7 ms·

Anyone think recent board games are becoming unnecessarily complex and deeply strategy based? It could just be what I've seen from my friends but a lot of the t

by gglover 10y ago

Anyone think recent board games are becoming unnecessarily complex and deeply strategy based? It could just be what I've seen from my friends but a lot of the times you can tell from the box art and title alone that you're going to need tiles, tokens, cards a 3 page manual and a practice round before you can even start. For me, that's a slog. It's too hard to hold conversation or focus on anything other than the game. I guess there will always be a divide between people who can spend 3 hours of intense concentration on a Settlers of Catan game and people who just want to play Jenga for a few rounds. Are there any popular simple games in the latter category recently?

splawn 10y ago
There are lots of new party games coming out too. Codenames is one that is simple and seems to be getting more and more popular.
- ygra 10y ago
  Have been playing Codenames yesterday and it's surprisingly fun for a game that essentially just consists of 25 words during gameplay. Exploding Kittens and Love Letter are two other games that are quick to explain and fast to play (and that we play somewhat regularly). Basically, a good list might be Board Game Geek's list of Party games: http://boardgamegeek.com/partygames/browse/boardgame?sort=rank&rankobjecttype=family&rankobjectid=5498 http://boardgamegeek.com/partygames/browse/boardgame?sort=ra...
internobody 10y ago
There are a ton of card-based games that are fast and easy to play, without complicated rules, such as Cards Against Humanity, Red Flags. These require minimal explanation and are quite portable but are still fun and social.
greglindahl 10y ago
While playing Empires in Arms, a mega-wargame that requires 7 players and 18 months of 1-per-week play to finish, we'd play side games of Nuclear Destruction, which is fluffy card game. Both kinds have always existed.
totalrobe 10y ago
Check out Exploding Kittens - simple but requires a bit of tactical skill.
- rrmm 10y ago
  Played this last weekend with a group that included two young kids. It was a pretty fun diversion with a few simple mechanics, and the kids enjoyed the cards. Munchkin is slightly more complex but worked as well. I also think Zombie Dice is a pretty fun game while being relatively easy.
KVFinn 10y ago
>Anyone think recent board games are becoming unnecessarily complex and deeply strategy based? Nah, both simple and complicated board games are more popular than ever. This particular list is focused on the complicated side. But off the top of my head some great and recent simpler ones: Codenames, Bring Your Own Book (free if you print your own copy), Potion Explosion, A Fake Artist Goes to New York, Spaceteam, Colt Express, HABA Go Cuckoo! A Wobbly Nest-Building Game (Jenga-esque!), Wits and Wagers.
- d13 10y ago
  A few more to add.. You can teach the rules of these amazing games in about a minute: Love Letter (best card game ever?), Hand of the King, Splendor, Carcassonne. You can teach the rules of these equally great games in about 5 minutes: Forbidden Island, Inis (my favourite game of the year!), Not Alone (a brilliant cat-and-mouse game card game that scales from 2 to 7 players )
  - elliottcarlson 10y ago
    Both Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert were a great hit and easy to teach my < 10yo nephews. Another game that is pretty quick to pick up is Machi Koro.
  - indigo_rex 10y ago
    I haven't played the original Love Letter, but Batman Love Letter (from what I remember, the Robin card is the major variation, but I could be wrong) is a great game to break out for small gatherings. Anyone can play it, and there's enough luck involved that anyone can win a given game. Star Realms is not as easy, but most people can pick up the basics pretty quickly, and it's one of our favorites. The app is also great! It requires more setup, but King of Tokyo is easy and fun, too. The main problem with King of Tokyo is that it soon becomes obvious that rolling for points is the best approach most of the time. King of New York fixes this, but new people are more likely to struggle with the rules. Zombie Dice is almost purely a game you play while doing something else, but it doesn't get much easier, and it's still pretty fun.
  - 10y ago
icefox 10y ago
This past year at work friends and I made a little board game and your complaints were our top requirements. We wanted it to be setup in minutes, explained in 5, played in about an hour, with turns lasting just minutes at most and with a high degree of social interaction and yet still have a fair amount of depth and strategy. We ended making a little stock game called "Day Traitor" where on your turn you play one of your three cards that let you see the future of two stocks, followed by selling and buying stocks, and cash out for gold. Get 10 gold and you win. The amusing part is that on the back of the card half of the information (either the stocks or the amount they will change) is visible so everyone else around the table can see this partial information. And to go with that you might have just bought a bunch of "Red" stock further leaking information that you think it will go up and so the person going after you might also buy Red. When you buy a stock it gets a bonus $1 bump in price (as well a negative $1 bonus when you sell). This all combines to create many situations where we try to convince each other the now is the time to buy/sell something to great amusement because doing so might help you. Over the course of the game you need to cash out for gold, but the more gold you buy on a turn the more expensive it is so you want to acquire gold at just the right speed for however the game plays out. There is a little bit more, but that is the meat of the game. It has been a lot of fun designing it with our group and just need to get some art and then I will stick it up thegamecrafter.com or somewhere so at least we can get a copy. We went through a lot of design choices where we found something fun, but would cause a turn to take twice as long or double the explanation time or setup time. We ruthlessly would cut anything that didn't add fun or broke our requirements of fast quick setup and explanation and in the end created something pretty fun.
- kbenson 10y ago
  That sounds like a lot of fun. You should definitely do a Show HN if/when you get it up somewhere, I'm sure a lot of people here would be interested in the design process. Edit: Also, I really want to play this. Please do that Show HN so I know I can get this game somehow. :)
- RangerScience 10y ago
  Checkout the board for "Wealth of Nations"; it's a slick way of handling market pricing.
jacalata 10y ago
I suspect that what you are seeing is not a change in the market but a change in what your friends are interested in. Many of my friends who play board games regularly no longer want to play the simpler games available.
jldugger 10y ago
There's absolutely a Renaissance of complicated board games. They rarely rise to the level of Civ for PCs, but can still involve a lot of reading rules / cards. For the die hard fans, they're usually easy to pick up because few games are really 'new'. But for the beginner, telling someone "this is a dice version of Puerto Rico" is useless. Are there good, easy to learn party games from the past few years? Codenames is a huge hit, and released a Codenames:Pictures followup this year. Insider is sort of a 20 questions game where one of the guessers knows the buzzword, and must help push the team towards the goal within the time limit without being voted as the insider at the end of the game. Secret Hitler situates players in 1930's Germany, pitting liberals against fascists in a social climate favoring authoritarian policies. Sushi Go Party! is a card drafting / set collection game that's fairly easy to explain to novices, and a lot of the appeal is in the variable setup. This version also scales to like 8 or 10 players, if need be. Captain Sonar is more complicated, but varies with the player's duties (First Mate is considered easiest by my group). It involves two submarine teams hunting one another. The mix of roles i interesting, from easy things like First Mate charging systems, to more challenging roles like Captains navigating the ship without giving away position or Radio Operators tracking the enemy ship and narrowing down their position. Most of the rules are simple, and the rulebook's size is mostly attributable to explaining the more complicated maps. Personally, I like the radio operator, as it's something of a real time Japanese pencil puzzle game.
xiaodown 10y ago
There's lots of not-so-deep ones out there in the new "board games renaissance", too - like Forbidden Island / Forbidden Desert, Sheriff of Nottingham, or recently this year, Secret Hitler. They take like 2 minutes to set up, 2 minutes to understand the rules, and are loads of fun even for kids (maybe not so much on the kids with the Hitler).
DanBC 10y ago
Bohnanza is fun, and doesn't get much attention. Ticket to Ride is great fun too. Button Men is fun, and possibly free if you print it, but requires some dice.
enraged_camel 10y ago
Wait, are we talking about board games, or JavaScript frameworks? :P
facepalm 10y ago
I often think "all the accounting could be better done by a computer". So I am not that much into that kind of games anymore.
hoodwink 10y ago
Anyone feel like there's been a resurgence in the popularity of board games in general? Maybe I'm just getting older and my friends are interested in activities other than partying, but I feel like all my circles have simultaneously taken interest in board games. Which is awesome. It used to be impossible to organize a group to play a round of Catan. Now people are down to play Through the Ages.
- chrisabrams 10y ago
  Yes thanks to kickstarter I've enjoyed many board games that I otherwise would not have even heard of. It's offered an alternative path to production thats led to many great games.
mkaziz 10y ago
I don't think Catan is particularly complex. I play casual rounds with friends all the time.
- TulliusCicero 10y ago
  Catan is more complex (but less complicated) than Monopoly.
  - tempestn 10y ago
    That's a pretty low bar, considering how little strategy is involved in a game of Monopoly.
  - ufo 10y ago
    What are your definitions for "complex" and "complicated"?
    - TulliusCicero 10y ago
      Monopoly has less strategic depth but more rules. Or at least feels that way to me.
      - ralfd 10y ago
        Monopoly has zero depth. Zero! Imagine making a computer game out of it, so throwing the dice, counting money and moving your game figurine is automated. What is left? Almost nothing. It is busywork, there are no decisions for the players to make.
        agscala 10y ago
        That's not necessarily true actually. Monopoly isn't a terribly complex game, but if you play it correctly you must either buy or auction every property landed on. It's mostly an auction and money management game, and there are decisions to be made
m12k 10y ago
There's many board games of a lot of types coming out in recent years. I also usually prefer the ones that seem 'pure' in that they have a focus on a few mechanics that work well and are quick to explain. A couple examples are Coup, Codenames and King of Tokyo.
VLM 10y ago
3 whole pages... Today's active grognard community of hex based (and other) military sims with their 60 pages of manuals for MBT/Panzer or the COIN series games are providing plenty of pressure from the other end to keep things level. To say nothing of the guys with a lineal yard of book shelf space of pathfinder rulebooks or binders full of advanced squad leader and federation commander... I'm just saying theres many levels of orders of magnitude higher complexity games pushing down from their more complex territory to keep the eurogames simple, relatively. If there's a push against eurogames its probably from the bottom up. The days of the bottom being very weak like chutes n ladders or monopoly are mostly gone so eurogames have to up their game a bit, which seems to result in games more complicated than a single page like the old days of carcassone. Still for request for simple games, there's card games like Fluxx, which is old but under continuous development such that 1990s fluxx isn't 2014 fluxx. There's a whole genre of bluffing games, Sheriff of Nottingham and the various who is the werewolf games. Then there's organization games like the dice version of space cadets which takes about two minutes to set up and about three days for your voice to recover from all the arguing (unless your starship is more disciplined than ours LOL)
- godelski 10y ago
  I also have to suggest Love Letter for a simple quick game. Something which is enough luck based that you can win the first time but has enough strategy to make it more entertaining.
  - ashark 10y ago
    Would 3rd Love Letter, also suggest Sushi Go Party. Plus it's a gateway drug to the excellent 7 Wonders.
- syngrog66 10y ago
  a mere 60 pages? :-) - ASL fan
quink 10y ago
Since 2010: https://boardgamegeek.com/search/boardgame?sort=rank&advsearch=1&q=&include%5Bdesignerid%5D=&include%5Bpublisherid%5D=&geekitemname=&range%5Byearpublished%5D%5Bmin%5D=2010&range%5Byearpublished%5D%5Bmax%5D=&range%5Bminage%5D%5Bmax%5D=&range%5Bnumvoters%5D%5Bmin%5D=&range%5Bnumweights%5D%5Bmin%5D=&range%5Bminplayers%5D%5Bmax%5D=&range%5Bmaxplayers%5D%5Bmin%5D=&range%5Bleastplaytime%5D%5Bmin%5D=&range%5Bplaytime%5D%5Bmax%5D=&floatrange%5Bavgrating%5D%5Bmin%5D=&floatrange%5Bavgrating%5D%5Bmax%5D=&floatrange%5Bavgweight%5D%5Bmin%5D=&floatrange%5Bavgweight%5D%5Bmax%5D=2&colfiltertype=&searchuser=quink&playerrangetype=normal&B1=Submit https://boardgamegeek.com/search/boardgame?sort=rank&advsear...
ythn 10y ago
> Are there any popular simple games in the latter category recently? One Night Ultimate Werewolf Splendor Love Letter Coup
2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
A lot of these games just need a good editorial team or better design. The rules are often not as concisely or clearly explained or the iconography is confusing. Once you get down to it, it's easy.
partisan 10y ago
My friends and I enjoyed a lot of rounds of Pit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(game)). It is a good game for when you have a group of 4 - 6 people and don't want the commitment of an overlong game.
spaceisballer 10y ago
Totally agree. I've enjoyed Codenames, fun team game and each game doesn't take long. With family or friends we've had the most fun playing the Jackbox Games, specifically Drawful or Fibbage. You can buy them on Apple TV or usually I use the steam link my PC. Each player just needs a phone or tablet. Granted they are not board games but most people have a PC or a Apple TV or Android device hooked up to their PC.
fian 10y ago
I have introduced Cogz: http://cogz.raez.net/ http://cogz.raez.net/ to a few friends. They all liked it and a couple bought it to play with their children. The rules are reasonably simple, setup takes about 5 mins. Success requires some strategy and some luck. Games usually take about 30 mins.
stale2002 10y ago
Speaking as a hard core board gamer, I find it absolutely hilarious that your idea of a complex board game is Settlers of Catan! That's the intro, beginners board game to these complex Euro games. But I guess that kinda proves your point...
sandworm101 10y ago
Giant jenga is fun. Dependinh on how you play it can be more demamding than you might assume. But still, no ruke book or cards means anyone can pick it up in seconds. Correction: "giant wood block stacking game" as the "giant jenga" product isnt exactly giant imgo.
chapium 10y ago
If anything, what I have seen are games get simplified and play optimized to the point where each player has little downtime. It all really depends on the designer of the game and the style of games they create. I would recommend titles such as Splendor or Ticket to Ride. Both have very simple rules and are addicting to play. As for Jenga vs strategy games, its not really fair to compare these since they lie in very different genres. The preferences and expectations of the players will be towards different genres. The strategy genre is booming right now.
racl101 10y ago
Yeah I"m with you. I hate games that take forever to learn the rules, to get going, that cause mass confusion, that require extreme amounts of patience. I usually pass out from fatigue or the alcohol. Not fun at all and things get too tense.
croon 10y ago
Not necessarily Jenga-simple, but I've also come to realize that I'd much rather play 2-3 rounds of a 30 minute game with friends than try to get through a 120 minute round of one game where it's not clear if we're playing correctly or how we're doing in the game. In this regard I (we) have had a lot of fun with King of Tokyo (the Power Up! expansion is cheap and IMO required). There is also the newer King of New York that supposedly fixes some balance issues (and a Power Up! to that as well). I've also heard good things about 7 Wonders.

by gglover 10y ago

splawn 10y ago

There are lots of new party games coming out too. Codenames is one that is simple and seems to be getting more and more popular.

ygra 10y ago
Have been playing Codenames yesterday and it's surprisingly fun for a game that essentially just consists of 25 words during gameplay. Exploding Kittens and Love Letter are two other games that are quick to explain and fast to play (and that we play somewhat regularly). Basically, a good list might be Board Game Geek's list of Party games: http://boardgamegeek.com/partygames/browse/boardgame?sort=rank&rankobjecttype=family&rankobjectid=5498 http://boardgamegeek.com/partygames/browse/boardgame?sort=ra...

internobody 10y ago

There are a ton of card-based games that are fast and easy to play, without complicated rules, such as Cards Against Humanity, Red Flags. These require minimal explanation and are quite portable but are still fun and social.

greglindahl 10y ago

While playing Empires in Arms, a mega-wargame that requires 7 players and 18 months of 1-per-week play to finish, we'd play side games of Nuclear Destruction, which is fluffy card game. Both kinds have always existed.

totalrobe 10y ago

Check out Exploding Kittens - simple but requires a bit of tactical skill.

rrmm 10y ago
Played this last weekend with a group that included two young kids. It was a pretty fun diversion with a few simple mechanics, and the kids enjoyed the cards. Munchkin is slightly more complex but worked as well. I also think Zombie Dice is a pretty fun game while being relatively easy.

KVFinn 10y ago

>Anyone think recent board games are becoming unnecessarily complex and deeply strategy based? Nah, both simple and complicated board games are more popular than ever. This particular list is focused on the complicated side. But off the top of my head some great and recent simpler ones: Codenames, Bring Your Own Book (free if you print your own copy), Potion Explosion, A Fake Artist Goes to New York, Spaceteam, Colt Express, HABA Go Cuckoo! A Wobbly Nest-Building Game (Jenga-esque!), Wits and Wagers.

d13 10y ago
A few more to add.. You can teach the rules of these amazing games in about a minute: Love Letter (best card game ever?), Hand of the King, Splendor, Carcassonne. You can teach the rules of these equally great games in about 5 minutes: Forbidden Island, Inis (my favourite game of the year!), Not Alone (a brilliant cat-and-mouse game card game that scales from 2 to 7 players )
- elliottcarlson 10y ago
  Both Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert were a great hit and easy to teach my < 10yo nephews. Another game that is pretty quick to pick up is Machi Koro.
- indigo_rex 10y ago
  I haven't played the original Love Letter, but Batman Love Letter (from what I remember, the Robin card is the major variation, but I could be wrong) is a great game to break out for small gatherings. Anyone can play it, and there's enough luck involved that anyone can win a given game. Star Realms is not as easy, but most people can pick up the basics pretty quickly, and it's one of our favorites. The app is also great! It requires more setup, but King of Tokyo is easy and fun, too. The main problem with King of Tokyo is that it soon becomes obvious that rolling for points is the best approach most of the time. King of New York fixes this, but new people are more likely to struggle with the rules. Zombie Dice is almost purely a game you play while doing something else, but it doesn't get much easier, and it's still pretty fun.
- 10y ago

icefox 10y ago

This past year at work friends and I made a little board game and your complaints were our top requirements. We wanted it to be setup in minutes, explained in 5, played in about an hour, with turns lasting just minutes at most and with a high degree of social interaction and yet still have a fair amount of depth and strategy. We ended making a little stock game called "Day Traitor" where on your turn you play one of your three cards that let you see the future of two stocks, followed by selling and buying stocks, and cash out for gold. Get 10 gold and you win. The amusing part is that on the back of the card half of the information (either the stocks or the amount they will change) is visible so everyone else around the table can see this partial information. And to go with that you might have just bought a bunch of "Red" stock further leaking information that you think it will go up and so the person going after you might also buy Red. When you buy a stock it gets a bonus $1 bump in price (as well a negative $1 bonus when you sell). This all combines to create many situations where we try to convince each other the now is the time to buy/sell something to great amusement because doing so might help you. Over the course of the game you need to cash out for gold, but the more gold you buy on a turn the more expensive it is so you want to acquire gold at just the right speed for however the game plays out. There is a little bit more, but that is the meat of the game. It has been a lot of fun designing it with our group and just need to get some art and then I will stick it up thegamecrafter.com or somewhere so at least we can get a copy. We went through a lot of design choices where we found something fun, but would cause a turn to take twice as long or double the explanation time or setup time. We ruthlessly would cut anything that didn't add fun or broke our requirements of fast quick setup and explanation and in the end created something pretty fun.

kbenson 10y ago
That sounds like a lot of fun. You should definitely do a Show HN if/when you get it up somewhere, I'm sure a lot of people here would be interested in the design process. Edit: Also, I really want to play this. Please do that Show HN so I know I can get this game somehow. :)
RangerScience 10y ago
Checkout the board for "Wealth of Nations"; it's a slick way of handling market pricing.

jacalata 10y ago

I suspect that what you are seeing is not a change in the market but a change in what your friends are interested in. Many of my friends who play board games regularly no longer want to play the simpler games available.

jldugger 10y ago

There's absolutely a Renaissance of complicated board games. They rarely rise to the level of Civ for PCs, but can still involve a lot of reading rules / cards. For the die hard fans, they're usually easy to pick up because few games are really 'new'. But for the beginner, telling someone "this is a dice version of Puerto Rico" is useless. Are there good, easy to learn party games from the past few years? Codenames is a huge hit, and released a Codenames:Pictures followup this year. Insider is sort of a 20 questions game where one of the guessers knows the buzzword, and must help push the team towards the goal within the time limit without being voted as the insider at the end of the game. Secret Hitler situates players in 1930's Germany, pitting liberals against fascists in a social climate favoring authoritarian policies. Sushi Go Party! is a card drafting / set collection game that's fairly easy to explain to novices, and a lot of the appeal is in the variable setup. This version also scales to like 8 or 10 players, if need be. Captain Sonar is more complicated, but varies with the player's duties (First Mate is considered easiest by my group). It involves two submarine teams hunting one another. The mix of roles i interesting, from easy things like First Mate charging systems, to more challenging roles like Captains navigating the ship without giving away position or Radio Operators tracking the enemy ship and narrowing down their position. Most of the rules are simple, and the rulebook's size is mostly attributable to explaining the more complicated maps. Personally, I like the radio operator, as it's something of a real time Japanese pencil puzzle game.

xiaodown 10y ago

There's lots of not-so-deep ones out there in the new "board games renaissance", too - like Forbidden Island / Forbidden Desert, Sheriff of Nottingham, or recently this year, Secret Hitler. They take like 2 minutes to set up, 2 minutes to understand the rules, and are loads of fun even for kids (maybe not so much on the kids with the Hitler).

DanBC 10y ago

Bohnanza is fun, and doesn't get much attention. Ticket to Ride is great fun too. Button Men is fun, and possibly free if you print it, but requires some dice.

enraged_camel 10y ago

Wait, are we talking about board games, or JavaScript frameworks? :P

facepalm 10y ago

I often think "all the accounting could be better done by a computer". So I am not that much into that kind of games anymore.

hoodwink 10y ago

Anyone feel like there's been a resurgence in the popularity of board games in general? Maybe I'm just getting older and my friends are interested in activities other than partying, but I feel like all my circles have simultaneously taken interest in board games. Which is awesome. It used to be impossible to organize a group to play a round of Catan. Now people are down to play Through the Ages.

chrisabrams 10y ago
Yes thanks to kickstarter I've enjoyed many board games that I otherwise would not have even heard of. It's offered an alternative path to production thats led to many great games.

mkaziz 10y ago

I don't think Catan is particularly complex. I play casual rounds with friends all the time.

TulliusCicero 10y ago
Catan is more complex (but less complicated) than Monopoly.
- tempestn 10y ago
  That's a pretty low bar, considering how little strategy is involved in a game of Monopoly.
- ufo 10y ago
  What are your definitions for "complex" and "complicated"?
  - TulliusCicero 10y ago
    Monopoly has less strategic depth but more rules. Or at least feels that way to me.
    - ralfd 10y ago
      Monopoly has zero depth. Zero! Imagine making a computer game out of it, so throwing the dice, counting money and moving your game figurine is automated. What is left? Almost nothing. It is busywork, there are no decisions for the players to make.
      - agscala 10y ago
        That's not necessarily true actually. Monopoly isn't a terribly complex game, but if you play it correctly you must either buy or auction every property landed on. It's mostly an auction and money management game, and there are decisions to be made

m12k 10y ago

There's many board games of a lot of types coming out in recent years. I also usually prefer the ones that seem 'pure' in that they have a focus on a few mechanics that work well and are quick to explain. A couple examples are Coup, Codenames and King of Tokyo.

VLM 10y ago

3 whole pages... Today's active grognard community of hex based (and other) military sims with their 60 pages of manuals for MBT/Panzer or the COIN series games are providing plenty of pressure from the other end to keep things level. To say nothing of the guys with a lineal yard of book shelf space of pathfinder rulebooks or binders full of advanced squad leader and federation commander... I'm just saying theres many levels of orders of magnitude higher complexity games pushing down from their more complex territory to keep the eurogames simple, relatively. If there's a push against eurogames its probably from the bottom up. The days of the bottom being very weak like chutes n ladders or monopoly are mostly gone so eurogames have to up their game a bit, which seems to result in games more complicated than a single page like the old days of carcassone. Still for request for simple games, there's card games like Fluxx, which is old but under continuous development such that 1990s fluxx isn't 2014 fluxx. There's a whole genre of bluffing games, Sheriff of Nottingham and the various who is the werewolf games. Then there's organization games like the dice version of space cadets which takes about two minutes to set up and about three days for your voice to recover from all the arguing (unless your starship is more disciplined than ours LOL)

godelski 10y ago
I also have to suggest Love Letter for a simple quick game. Something which is enough luck based that you can win the first time but has enough strategy to make it more entertaining.
- ashark 10y ago
  Would 3rd Love Letter, also suggest Sushi Go Party. Plus it's a gateway drug to the excellent 7 Wonders.
syngrog66 10y ago
a mere 60 pages? :-) - ASL fan

quink 10y ago

Since 2010: https://boardgamegeek.com/search/boardgame?sort=rank&advsearch=1&q=&include%5Bdesignerid%5D=&include%5Bpublisherid%5D=&geekitemname=&range%5Byearpublished%5D%5Bmin%5D=2010&range%5Byearpublished%5D%5Bmax%5D=&range%5Bminage%5D%5Bmax%5D=&range%5Bnumvoters%5D%5Bmin%5D=&range%5Bnumweights%5D%5Bmin%5D=&range%5Bminplayers%5D%5Bmax%5D=&range%5Bmaxplayers%5D%5Bmin%5D=&range%5Bleastplaytime%5D%5Bmin%5D=&range%5Bplaytime%5D%5Bmax%5D=&floatrange%5Bavgrating%5D%5Bmin%5D=&floatrange%5Bavgrating%5D%5Bmax%5D=&floatrange%5Bavgweight%5D%5Bmin%5D=&floatrange%5Bavgweight%5D%5Bmax%5D=2&colfiltertype=&searchuser=quink&playerrangetype=normal&B1=Submit https://boardgamegeek.com/search/boardgame?sort=rank&advsear...

ythn 10y ago

> Are there any popular simple games in the latter category recently? One Night Ultimate Werewolf Splendor Love Letter Coup

2muchcoffeeman 10y ago

A lot of these games just need a good editorial team or better design. The rules are often not as concisely or clearly explained or the iconography is confusing. Once you get down to it, it's easy.

partisan 10y ago

My friends and I enjoyed a lot of rounds of Pit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(game)). It is a good game for when you have a group of 4 - 6 people and don't want the commitment of an overlong game.

spaceisballer 10y ago

Totally agree. I've enjoyed Codenames, fun team game and each game doesn't take long. With family or friends we've had the most fun playing the Jackbox Games, specifically Drawful or Fibbage. You can buy them on Apple TV or usually I use the steam link my PC. Each player just needs a phone or tablet. Granted they are not board games but most people have a PC or a Apple TV or Android device hooked up to their PC.

fian 10y ago

I have introduced Cogz: http://cogz.raez.net/ http://cogz.raez.net/ to a few friends. They all liked it and a couple bought it to play with their children. The rules are reasonably simple, setup takes about 5 mins. Success requires some strategy and some luck. Games usually take about 30 mins.

stale2002 10y ago

Speaking as a hard core board gamer, I find it absolutely hilarious that your idea of a complex board game is Settlers of Catan! That's the intro, beginners board game to these complex Euro games. But I guess that kinda proves your point...

sandworm101 10y ago

Giant jenga is fun. Dependinh on how you play it can be more demamding than you might assume. But still, no ruke book or cards means anyone can pick it up in seconds. Correction: "giant wood block stacking game" as the "giant jenga" product isnt exactly giant imgo.

chapium 10y ago

If anything, what I have seen are games get simplified and play optimized to the point where each player has little downtime. It all really depends on the designer of the game and the style of games they create. I would recommend titles such as Splendor or Ticket to Ride. Both have very simple rules and are addicting to play. As for Jenga vs strategy games, its not really fair to compare these since they lie in very different genres. The preferences and expectations of the players will be towards different genres. The strategy genre is booming right now.

racl101 10y ago

Yeah I"m with you. I hate games that take forever to learn the rules, to get going, that cause mass confusion, that require extreme amounts of patience. I usually pass out from fatigue or the alcohol. Not fun at all and things get too tense.

croon 10y ago

Not necessarily Jenga-simple, but I've also come to realize that I'd much rather play 2-3 rounds of a 30 minute game with friends than try to get through a 120 minute round of one game where it's not clear if we're playing correctly or how we're doing in the game. In this regard I (we) have had a lot of fun with King of Tokyo (the Power Up! expansion is cheap and IMO required). There is also the newer King of New York that supposedly fixes some balance issues (and a Power Up! to that as well). I've also heard good things about 7 Wonders.