4 ms·

I caved to socializing with my friends that were into "game nights". What I learned is that the board game scene is ridiculous and obtuse. That's after learnin

I caved to socializing with my friends that were into "game nights". What I learned is that the board game scene is ridiculous and obtuse. That's after learning there is a board game scene at all. Insanely complex and stressful games where it isn't clear if you are competing with the other players as opposed to competing with surviving the mechanics of the game itself. Where you need an entire round of reconciliation just to understand what the "score" was, for the slight gratification of knowing who won. I can appreciate a game, I just don't think I can appreciate why this is a scene at all. How often is anybody playing these games? Why do people feel like they can make and launch board games themselves now, aside from enthusiasts pre-ordering a single run of a game on Kickstarter that nobody else will ever buy?

skinnyarms 5y ago
I have a lot of fun with friends playing games like this. Sometimes learning the rules can be tedious and annoying, but the more you play different games the more you see the same mechanics come up and it makes it easier. For us, the highs are worth the lows. We aren't the only ones either, the market is doing well: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/board-games-market-size-to-reach-revenues-of-around-30-billion-by-2026--arizton-301192937.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/board-games-market-... You and your friends might be better served with a more casual game...or maybe it's just not your thing.
- vmception 5y ago
  mmmm, that's interesting, how does one make recurring revenue in this market? I saw that the event closures substantially affected these growth metrics, what does that mean? are people playing so intensely training for events that they ruin their board games and have to buy additional copies? are the events causing the most interest in certain board games? are the events selling that much of the board game on the spot? I don't know anything about this market aside from small teams launching new games on kickstarter and occassionally one of those getting a distributor for perpetual sales.
  - spencerflem 5y ago
    I think it's like movies and videogames - something new that comes out is interesting and novel, and a subset of old games are good enough that new people joining the scene will want a copy
  - skinnyarms 5y ago
    As for recurring, designers and publishers are always releasing new games and expansions. Games like Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer, and Magic the Gathering are always releasing updates that encourage updating your materials. There are a few popular game awards, and the top x games from those tend to sell out everywhere. There are some game shops that encourage playing but I don't know that I'd call it successful...just not enough money moving to justify the space.
shitloadofbooks 5y ago
As someone with over 500 games (and way more expansions), I think your friends put you in over your head. It's akin to any other hobby. If you put strong-tasting craft beers into the hands of an in-experienced beer drinker, they'll have a similar experience. There are hundreds of "gateway" games and thousands of fantastic middle-weight games with elegant minimalistic rules which are still thinky and satisfying. Otherwise, there's millions of lighter games, which just act as a prop to get together and socialise without being the center of the night. And as someone who made and launched a game "by myself" (with a friend) that sold ~1000-1500 copies, why would anyone make anything? Why make a JS library that only 1000 people will use when FAANG can have a team do it? Pure creation, the enjoyment?
- vmception 5y ago
  Perhaps, but I think thats too reductive, I was able to learn the mechanics and compete and win sometimes on my first exposures. I would say this group of friends was the right level of competiveness for me, as I would go to other gamenights with different people and sweep the floor with the players such that it wasn't even fun for anyone else. I think I'm just not into it. Although maybe you have more experience with the likelihood of getting people into things with a more gradual approach even if they weren't challenged? I recall seeing something similar during a "sudoku" craze 15 years ago or so. I never played, and the people I worked with never played, but when they did they would solve it so fast and wonder what the craze was about. I was shocked and asked them if they knew that people coveted that level of skill with championships and cash prizes. They just weren't into it, and it always made me think about unsolved problems or records or genius, if problems weren't even interesting to the people with the cognitive abilities to solve them. But yes, even when I was writing my post I could see how the same could said for any other hobby. Not so different than video games. I just wasn't aware board games had gone that elaborate direction.
sdenton4 5y ago
Board games have a number of interesting problems to solve. As a designer, you are often trying to simulate a particular kind of 'interesting' system in a way that's fun, engaging, and simple enough to run by moving a few pieces of cardboard around (while perhaps slightly drunk). It's a fascinating design space. Occasionally a new game comes around with a fascinating new core game mechanic, which often solves a core design problem in an entirely new way. And then you'll see a few years of other games imitating the initial innovation... Often the 'originator' game may be pretty simple, to show off the new technique, and the followers steadily add complexity. People who play a lot of board games tend to pick up rules faster, due to knowing a lot of common mechanics already, and have a higher tolerance for complexity. Here's four great games which are pretty easy to learn and solved a problem in an interesting way. Settlers of Catan: Introduced 'early stopping' via victory points to avoid having 'dead' players stuck at the table, waiting for things to draw down. (Think of how terrible the end-game is in Risk or Monopoly.) Seven Wonders: It's really awful playing a turn-based game with more than four players... What if everyone takes their turns at the same time? Dominion: The best part of magic the gathering is building your deck, but - because of the CCG format - the playing field is really uneven. What if building your deck was part of the game? Hanabi: The worst part of cooperative games is that guy who just tells everyone what to do. What if you hid some really important information from each player, so no one can run the table?
- vmception 5y ago
  > And then you'll see a few years of other games imitating the initial innovation... Often the 'originator' game may be pretty simple, to show off the new technique, and the followers steadily add complexity. People who play a lot of board games tend to pick up rules faster, due to knowing a lot of common mechanics already, and have a higher tolerance for complexity. Thanks for that explanation! Yes, it seemed like there were some scene assumptions and complications that I had no idea existed. Very different from the time tested Monopoly and Scrabble. Now everything has phases, multi-variable resources, multi-variable point systems dependent on the phase, etc. Its just hard for me to discern where any of this came from, why people are aware of some of these mechanics, and which games just have really bad designs and bad product market fit - if the whole scene is just indie producers winning a popularity contest once on a crowdfunding site. There is a real skepticism for me on whether any set of rules or mechanics is "good" or just absurd - due to that last observation.
Macha 5y ago
I think games like seven wonders which is one of those where there does need to be a calculation of the score at the end of the game do this to avoid players feeling left out if they know they've lost and there's potentially twenty minutes of game left. The other way this is handled (and 7 wonders applies this too) is to make scores more swingy in the later rounds.
luxurytent 5y ago
The ideal board game is easy to learn while being difficult to master. Your friends put you through the ringer of what I imagine were overly complex games -- some people are into those, but I agree, they are not fun :) Kanban EV, Brass: Birmingham, Feast of the Odin Examples of recent games I've played which meet that easy learning / hard mastery blend
polm23 5y ago
That sounds like my experience with Agricola. The person who introduced it to me was very enthusiastic and friendly but I found it just a miserable experience. That said, I play and enjoy a lot of games. Many of them are more social and lighter, and all are more directly competitive/interactive. It sounds like, while of course board games just may not be for you, it's also possible your tastes didn't match with the group you were with. That said a lot of people tend to like games with no direct competition. These are derisively called "multiplayer solitaire", and a few times I've played some games like this by mistake and been mystified as to what's interesting about them. Recently, partly due to the pandemic, the "roll-and-write" genre, which is basically all like this, has been experiencing a burst of popularity. So a lot of people seem to enjoy it. It's not as solitary, but Gloomhaven, the number one ranked game on BoardGameGeek, is a very expensive game with a typical session taking four hours, and by the admission of its fans a large chunk of the gameplay time is setup, teardown, and bookkeeping. I played it once and I can't imagine what anyone sees in it, but there's demand so more games like it end up on Kickstarter or whatever. It's frustrating to see something I can't enjoy at all be the top of the industry in some ways, but the nice thing about games is they're quite diverse, so it's not that hard to find something more to my taste. I just have to keep in mind that some people have very difference preferences and that's not always communicated clearly.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Agricola was an early peak for worker placement games, but it definitely has rough edges. A huge number of the occupations and improvements are garbage, making entire huge decks seem like afterthoughts. It also only really hums if players clearly understand the flow of the game and can proactively plan and interfere with the plans of other players - but this is only feasible if everybody at the table has played many times. The game is also unbearably slow with 4+ players, even if everybody knows how to take their turns quickly. I think Gloomhaven is loved for somewhat similar reasons. It is a better cooperative tactical combat game than many others but I think that it really developed a following by being one of the first giant kickstarter games. This meant that the game could expand to be unreasonably large - 100 or so scenarios, like 20 playable characters, and riding the wave of legacy-style games with permanent changes to the game over time. It therefore hit at just the right moment when really nothing else like it existed on the marketplace. Since then, there have been a lot of other enormous boxes with far too many miniatures funded by kickstarter so it feels a little more bland today.
anthony_romeo 5y ago
People who play the complex games grow into them over time. Most people learn and enjoy checkers before they learn to appreciate and play chess. The people who successfully learn to play and enjoy a game like Twilight Struggle or Die Macher or Terra Mystica are likely well-versed in the jargon of board games and well-practiced in several types of game mechanics. So over time, the die-hards will tend to play more and more complicated games, as they’re readily able to understand and use these mechanics. So yes, games are getting more and more complex. However, what is inarguable is that board games have on the whole improved dramatically over the past decade. IMO a ‘modern classic’ like Catan is outdated, imbalanced, long, random, and frustrating compared to the current crop of ‘gateway games’ that are on the market. Games today are shorter, more engaging, more elegant in their designs, and higher quality than what one might have seen in a US department store in 2010, which were basically the same random and frustrating games of the past like Monopoly, Life, Risk. Furthermore, old games that were utterly utterly brilliant and fun (Cosmic Encounter) get continued rereleases and updates. Anyway, it’s just a fun way to stay social.
- vmception 5y ago
  Thanks! I thought I was perceiving something like that but I wasn't sure, glad to see it is a likely more fun or at least more engaging way to stay social than board games of the past.
jim-jim-jim 5y ago
Spot on. I love my friends, but I don't love learning a new set of bullshit rules every time I socialize with them.
Doxin 5y ago
There's a pretty wide variation in how complex board games get. On the one hand there's games like "The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Dice Building Game" which I haven't managed to play at all due to how complex a game it is. On the other hand there's games like "Patchwork" which is one step above snakes-and-ladders complexity-wise. The complexity of the rules is fairly orthogonal to how "deep" a game is though. I've now played patchwork a fair few times and I've not yet found a specific strategy that aproximates optimal. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you might just have had a single bad experience. I'd recommend trying again with different games. There's something out there for everyone.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
There is the subset of Spiel winners which are board games which have simple rules and usually are short, with however incredible depth. Check those!

skinnyarms 5y ago

I have a lot of fun with friends playing games like this. Sometimes learning the rules can be tedious and annoying, but the more you play different games the more you see the same mechanics come up and it makes it easier. For us, the highs are worth the lows. We aren't the only ones either, the market is doing well: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/board-games-market-size-to-reach-revenues-of-around-30-billion-by-2026--arizton-301192937.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/board-games-market-... You and your friends might be better served with a more casual game...or maybe it's just not your thing.

vmception 5y ago
mmmm, that's interesting, how does one make recurring revenue in this market? I saw that the event closures substantially affected these growth metrics, what does that mean? are people playing so intensely training for events that they ruin their board games and have to buy additional copies? are the events causing the most interest in certain board games? are the events selling that much of the board game on the spot? I don't know anything about this market aside from small teams launching new games on kickstarter and occassionally one of those getting a distributor for perpetual sales.
- spencerflem 5y ago
  I think it's like movies and videogames - something new that comes out is interesting and novel, and a subset of old games are good enough that new people joining the scene will want a copy
- skinnyarms 5y ago
  As for recurring, designers and publishers are always releasing new games and expansions. Games like Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer, and Magic the Gathering are always releasing updates that encourage updating your materials. There are a few popular game awards, and the top x games from those tend to sell out everywhere. There are some game shops that encourage playing but I don't know that I'd call it successful...just not enough money moving to justify the space.

shitloadofbooks 5y ago

As someone with over 500 games (and way more expansions), I think your friends put you in over your head. It's akin to any other hobby. If you put strong-tasting craft beers into the hands of an in-experienced beer drinker, they'll have a similar experience. There are hundreds of "gateway" games and thousands of fantastic middle-weight games with elegant minimalistic rules which are still thinky and satisfying. Otherwise, there's millions of lighter games, which just act as a prop to get together and socialise without being the center of the night. And as someone who made and launched a game "by myself" (with a friend) that sold ~1000-1500 copies, why would anyone make anything? Why make a JS library that only 1000 people will use when FAANG can have a team do it? Pure creation, the enjoyment?

vmception 5y ago
Perhaps, but I think thats too reductive, I was able to learn the mechanics and compete and win sometimes on my first exposures. I would say this group of friends was the right level of competiveness for me, as I would go to other gamenights with different people and sweep the floor with the players such that it wasn't even fun for anyone else. I think I'm just not into it. Although maybe you have more experience with the likelihood of getting people into things with a more gradual approach even if they weren't challenged? I recall seeing something similar during a "sudoku" craze 15 years ago or so. I never played, and the people I worked with never played, but when they did they would solve it so fast and wonder what the craze was about. I was shocked and asked them if they knew that people coveted that level of skill with championships and cash prizes. They just weren't into it, and it always made me think about unsolved problems or records or genius, if problems weren't even interesting to the people with the cognitive abilities to solve them. But yes, even when I was writing my post I could see how the same could said for any other hobby. Not so different than video games. I just wasn't aware board games had gone that elaborate direction.

sdenton4 5y ago

Board games have a number of interesting problems to solve. As a designer, you are often trying to simulate a particular kind of 'interesting' system in a way that's fun, engaging, and simple enough to run by moving a few pieces of cardboard around (while perhaps slightly drunk). It's a fascinating design space. Occasionally a new game comes around with a fascinating new core game mechanic, which often solves a core design problem in an entirely new way. And then you'll see a few years of other games imitating the initial innovation... Often the 'originator' game may be pretty simple, to show off the new technique, and the followers steadily add complexity. People who play a lot of board games tend to pick up rules faster, due to knowing a lot of common mechanics already, and have a higher tolerance for complexity. Here's four great games which are pretty easy to learn and solved a problem in an interesting way. Settlers of Catan: Introduced 'early stopping' via victory points to avoid having 'dead' players stuck at the table, waiting for things to draw down. (Think of how terrible the end-game is in Risk or Monopoly.) Seven Wonders: It's really awful playing a turn-based game with more than four players... What if everyone takes their turns at the same time? Dominion: The best part of magic the gathering is building your deck, but - because of the CCG format - the playing field is really uneven. What if building your deck was part of the game? Hanabi: The worst part of cooperative games is that guy who just tells everyone what to do. What if you hid some really important information from each player, so no one can run the table?

vmception 5y ago
> And then you'll see a few years of other games imitating the initial innovation... Often the 'originator' game may be pretty simple, to show off the new technique, and the followers steadily add complexity. People who play a lot of board games tend to pick up rules faster, due to knowing a lot of common mechanics already, and have a higher tolerance for complexity. Thanks for that explanation! Yes, it seemed like there were some scene assumptions and complications that I had no idea existed. Very different from the time tested Monopoly and Scrabble. Now everything has phases, multi-variable resources, multi-variable point systems dependent on the phase, etc. Its just hard for me to discern where any of this came from, why people are aware of some of these mechanics, and which games just have really bad designs and bad product market fit - if the whole scene is just indie producers winning a popularity contest once on a crowdfunding site. There is a real skepticism for me on whether any set of rules or mechanics is "good" or just absurd - due to that last observation.

Macha 5y ago

I think games like seven wonders which is one of those where there does need to be a calculation of the score at the end of the game do this to avoid players feeling left out if they know they've lost and there's potentially twenty minutes of game left. The other way this is handled (and 7 wonders applies this too) is to make scores more swingy in the later rounds.

luxurytent 5y ago

The ideal board game is easy to learn while being difficult to master. Your friends put you through the ringer of what I imagine were overly complex games -- some people are into those, but I agree, they are not fun :) Kanban EV, Brass: Birmingham, Feast of the Odin Examples of recent games I've played which meet that easy learning / hard mastery blend

polm23 5y ago

That sounds like my experience with Agricola. The person who introduced it to me was very enthusiastic and friendly but I found it just a miserable experience. That said, I play and enjoy a lot of games. Many of them are more social and lighter, and all are more directly competitive/interactive. It sounds like, while of course board games just may not be for you, it's also possible your tastes didn't match with the group you were with. That said a lot of people tend to like games with no direct competition. These are derisively called "multiplayer solitaire", and a few times I've played some games like this by mistake and been mystified as to what's interesting about them. Recently, partly due to the pandemic, the "roll-and-write" genre, which is basically all like this, has been experiencing a burst of popularity. So a lot of people seem to enjoy it. It's not as solitary, but Gloomhaven, the number one ranked game on BoardGameGeek, is a very expensive game with a typical session taking four hours, and by the admission of its fans a large chunk of the gameplay time is setup, teardown, and bookkeeping. I played it once and I can't imagine what anyone sees in it, but there's demand so more games like it end up on Kickstarter or whatever. It's frustrating to see something I can't enjoy at all be the top of the industry in some ways, but the nice thing about games is they're quite diverse, so it's not that hard to find something more to my taste. I just have to keep in mind that some people have very difference preferences and that's not always communicated clearly.

UncleMeat 5y ago
Agricola was an early peak for worker placement games, but it definitely has rough edges. A huge number of the occupations and improvements are garbage, making entire huge decks seem like afterthoughts. It also only really hums if players clearly understand the flow of the game and can proactively plan and interfere with the plans of other players - but this is only feasible if everybody at the table has played many times. The game is also unbearably slow with 4+ players, even if everybody knows how to take their turns quickly. I think Gloomhaven is loved for somewhat similar reasons. It is a better cooperative tactical combat game than many others but I think that it really developed a following by being one of the first giant kickstarter games. This meant that the game could expand to be unreasonably large - 100 or so scenarios, like 20 playable characters, and riding the wave of legacy-style games with permanent changes to the game over time. It therefore hit at just the right moment when really nothing else like it existed on the marketplace. Since then, there have been a lot of other enormous boxes with far too many miniatures funded by kickstarter so it feels a little more bland today.

anthony_romeo 5y ago

People who play the complex games grow into them over time. Most people learn and enjoy checkers before they learn to appreciate and play chess. The people who successfully learn to play and enjoy a game like Twilight Struggle or Die Macher or Terra Mystica are likely well-versed in the jargon of board games and well-practiced in several types of game mechanics. So over time, the die-hards will tend to play more and more complicated games, as they’re readily able to understand and use these mechanics. So yes, games are getting more and more complex. However, what is inarguable is that board games have on the whole improved dramatically over the past decade. IMO a ‘modern classic’ like Catan is outdated, imbalanced, long, random, and frustrating compared to the current crop of ‘gateway games’ that are on the market. Games today are shorter, more engaging, more elegant in their designs, and higher quality than what one might have seen in a US department store in 2010, which were basically the same random and frustrating games of the past like Monopoly, Life, Risk. Furthermore, old games that were utterly utterly brilliant and fun (Cosmic Encounter) get continued rereleases and updates. Anyway, it’s just a fun way to stay social.

vmception 5y ago
Thanks! I thought I was perceiving something like that but I wasn't sure, glad to see it is a likely more fun or at least more engaging way to stay social than board games of the past.

jim-jim-jim 5y ago

Spot on. I love my friends, but I don't love learning a new set of bullshit rules every time I socialize with them.

Doxin 5y ago

There's a pretty wide variation in how complex board games get. On the one hand there's games like "The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Dice Building Game" which I haven't managed to play at all due to how complex a game it is. On the other hand there's games like "Patchwork" which is one step above snakes-and-ladders complexity-wise. The complexity of the rules is fairly orthogonal to how "deep" a game is though. I've now played patchwork a fair few times and I've not yet found a specific strategy that aproximates optimal. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you might just have had a single bad experience. I'd recommend trying again with different games. There's something out there for everyone.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago

There is the subset of Spiel winners which are board games which have simple rules and usually are short, with however incredible depth. Check those!