3 ms·

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.

by 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.

by polm23 5y ago

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.