how likely/eager would I be to agree to a game of X". By that measure tic tac toe deserves to be ranked very lowly. Same goes for Monopoly for me it's mostly a boring long grind with very few interesting decisions. Once you've understood that some squares are reached more often than others it's also closed to solved imo...at least there's a very good standard strategy. Granted that's not how most people would rank games especially if they get played only once a year or on the occasional family meeting. I would also rank "A few Acres of Snow" very lowly but it's still reasonably high on BGG despite being solved/broken. There's also many people on BGG who have a "mission" of getting people to play less boring games. I'll gladly rank Monopoly lower than its true value because in relative terms I want it to lose as much ground as possible. It's also noteworthy that they have different categories (overall ranking, strategy games, family games, war games etc.). The family games ranking is very useful when buying games for the occasional game night (Monopoly replacement). There's also the (sometimes artificial) divide between thematic games (commonly referred to as Ameritrash) and strategy focused games (commonly referred to as Eurogames). Both archetypes are great fun for me but some people prefer a rich story and immersion (say Imperial Assault where you play a bunch of Rebels facing off against the Empire) and some want their games to be more pure optimization exercises. Like I said I love both types but this shows how hard it is to produce a unified ranking that makes everyone happy. And of course their algorithm is far from great (imo). Some games stick around for sentimental reasons or because they are hard to get, it's odd that they don't unify versions of games etc. Same guess for the UI which is quite horrible (once again imo).
jld89 11y ago
It is pretty obvious to me that this is a natural trend in a lot of areas of entertainment. Game design techniques are refined with time it is only normal that "classical" games get to the back rack as games develop to be more subtle, simple and refined.

37 points by mudil 11y ago

I don't see why a factor of chance makes a game unworthy. We want to learn for real life from games, and real life is full of chance. And there are strategies for dealing with chance, like hedging your bets. For Monopoly, mathematicians have worked out winning strategies. I think it has to do with a high chance of people landing in jail and the odds of landing on fields when starting from jail.

DanBC 11y ago
Monopoly's lack of fun isn't because it uses dice. Monopoly's lack of fun comes from the player elimination, which is a crucial part of the game. People dislike player elimination (because it feels mean), and include stuff to avoid it, (fines go in the middle and are collected if you land on free parking, for example). These house rules turn a 1 hour game into an interminable 5 hour slog. If you have a group of people who are happy with the concept of player elimination, and who play to win, and you avoid the house rules, Monopoly becomes somewhat fun. But there are very many much better games.
- drostie 11y ago
  So much this. The last game of Monopoly I played with my girlfriend, she was in the lead. She eventually started on the "well, it costs this much, but you don't have to pay if you don't want to..." No. The game is, just kill me and win. Stop trying to prolong it.
Mithaldu 11y ago
"A factor of chance" does not make a game "unworthy". Particularly, you're looking at this as a binary decision of worthy or unworthy. What makes a game interesting to most people is how much randomness there is. Human brains are built to dole out reward hormones when they make predictions and, followed by a period of uncertainty/expectation, their predictions come true; OR fail in such a way that they gain enough information to improve future predictions. Having too little randomness can (if there is little complexity) mean that predictions always come trivially true, which does not trigger the reward mechanism. Having too much randomness disables the triggering by way of a "teaching failure". (Though it still leaves the way open for the success trigger, thus addictions to gambling.) So in order for a game to be good, it needs to strike a certain balance between simplicity/complexity and determinism/randomness.
- Zikes 11y ago
  Some of my favorite games have a large amount of chance. There's a variety of dice games called "press your luck" where you can roll a set of dice and accept the results as they are, or roll again and again hoping for better results, but also increasing the odds that you'll "bust" and lose your turn entirely. I've played a few games where someone managed to win after only a couple of turns, or I just roll busts over and over, but there are still plenty of opportunities for strategy in between those wild swings of good and bad luck.
sago 11y ago
> I don't see why a factor of chance makes a game unworthy. Because it often makes it unfun. Not always, of course, many of the highest rated games on the Geek also have random elements. But in the case of, say, Chutes and Ladders, the entire outcome is random. Might as well flip a coin and call it. Why spend the time going up and down the board? For monopoly, a big crime is that it takes a long time to lose. You can spend an hour with no chance of winning, kept alive only by random chance. These are not 'unworthy', they are just boring in comparison to many other games. I think people avoid the 'other' games not because they have some deep subtle appreciation for the merits of the 'bad' games, but because they haven't come across better options. It is rare to find someone who likes Monopoly who can describe another game with the same theme (not counting Star Wars Monopoly!).
- kqr 11y ago
  > For monopoly, a big crime is that it takes a long time to lose. You can spend an hour with no chance of winning, kept alive only by random chance. ...and when the first player loses, they have to sit by and idly watch while one player gains a larger and larger advantage, only waiting for the rest to lose.
- facepalm 11y ago
  I guess it is true that the time it takes to lose is the real issue. Still, I played a lot of Monopoly as a kid. Nowadays it wouldn't be my first choice for a game evening, but I have brought it out occasionally for my preschool kid. I make him calculate change money, which he doesn't always like. Even Chutes and Ladders can be great fun for kids, and they can practice counting. I think the boardgame geek top list is a bit biased, because it was made by gaming geeks who might tend to prefer complicated game mechanics.
  - sago 11y ago
    I don't think so, a game like Werewolf, say is very simple, and has a lot of love on the Geek. A game like Ticket to Ride, or the Resistance, or Forbidden Island is much less complex than Monopoly, but are routinely in top lists of game fans. Okay, you have to be into heavier games to be into Brass, but heavy Euros are hardly the be-all of board gaming. [edit: Yeah, I take back the 'I don't think so' - on reflection - there is a bias towards heavy games at the top, but I don't think that's why Monopoly, Parcheesi et al are low]
babarock 11y ago
There are many things I dislike about Monopoly but the randomness isn't one of them. A good deal of games I love have a big chunk of luck/randomness and I'm fine with it. The things I dislike about Monopoly: * Not too much strategy involved. The player who wins is usually the one who buys a lot of lands early. * It's long. Even the shortest games last over 90 minutes. However the winner is decided much earlier in the game. There's very little you can do to prevent an early leader from taking the game, and you have to sit there watching them bully you slowly for several hours. * The theme sucks. "Buy land, make more money". I don't find that particularly fun. * The good elements of monopoly are often found in other games that don't share the same bad elements (I'm thinking of Settlers, but there are others too).
- onion2k 11y ago
  The player who wins is usually the one who buys a lot of lands early. That's testable. Simulate a few tens of thousands of games based on some criteria (players always buy properties they land on if they can afford them, players will mortgage their portfolio to buy properties if it blocks another player, etc) and see if the person winning on round n where n is an early round is the same as the person who's winning at the end of the game. It certainly sounds like it's true. It'd be interesting to see how early you can abandon a game and still know who'd have won.
lmm 11y ago
An element of chance is fine, if it allows interesting decision making. Good games of chance indeed involve strategies like hedging your bets. But with Monopoly, 90% of turns involve literally no decision-making - you roll, move along, and pay out or not. Occasionally you have a tough call to make about whether to buy a property, or how many houses to buy - but those are the exception rather than the rule. 90% of the game is essentially you doing bookkeeping for the game.

Zikes 11y ago

Someone recently posited a theory that really stood out to me: when a better version of a board game comes along, the old one simply becomes obsolete. The game that they were referring to in particular was Secret Hitler, which they felt obsoleted Werewolf and The Resistance. When I have an opportunity to play board games with people I will always want to play something that I think is fun, exciting, or new. Monopoly is none of those things to me. For some people it probably endures primarily out of nostalgia, or a lack of interest in other options, but there are so many better options for new board game players.

anywhichway 11y ago
There is a huge list of games that "fired" other games like this on boardgame geek: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/50286/games-fired-other-games/page/1 https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/50286/games-fired-other-g...?
jclos 11y ago
That's one of the things these articles don't really take into account: games, much like movies, tv shows, music, etc. evolve and crossbreed. Some good games could become virtually unplayed because they were so great that the following generation of game designers took the mechanics they liked in them and used them to create new games.
cableshaft 11y ago
I was kind of thinking that about Resistance also recently (that it's pretty much obsolete), but after playing "Deception: Murder in Hong Kong". It still has the bad guys of Resistance, but there's a silent moderator giving clues for the good guys to figure out who they are, and there are actual murder weapons and clue cards that the good guys can use to help make their decisions. It's more interesting than "okay he voted this way this round, he must be a bad guy!"

kqr 11y ago

I think this article blows past several important points – perhaps unknowingly. 1. Sure, tic-tac-toe is a fantastic game for someone who needs to learn the "rewards of thinking ahead and taking the opponent’s strategy into account". Game enthusiasts (or indeed anyone above the age of 12) are very unlikely to need this lesson. 1> However, there is an interesting variant of tic-tac-toe[1] so disregarding the game completely isn't fair either. 2. People don't dislike Monopoly because it has dice. Risk has dice, and is incredibly popular. People dislike Monopoly because it is designed to be a game that is not fun to play for all but one player. 2> The game was designed as an anti-capitalist, anti-monopolist lesson.[2] When the rules are set up just right, only one person will be the winner and the other people will spiral into a negative feedback loop and quickly run out of all their money. That's the entire premise of the game: if you have a lot of money you can easily get more. Of course a game which is designed to distress 3/4 people playing in a session is not going to be very highly rated. That said, I do think there is one popular game that gets very little respect from (at least western) game enthusiasts: go[3]! Probably known in these circles as "the game computers can't yet beat top humans in" it's an abstract strategy game for two players (like chess) – with incredibly simple rules. You can learn the rules in a few minutes (literally) but it will take you weeks to even start feeling like you know what you are doing, and years before you're competent. The strategic and tactical depth is vast, much deeper than any other game I've tried. [1]: http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/06/16/ultimate-tic-tac-toe/ http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/06/16/ultimate-tic-tac-t... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_board_game_Monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_board_game_Mono... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)

thraxil 11y ago
> That said, I do think there is one popular game that gets very little respect from (at least western) game enthusiasts: go I guess I would have to disagree with your characterization of go as not respected. I've never heard any of the game enthusiasts I know talk about go in anything but the same reverent tone you use to explain why you like it. Who are you hanging out with?

chipsy 11y ago

Art is at its best when it presents questions. If our games declare random winners, or can be played perfectly to a predictable conclusion, they have stated a definite answer about strategy, and lack room for further investigation, which is distasteful to enthusiasts. That said, games also say something about the societies that play them. Monopoly's popularity in spite of its unfairness speaks to that. Playing it, and winning, reinforces a certain fantasy about becoming a property owner. The casual player believes: "This is how life works."

VLM 11y ago

"Complexity can be the result of elegant design" LOL its always the opposite. More detail below: The second to last paragraph is a direct analogy with programming where outsiders think the best programmer is the one generating infinitely complex code, but for people actually in the field the criteria is the reverse and the best programmer solves the problem with the least complex code. Of course this is somewhat political and some lisp-ish functional-ish languages are more aerospace "simplicate and add lightness" than other more grindy languages (java, cobol, whats the difference...) A gaming insider's view of the last paragraph is the lead story in the latest "C3I Magazine" is by the COIN series designer explaining the virtue, measurement, and minimization of complexity as a series of games develop. On a slightly tangential topic, C3I Magazine has an interesting although probably unscalable solution to the magazine industry crisis.

VLM 11y ago

An interesting aspect of Monopoly hate not discussed so far is the analogy with computer graphics / VR "uncanny valley". Much like a CGI face can approximate a human closely enough to be just far enough off to be repellent, an individual board game can approximate the ideal of a really good game yet end up so far off the mark that it lands in the uncanny valley of dislike. Most of the general public doesn't like political activism, and the game being invented as a piece of propaganda, more or less, it not going to appeal to most people because its propaganda, and even worse, some of why the game sucks might have been required for propaganda purposes. And that circularizes the argument for the general public, see why political propaganda is bad, it made the Monopoly game suck by dumping to the bottom of the uncanny valley therefore propaganda is bad. In summary I'd theorize that game appeal follows an uncanny valley curve and unfortunately right at the bottom of the trench is where you'll find Monopoly.

muzani 11y ago

Monopoly is such an underrated game. It's about negotiation and alliances. I think their biggest mistake is calling it Monopoly, implying it was one person killing off everyone else. It might be more interesting if it was called Balance of Power. It has to be played with around 4+ people. They need to trade favors along with their land. With enough players, the favors owed last long enough to make a difference. The randomness simply makes negotiation power the main focus of the game. E.g. if you land on a rival's hotel and go broke, a rich ally can pay you premium on your land. You'll realize early on that everyone is either going to be doomed or super-rich, so it's worth being diplomatic really early on. When someone starts to snowball into a monopoly, they have to start laying low, while the others have to encourage the others to pile pressure. The players have to notice this trend early, at the point where it makes sense to 'blacklist' certain players. It's a game with about as much depth as Settlers of Catan, without having to worry about too much complexity.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
> Monopoly is such an underrated game. It's about negotiation and alliances. I think their biggest mistake is calling it Monopoly, implying it was one person killing off everyone else. It might be more interesting if it was called Balance of Power. Ironically, Balance of Power is an actual game, and it's single-player. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)
colejohnson66 11y ago
Monopoly was originally created to show the dangers of letting a business become a "monopoly". That is until the Parker Brothers started making it and marketing it as a game. From Wikipedia[0]: > The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903,[1][4] when American anti-monopolist Elizabeth (Lizzie) J. Magie Phillips, created a game through which she hoped to be able to explain the single tax theory of Henry George. It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)#Early_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)#Early_history
lmm 11y ago

purpled_haze 11y ago

The comment about chess is just astounding to me: "The queen, which can move horizontally, vertically or diagonally, is nothing more than a combination of the rook and the bishop, making it an inelegant redundancy." Whoever stated that has never played chess to the level they should before even attempting to comment on the game. Chess would seem to me to be one of the ultimate games for humans; it's simple enough to teach a child, but few adults can come close to mastering it. Even the term "chess master" is a bit of a lie. To be a "chess master", you'd have to know the perfect solution move for every board configuration- forget openings, gambits, tactics- that's child's play compared to truly mastering the game. People called "masters" are just really damn good- not perfect. In comparison, I am a "tic tac toe" master. I know that I can fail to lose at the game if I try.

heydenberk 11y ago
The rules of chess are, in fact, complicated and inelegant compared to the rules of Go.
- kqr 11y ago
  Especially with the modern variants in play in competitive games, such as en passant capture and the like. Many fairly enthusiastic chess players aren't exactly sure what all the rules are.
  - hollerith 11y ago
    Not counting online games, I've played many 100s of games of chess with many dozens of people, mostly strangers, incl 12-year-olds (when I was 12) and not once did a dispute or difference of opinion arise about the legality of any move (incl en-passant moves). What is the name of this strange country where players who are not just starting out don't know the rules of chess?
    - lmm 11y ago
      Here in the UK I have had to call a referee over during a tournament because my opponent didn't know about en passant. And it turned out said referee didn't know either (fortunately the other players backed me up).

vacri 11y ago

Weird article. "Why do games enthusiasts dislike these games? You know, the games that are great for teaching children some supposed lesson or other?". I expect other articles from the author to include "Why don't wine enthusiasts like $3 bottles of rotgut? I mean, it's really popular with winos" and "why do people like listening to musical bands? Toy xylophones are popular with kids, and teaches them hand-eye co-ordination, rhythm, and so forth." I mean, the author lionises tic-tac-toe as providing some deep life lesson, when in actuality, even the author's target demographic gets bored of it in very short order.

toothbrush 11y ago

Simply commenting on the title, but it struck me that you can probably say “Some of the most popular $X get the least respect from $X enthusiasts” — examples of X that come to mind are music, food, wine, ….

joezydeco 11y ago
...Adam Sandler movies...

cwyers 11y ago

> Monopoly is neither simple nor random Well, it's not simple.

cognivore 11y ago

I think the proof is in the pudding. I've played hundreds of hours of chess in my life, and I set chess aside as a special case, but as for the rest of the traditional board games, they become boring once you've played highly rated games on boardgamegeek.com. Monopoly is a good example. It feels crushingly dull and random (yes, even with wheeling and dealing) to the point that I would call it an anti-game - it actually removes fun instead of creates it. A better title would be "Death March." I've spent that last thirty years playing and watching board games enter what seems to be their golden age, and have introduced scores of people to the games I love, and have had friends do so in kind. Almost universally people say something along the lines of, "Wow, that was fun. It's nothing like the games we played as a kid." Often followed up with "Where do we buy this?" They don't play the games from their childhood anymore because they're boring and they didn't know there were alternatives. Now they'll play board games as adults and enjoy themselves. Beats the Hell out of TV.

agentultra 11y ago
The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. And the rating system on that site is in question of late due to a presently controversial number 1 game: Pandemic: Legacy. The rating system is highly subjective and many suspect is prone to "flavor of the week," ratings by people who don't take time to read the scale and objectively rate the games they play. Monopoly could be rated so lowly because it is a popular opinion on the site that it's not a good game. That being said I don't think the classics are disappearing or that they're bad games. A game like Mancala is seeing a resurgence as a mechanic in many popular games today. I think we can learn something from what made these games endure for so long and are starting to incorporate them into new games. Don't let the rating system on boardgamegeek dictate what we think is a really good game until the objectivity problem gets sorted out. update: An example of a thread that comes up every now and again: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1512907/new-rating-system-needed-bgg https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1512907/new-rating-system-n...
- cognivore 11y ago
  "The proof of the pudding is in the tasting" is certainly a statement I would agree with. Controversy around the rating system on boardgamegeek.com doesn't really invalidate that games that rank higher tend to be better. The same could be said of rottentomatoes.com, metacritic.com, and just about anything that rates anything. Use a large enough set of data and even subjective evaluations are useful. But I certainly wouldn't let a rating system dictate what I think is a good game.

kriro 11y ago

BGG rankings are essentially based on the idea of "how likely/eager would I be to agree to a game of X". By that measure tic tac toe deserves to be ranked very lowly. Same goes for Monopoly for me it's mostly a boring long grind with very few interesting decisions. Once you've understood that some squares are reached more often than others it's also closed to solved imo...at least there's a very good standard strategy. Granted that's not how most people would rank games especially if they get played only once a year or on the occasional family meeting. I would also rank "A few Acres of Snow" very lowly but it's still reasonably high on BGG despite being solved/broken. There's also many people on BGG who have a "mission" of getting people to play less boring games. I'll gladly rank Monopoly lower than its true value because in relative terms I want it to lose as much ground as possible. It's also noteworthy that they have different categories (overall ranking, strategy games, family games, war games etc.). The family games ranking is very useful when buying games for the occasional game night (Monopoly replacement). There's also the (sometimes artificial) divide between thematic games (commonly referred to as Ameritrash) and strategy focused games (commonly referred to as Eurogames). Both archetypes are great fun for me but some people prefer a rich story and immersion (say Imperial Assault where you play a bunch of Rebels facing off against the Empire) and some want their games to be more pure optimization exercises. Like I said I love both types but this shows how hard it is to produce a unified ranking that makes everyone happy. And of course their algorithm is far from great (imo). Some games stick around for sentimental reasons or because they are hard to get, it's odd that they don't unify versions of games etc. Same guess for the UI which is quite horrible (once again imo).

jld89 11y ago

It is pretty obvious to me that this is a natural trend in a lot of areas of entertainment. Game design techniques are refined with time it is only normal that "classical" games get to the back rack as games develop to be more subtle, simple and refined.