Are boardgames fun anymore?

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Ghost Whistler

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There are so many heavy big box uber-sophisticated products, but to justify the price...is the experience worth paying damn near £100 for a game?

You get one of these massive boxes, spend two hours setting the game up and come away exhausted. Then you just put it away again after marvelling over the omponent quality promising yourself you'll walk yourself through it later.

I spent yesterday afternoon perusing the LGS. I was tempted by Forbidden Fotress, Blackstone Fortress (i think I enjoy dungeon crawl type games) and Folklore the Affliction, amongst others (all games I can solo, which is key). Yet I just cam away thinking, it's not worth it.

That makes I sad.
 
Folklore the Affliction

I immediately googled this and was disappointed that it wasn't a World of Darkness parody.

Anyway, in my experience, the people most inclined to buy the new boardgames are likely either...
A) Boardgame fanatics with terminal cases of "new shiny" syndrome.
B) Busy geeks with diverse interests who want a pretext to get their friends together for a casual evening of fun.

Both of these types suffer from an inability to play a specific boardgame the number of times necessary to truly get maximum value out of such a product.

So, like like a lot of leisure activities nowadays, I feel boardgames suffer from competing with too many alternative ways to spend time.

What worked for me was setting up a boardgame on the table and leaving it deployed there for a few weeks, with the same small group of people coming back to it quickly and repeatedly. Kind of like a short-term RPG, really. Obviously this won't work for many adults though.
 
There is certainly a love for the 'new shiny'. But at the same time beyond the packaging and the component quality, I don't think you get an experience that lives up to that.

That's not a criticism, it's just the reality. Boardgames set up a specific premise: this game is about X, do X to win. But the components and gloss promise something deeper. A sense of immersion and depth that isn't always present, nor intended to be. I played Arkham Horror the LCG. The cards were beautiful and the variety of missions pretty intriguing. But ultimately it was just about collecting tokens. The missions did so with a variety of permutations and a lot of fiddliness masqueratind as immersion. In the end I just...lost interest. Having to build the encounter deck read the scenario accurately, collect up cards, just wore me down. I want to like it more than I actually did.

Now I look at something like Gloomhaven which people consdier the apotheosis of design and I wonder...am I going to enjoy a £150 enormous box full of stuff that will take hours to set up? Is that actual core experience worth it?

I think rpg's can offer what I want: immersion, depth, complexity of options (character creation etc). The only difference is that the boardgames I'm interested in can be played solo. That's one of the reasons I chose Arkham Horror, plus it was the new hotness. Ultimately it's not really a card game, it's a boardgame. You create a board of locations and move around. Card play and deckbuilding is minimal, relatively speaking.
 
Folklore seems to be heavily thematic, but ultimately a very basic board oriented rpg. No real tactical depth. So they say. I'd love to try it because that theme is compelling.
 
yeah I get it, it is a lot both in money and time to set up with no guarantee that afterwards the enjoyment will justify the effort. the "new shiny" componement helps cover up that the rules of a game are a retroclone of hero quest. A game we all love and have multiple copies cluttering up our closets, attics, and basements.

If it's any help alot lot of the older rpgs were made to have a heavy tactical/bookkeeping which in my experience really increases the enjoyment of solo play. additionally as older games they were designed to take up way less space then today's uber games which almost need to played in a room dedicated to themselves.

-4ed dnd create your team and manage your expedition through the dungeon is a refreshing take on heroquest.
- savage worlds pirate of the spanish main is more engaging experiance then pirates gold both in terms of naval combat and commerce.
- gurpswod is the best supernatural small business simulator out there... if you ever want to see how a dracula, a wolf man and a crazy space wizard would handle a local bar this is the game for you.

all of these while techincally rpgs have enough rules support and engaging premise to make for fun solo board gaming with only a minimal amount of tweaking.
 
Even games like Gloomhaven can be set up and pulled down pretty quickly if you store all the pieces properly. A friend of mine has it, and the set-up time has never seemed all that rough. I'd say the set-up time is a lot smoother than a lot of the board games that I played back in the '80s mainly due to these premium games providing organized storage.

On the whole though, I am getting a little tired of board games that emulate RPGs. Gloomhaven, Kingdom Death and Shadows of Brimstone are fun, but they all are trying to function as RPGs without a GM. As I get to play RPGs with a GM on a regular basis, I'd just rather just do that, as its a more interesting experience.
 
You seem to be talking about a specific kind of boardgame. There’s a wide range of games that avoid the long set-up, excessive number of assets, etc.

For instance, my wife and I recently played the Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective game for the first time which literally involves just putting down the board and reading out the intro and the game begins. It is an ingenious and instantly fascinating game for us.

As for immersion, not to open that (boring) can of worms but that seems like an odd goal/measure for a boardgame, I think engrossment is a better term although which game clicks for who is going to be very subjective.
 
You seem to be talking about a specific kind of boardgame. There’s a wide range of games that avoid the long set-up, excessive number of assets, etc.

For instance, my wife and I recently played the Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective game for the first time which literally involves just putting down the board and reading out the intro and the game begins. It is an ingenious and instantly fascinating game for us.

As for immersion, not to open that (boring) can of worms but that seems like an odd goal/measure for a boardgame, I think engrossment is a better term although which game clicks for who is going to be very subjective.

Yes, I'm talking about games that I might enjoy. There are a lot of games I just have no interest in. Heavy euro's for example. Theme is super important for me and that usually comes with ameritrash. But pure ameritrash is just too random/simple. So i'm very and unapologetically fussy.
 
Yes, I'm talking about games that I might enjoy. There are a lot of games I just have no interest in. Heavy euro's for example. Theme is super important for me and that usually comes with ameritrash. But pure ameritrash is just too random/simple. So i'm very and unapologetically fussy.
Maybe move to picking up old games in the secondary market? It's what I do almost exclusively and you'll find the games are frequently cheaper than picking up brand new games.

If you want theme without simplicity a lot of old AT should suit you - Blood Royale, Junta etc.
 
On the whole though, I am getting a little tired of board games that emulate RPGs.
Our local face-to-face RPG group occasionally has put some of those on the table and I always end up wishing we were just playing an RPG instead.
Something closer to a skirmish wargame (Space Hulk, Kill Team) can grab me though... and I am happy to play them solo, but for most boardgames the real fun is in the other players.
 
Yes, I'm talking about games that I might enjoy. There are a lot of games I just have no interest in. Heavy euro's for example. Theme is super important for me and that usually comes with ameritrash. But pure ameritrash is just too random/simple. So i'm very and unapologetically fussy.

There has been a whole wave of highly thematic ameritrash looking board games that are much lighter than the ones you list, often using Eurogame mechanics to streamline and improve the game play. You just need to look a little further and particular past the wave of "look at all the cool miniatures we have" KS, that are generally poorly designed.

To give examples:
- Monolith's Conan plays in less than 60 minutes, is gorgeous and filled with miniatures, and requires very little book keeping.
- Matagot's Cyclades is a Axis and Allies style Greek myth wargame than plays in 90 minutes, is super tense, and has very little resource management.

There are also other options, such as the D&D Adventure series. They are pretty light and quick despite being chock filled with miniatures.
 
Both of those are games that interest me. But they are both games that won't get played enough, as multiplayer games, to justify the investment. Conan especially, even though I really like the look of the mechanics.
 
What about a cooperative game then, that can be played solo? The D&D Adventure Games all qualify. I personally recommend Temple of Elemental Evil.
 
"Are boardgames fun anymore?"

No. As age slowly creeps upon us, the joys of youth are diminished under the weight of banality, with only the desperate attempts to avoid adult responsibilities causing people to cling to the vestiges of childhood in a futile attempt to replicate experiences forever lost to us like tears in the rain, clinging desperately to an idealized yesteryear built in our imaginations on a scaffolding erected from denial of the accumulated pains and heartbreaks that erode the soul as we spiral towards the inevitable end.
 
The fun of roleplaying games, for me is creative. Board games and card games don't tweak that at all. Miniatures games do but to a lesser extent. I can have fun playing a board game but it always seems pretty dry and dull by comparison.
 
coop games are great - until they aren't. Once you beat them, or once you start to see the wires, so to speak, the spell is broken. Plus, more importantly, most of them are very very expensive. I checked out of the Arkham Horror LCG because it wasn't so much a card game as a boardgame and because the random element is horrible. I would like to try Spirit Island, made by the peeps that produced Sentinels fo the Multiverse. But SI is very expensive and I'm not terribly sure why as the components appear a bit cheap (maybe in real life they are better but the map looks childish). Sentinels is an interesting one; a lot of love for the comic book genre, but it's very "processy". Tracking lots of different damage types for example. It isn't really complicated, and it is very flavourful, but it is also very easy to manipulate. Pick a hero who can deal with the way the villain fights and it's an autowin, pick a hero who can't and it's just frustrating. I felt the same way about Marvel Legendary. Deck buidling is fun, but the game just offered no challenge whatsoever.
 
"Are boardgames fun anymore?"

No. As age slowly creeps upon us, the joys of youth are diminished under the weight of banality, with only the desperate attempts to avoid adult responsibilities causing people to cling to the vestiges of childhood in a futile attempt to replicate experiences forever lost to us like tears in the rain, clinging desperately to an idealized yesteryear built in our imaginations on a scaffolding erected from denial of the accumulated pains and heartbreaks that erode the soul as we spiral towards the inevitable end.

...by playing This War of Mine or Black Orchestra :grin:
 
Cool. It seems your sample size is relatively limited and it includes a selection of games which all share the attributes that your dislike. There are thousands of board games out there. I am sure you can find some you enjoy by going off your beaten paths.

I get your predicament though. Those big fat games look so attractive but are a burden to play. You just need to manage your impulses and look a bit deeper.

For example Unicornus Knights is a coop that doesn’t really have procedural elements you speak of. Heavy on them, mid level crunch, and not too expensive.

For a collaborative game (where cooperation isn’t required but possible), New Angeles is another excellent game heavy on theme, mid level crunch, and affordable.

There must be tons of other examples out there if you look for them.
 
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The fun of roleplaying games, for me is creative. Board games and card games don't tweak that at all. Miniatures games do but to a lesser extent. I can have fun playing a board game but it always seems pretty dry and dull by comparison.
That's why I prefer games that are about player interaction; negotiation, backstabbing etc. at their core. Something like Republic of Rome takes a different kind of creativity, but it's still there for me.
 
Realistically though these days my gaming loves are probably in this order:

1. LARP
2. Megagames
3. Board games
4. Tabletop RPGs

Even though I'm in a weekly RPG group and enjoy it it's not where my passion is compared to the past.
 
That's why I prefer games that are about player interaction; negotiation, backstabbing etc. at their core. Something like Republic of Rome takes a different kind of creativity, but it's still there for me.
I agree. I mentioned earlier that I am burned out on RPG-simulation board games, and I think part of it might be that when I play a boardgame, I don't always want to work as a team. While I like that in RPGs, with board games, I want the mix of conditional alliances and conflict with the other players.

It's interesting that you used Republic of Rome as your example as its a competitive game that also forces the players to actually cooperate at times to avoid Rome crumbling.
 
I agree. I mentioned earlier that I am burned out on RPG-simulation board games, and I think part of it might be that when I play a boardgame, I don't always want to work as a team. While I like that in RPGs, with board games, I want the mix of conditional alliances and conflict with the other players.

It's interesting that you used Republic of Rome as your example as its a competitive game that also forces the players to actually cooperate at times to avoid Rome crumbling.
Baulderstone have you ever played Diplomacy? Its all about conditional alliances and backstabbing!
 
I highly recommend New Angeles for those interested in conditional alliances. It’s essentially a negotiation game, but every player only needs to beat one other player (selected randomly and in secret) at the table. That makes room for actual negotiation where both players can come out on top, which is not the case in other games where there can be only one winner.
 
Cool. It seems your sample size is relatively limited and it includes a selection of games which all share the attributes that your dislike. There are thousands of board games out there. I am sure you can find some you enjoy by going off your beaten paths.

I get your predicament though. Those big fat games look so attractive but are a burden to play. You just need to manage your impulses and look a bit deeper.

For example Unicornus Knights is a coop that doesn’t really have procedural elements you speak of. Heavy on them, mid level crunch, and not too expensive.

For a collaborative game (where cooperation isn’t required but possible), New Angeles is another excellent game heavy on theme, mid level crunch, and affordable.

There must be tons of other examples out there if you look for them.
It's not just that they are a burden to play it's that they cost an arm and a leg. Spirit Island is £70! For a boardgame!

I enjoy boardgames very much, always have. But i feel this age of kickstarter high production values and sculpts has bred a monster. I'm on a buy/sell FB group and there's a lot of throughput for these games. People KS them and then...sell them on.

One feature I'm not keen on though is the 1 v many model, used by the likes of Imperial Assault. Specifically being the 1. I much prefer either full coop or full multiplayer. I don't enjoy gatekeeping the rules and playing against the players. There are also always major balance issues. In that regard Imperial Assault is wonky as fuck
 
£70 isn't very much, if it's a new game with high quality components.
 
Realistically though these days my gaming loves are probably in this order:

1. LARP
2. Megagames
3. Board games
4. Tabletop RPGs

Even though I'm in a weekly RPG group and enjoy it it's not where my passion is compared to the past.

What's a "mega game"?
 
coop games are great - until they aren't. Once you beat them, or once you start to see the wires, so to speak, the spell is broken. Plus, more importantly, most of them are very very expensive. I checked out of the Arkham Horror LCG because it wasn't so much a card game as a boardgame and because the random element is horrible. I would like to try Spirit Island, made by the peeps that produced Sentinels fo the Multiverse. But SI is very expensive and I'm not terribly sure why as the components appear a bit cheap (maybe in real life they are better but the map looks childish). Sentinels is an interesting one; a lot of love for the comic book genre, but it's very "processy". Tracking lots of different damage types for example. It isn't really complicated, and it is very flavourful, but it is also very easy to manipulate. Pick a hero who can deal with the way the villain fights and it's an autowin, pick a hero who can't and it's just frustrating. I felt the same way about Marvel Legendary. Deck buidling is fun, but the game just offered no challenge whatsoever.
I've only played physical Sentiinels once, but the app is brilliant.
 
I've only played physical Sentiinels once, but the app is brilliant.
Yeah, Sentinels is one of the few games where I strongly prefer the digital version because it removes the bookkeeping.
 
Steam has that super-discounted presently, until the 11th. Tempting. My machine might be able to cope with it

There's also the early access version of the pc iteration of FFG's LotR living card game. I would be keen to try that out, but not sure I want to invest. Again my machine might be able to cope with it
 
Sentinels has quite a few extra content packs, but they're all pretty chunky and you know what you're getting with them. I think there's a free demo to see how it replicates the cardboard's mechanics, but if you've played the game before then you'll know if you like it.

From what I've read of the LotR port, it's not the same game but something strongly inspired by it. I haven't played the original, but I do want to try the electronic version; I'm waiting until it leaves early access so I can try the demo of it.
 
There is certainly a love for the 'new shiny'. But at the same time beyond the packaging and the component quality, I don't think you get an experience that lives up to that.

That's not a criticism, it's just the reality. Boardgames set up a specific premise: this game is about X, do X to win. But the components and gloss promise something deeper. A sense of immersion and depth that isn't always present, nor intended to be. I played Arkham Horror the LCG. The cards were beautiful and the variety of missions pretty intriguing. But ultimately it was just about collecting tokens. The missions did so with a variety of permutations and a lot of fiddliness masqueratind as immersion. In the end I just...lost interest. Having to build the encounter deck read the scenario accurately, collect up cards, just wore me down. I want to like it more than I actually did.

Now I look at something like Gloomhaven which people consdier the apotheosis of design and I wonder...am I going to enjoy a £150 enormous box full of stuff that will take hours to set up? Is that actual core experience worth it?

I think rpg's can offer what I want: immersion, depth, complexity of options (character creation etc). The only difference is that the boardgames I'm interested in can be played solo. That's one of the reasons I chose Arkham Horror, plus it was the new hotness. Ultimately it's not really a card game, it's a boardgame. You create a board of locations and move around. Card play and deckbuilding is minimal, relatively speaking.
I think you want the Mythic GM emulator, and/or the Conjecture GM Emulator...:grin:
 
I tried the game when it first came out but the piss poor distribution of cards put me right off and I sold it on. I regret that, but I'm not sure I can get back in. 99% of it is OOP, it'll be expensive. Two starters alone is £70 new and half the cards will be reundant.

Besides a massive collection of cards isn't really what I want anymore
 
Sure they're still fun. If any of them are less fun for me of late, it's the ones that are trying to blur the lines between tabletop RPG and board game: The Descents and Gloomhavens and what-have-yous, that do their best work when you are able to play a consistent campaign of games with the same players across multiple playthroughs. They feel like either a means for people to try out the ideas of tabletop RPGs in a discrete package and/or a substitute for tabletop RPGs for busy people; however, I'm already comfortable with tabletop RPGs in their base state, and if I'm busy enough to be unable to run a tabletop game I'm certainly too busy for a board game/RPG hybrid.

But the ones that aren't trying to do that? Great stuff. I will always be happy to play Agricola, I still feel satisfied planning and successfully executing a day set aside for Twilight Imperium, and GMT's COIN series are now some of my favorite wargames.
 
To plug an obscure but excellent game I got recently I highly recommend No Honor Among Thieves to anyone who likes a lot of negotiation and backstabbing.

It's set in a fictional medieval city and you put together crews of thieves to go on heists. But at the end of any joint heist someone might betray you and break the thieve's code, leading to the game getting more dangerous for everyone.

Complexitywise it's somewhere between Sheriff of Nottingham and Republic of Rome. Which is a nice niche to slot into.
 
I've only played physical Sentiinels once, but the app is brilliant.

I own nearly everything Sentinels and have played the physical and digital game both many times, and it's definitely in my top five favorite games of all time. I'm also really looking forward to Sentinels of Earth-Prime.

I have to say that the earlier post about co-op games losing their shine hasn't turned out to be true for me. I've played a lot of Sentinels, and branched out to One Deck Dungeon, Aeon's End, and Pandemic, and in general there's enough diversity in enough combinations in many of these games to fuel a lot of play. I don't find, for example, that there are necessarily any slam dunk combos that can completely nerf any given villain, although I do find that certainly some heroes do better against some villains. I don't think any particular hero combination is an impossible task against any particular villain (or combination of villains in team mode).

I think it's more a matter of taste than anything else. Some people like co-op games and really click with them, and some people don't. It doesn't have to mean they're the best ever or they're not that great. It can just mean they're not for you.
 
Sentinels is a good game and I have a lot of time for it, but it's just far too easy to exploit and overly 'procedural'. For example if you don't take an AoE character against Matriarch (whose design I really liked) then you lose because her crows just peck you to death doing around 20 damage to each hero a turn. If you do, she dies instantly because those crows are almost all she has.

The characters are fantastic, but the gameplay is very unthematic; it's a numbers game and transparently so. Plus, there is never really a wide array of choices. You always have an optimal play based around what your hero does and what's on the table.

I would happily play it, but I don't think I'd own it. Besides solo you need to play at least 3 hands simultaneously which isn't really what I want to do. I don't think it scales terribly well, but not as bad as something like Arkham Horror which IMO is unplayable solo (and also, not really intended that way since each deck has a specific role and the interplay is really what makes the experiencce).

I think my problem is that the modern kickstarter-fuelled production has spoiled me. I'm a sucker for production values, so when I see an adventure game with sumtpuous art, miniatures and components, it's like watching a movie and I expect that game experience to be just as rich. I expect to participate in a full world experience. Of course games aren't quite like that. I'm really torn on Spirit Island; it has phenomenal reviews but the board looks like ass and, as with Sentinels, it looks heavily procedural. A very transpartent puzzle in spite of the theme of playing island spirits defending a native community.

On the other hand the new Arkham Horror boardgame is really good and preferrable to the ccg IMO (I don't think I can be collecting endless boxes of cards anymore). The new star wars Outer Rim game looks good as well, though I can't tell whether it's a big box epic (like the Journes in Middle Earth game also forthcoming - another sumptuous adventure game) or a smaller one like Heroes of Terrinoth.
 
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