4 ms·

How much of this is just "most board games are awful"? Awful in the sense of overly complicated and fiddly. There are plenty of games with deep strategic depth

How much of this is just "most board games are awful"? Awful in the sense of overly complicated and fiddly. There are plenty of games with deep strategic depth that have been around for hundreds of years and are simple enough that the rules fit on an index card and children routinely learn them from other children in the course of playing. If you end up with a 20-page rulebook, perhaps the problem is not how best to organize that rulebook, but that you have 18 pages too many rules in the first place.

krisoft 2y ago
> If you end up with a 20-page rulebook, perhaps the problem is not how best to organize that rulebook, but that you have 18 pages too many rules in the first place. Exactly. My pet peeve is when a game is launched as a kickstarter and they add new game mechanics as stretch goals. If it was a good game with just the basic mechanics then why on earth would anyone want it be more complicated just because more people have funded it? And from the other angle if it is a better game with the extra rules and mechanics added then why not make that the game? It is the job of the game’s designer to make the very hard choices and tradeoffs between complexity of rules and the fun people will have with them. If they abdicate this responsibility and leave it up to “let’s see how viral our kickstarter canpaing will be” then they don’t understand their task.
- ta_1138 2y ago
  Kickstarter games tend to have far more design than development, as the success of the kickstarter campaign has little to do with the game being any good, but with the material available at campaign time being attractive. So overproduced games with way too much art, and way to many systems, end up doing far better than, say, a simpler game that would have gone through a more traditional euro publisher 10 years ago. If you talk to people in industry, they realize that this is making the games worse, but it's making them sell better. Just like today, just like with a movie, high sales don't come from great mechanics, but franchises or licensing. Your superhero coop game is going to do much worse if it doesn't have a license. Why do we have so many boardgames with video game licenses? Because it sells. There's way too many games in the market right now for even industry insiders to good track of most offerings. Buyers working for large internet game stores are overwhelmed. So no, game designers are 100% understanding their task, which is to make a game that gets backed and is profitable. Cutting half the game after you told backers what you were doing is a disaster, and it's all those extra rules and extra boards that sold the game in the first place. The fact that the game is shelved after 3 plays is not a problem for them.
  - zahlman 2y ago
    How many times do Kickstarter backers have to get burned before they understand these ideas and switch to backing things that are actually likely to have good gameplay?
    - BeFlatXIII 2y ago
      Never: a new fool is born every minute.
erehweb 2y ago
I sympathize with this view, but I think it glosses over some of the point of boardgames - simulation of a world. Chess has been around for hundreds of years with great depth, but it is not a good simulation of a war or a battle. If you want something like that, then that's going to lead you to have a longer rulebook. (Though many games could still do with some mechanism-pruning).
- wolrah 2y ago
  I would argue that if your game legitimately requires a long and complicated rule book that perhaps a board is not the best medium for the game. My partner loves board games, and one of my takes that drives her nuts is that IMO most board games are better as a computer game where the tedious mechanics are automated. I am certainly an extremist in this way, I believe almost every board or card game ever made is better to play on a computer, but I think we should all be able to agree that a LOT of board games would benefit from automation. Monopoly is a great example, because basically everyone has at least some understanding of the game and basically no one has ever played it entirely correctly in purely analog form. I have literally never seen anyone do the auctions in real life, mortgaging is rare, and other "house rules" like the pot on "Free Parking" are common. All of these things tend to cause the game to drag on forever, ironically the thing most of those same players will complain the most about. If you play any of the computer/console versions the auctions are automatic and easy for everyone to participate. Some support the house rules as options, but they have to be enabled and some versions specifically warn that they will break the game. Computers exist to automate tedious tasks, if your game has tedious mechanics that require a lot of text to explain it'd probably be better as a computer game where those parts can be automated and the player just has to make their choices within that framework. In industrial safety one of the mantras is that if it's easier to do it wrong than right people will definitely do it wrong, so you need to make the right path also the easy path, sometimes changing entire systems or processes to make it that way. I believe the same logic should be applied to gaming. If your game is complicated enough that effectively no one is going to play it correctly as a board game, either simplify it so that's not the case or don't make it a board game. My partner would argue that the physical interaction with the pieces/cards/board/whatever is what matters and computers don't have that, but I believe if I'm judging a game as a game then the gameplay not making me hate it is the most important part.
jidar 2y ago
I mean, if you're not in the hobby you probably don't have any insight into this.
ggregoire 2y ago
A large number of players are only interested in those "overly complicated and fiddly" boardgames (commonly known as "heavy"). The BGG ranking is massively dominated by those games [1]. There are also Youtube channels dedicated only to those heavy boardgames [2]. [1] https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame [2] https://www.youtube.com/@Heavycardboard/streams https://www.youtube.com/@Heavycardboard/streams
- tylrprtr 2y ago
  Or put another way, a large number of people who spend their time talking about board games on the internet appreciate "heavier" games.
barbs 2y ago
Having lots of rules does not automatically make a game awful. So many people (myself included) enjoy games with lots of rules. Granted, there's an upper limit where a game takes more energy to "maintain" by ensuring the rules are being followed than is spent actually playing the game, but by and large I've found nearly all games fall below this threshold.
Xortl 2y ago
My personal favorites are those games with simple rules and deep strategic depth and I play them regularly online or with other people who love those games in particular. I am also in two general boardgame groups and they both much prefer the complex rule games, I'll give my best guesses as to why. 1) They like the worlds of the complex games, building societies or facing some major broad challenge. 2) Elaborate games are so open-ended and hard to analyze forward strategically that they are much more balanced across people of different skill levels. People who would have no hope of a competitive, fun game of chess will have a more interesting game of Brass: Birmingham or Eclipse. 3) The games can be played with a lot of players and involve a lot more human-human negotiation and discussion, rather than pure strategy. I love the simple but incredibly complex games myself, but I understand why they're not everyone's cup of tea.
- Jensson 2y ago
  Well, simple games are like simple procedural generation, just like how procedurally generated items all feel the same very soon every game of chess feels the same. To some they don't care about that they just want to play the same puzzle over and over, each chess board state is like another sudoku, to others they just want to consume more content designed by humans and then you need more elaborate rules. To the ones who want human designed things chess is like this vast procedurally generated forest that just has trees everywhere with different branch layouts, so you have to climb them in different ways.
fsn4dN69ey 2y ago
There's a certain charm to doing things in person. Same reason as to why some people prefer film photography when digital exists - traveling in person when google maps exists, reading books when movies exist. It's just a different medium of interaction. I personally enjoy it (heavy board games) but totally understand why others don't.

krisoft 2y ago

> If you end up with a 20-page rulebook, perhaps the problem is not how best to organize that rulebook, but that you have 18 pages too many rules in the first place. Exactly. My pet peeve is when a game is launched as a kickstarter and they add new game mechanics as stretch goals. If it was a good game with just the basic mechanics then why on earth would anyone want it be more complicated just because more people have funded it? And from the other angle if it is a better game with the extra rules and mechanics added then why not make that the game? It is the job of the game’s designer to make the very hard choices and tradeoffs between complexity of rules and the fun people will have with them. If they abdicate this responsibility and leave it up to “let’s see how viral our kickstarter canpaing will be” then they don’t understand their task.

ta_1138 2y ago
Kickstarter games tend to have far more design than development, as the success of the kickstarter campaign has little to do with the game being any good, but with the material available at campaign time being attractive. So overproduced games with way too much art, and way to many systems, end up doing far better than, say, a simpler game that would have gone through a more traditional euro publisher 10 years ago. If you talk to people in industry, they realize that this is making the games worse, but it's making them sell better. Just like today, just like with a movie, high sales don't come from great mechanics, but franchises or licensing. Your superhero coop game is going to do much worse if it doesn't have a license. Why do we have so many boardgames with video game licenses? Because it sells. There's way too many games in the market right now for even industry insiders to good track of most offerings. Buyers working for large internet game stores are overwhelmed. So no, game designers are 100% understanding their task, which is to make a game that gets backed and is profitable. Cutting half the game after you told backers what you were doing is a disaster, and it's all those extra rules and extra boards that sold the game in the first place. The fact that the game is shelved after 3 plays is not a problem for them.
- zahlman 2y ago
  How many times do Kickstarter backers have to get burned before they understand these ideas and switch to backing things that are actually likely to have good gameplay?
  - BeFlatXIII 2y ago
    Never: a new fool is born every minute.

erehweb 2y ago

I sympathize with this view, but I think it glosses over some of the point of boardgames - simulation of a world. Chess has been around for hundreds of years with great depth, but it is not a good simulation of a war or a battle. If you want something like that, then that's going to lead you to have a longer rulebook. (Though many games could still do with some mechanism-pruning).

wolrah 2y ago
I would argue that if your game legitimately requires a long and complicated rule book that perhaps a board is not the best medium for the game. My partner loves board games, and one of my takes that drives her nuts is that IMO most board games are better as a computer game where the tedious mechanics are automated. I am certainly an extremist in this way, I believe almost every board or card game ever made is better to play on a computer, but I think we should all be able to agree that a LOT of board games would benefit from automation. Monopoly is a great example, because basically everyone has at least some understanding of the game and basically no one has ever played it entirely correctly in purely analog form. I have literally never seen anyone do the auctions in real life, mortgaging is rare, and other "house rules" like the pot on "Free Parking" are common. All of these things tend to cause the game to drag on forever, ironically the thing most of those same players will complain the most about. If you play any of the computer/console versions the auctions are automatic and easy for everyone to participate. Some support the house rules as options, but they have to be enabled and some versions specifically warn that they will break the game. Computers exist to automate tedious tasks, if your game has tedious mechanics that require a lot of text to explain it'd probably be better as a computer game where those parts can be automated and the player just has to make their choices within that framework. In industrial safety one of the mantras is that if it's easier to do it wrong than right people will definitely do it wrong, so you need to make the right path also the easy path, sometimes changing entire systems or processes to make it that way. I believe the same logic should be applied to gaming. If your game is complicated enough that effectively no one is going to play it correctly as a board game, either simplify it so that's not the case or don't make it a board game. My partner would argue that the physical interaction with the pieces/cards/board/whatever is what matters and computers don't have that, but I believe if I'm judging a game as a game then the gameplay not making me hate it is the most important part.

jidar 2y ago

I mean, if you're not in the hobby you probably don't have any insight into this.

ggregoire 2y ago

A large number of players are only interested in those "overly complicated and fiddly" boardgames (commonly known as "heavy"). The BGG ranking is massively dominated by those games [1]. There are also Youtube channels dedicated only to those heavy boardgames [2]. [1] https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame [2] https://www.youtube.com/@Heavycardboard/streams https://www.youtube.com/@Heavycardboard/streams

tylrprtr 2y ago
Or put another way, a large number of people who spend their time talking about board games on the internet appreciate "heavier" games.

barbs 2y ago

Having lots of rules does not automatically make a game awful. So many people (myself included) enjoy games with lots of rules. Granted, there's an upper limit where a game takes more energy to "maintain" by ensuring the rules are being followed than is spent actually playing the game, but by and large I've found nearly all games fall below this threshold.

Xortl 2y ago

My personal favorites are those games with simple rules and deep strategic depth and I play them regularly online or with other people who love those games in particular. I am also in two general boardgame groups and they both much prefer the complex rule games, I'll give my best guesses as to why. 1) They like the worlds of the complex games, building societies or facing some major broad challenge. 2) Elaborate games are so open-ended and hard to analyze forward strategically that they are much more balanced across people of different skill levels. People who would have no hope of a competitive, fun game of chess will have a more interesting game of Brass: Birmingham or Eclipse. 3) The games can be played with a lot of players and involve a lot more human-human negotiation and discussion, rather than pure strategy. I love the simple but incredibly complex games myself, but I understand why they're not everyone's cup of tea.

Jensson 2y ago
Well, simple games are like simple procedural generation, just like how procedurally generated items all feel the same very soon every game of chess feels the same. To some they don't care about that they just want to play the same puzzle over and over, each chess board state is like another sudoku, to others they just want to consume more content designed by humans and then you need more elaborate rules. To the ones who want human designed things chess is like this vast procedurally generated forest that just has trees everywhere with different branch layouts, so you have to climb them in different ways.

fsn4dN69ey 2y ago

There's a certain charm to doing things in person. Same reason as to why some people prefer film photography when digital exists - traveling in person when google maps exists, reading books when movies exist. It's just a different medium of interaction. I personally enjoy it (heavy board games) but totally understand why others don't.