f13.net

I had not heard of this game before Christmas when my brother gave it to his kids. His kids played it with my kids.  The parents played as well.

http://www.worldofmuchkin.com/game (http://Munchkin game)

It is a simple, well-designed RPG-ish card game that pokes fun at many nerd/geek tropes, memes and characters from D&D through Trek. There are many different themed sets available but they are are all cross compatible.

Anyway, if you have kids that like card games, I expect they will enjoy this and you will too.

Threw up a little in my mouth. Munchkin is basically the most universally hated game on the market.

One of my D&D players has this; it's alright, but I think it's funnier than it is fun.

Also this probably belongs in the Boardgame thread.

I thought about merging it, but I don't want to poison a thread that's currently commenting on real games.

My list of games I will flat out refuse to play even if the other people I'm gaming with are playing it is pretty short, but Munchkin tops it for sure.

It must have its niche since it's so popular and has been for fifteen years, but personally I can't think of a single situation or group where a better recommendation than Munchkin doesn't exist.

I have good memories of playing it with family. I definitely agree with Rendakor that it's funnier than it is fun. Every game boils down to who fights a monster after everyone's used their potions/various other fuck-with-people cards.

Not really sure what about it merits hate, though. I mean.. I'd always rather play Dominion or Agricola rather than Munchkin but it's not Satan in card game form.

True story: fifth-grade nerds like Munchkin.  The wife, not so much.

While I'm not sure my dislike reaches levels of hate like it does for many others, the intense dislike I now hold for the game is due to the fact that in the gaming groups I've played it in, no one wants to try any of the better games out there because it's simple and the nerdy 'I get you' humor seems to trump the dull gameplay. 

For me, it's in the same grouping of games as something like Cards Against Humanity.  It was amusing the first time or two, but no one ever wants to move on, and they're not games that merit tons of replay. 

That might be why I don't hate it; I've only played it 3 or 4 times when we didn't have our full D&D group. The player who owns it doesn't play with us anymore so it doesn't come up anymore and never got old.

I'm not a super-geek with boardgames, but we couldn't complete a game of Munchkin.  Not even sure why, other than everyone was completely uninterested.  Also, the wife and I were complaining earlier today about CAH, how our friends have to play it every time we have a get together.  I'm so over CAH; mildly fun the first time but by the second play we were getting repeats.  Someone needs to make a deckbuilder with CAH humor so I can actually have some fun.

The most fun we had with a lite board game was Castle Panic.  If your group (with kids) likes Munchkin, grab Castle Panic and the expansion.  I know the hardcore folks will laugh at my suggestion, but it was one of the few games that me, my wife and my then 7yo daughter could all play and have fun.

This game has been out for 15 years? Jesus. I am so sorry for mentioning it then.  :ye_gods:

Still, my kids find it fun and I like the humor.

You must never have played Cards Against Humanity.

I think CAH is hilarious the first few times you play it. Once you start getting repeats, it gets boring pretty quickly but until then it's a blast. Of course, a tolerance for fucked up humor is a prerequisite.

It has a certain appeal to a select group - but the big problem is that the 'target audience' groups are likely to have 1 or more people in it that hate the game with a passion - sort of like Killer Bunnies.

If you really like it and you encounter these people, just get them really drunk first.  It is tolerable to most when they're really drunk. 

The only people I've seen dislike CAH are those with dyslexia or other problems reading.

I'm on the list of people that hate CAH, for reasons that would be better homed in a Politics thread.

Social Justice Warriors autohate it by name. Short version of why is the guy who made it when he was in college a dozen years ago lived in the dorms. The girl in the next door room and him were some sort of friends with benefits. The thing reached it's end after a while and both moved on. Fast forward to the guy releasing CAH and the girl makes a vague, nonspecific accusation that he was a rapist, had raped her, and then refused to go into any details other than he a raping rapist who raped her in college. The SJW community went apeshhit about it, the guy wrote an open letter, she ignored it because "rape", and Zoe fucking Quinn of all people moved in like a foul vulture of Hades and told him she could fix it with the community if he would agree to help fund her "all-female developer video game jam" that never did and never will exist.  He gave her a ton of money, which of course disappeared, and then Zoe went around knife-fucking him in the back and making it worse. True story.

So once again, feminists and social justice warriors prove they will shit up anything they touch over wild accusations with no proof just for something to do.

Also explains why Lamerass dislikes it so much since he/she appears to be the earthly avatar of Social Justices Movement's worst qualities. [edit] Also Ingmar.

I also enjoy Munchin in limited qualities, bu only with people who can handle the fact that to win usually requires fucking over the other players.

I don't think I've ever heard that story. My objection is about the content.

Unless you have a very smart group there is always at least one person who thinks just being offensive passes for humor.

Apples to Apples is a genuinely funnier game. CAH is an excuse for fuckwits to act like fuckwits and call it 'joking'.

Never heard that either, not sure what it has to do with anything other than bob wanting to shit up yet another discussion with his own personal issues.

Mine is a little of the content and a lot about what people say and do when playing it. As a game itself I just think it is boring and unimaginative, with certain people it just becomes really offensive.

Interestingly, I hate Cards Against Humanity for pretty much the exact same reason I hate Munchkin. All of the amusement you can derive from either of them could also be derived by just sitting alone in a room with them and reading the cards (or in CAH's case, tossing two cards together randomly and then reading the results). There's no actual reason to *play* them.

What could possibly be wrong with cards against humanity? Seriously.

Eh, here's something about it on Jezebel: http://jezebel.com/cards-against-humanity-creator-faces-sexual-assault-acc-1604695328

Not having heard about it before is just more proof that a segment of you just argue a bullshit position via bullshit without ever actually reading that might contradict what you want to believe because it was brought up in both the Zoe Quinn and Men's Right/Feminists are Terrible People threads.

I like 'em both, and not for lack of exposure: I've bought all of the CAH expansions, and I've played it a bunch with different groups.  Group composition is key, though.  If you're with people who will just award a point to "A midget shitting in a bucket" because HAHASOGROSSMIDGETSHA then you're going to have a bad night.  Clever plays are almost never about obscenity.

Well, right. What I mean is the content enables that. It's an excuse for people to say a bunch of really shitty racist stuff, laugh about it, then hide behind 'those were the cards the game gave me' as a defense.

Not sure what to tell you. CaH isn't funny if you're playing with unfunny people.

If there's a TARDIS keychain in the room, this is not the game for you.

Kind of like how you shit up every single thread you can with your same tired agenda.

Apples to Apples just has far more replay value even if you like CAH, and just as much potential for "Did you really go there?" moments with the deniability of "I was just dumping a card" to defuse any potential drama.

Bob, let the other thing go. Nobody was talking about it as a problem until you brought it up, and it's pure  :dead_horse: here.

--Dave

Quinns of Shut Up & Sit Down did a great anti-review of Munchkin within a review of another similar game (http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/blog/post/review-gauntlet-fools/):

I don't think we've ever had a "Did you really go there?" moment in my group, but we're pretty tolerent/fucked up (choose one) when it comes to sense of humor.

I've never come across a time when CAH has been particularly funny.

But Balderdash, Apples to Apples, or Dixit, all good and basically the same mechanic.

On a similar note, if you think you like Munchkin, you should be playing Cosmic Encounter. Has the same appeal of piling up absurd rules combos and shifting alliances to stop the leader, but the abilities are infinitely more interesting and amusing to play and the game design wasn't slapped together on the back of an envelope in less time than I've spent on this post.

Agree about that. With the point that if you really don't like Munchkin you might not like Cosmic Encounter that much either.

Also it's a much bigger package to lug around.

If logistics are really a concern you can get all the alien sheets on a smart phone app. You only have to carry around the deck of cards and a small ziploc of counters etc for each player.

You must never have a played a three hour game of Munchkin that wouldn't end because it was just someone getting the lead and then being knocked down over and over and over and over and over and over.  That was the game that for me took Munchkin from "I would rather not play this." to "Fuck off, I'm not playing Munchkin."

CaH I can still get some enjoyment out of with people I know that haven't played it before even if all the jokes are old to me now.

I like munchkin.  It's up there with monopoly on "games to make mortal enemies" with.  But then when a game drags out I'm one of those players that takes the initiative in making sure someone, ANYONE, wins.  Plus it's a one game maximum kinda game.  You can avoid repeats by keeping tinsel in your pocket for emergency distraction.

F13 never fails to disappoint.  As with many things here, I've never met a person, EVER, who didn't absolutely love playing CaH when introduced to it.  Or at least was offended by the content.  Except now on F13 (which I guess doesn't count as meeting).

Just..... *head explosion*

Games like Munchkin and Killer Rabbits seem like fast easy fun at first, but as mentioned, they can go on for god damned ever.  Which gets old quick.

Munchkin was fun 15 years ago, when that kind of humor wasn't plastered all over the internet. Since you can't surf the web today without tripping over 5 memes and new stuff is discovered, passed around and overexposed until everyone hates it at a record pace, munchin seems kind of lame by comparison. You also need to be one of the demographics the game pokes fun at to really enjoy it. It is not very accessible to people that won't get the jokes/tropes that are being made fun of. It also feels very stale due to its age and the way the internet has assimilated that kind of humor.

CAH is more accessible because you don't need to be a part of any sort of "club" or sociotope to appreciate its humor so anyone can play it. The kind of taboo breaking gameplay is also weirdly accessible to all kinds of people, even those that normally wouldn't play games. In my opinion it suffers from the same general problem Munchin does, it's only fun for a few rounds until the novelty factor wears off and building crass or blue or taboo breaking sentences with the cards stops being exciting. It's pretty much played for the novelty factor and then gets boring fast.

I could have predicted that.

Hippy.  :why_so_serious:

I fully admit to loving CaH, but for me its one of those games we only break out a couple times a year, usually at gatherings that involve large amounts of booze.

I'd agree that CAH is more accessible than Munchkin.

But comparing the two is a bit silly, as the point being made is that they are bad examples of completely different genres.

Apples to apples or Dixit, are funnier, more interesting, and more accessible to wider audience than CAH. I'm not sure anyone is saying they find the game offensive in itself,  just that bad players are unnecessarily encouraged to be offensive if they can't be interesting, and there is no real need to play games that do that when there are plenty of examples of much better games based on exactly the same mechanic.

When I've got a black card in CAH I let everyone know up front that I'll be picking the white card that makes me hesitate before reading it.

Neither Dixit nor Apples to Apples is more interesting or funnier than CaH. First of all, those games are only as funny as the people that play them. In a vacuum, there's absolutely no question that CaH is funnier than either of those are those are not funny in a vacuum. At all. They require context and effort to be funny. CaH does not require context or effort, but is enhanced when funny people play it. Second of all, accessible to a wider audience? Correct, you can't play CaH with children, the unfunny, or excessively old and obsolete. What a tragedy. I won't be taking CaH to my local old folks home on children's visiting day.

It's always interesting to see how widely opinions vary.  Apples to Apples is my other game along with Munchkin that I will pretty much flat out refuse to play.  I don't enjoy anything about it, just throw a random card in, pick a random card from the pile, read the possibly mildly entertaining result and you're now playing Apples to Apples.

But you aren't offending anyone! It's a giant pile of nothing but non-trigger words! SafeForTumblr™

Munchkin is indeed a dull game system that lives and dies on the cleverness (or lack thereof) of the references. My group really gets our Munchkin kicks by combining expansion packs (space pirates, zombie Conan, etc). I definitely prefer it to CaH, which to me is fun for a round or two and then I'm kinda done. I'll keep playing if that's what everyone wants to play, and I'm not against it by any means, but there are only so many George Clooney Big Bird porn jokes I can force myself to laugh at each week.

Or people could play good games that aren't Munckin, or Apples, or CaH, but we already have an entire thread for that.  :oh_i_see:

The more offensive CaH cards make great tokens for Magic.

Play CAH with a random dummy hand if you haven't. That can have some fun results. It also makes a fun drinking game.

If your card doesn't get picked you drink. If the dummy hand beats everyone, you all have to finish your drink.

If having a random hand improves the game wouldn't it be even better if you just randomly picked and read cards while people drank until they got bored?  You can skip the "game" completely!

It's not really a game at all. It's an experience. Like Mad Libs.  :why_so_serious:

Funny how before this thread, I've never heard a bad thing about Munchkin.  Meanwhile, I've also never heard anyone complain about Cards Against Humanity unless they were offended by the humor.  Plus, CaH gives out fantastic holiday presents.  You guys can argue all day, I'll be on my square foot of Hawaii 2 sipping margaritas.

Hi neighbor!

Prior to playing the Adventure Time variant of Munchkin with my son, my experience with it was using Munchkin Cthulu as something to clear our heads of Arkham Horror.

Card Wars is a better game, really.

And Card Wars is terrible.

Also, CaH comes out with expansion packs fairly regularly so that the game doesn't get stale.  I got something like 30 new cards just from the holiday promotion, on top of island real estate, three packets of magic berries, a booklet of hate mail they received and a list of the financial contributions to Mitch McConnell.

Yea, well, they made someone uncomfortable with a rape joke once, sooooooooooooooo just like whatever, man.

About 1/3 of it goes over my redneck neighbor's heads. So you have to play to whoever the judge is, but I still never win because I just play for my own amusement anyway. Their daughter is a bit twisted, but she's still naive and nice enough to not get the really dark ones. And I do admit I have a meta game, trying to guess how many hands before one neighbor gets too drunk and confused and quits.

Weeeeell, one of the cards IS "Surprise Sex".

Also, the last time I played, I had a hand consisting of the following cards: "White People", "Black People" and "The Jews".  Two of them won me hands, can you guess which?

White people don't win anything.

They win everything!

Munchkin is shit. Most of my roleplaying friends however think it's hilarious and have all the expansions so insist on cracking it out at any opportunity. John Kovalic is a nice guy and I like his art generally but I give him a hard time about beating the Munchkin horse every time I bump into him.

Kovalic sucks. Not as much as the Foglios, but he's pretty much in a class of his own shit.

The real problem is Steve Jackson. Their money maker happens to be trash. Bleh.

Yeah but it pays for everything else they do.

I'm aware. Everything else they do is pretty shit also. So I guess the King of Shit Mountain funding the rest makes sense.

I really don't like SJG.

Zombie Dice was fun-ish while working towards getting sloshed.  Until we played King of Tokyo, then we never played Zombie Dice again. 

That's all I got for SJG though.

Car Wars was fun in the 80s.

The Foglios? There's more of them now? I hated Phil Foglio's crap in Dragon.

I like Talisman. You don't have to do anything in it except throw a dice or three. That is its greatest virtue, especially after playing a lengthy Descent campaign where people ocd for hours over moves because who the fuck caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaares.

The only thing I knew from SJG was GURPS.

American gaming probably wouldn't be what it was today without SJG, and I feel that they deserve some (waning) measure of respect for that. Some of my first memories of hobby board gaming are their pocket box games from the early 80s, and my friends and I played the hell out of Car Wars, Illuminati, Ogre, and Hacker in junior high and high school, but they've gone incredibly stagnant in the last decade with basically nothing but endless iterations on Munchkin, and the occasional kickstarter attempt to relive their glory days with a deluxe version of one of their classics. Fantasy Flight has completely ousted them as the kings of ameritrash.

And there have always been 2 Foglios since... man, at least the mid 90s. Phil and his wife Kaja.

Since this is a thread about bickering. I loved Talisman as a kid, now I'd rather light my balls on fire than have to play another game. So. Fucking. Boring.

Cave Evil is more Ameritrash than anything Fantasy Flight will ever be able to make.

Which might go a long way to explaining why I can't bring myself to buy it... But regardless, I was talking about volume of distinct games produced, not position on some euro<->ameritrash scale.

I'm aware of what you were saying. There can, however, only be one king - and Emperors of Eternal Evil is the once and future Ameritrash king.

I picked up the Talisman digital edition for my gaming group when it was on sale this holiday.  It's pretty boring, I agree, but then these games are more entertaining due to the players than the game itself.  I don't think there is a single game that can survive repeated use.  They all get old pretty fast.  But I'd love to be proven wrong.

I stopped giving a fuck in the mid-80s. So.

FTFY

I don't dislike CAH, it's just the kind of game that stops being fun once the novelty has run out.

A conversation with a colleague today reminded me that Fluxx exists, which in turn reminded me of this thread about terrible but inexplicably popular games.

I think I'd rank it as worse than Munchkin.

As far as I can tell, Fluxx more self-aware of how crappy it is.

Fluxx is quite possibly my most hated game. Even more so because half the time when I explain what a Nomic is to people they say "Oh, so it's like Fluxx" and my vision goes red, and I come to covered in blood with a severed ear in my mouth.

I played Pit with my in-laws (that particular version had to date back to the 70s or early 80s) and had a blast. Simple games are often fun. :)

Also introduced my father-in-law to Ticket to Ride, which is just up his proverbial alley.

Mostly, though, we play hearts or spades and grumble about cheating.

I do hear good things about Cosmic Encounters though.

I used to really like Fluxx because the novelty of a game that rewrites its own rules is interesting.  It's also very well designed as far as it goes, i.e. having all of the rules on the cards, including rules for how to play the cards that don't add new rules.  It was the first game I ever played that was so elegantly self-documenting.  But it's amazing how quickly it went from "oo, neat" to "this is the worst game I have ever played" once that wore off.  It also falls in the "an experience, not a game" camp.

Speaking of games I used to like that I've kinda gotten tired of, I've been thinking about dusting off my Catan board so I can try the Drunkards of Catan mod:

 - There is a new resource, Alcohol.  You can build 1 Alcohol out of 1 Wheat + 1 Wood.
 - Each 2 Alcohol in your possession are worth 1 Victory Point.
 - You may "drink" 1 Alcohol by trading it for 1 resource from the bank; you must take a drink.
 - You may "gift" 1 Alcohol to another player; when you do this they must take a drink.
 - Any time doubles are rolled for resources, it's a festival; all players must drink half their Alcohol.

It'll be entertaining at least once just to see how it integrates into the rest of the game.

Fine at the time;  badly later on.

I know I'll get some flack for saying how much I enjoy Ticket to Ride, presumably from someone telling me how shitty it is.  Most board/card games are pretty shitty, in my opinion, but they are just games you play to engage other people that you presumably want to have fun with, so whatever.

I lost my first Card Wars game, haven't played a second time, so I don't know where it is on the crap scale.  I can tell you that it doesn't seem to have nearly the same enragement potential as Munchkin.

I bought my brother the 10th anniversary edition of Ticket to Ride for Christmas, the whole family really enjoyed playing it.

There's a whole other thread for that.

Yea, Ticket to Ride is a good game. It doesn't belong here.

Whoops, forgot which thread I was in.

I've grown pretty tired of Cards Against Humanity. A lot of the people I know want to play it once they get drunk but then it just devolves into being rude and shock value.

I hate cards against humanity for the same reason I hate apples to apples: you could close your eyes and randomly throw a card on the table every round without seriously impacting your chances of winning.  At least for something like balderdash the players have to write their answers from scratch, the card games remove even that much gameplay from the game.

Then it's working as intended. CAH is a game for people who want to make shock jokes, but can't be bothered coming up with a set-up or a punchline. Plus they also want the defence of, "I didn't say that; the card did".

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-worst-board-games-ever-invented/

 War (the card game), tic-tac-toe, Snakes and Ladders, Candy Land, The Game of Life and Monopoly.

It would be a close thing for me between playing Monopoly and half the Euro worker placement games popular on BGG.

As a small child, I absolutely hated Candyland because once the deck is shuffled, everything else is absolutely determined, for me the absolute worst combination of blind chance and rigid determinism.

It wasn't until I read this comic (http://www.critical-theory.com/camus-explained-perfectly-with-candy-land-comic/) that I understood why. Warning: link may trigger an existential crisis.

--Dave

Boardgamegeek is the hipster cesspit of boardgaming.

I like Life and Monopoly.

Haters.

Weird, Extra Credits just did an entire episode about how awesome Snakes and Ladders is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzLYKY1nPsY

I'm having a hard time deciding which I disagree with more.

I did not know this existed.

(https://lilydoesmedschool.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/finn-clap-zeal.gif)


Talisman was a lot of fun back in the day, but it really depended too much on which adventurer you drew. If you got someone like the Chaos Warrior or Space Marine you were golden, but if you got Philosopher or Minstrel you may as well punch your own dick the whole game.

Games Workshop amazes me with having such a huge marketshare for decades while consistently having the most poorly written and most imbalanced rules in the industry.

I don't know of what to tell you regarding life, but if you think you like monopoly, is it the auctions for assets? If so, try power grid. If it is convincing a friend to do a terrible trade, try Chinatown. If it is anything else, you need to help us to help you.

I tend to think that specific games are bad for specific people, personally. A bad game is one that isn't good for anyone.

Thats an excellent way to never have to give a firm opinion that may be proven wrong.

This is broadly a fair statement, but I find it hard to imagine the person for whom Munchkin or Fluxx is a valid life choice. You don't just walk past someone labouring under a misapprehension about this, just as friends do not let friends base their financial planning on payday loans, drink miller light, or play Battlecruiser 3000.

Munchkin is targetted at an subset of D&D nerds; specifically, those who like D&D but can't play it (because time, effort, commitment, whatever). It's like the Candy Crush of PNPRPGs.

As opposed to having insanely firm opinions that are proven wrong as in the exact nanosecond that they are uttered? At the level of antimatter meeting matter and fueling the warp engines of the Enterprise? Not like anyone around here is wrong like that.

Hardly! I've never been accused of lacking opinions (or of not being proven wrong) before.

No, it's just that something like tic-tac-toe or Snakes and Ladders is clarly a good game for its demo, and a bad game outside of it. I'm practical and functionalist about it. Hammers make for poor knives, and all that.

Basically, a bad game is one that is badly constructed for even its intended purpose. There is no shortage of bad games out there.

You don't get to be vague and non-committal when you literally write a book about fun. Comparing apples to authors here, bruh.

Being good for 4 year olds doesn't make something magically not be unequivocal shit. It just means 4 year olds have terrible taste, standards, and concepts of fun. "A good game for its demo." Bah.

I'd agree Snakes and Ladders isn't as bad as the games discussed in this thread.

But seeing some of really well designed stuff my nieces and nephews play (especially anything from Haba) I certainly wouldn't describe S&L as "good for its demo".

Just as everyone seems to have given up making good video games over the last couple of years, board games are suddenly good, even for 4 year olds.

What?

Seriously, what?

I think what is going on here is a "people should like better games" thing, but this argument is dumb even when dealing with adults.

I happens a lot with this crowd. The board game nerds get enraged when you say you like a popular board game.

What they never seem to get is that nobody in a regular family of non-geeks is lining up in the holidays to play something random or really strategic. They want to throw dice and have fun.

Pretty much this.  I only get a chance to play these types of board games 2-3 times a year.  Even really bad games can survive a long time with that kind of exposure.

The only issue with that is that there are a ton of great, simple, board games out there now that the family can just pick up and play easily.  Many of which are far more enjoyable than Monopoly.  But because your grandparents played monopoly, and forced your parents to play it, who then forced you, everybody will continue to play it for tradition sake instead of glancing up and realizing we've been having a board game revolution (across all genres, not just nerdy strategy games) the last decade.  

To many, it's annoying just because nobody is even looking for other shit to play, and insists upon the ancient games of their ancestors, because We Fear Change.

All I know is the new version of Mouse Trap is Utter, Utter shite.  It sucks the marrow of the earth and even Elena is disappointed at Santas Choice in the matter.

I really wish there was a good intro to roleplaying boardgame I could get tho, but I've never really seen one that might scratch the itch.

Mice and Mystics seems to be the stock recommendation for that, though I haven't played it myself.

BGG reckons it works from age 8, manufacturer says age 7.

How about Aye, Dark Overlord!? Bonus: it also teaches the players the necessary survival skills for a Paranoia campaign.  :why_so_serious:

You realize how crazy this sounds right? I'm hoping you do.

I mean you just used board game revolution non-ironically.

Plus this falls into the Like What You Like category. I'm happy you like new games. Stop shitting on people for not liking them. We don't want to play what you like.

I don't think anyone has ever actually completed a game of monopoly and you can't convince me otherwise.

No one is enraged. I'd just rather people play Love Letter, Ticket To Ride, or whatever. it's really not asking too much for people to stop playing trash given the volume of good, fast, easier than rolling dice shit on the market.

What Schild said.  There is no 'rage' or anything.  You seem to have taken that post way to personally.  I'm saying its just like watching that old crazy relative who refuses to look up anything on the internet because the yellow pages have always worked just fine.  Or my Mom who is proud to have never used an ATM in her life, and still walks into the bank and waits in line to withdraw money because she's done that all her life.  You just feel sad for them.  You want to help them!  Slide them hints about the quality of life improvements they might get by perhaps trying something new for once.
My Family is one of those that has played Monopoly forever because every generation did.  I've played a shit ton of games growing up till now with the family.  I can recall one time in the 31 years of my life where we finished a game.

This is entertainment. Not a life upgrade. The comparisons to phones or technology aren't apt because these are board games.

Wanting to help people understand how to use their ATM because it saves them time is one thing. Wanting to "help" people understand why your version of entertainment is superior isn't helping. That's being a dick.

Which is why I say, it's great that you like things. There's no need to evangelize when people say they like Monopoly like they are lost in the woods heathens.

Think "revolution" as in "industrial revolution," not "French revolution".  As in, characterized by huge strides forward in craft and design, not by having people's heads cut off if they disagree with you, which I think is the connotation you're getting.

I mean, it's fine if you want to keep driving a horse and buggy to your mill where you grind your flour by hand every day and insisting that these newfangled steam contraptions are for hipsters, but every now and then your grandchildren are going to try to convince you that this "electricity" thing is pretty cool and I don't think there's any escaping that.

(fake edit: haha, Teleku also used the technology comparison.  Whatever, it's apt.  Grampa.)

It's not apt. This is entertainment. Not using gunpowder.

I think you're on the wrong forum to try arguing that there is no such thing as progression in game design.   :grin:

Would you argue that, say, WoW was not a stride forward from EQ in terms of design?  I'm not a fan of either, but it seems uncontroversial to me to say that WoW succeeded because it essentially does what EQ does but it does it much better.  When people compare Monopoly to Power Grid they're saying the same thing.

Actually, it's EXACTLY like that.

What if I want to drive my horse and buggy to my new-fangled, electric factory?  Can't I have a foot in both worlds if I want to?

I want a horse and buggy, god dammit.

I really just want a pony.

FIFY.

That's because you're a bit of a princess.

Recent Monopoly games have slightly modified rules to have less math.  Unfortunately it still takes longer than an Indian cricket match to finish.

"Finish" is a vague term. When one of the final two players is at an overwhelming disadvantage, the game is finished when the loser's will breaks. As someone who used to play a lot of Monopoly, I can count on one hand the number of games that were close stalemates.

Monopoly is an objectively bad game. You can like it if you want to but it fails at game design in a number of very fundamental ways.

You're wrong when you try and characterise this as 'like what I like or be shunned', there are a lot of games out there and you're trying to paint everything that isn't a Parker Brothers game as some kind of arcane, hipster Euro-art game that normal people can't possibly enjoy when in fact the rest of the industry covers pretty much any base you can think of.

Kamisado is an abstract strategy game that takes ten minutes to play, can be explained in four sentences and you'll want another go as soon as you've finished a game.

Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre is a game that people who like Munchkin would like but it's a billion times more fun than Munchkin while being just as simple

People have already mentioned games like Dixit, Apples to Apples, Power Grid, Metro etc. All of these games are as different from each other as they can be, they are all easy to play even for non-gaming relatives and they are all objectively better games than Monopoly or Munchkin.


Have you tried some of the Lego boardgames?

The LEGO board games are not great, but they are fun to play with if not to play.  If that makes sense.  My son and his friend spent hours assembling some crazy dungeon thing with multiple games, making rules for it and never actually playing it.  Much like my D&D campaigns in high school.

[citation needed]

You really want me to dump a few thousand words describing Monopoly's faults, and exactly why they are bad game design? Or just a few dozen lines of technobabble, because Monopoly is such a touchstone of design errors we've given them names?

It's a bad game. Its biggest single fault is that you have to keep playing for a long time after there is no chance of winning, or watching others play after you have been eliminated. By the third lap around the board, all but two players are effectively out of the running. About the only meaningful decision to be made is if the player who is running 3rd decides to hand all his stuff to the 2nd place player. It gives the superficial appearance of complexity, but in fact it is very simple.

--Dave

please

You know, you could replace "boardgames" with "music" in this thread and not really have to change much.

"Why do people like shit music? X is shit music. People who like X have no taste".

It's the same shit, whether it's wine snobs or music snobs or game snobs. And in the end? Doesn't really matter. People will play what they like, even if they like it for all the wrong reasons. Even if it's because they've never TRIED better stuff that'd be awesome and they'd love -- that's just fucking life. I'm sure there's some pretty kick-ass bands out there that would become my one true music love in the world, if I just happened to bump into them.

Monopoly does suck as a game though. If nothing else it is way the hell too long for my tastes.

Munchkin -- I'm okay with, but I play it like once a year and it's more an excuse to bullshit and drink beer. Nobody really gives a fuck about the game. We play different games when we give a crap. :) Munchkin is for when nobody gives a crap and it's more something to do as you talk.

I'm on my tablet and feeling lazy, this guy covers most of it (https://danq.me/2013/04/03/monopoly/).

--Dave

At least we can all agree that Cards Against Humanity is a bad design. Its literally Apples To Apples with racism and cruidity inserted so that people who are to dumb to find humor and wit in everyday life can pretend they're Gilbert Gottfried.

Monopoly is pretty shit too, but ignoring the reasons as to why it is so popular as 'oh its just old' is missing a lot of the point. Some people like The Game of Life. They don't look for the same thing in a game as most of us here.

While I agree that non-hobbiest gamers look for something different to Twilight Struggle or Agricola, this isn't about suggesting your mother try Twilight Imperium, this is about suggesting introducing non-gamers to good family games in place of bad ones that regularly put people off the hobby forever.

Monopoly isn't popular because it is simple or family friendly, because it isn't any of those things.

Games that are *much* simpler and will likely encourage your family to take more interest in gaming include Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, and Pandemic. If your family genuinely manage to enjoy the extra complexity of monopoly you could kick it up a gear to Puerto Rico, Power Grid and Cosmic Encounter.

I dislike CAH but it isn't (purely) an absurd tradition of brand momentum and antifun in the way monopoly and game of life are.

I dislike Monopoly and won't willingly play it, however, lets be devil's advocate for those who might play it. Going through his points:

1. It takes too long to play.

It takes up an evening, giving grounding to a social occasion without having to do a bunch of different things, learn new games, or find new activities.

2. It's an elimination game.

Those who aren't doing well and can't win aren''t forced to sit there and can instead concentrate on drinking, chatting, or go do something else. Despite it's length it doesn't hold those who might have switched off hostage.

3. It depends a lot on luck. Without a lot of luck games would nearly always be won by the most skilled players, which is anathema to getting people who aren't good to replay them. The luck gives them a chance and keeps them interested.

4. It's too quick to master.

This means that people don't spend too much time confused by the game, and can instead focus on other things like socializing instead of concentrating on the board and trying to puzzle the game out. It also means those who've played it a lot don't have much of an advantage over new players, which adds to point #3.

5. Little choice.

This cuts down on AP, so the game doesn't get bogged down. It also means you can go and get a drink between turns and come back to the game and make you move without needing a rundown of everything that has happened.

6. Rule ambiguity.

Exists in nearly all games, Monopoly is light on this compared to many others, especially the ones he advocates.

7. This is a stupid complaint.

8. This is also stupid.

9. Still stupid.

10. This guy really needed to find words to fill out the article it seems.

11. This is just silly now. This guy must hate Newton too.

12. Eh I'm done, they guy is just a tool. So what if people don't all want to play a game the same way as him, that doesn't mean they're wrong, they're just not him.

No, I have not.  I'll take a look.  Any specific recommendations ?

My biggest single complaint about Monopoly is that the winner will almost certainly be determined by how much of a dick an experienced player is willing to be in taking advantage of a less savvy player when convincing them to take a bad trade. Worse, if someone doesn't step up and act like a dick the game never ends.

 The trading mechanic is so open to preying on the weak I do not understand why anyone considers this abomination suitable for non-gamers. I can't remember ever playing something more likely to irritate players or any game more responsible for people rejecting other games on the grounds that they look "even worse than monopoly".

(for better negotiation games, as well as the obvious Cosmic Encounter, see also China Town, cash n guns,  sheriff of Nottingham, Catan, panic on Wall street)

The game rewards the most dickish player by design.  The origins of the game were to basically teach people that landlords are evil, private land ownership is wrong, and that the better course is to have land commonly owned by the populace. 

Trading wise you could level those complaints at Catan too.

I always thought, given when it was created, Monopoly was intended to show that being a huge dick was the only way to be a winner. 

The *mechanics* of CAH, Apples to Apples and their ilk do not offend me.  They're just not games I pull out often.  However, I definitely keep them on my game shelf and pull them out when the right group is there.  What is the right group?   Newbies.  If you want to get newbies to try more complex games, you need to hook them.  Games that hook newbies are easy to explain, allow them to make decisions that seem meaningful, and give them a real observable chance to win when competing with experienced players.  That means they need to look on a superficial level like they are skill based, when in fact they are mostly luck based.  These games hit those requirements on the head.   

If you're playing with the right/wrong crowd, the taboo draw of CAH can create more interest and can keep them coming back longer, so I don't shy away from the game.  I don't think that playing the game changes anyone, and people get enough reinforcement for their world views from the rest of their lives that seeing it in the game doesn't change anything.  Why play with a-holes that like that humor?  I find that most people are a-holes of one type or another.  If I started cutting people out of my life just because they were a-holes or brought up a-hole topics...  I'd rather take people with their faults and see if we can move past the bad stuff and find the good stuff we have in common. 

Up to a point, but everything on that list contains ideas that stop the game being defined by one lopsided trade (or at least end the game quickly once it happens). The most obvious include encouraging more smaller trades which help newer players learn what has value and makes recovery possible after a mistake, and clearer presentation of the value of stuff.


But there are of course many good family games that feature zero trading as well.

I'd like to lodge a complaint about set-up times too.

I remember Monopoly having a horrid set-up time, but I think that's because we were young and just threw everything in a box in a way that would cause me to lose sleep now.

But when trying to convince my group to play some of the more involved games, I tend to use "dude, it takes less time to set-up than monopoly and we'll actually get to finish.".

Monopoly raped your childhoods. Which I find really funny.

It's an objectively bad board game? Please. Stop.

Monopoly is the lutefisk of board games.

It's all fun and games until people are mean about a thing that I like.  But this discussion has taught me that I'm dumb, so at least I've self-actualized a little.

It is and for many reasons. It doesn't mean you can't like it, it's just that why would anyone who doesn't have some kind of emotional attachment to the game play it when there are so many better options available? In any case, it's clear that you aren't engaging in good faith or actually providing any counterpoints of your own so I'll let you get on with being wrong in your corner.

My counterpoint is you're trying to shoehorn objectively into a subjective argument.

It's entertainment. This is what you get dinged on over and over. You assume someone is wrong for not liking something that is "poorly designed" which is again subjective based on what you interpret as the goals, which is most likely not "fun"

If a game is objectively bad, it doesn't work. You can't play it because it won't function. The pieces are missing or aren't provided.

You don't like the way Monopoly is designed, there's no right or wrong about entertainment or fun, despite your need to tell us about the coming of your Game Board Messiah who will smite your Monopoly-loving enemies.


Let me give you an example. In a Christmas thread, I said I was going to buy Apples to Apples for my family because they wanted it. This spawned about five or six posts from the game board inquisition who were like WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY SO MANY BETTER GAMES YOUR FAMILY LIKES GARBAGE AND ARE WRONG.

Get this through your heads. Regular people don't want to play your shit. They don't want to hear about how you found something on the internet that is truly well designed and rewards thoughtful strategy. It's the same reason they want to play checkers instead of chess. It's not some passed-down blah blah blah. They like what they like.

Get over it.

That was a good goalpost-shuffle there.   :awesome_for_real:  Apples to Apples is easier to defend because as far as what Apples to Apples tries to be, it's at least adequate.  Arguably it's not much of a "game" (much like CAH) but for what it is it's hard to argue that it's poorly designed.

Monopoly is different because it's this big complex thing with lots of parts that nobody finds fun (okay, ALMOST nobody -- you haven't piped in to say "hey, I like those parts because I'm a masochistic accountant" so I'm assuming even you don't enjoy the parts of the game everyone else has been critiquing, but maybe you do -- odds are the people you force to play with you don't) but puts up with because they think they have to, and every mechanic that might make Monopoly fun is done in some other game but without any of the stuff that makes Monopoly unfun.  You keep trying to paint this as a bunch of nerds saying "these games are better because they're harder to learn and play".  No.  Everyone is saying the opposite of that.

I'd say the most damning critique of Monopoly is lamaros's explanation of how the great thing about Monopoly is that you can wander off and do something else while everyone else is still slogging through it.

My own story about Monopoly and families is that my dad refuses to play it any more because the last few times he's tried it's been so intensely frustrating that he actually broke down emotionally and had to leave the room.  Granted my dad's a sensitive artist type, but really, that's not the hallmark of a well designed family game.  I've had a lot of success getting him to play other (better) board games, but they required getting over the mental hurdle established by Monopoly of intricate board games being intrinsically painful and awful experiences. 

There is probably somebody in your family who suffers silently through games of Monopoly because it makes you happy, and there is probably some game out there that they AND you would enjoy more, but they don't know any better and you choose not to know better because fuck nerds or something.

It's all subjective anyway, maaaan.  We could all be butterflies dreaming they're people, so there's no point discussing anything, right?

Warhammer has a horrible setup time. Warhammer 40k has an (even more) horrible setup time because it's actually longer than a game of Warhammer 40K. Games where you need to set-up for half an hour and then take only 45 minutes to complete have horrible setup times (arkham horror, I'm looking in your direction).

For all its faults Monopoly doesn't have a horrible setup time when all you need to do is give everyone the starting money, put the board on the table and select a playing piece.

That complaint is even more ridiculous coming from a boardgame hipster on youtube that recommends games that take ages to set up.

I like the part of introducing games to people where their eyes light up because they realize that board games don't need to be soul crushing experiences or require an accountant degree to get the rules and can actually be fun. It's just hard to actually get them to play anything and convince them that there's something besides Parker Brothers and MB.

Again, this just underscores the fact that you aren't listening to what people tell you. Games can be objectively badly designed without being actually unplayable. Fun is ephemeral and people can enjoy different experiences so the fun is the subjective part, not the design part. If you enjoy being kicked in the nuts I'm not going to tell you you're wrong, I'm just going to tell you that a game where you get kicked in the nuts is a bad game. Monopoly fails objectively because the experience that it delivers is poor. There are many critiques explaining why, Dave posted one earlier, there are others. By design it makes winners stronger and losers worse from the outset which is an objectively bad game design decision.

The other thing you are doing is handwaving everything else away as obscure artisanal euro-games. Have you walked through a toystore recently? I don't mean a specialist games store, I mean the toys and games section of your local department store? Many of the games people have pointed out are right there on those shelves. They are at least as mainstream as any other board game out there. They are 'regular people games'. It's not a binary between Monopoly and art-house euro games, there are literally thousands of games that are commonly available that give a better experience than Monopoly for the same audience because they don't have the huge design flaws of that game. The point people are trying to make to you (and about the Apples to Apples post too) is that, if there's an element that you do enjoy about Monopoly (or A2A) then, there will be a selection of games that offer exactly that experience within an objectively better whole and for some reason you're choosing to point and laugh at 'boardgame hipsters' instead.

Setup times are subjective.  What even is "time," maaaan?   :why_so_serious:

A good comparison and contrast to Monopoly in terms of games I don't personally have the patience for BUT can understand the appeal of is Twilight Imperium.  Talk about an agonizing protracted siege of slow elimination that sucks for half the players after the first half of the game.  But that said, TI clearly delivers a unique type of fun that nobody has figured out how to deliver independently of that gigantic setup and play time, so I can totally understand how somebody who values that brand of fun (nerrrrds) and has more patience than me would love the shit out of it,  and therefore wouldn't call TI an objectively bad game.

To be fair: Monopoly breaks down after the mid-game.  Until that point, it is fine as a luck focused game.  If you end the game as soon as someone is clearly going to win, rather than playing it out, it isn't *that* annoying.  It is luck determined with the only skill being in negotiating deals - but if you're ok with luck based games, it is fine.  I think it gets worse treatment than it deserves.  It would not make my top 100 games, but I've played games that are annoying from start to finish...

No, you definately just don't understand. Monopoly is objectively bad. If you look up bad game in a dictionary you will literally see a picture of monopoly. This bears repeating.

The counterpoint I'm making to you, is that gaming nerds usually have an answer to a question you never asked. I even found the thread where I said I asked for Apples to Apples for Christmas. Here were the responses.






I went from saying this is what I want for Christmas to people telling me what I want for Christmas. That's not helping. That's being a dick.  :oh_i_see:

If I asked, HEY GUYS WHAT BOARD GAME SHOULD I BUY? This is the appropriate time for opinions.

Show us on the doll where the boardgame hipsters touched you.   :why_so_serious:

Also, the thread that is expressly about bashing bad games is probably the best possible place to complain that you don't want to hear people bashing bad games.

Meh it's the thread where we bicker. I have a hang-up about people saying entertainment objectively sucks. I don't think you can prove it.

I think you can prove that something objectively is worse at a particular goal. As an example if I said that one action movie is objectively less explosive than another due to a lack of explosions. Okay. Saying a movie is objectively worse than another movie is just insane in my mind. The idea of fun to me is subjective, which is the undefinable goal of all entertainment.

Sure you can.  There's a certain level of competence that one has to expect out of entertainment.  For example, Plan 9 From Outer Space is objectively worse than North by Northwest, if we're talking about movies made in 1959.  You would have to twist yourself into a logic pretzel to try to argue any other way.

I was going to compare Plan 9 to Star Wars but thought that wouldn't be fair given the 20 year difference between the two.  Then I remembered that Monopoly is something like 80 years old and it's being compared to modern games.  It's no wonder it falls so short.  It's a terrible game but back then there weren't exactly a lot of other board games around to beat it into the obscurity it deserves.  Now it's just popular because it's always been popular.  Seriously, how many board games that old or older are actually good?  Go, Chess and maybe Backgammon are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head.

By all means, please make sure to let us know in the future if we should comment on your posts.

Just trying to help a brother out and get smacked down for it.   :uhrr:  From two fucking years ago, no less.

Monkeys never forget. Or is that elephants?

I personally disagree with most of the biochemistry of humans that allow something like a MFA degree to exist, however I do admit that something can be mechanically or academically sound, well-designed, or a pile of sloppy shit, independent of being popular or enjoyable.  A proper separation of enjoyment of a thing and the process used to devise a thing is in order here.  This is what allows me to drive over a bridge without giving a fuck about the engineering of it.

We need to move on from Monopoly in any case, it's monopolizing the thread.  Is Clue a bad game?

(http://kellimarshall.net/my-blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2011/12/flames-on-the-side-of-my-face.gif)

Regarding setup times, there is a game which I enjoyed setting up more than I enjoyed playing it:
(https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7225/6882128748_96ea852d9e.jpg)

It was just something that jumped out at me in my memory because it was completely out of place. I made a list of like 20 things, and people came out of the woodwork on Apples to Apples to tell me my list was flawed. Like I'd chosen the loser spec in WoW, and if I really wanted to get serious about raiding I needed to go read up on my shit. Except I wasn't raiding.

We do that as gamers, and it's a really shitty internet quality that I honestly don't think people do on the street, or at least not in the same personally dismissive manner. I'm guilty of it too on things. This conversation sort of brought it up. It's like the PC Master Race joke, except for the people that are actually serious.

So let me get this straight.  Does this mean I get to call you a hipster douchebag every time you criticize a video game?

The answer is yes.   :awesome_for_real:

You can call me a hipster douchebag if I call a game objectively bad all you like. I'm sure I've done it somewhere in the past. Still makes me a dick for doing it.

Remember, saying why you don't think a game is fun is ordinary. It's the going the extra mile of calling people stupid or smugly looking down on them that is the shitty gamer mentality we see constantly.

I hate this time of the month too.

No, this isn't true. I'd really be derailing it if I talked about music, but there's a vast difference in how music (and other art that is experiential rather than participatory) and boardgames can fail.

Yes.  It's a cute theme and a layer of fake complexity plastered over a game of Snakes and Ladders.  Ultimately it's just about who can visit each of the locations the fastest to cross off all the cards they don't have.  Like most games that are fun exclusively for kids (which I'd call "bad games" because there are lots of games that are fun for kids AND adults), once you figure it out it loses all its entertainment value.

Again, you and I are not the sum total of all adult types. Some like it because its exactly that.

Not all games are or have to be about skill.

It's pretty much accepted fact that Monopoly is an objectively bad game. The only people that enjoy it are children, bad parents, and the mildly to grossly retarded.

If you're one of those things, I apologize. Continue to enjoy Monopoly. It's ok to like bad things, but don't pretend it isn't because people enjoy it.

(http://i.imgur.com/8uehG06.gif)

They don't, but then there need to be other elements that make the game fun, like humor, or excitement.  Clue's got a certain amount of humor potential (as the movie proved) but it doesn't take long to exhaust that.  Plodding around the board and hoping to roll higher dice so you can plod a little faster isn't exciting.  You can get excitement out of pure luck-based games but those games always have very short rounds, because you need to reset the game in order to keep that element of uncertainty alive while still making each roll feel like it has consequence.

That said, some people might like it anyway but I would argue it's because they literally do not know any better -- it has somehow escaped their notice that the game is devoid of meaningful choices (which would allow the game to be exciting for them because the illusion that they're solving a mystery is exciting), in which case they're basically in the "child" category.  Or they're doing it because it's a thing to do to waste some time until their inevitable death and they don't care that it's not fun because they don't know what fun is.  Which is sad, but I do know a lot of people like that.

As a game to be played casually, perhaps with children, Clue at least has the redeeming features of being comparatively short, and allowing all players to participate until someone wins (rather than eliminating them one by one). Like other "teaching" games, it's a good way for children to learn some basic logic, while not driving the adult participants completely insane with boredom.

It's not a "bad game" in the same way that Tic-Tac-Toe is not a bad game. Simplicity is not a fatal flaw (nor is complexity an automatic virtue).

--Dave

Oh look it's the internet I was talking about.

No, it's reality. Do me a favor and go play some Monopoly to completion and tell me the redeeming qualities and how it's not a bad game when you get back. If you ever get back.

Played some this holiday. We're accountants. And financial analysts. You seem to forget this. Ridiculous deals get made.

I don't pretend it's for a dance around the Maypole for everyone, but it always seems to sell, and I enjoy it. It's not a bad game. It's a bad game FOR YOU.

Not everyone wants to give a shit about board games.  Sometimes, you just play them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

I doubt the family will ever progress beyond the staples, because really, no one cares.  Maybe the boy will get into it, until then, I've got Monopoly.  We never feel compelled to finish. 

If you *want* to entice people into more complex games, I like the following chain of games to step people up from 'I play Monopoly' to 'I hate Monopoly':

1.) Lost Cities.  2.) Ticket to Ride.  3.) Settlers of Catan 4.) Stone Age.  5.) Primordial Soup. 6.) Lords of Waterdeep. 7.) Dominion 8.) Power Grid 9.) Agricola 10.) Twilight Struggle

I don't know. I feel completely comforted by the fact accountants would play what may be the most backasswards game about financing ever made. There couldn't possibly be a better game about numbers accountants would enjoy more. Such a thing surely doesn't exist because Monopoly just fits the bill so well.

To me this is like everyone getting together for Family Movie Night every week and putting a copy of Ishtar in the VCR each time and then giving up halfway through because not everyone wants to give a shit about movies.

I can sort of understand it, but surely you can understand how it's sort of horrifying to people who actually enjoy things.

So the girlfriend played Settlers of Catan for the first time and loved it every part of it. Since there's like a hojillion expansions and spin offs for it, which ones are worth getting?

Last time I played Monopoly, which was about three years ago and because it was "Beatles Monopoly' and my brother insisted, it boiled down to three people competing against one because it was realized half-way through that three people were screwed. And everyone knew who those three people were.

The end-game was bitter. Shouldn't have let me get all the railroads and the utilities, bitches.

Honestly, it's one of those games I'd only play half-seriously while doing something else -- whether it's socializing or drinking or whatever. Sometimes that's the game that fits. One that's more an excuse than an activity.

Ugg.. terrible analogies.  No mas. Please.  

I seriously hadn't played a board game since college.   I maybe played like a game or two of Apples to Apples when Yoru visited the f13 house, pre child days.  I could be mistaken; we were drinking a lot.

So, all I own are the dumb board games you play with a 5 year old.  They're all super exciting.  But he's 5.  He's got a limited strategic capacity and hates losing.  I don't feel bad about fudging dice rolls so he wins.   :awesome_for_real:

Indeed, it kind of works both ways.  You get together for Family Movie Night and every week you watch Norbit because a few people don't want to ever watch anything new or try anything better.

SEE.

 :why_so_serious:

If I skipped the analogies and just said games are a creative work, it is possible to have fun with them rather than having them be a thing you just endure to kill time, and that some are better crafted toward that purpose than others, would that work better or would you tune out halfway through the sentence because you don't speak pretentious hipster?   :awesome_for_real:

Handwaving any sort of critique or discussion away with "it's all subjective" or "nobody cares" would seem weird if you did it to most other artistic/design disciplines, but for all the time that people spend playing games, the entire concept of game design is still treated as a red-headed stepchild for some reason.

There are actually a few people on BGG who like Clue. I have no idea why, but it's absolutely not because they don't know any better.

It's very hard not to judge, but I think it's best to just judge the game and not the people who don't agree with your judgement of the game.

Or not. God I get bored shitless playing some of those games. You'd have lost me and a few I know. Give me something thematic and conflict heavy. We managed to enjoy Catan a bit last Christmas, but it was only because the game went for 2+ hours and consisted of a lot of trade banter. Me winning every time didn't hurt either, it drove their spirit of competition in to overdrive.


Depends. Views range from "plays best with 4 and four only" to "get the 5-6 player expansion" and "just play original, expansions take longer and ruin the fun of the experience" to "make it epic and add in everything!"

Without knowing why your girlfriend likes it and etc it's pretty hard to give recommendations. Crap answer, but also true. Read up as much as you can about them and try and see what you think would connect with her.

While understand your point and can relate to what you are doing here,  I think it kind of misses the point of this discussion.

The purpose of playing good family games isn't to train people to like Agricola, it is because they are great in their own right and there is practically unlimited scope in that weight class.

My 'path' for non-gamers consists mostly of Carcassonne, Carcassonne expansions, the occasional foray into TtR, Mysterium, Love Letter and back to more Carcassonne, if I'm really brave maybe Cosmic with the green aliens or Dixit and Balderdash. To be honest there isn't even a need to get to stuff as complex as Catan unless you really feel your family would appreciate it.

This thread is what happens when you DON'T do a Festivus thread.

You monsters.

I actually don't see how that's terrible. It's basically exactly what you're doing when you play Monopoly.

"Hey everybody, let's play, literally, one of the worst board games ever made."

Just because our parents had bad fucking taste doesn't mean we have to subject our children to it.

Edit: Followup, fucking boomers.

Nobody is hand-waving away critique. I fully understand why you don't enjoy Monopoly. Telling people why you specifically didn't enjoy a game or why it's not for you is perfectly fine. Where I start drawing the line is, "Because it's a bad game and nobody should like it because there are so many better options."

One is your opinion. The other is trying to hoist your opinion as gospel of fun.

We've played the game for years and own most of the expansions. We generally consider Cities and Knights mandatory. Adds a bit more complexity, but blends with the game well. Seafarers is also decent, without changing the game too much. All the other expansions I tried were more like scenarios or alternate ways to play, so we didn't really ever go back to them.

Also, there is a thread for good board games that might have gotten a quicker response, since this seems to be the shitting on people's poor taste in games thread.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/82533/seinfield.gif)

I see Paelos has moved the goalposts once again from 'you can't prove design is objectively bad' to 'stop commenting on my opinions about terrible games'. I'm a games designer, if I tried to argue that games design can't be objectively bad then I'd never find work again.

That's ok, I'll move them back.  You can't prove that design is objectively bad.  You may not like it, but your opinion is suspect because I heard you like X, which I know to be objectively rubbish.



(Where X is Nickelback, Birdemic, Fifty Shades of Grey, or something else that people think is terrible but is also inexplicably popular)

Warhammer Online

That falls down in the face of most of us who argue for the concept of objectivity also admitting that we like some things that are objectively awful for subjective reasons.

Here's one for Paelos: I keep all my savings in a checking account rather than putting it somewhere that it'll earn interest.  Is this an objectively bad financial decision even though it makes me personally feel more comfortable?   :why_so_serious:

The second half was intended to be a preemptive, sarcastic rebuttal to someone coming up with a theoretical "no, Y is objectively awful because I said so".

Arguing about adjectives is bad. Objectively so.

It's not objectively bad, if you have a desire/need for liquidity....  or during periods of stockmarket volatility leaving money in a checking account is insulating yourself from investment volatility.


You can say something is objectively bad, but only in certain parameters.  Monopoly is a social lubricant game:  it's easy to understand, learn and play, and facilitates hanging out.  In my family, we play a fair amount of a card game called Pitch at larger or longer gatherings.  It's pretty simple, pretty easy to learn, and facilitates shooting the shit while also not taking up a considerable amount of attention.  It isn't a particularly deep game, highly draw/luck based, etc.

Basically, people are freaking because Monopoly isn't objectively good, if your objective is fun or a well-designed skill based game or whatever.  But really people play monopoly to facilitate social interaction and the game can't be hung up on one person not paying attention or whatever.  Apples to Apples is also a great game for random get togethers where people don't know each other (easy to learn, not deep, doesn't matter if one player isn't paying attention, social lubricant).

A game where you spend half an hour going over the rules, and the play bogs down because Person A is too busy watching the game and Person B is constantly leaving the room to talk to someone else?  Yah, not so good.

No. A financial analyst who tells you to do what makes you completely uncomfortable is an idiot. Plenty of rich people sit on piles of cash earning nothing because of fear/risk, and it's a valid financial decision to keep a base of cash to avoid that risk.

Is it the best strategy to increase your wealth? No. The thing you're continually not addressing is goals. If you have a goal of making 10% a year, than it's an objectively bad decision to sit on an interest account earning less than 1% with a heavy majority of your cash. If the goal is to be happy with your investments and sleep at night? Then you have different viewpoints on how much risk it takes to accomplish that goal.

With entertainment if the goal is fun or togetherness? There are no objectively bad games. If the goal is that it provides this kind of defined result like for example a game finishes in less than 30 minutes? Absolutely there can be objectively bad designs for that goal. But your goal can't be nebulous or subjective. Because if the goal is subjective, then the ways to achieve that goal are going to be subjective too.

The 5-6 player expansion is worthwhile if you have a large group, but I would not get an expansion for this game as my 2nd investment in recent games - I'd get another game.  Ingenious, Ticket to Ride, Stone Age, or Primordial Soup are all good candidates if she enjoyed Settlers.  I'd go back and invest in the expansions for Settlers down the road when you've played it 20 or so times...

I would suggest the Seafarers expansion for Catan, but stop there.  It introduces boats as an addition to roads but does not complicate things more than that.  The other expansions add many other rules and variables that become cumbersome to track.

I'm going to buy Dungeon!

Fuck you all.

I never understand people that'd rather spend an insane amount of energy, time and effort to rationalize why what they like is secretly great than admit that what they like is bad but that they like it regardless. Big fucking deal. The thing you love is not that great. Welcome to the club. No need to write a whole PhD thesis about it.

Most entertainment is mediocre or objectively bad (yes objectively, deal with it). I like lots of stuff that is ridiculously bad, everyone does. The difference is that most people have no problem admitting that what they like is shit yet still continue to like it.

Why is your self worth coupled so tightly to only liking things that are good that you keep on arguing about the merits of fucking monopoly? What's next? A deep mechanical analysis of Candyland or 22 ways why 'The Game of Life' is secretly awesome?

I like Munchkin. Is it a bad game? Yes, it's fucking terrible! Does it matter? No!

So can we get back to the discussion of bad games and why they are bad without people getting their panties in a bunch just because we insulted their special brand of bad entertainment?

For the hundredth time, nobody cares if you think something is bad. That's valid opinion.

It's the IT'S BAD IN ALL UNIVERSES AND YOU MUST ADMIT THIS!

Fuck off with that.

The flip side is that if you believe something is bad that somebody likes, there's no reason to make them agree with you that it's bad.

Then why did you start the argument? Nobody told you that you couldn't like the game all they said it that it is a bad game. Which is what people say when they mean "I think it is bad". It#s also something you should expect when you click on a thread labelled " Shitty board games".

Even though you apparently don't like the thought, one could even realistically argue that it's a cathegorically bad game and find reasons why. That doesn't preclude you or indeed anybody from liking or loving it though and nobody said you couldn't or mustn't.


You've made it about that and nobody else so don't blame the whole argument on us just because we've accidentally hit a nerve.

At least pick your battles and save your energy for something more worthwile to defend than monopoly.

Agreed.

What's complicated about this?

The design is objectively bad.

You are allowed to enjoy objectively bad things.

In doing so, you have bad taste. Just like, be ok with having shitty taste and move on. Nobody actually cares.

(http://i.imgur.com/8r9rTbW.jpg)

Always one step too far. That's the internet critique in a nutshell.

It can't just be bad, it has to be objectively bad. And don't pretend that you don't mean it as exactly the shaming you intend. You want people to understand that they like shit, and that your method of fun is superior. Which is frankly stupid.

It's different from just saying you don't like something because you think it's poorly designed. It's taking that and then making it about everyone else.

The people saying the design is bad are nearly all game designers.

The people saying the design isn't bad is an accountant and an engineer.

This is why you don't see "Unreal Tournanament from the engineering and accounting team that brought you uhhhh, Bank Simulator 2006."

Is Samwise the only other person that understands what objective means?  IainC also.  Maybe one more.

The interesting thing is that Paelos made a lot of sense to me when we sidetracked into finance.  So, do what you are comfortable doing with your assets in either case: money or games.  We didn't explore if there are objectively-bad checking schemes.

The analogies (I love, love, love analogies) didn't line up exactly, in my mind.

"Keep my money in a checking account" is, I think, equivalent to "I play one or more board games with acquaintances";

while "I have my money in a checking account that charges me a monthly fee" is equivalent to "I play poorly-designed board games with acquaintances";

and "I keep bouncing checks" equates to "I know it sucks but I don't want to do anything else because who gives a shit about money".

You guys are objectively Hitler.

CAH is objectively bad. It is objectively stealing from Apples to Apples. The people who enjoy it are objectively simple.

Also on a more serious note, appeals to authority are the worst.

Yeg: design isn't objective in a vacuum. Also let's not go in to philosophy and semantics. Paelos enjoys Monopoly, we all this its crap. Some of you enjoy CAH, Ingmar and I think it is crap.

I like philosophy a lot.  It's what people did before science.

I don't care if anyone likes Monopoly or not.  I do care if people try to argue that it doesn't have any mechanical flaws, considering basically any goal you might want to assign it, since I think anyone here could come up with ways to improve it.  I'm actively irritated when these two ideas are not separated, but that's just my bias I think since it's really human nature to say "this sucks and so do you".

I don't like to get picky on semantics, not in the least, but I need to have some way to concretely express my ideas.  Pictures seem overkill.

I just think the goals of people are not being properly understood and expressed in regard to how Monopoly meets them, because there's no denying its historical and continued success.

Why do so many play Monopoly without the auction rule and with the incorrect free parking one, for example? Not an accident.

Not a game we want to play, but to say that it is a bad design and doesn't satisfy the goals of those who do play it (continuity and repeatedly) is just being silly.

The same conversations are had about Catan, where people find its popularity inexplicable given what else they think is out there. And while ignorance of other opportunities is certainly a valid reason as to why popular games get played even though some of the players might prefer something else, the popularity begins and grows from from the fact that those games give most of those who play it something that other games don't, which they enjoy.

Why did we used to play Risk when we were younger and had the odd break from a poker game? Not because we didn't know about other 'better' (less long, less player elimination, more interesting decisions, less luck) games, but because Risk suited our desires (bullshit, beer, trash talk, etc).

I don't understand the hostility I get from people when I try to save them by introducing them to Jesus Christ.  Don't they know they're going to go to hell and burn eternally?

That's pretty much how most of this thread reads.

I've always felt the game (and other bad games) succeeded in brand building because there really hadn't been much serious thought going into the mechanics of gaming prior to the rise of computer games. I'm not convinced Monopoly's success demonstrates that it meets needs so much as it demonstrates a demand for an indoor activity that families can share, combined with a collective failure of imagination in setting expectations of board games.

I know when I was a kid board games (especially monopoly)  were a chore for most female or older members of the family who are now generally the most interested in whatever modern game gets opened up at Christmas.

This is a super-awesome point, actually.

I think Monopoly is popular because of marketing (tips to eldaec) or because it is familiar and nostalgic (like EQ or UO).  People love that stupid Monopoly-McDonald's "game" too.

I don't want to stop talking about bad games, though, so maybe we can try to not get our feelings hurt over any of this.  I figured if we could objectify our discussion then no one would get their anus in a wad, but that wasn't the case.  People got upset over the objectification instead!

I played Axis and Allies once and I beat the red-headed shit out of the rest of those neckbeards because I played the US and aced my tech rolls.  Bad game?

I think the continued success of Monopoly stems from its ubiquity and the fact that it's familiar. There's also been a fairly hefty campaign in the last twenty years or so to diversify it into various specific interest groups (without actually changing the game at all) - so you get Star Wars or other fandom themed Monopoly as well as versions for pretty much any location you care to mention. When I lived in a tiny town in the middle of the Black Forest, the local department store had a shelf full of local Monopoly sets (http://www.amazon.de/Winning-Moves-42655-Villingen-Schwenningen/dp/B007VCC7HY) which were sold as a local novelty. For a lot of people who don't really care about boardgames (which is most people), it might be the only game that they own - or at least the only one that's playable by everyone from kids on up. Not because it's a good game but because it's the game they recognise on the shelf at the store and they aren't likely to either browse BGG for alternatives or pick up a random game they've never heard of on a whim.


I don't think that's a fair read. No-one is saying you can't like Monopoly and no-one is telling you what you should like either. Just pointing out that there are a lot of other games out there that are better than Monopoly for the niche that Monopoly tries to inhabit - low learning curve, multi-player games based on player-to-player transactions with varying amounts of luck added to the mix. No-one is insisting that you must only enjoy art games that simulate competitive beard-growing during the Age of Reason, just that trying to pretend that Monopoly isn't awful at the job it tries to do is provably wrong.

I still don't agree. List this games that you think do what Monopoly does but better, I'm sure there are many non insignificant differences.

Yes, familiarity is a big thing, but just like WoW found a lot of customers because it was everywhere and everyone's families and friends were playing it, it got that big from somewhere, not just chance.

I cannot think of a single game that is 'like Monopoly but better' and I think holding that view ignores an understanding of the popular elements of its design and is elitist and incorrect.

Of course it came from somewhere; Monopoly was decades ahead of its time as far as board game mechanics go. How many games less abstract than chess even existed in the '30s?

But if Monopoly as a contemporary American family tradition were instantly overturned and replaced with Ticket to Ride or whatever, utility/pleasure across the general public would be increased. In that sense, Ticket to Ride is objectively a better Monopoly than Monopoly is (I'm not a utilitarian but the terminology works well enough here).

Lets agree on this.


Not sure I can agree on this. They're far too dissimilar to make this statement anything other than speculation. I might tend towards agreement, but it's still speculation; there's nothing - word of the day - objective about it.

Objective fact: Reading this thread is more entertaining than any game of Monopoly.

I bet you guys haven't played bloodbowl.  :why_so_serious:
Rendakor pussied out when he heard his player can permanently die.  :why_so_serious:

Of course it's objective. The thing I said may not be true, but it's not a matter of opinion. What other interpretation of "objective" is there that doesn't render all criticism of anything absurd?

Of course its an opinion... Are you just trolling me now?

2+2=4 is objective, and not an opinion. If I said no no its 17 you're all wrong! Then you could criticise me without it being absurd or an opinion.

But saying that if Monopoly got replaced with Ticket to Ride everyone would receive more pleasure, what?

Do you mean to say that I can disagree with you and say that if that happened then all it would do is mean people play fewer games, and say that is objective?

Because insofar as we are being objective then I'm going to side with me, and my objective points aren't critical of something I clearly dislike, so I'm far more likely to be removed from any biases in this conversation.

Or can we just say whatever we want and say its objective? Because that makes the word meaningless and pointless.

But I guess it passes the time...

Can't stop grinning during coffee break.
This thread delivers. *furiously updating txts*

Happy to be of service, rk.

If you're going to have a discussion about what constitutes a good game, I think you have to start with the assumption that human enjoyment is knowable, measurable, and, to an extent, predictable. So it is possible to make factual statements about whether or not somebody enjoys something. "Monopoly is boring because it doesn't have enough explosions" is subjective, because it is either true or false depending on the subject. "Most players would enjoy Monopoly more if it had more explosions" is - as I use the term - objective because its truthiness does not change based on the speaker. That's a meaningful distinction. And yes, you can contradict my objective statement with a different objective statement because "objective" is not a synonym for "true".

This bit:
goes both ways, but in my experience calling something "subjective" is used to stimy discussion more than the converse. Person A makes a claim, person B says "that's subjective" and now they're at an impasse. And in my experience, person B frequently then goes on to hold an interpretation of "subjective" that applies to everything ever, making their own statement tautological and meaningless.

Well, that would be a reasonable philosophical position to hold, and not an uncommon one.

I'm not sure what is gained by us declaring that we are all objective or all subjective though, either way the point becomes meaningless.

I'm using the worse in the sense that to be objective is to be without bias, which is to say that I think a lot of the monopoly bashing about how bad it is as a game isn't supported beyond personal likes and dislikes, especially the dog piling on those who have said they do enjoy it.

Its a popular game that people enjoy for what it is, not in spite of itself.

So is CAH, but while I might claim to be objective in saying its a direct ripoff of Apples to Apples I'm not claiming it what I say that it is shit, that's just my view and experience of it. I can readily accept that for (too) many people it is a fun game.

Likewise Monopoly, people (some even on this forum of gamers) like playing it. Its very odd to me but its true, and thus you have to check 'bad' as a catchall criticism of it.

So what do we think makes monopoly identifiably monopoly?

Set collection
Auctions
Trading
Eliminate other players to win
At a stretch a form of engine building
Low luck factor (people disagree with me on this, but my experience is that auctions and trading reliably allow the 'best'  player to win, the luck factor is purely how many hours others can delay the inevitable.)

I struggle to see any mechanic for which we haven't already discussed a list of better examples as long as your arm,  so struggle to see the above as likely answers.  I do agree that much of that list of better games didn't exist (probably) until relatively recently, so Monopoly had an awful long time to build market share.

Theme? I think localisation is a big plus helping to sell monopoly but the landlord theme certainly isn't unique.

(http://gifrific.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Homer-Walks-Into-Bar-and-Leaves.gif)

Lots of people don't play with the auctions. Regardless a game is not ousted if another game doesa single mechanic better, its a combination of them all. I'm still wondering what game out there does everything monopoly does better than monopoly does it, rather than just parts of it.

Maybe if Catan/TTR were first they would be the giant of the industry, but that still doesn't mean those who enjoy Monopoly still don't enjoy it because of what it is and not in spite of it.

But what is the combination we're thinking of.

I'm not convinced my list above is the right one, because they are also the things monopoly does badly and which people often house rule away.

If the answer was in the game rules themselves, surely the shelves would be full of clones.

You can't compete with the market leader and their econmy of scale and lawyers by making the exact same thing.

Board gaming is one of the few areas of IP not crawling with lawyers, because practically everything except the original artwork was ruled unprotectable before the courts were bought and paid for.

I mean you don't see mass market variations on monopoly the way you do see variations on trivial pursuit or Snakes and Ladders.

Perhaps it is about art and the elements you can protect. Monopoly is a reasonably good looking game after all.

You could just ask somebody who actually enjoys the game. If we haven't chased them all off yet.

"Bad" and "Good" are cathegories, as is "Poor". So if you want to get into the nitty gritty semantics of philosophical reasoning then there are objective criteria to assess what makes something "Bad" or "Good". That's most of what Kant or indeed what most of 18th century philosophy is about, actually. (Kant called it the cathegorical imperative because the imperative is cathegorically true as in objectively and always). Granted you'd then need to first come up with a definition of "Bad" or "Good" and criteria for reasoning whether something is "Bad" or "Good" in the context of the discussion. Doesn't mean that you can't "objectively" assess if something is "Bad" or "Good". You can dismiss it as philosophical wankery - and I'd tend to agree - but the criterium of "Objectivism" stems from the whole context of reasoning about moral/cathegorical topics and finding ways to make them cathegorically true/false - or "objectivizing" them.

Saying that "objectively bad" doesn't exist is false because a lot of work in philosophy and logics has gone into "objectivizing" discussions about cathegorical topics. So argue with Kant and Schopenhauer if you disagree.

That we now have a philosophical debate about objectivity in the context of Monopoly though is mad.

Interestingly enough they came up with the whole "objectivism" schtick as a reaction to the moral relativism and subjectivism of the time. They basically wanted to find a set of arguments and a process for logical reasoning that could assess whether or not something could be "cathegorically" true, as in "provably true in all frames of reference".

They were basically fed up with all of the "that's just, like, your opinion, man!" type arguments of the 18th and 19th century.

[fake edit:] before people simply dismiss it as philosophical masturbation, the work done by those philosophers has greatly influenced every kind of system that needs to assess something 'objectively' (to make it to be objectively true or false in the context of the rules and systems governing it). So it has be of great importance to law or governance for example.

So has the work of people who disagree with such views. I don't get what it has to do with Monopoly, as discussed here.

I think we should totally start arguing about capitalized Objectivism now. 

Hey, you guys couldn't let go and went the "mad as a hatter" route of arguing about the semantics and definition of objective vs. subjective so don't get irritated when people argue with you over semantics. I suggested everyonone should stop two pages ago, if you don't or can't then don't get mad when people join in on the action.

So if we do argue over philosophical semantics of terms then at least get the definitions right guys. Optionally you could just stop being insane, realize that it's a fruitless discussion wasted over a game we really shouldn't be arguing about and get on with your lives. Your choice not mine so don't blame me if I indulge your madness by participating in the discussion.

Somehow this thread is exactly what I'd expect to see from a group of boardgame neckbeards.

I'm not saying this is a bad discussion.  It's more fun than Monopoly.

I said in another thread that we needed a linguistics thread.  This one is getting there nicely.

For the record, an official definition of the word "objective" is "not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice".  Concepts like "good" and "bad" are extraordinarily vague and we should probably start by defining them as something other than "I, and other people like myself, do not enjoy this game."

And now I'm done using quotes for the rest of the week.

The original definition of objective as it concerns philosophy, logic and reasoning is slightly different though. Objective might now generally be used in the sense you described but if we go full neckbeard on the discussion then let's use the original definition instead.

"Generally, objectivity means the state or quality of being true even outside of a subject's individual biases, interpretations, feelings, and imaginings. A proposition is generally considered objectively true (to have objective truth) when its truth conditions are met and are "bias-free"; that is, existing without biases caused by, feelings, ideas, etc. of a sentient subject". Or more generally propositions that only depend on the extrinsical or intrinsical properties of the object of the debate, hence objectivism. In contrast to propositions that depend on the relationship the subject has to the object, hence subjectivism.

Hume, Descartes, Kant et al. or in the last century Popper wrote all kinds of treatises on the subject of subjectivism vs. objectivism. In that context you could reason about what makes a game objectively bad, if you come up with a reasonable and bias free definition of the term "bad" and can prove that the game fits your objective definition of "badness" without resorting to subjective categories. You can't objectively debate if a game is "fun" or not though because fun is by definition a subjective category since it depends on the " individual biases, interpretations, feelings, and imaginings" of the subject.

Everyone involved in this thread gets a bit pat on the back.  Seriously, folks.  You earned it.

I just want you all to know that I personally take credit for all of this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6AhepWgYg4

Holy fuck, I turn away from this thread for just a little bit, and BOOM!  What the fuck happened in here?

Monopoly also has a runaway leader problem.

You all wanted to go full neckbeard on this discussion, so let's get full neckbeard on the discussion.  :why_so_serious:

It could have been so simple. You could all just have agreed that Monopoly is not a particularly good game or you could all just have agreed that you agree to disagree. Instead you chose to debate subjective vs. objective and argue semantics. So if you all would rather be silly and argumentative over fucking Moniopoly then that's fine. Let's all argue semantics, the definition of objectivism and subjectivism, moral objectivism, the history of the philosophical debates on the subject and how the debate got shaped by Descartes, Kant, Locke and Hume and what 20th century philosophers like Popper made of it.  :grin:

It would make all of that hubbub about the merits of Monopoly or lack thereof at least somewhat worthwhile and interesting.

I'm all for being silly and argumentative since you all seem so down to it.

I always find this a strange way of describing a game problem.

The issue I have isn't that leaders become unassailable, the issue I have is that games don't end when it happens.

I know what you mean and agree etc, just always found that term misses the point.

I guess that's where one part of the dislike for Monopoly and similar type games comes from. They drag on for far too long even when it's clear that one player will eventually win.

Well, not always.  Usually when we play, if one guy becomes the obvious leader, everybody on the table bands together against him.  If you hit a hotel and have to sell off your crap, you give all your shit away to the next most powerfull guy.  Monopoly matchs become bitter blood matchs where nobody is allowed to win.  Which is probably why we never ever finish a game.

In my opinion games where players play against each other either have to limit the number of turns per game so that a game has a definite end or they need to have a win condition that is achievable withing a set timeframe.

In the former a winner is determined after the last turn is over so games last a deterministic amount of time. This is probably the best game mechanic for games where you can't come up with a good "win condition".  In the latter you have to come up with a clear and achievable goal that will determine the winner and you have to design your game in a way that this goal can be achieved without the whole game turning into a stalemate.

Otherwise you end up with a game where everyone already knows who has lost and who has won but where the players are expected to continue playing until all losing players are eliminated, or you'll end up with a game that is hard to win and where it takes a long time to get to a point where someone has won. (or to determine that everyone is bored and stop playing)

In the worst case you get games like Avalon Hill's "Diplomacy!" where nobody will ever win the game if all players are at least semi-competent at the game. (to be fair though in case of "Diplomacy!" it's by design)

Runaway leader is fine if the game ends once you get to that state. If your win condition is 'last man standing' though then it will get ugly.

Hmm, I'm not convinced limited number turns is the only way stop eternal tear-down-the-leader matches, but certainly agree designers need to do something.

Cosmic Encounter for instance has a design that means players hands grow in power to allow someone to overcome the group, plus it allows joint victories.

The thread has now come full circle back to Munchkin.   :awesome_for_real:

I suppose we can put that element into the Objectively Bad (In The Philosophical Sense) column.

The OBITPS column.

Speaking of bad, games shop owners in Glasgow are ignorant cunts. So there's that.

I'm not sure if "pick on the leader" is always necessarily bad, although there are lots of ways for it to be bad.  If it just results in painfully and spitefully protracting a game that should already be over, that's pretty bad.  In Munchkin it's bad for other reasons as well -- everyone  expends a lot of resources (one-shot cards) to take down the leader, and then when the next person in line wins because nobody has anything left to stop them, it just feels anticlimactic.

On the other hand in a game where the "leader" can change easily, "pick on the leader" can help keep the game balanced.  I guess the important element is that you can identify the leader and meaningfully impact them well in advance of their victory being assured.  Catan is a good example, e.g. all else being equal the person with the highest VP is probably going to get hit with the robber more often than not, and that slows them down a little so others can catch up.  

In both Monopoly and Munchkin someone can shoot ahead to an insurmountable advantage very quickly with a few lucky draws/rolls before anyone else can react, and opportunities to hinder them are limited, especially in the early game -- there's no point whatsoever in messing with someone early in a game of Munchkin because "bad thing" effects are usually very minor at low levels, so the competitive part of the game doesn't start until people start getting within a turn of victory.

But we can all agree the blue shell in Mario Kart is fucking bullshit, right? :)

So, long ago I fell into the "Duel of Ages" trap that Vasel laid for everyone.  It's a shitty boardgame.  Do not buy.  Unless, you've got a really good gaming group.  They have to be fast and they have to be smart and creative.  It plays like crap for the herp derp crowd.  And w/o the 1st expansion it's pretty much horrible.

That was EXACTLY what I thought of when I was talking about the Munchkin "everyone trip up the winner so the guy in second place can win instead" effect.  Although at least in Mario Kart you can try to avoid the blue shell by anticipating it and letting someone else pass you for just a second.  Munchkin is more like if the blue shell could be used as an automatic interrupt right as the winner was about to cross the finish line.

I thought the blue shell hit everyone in front of the person who shot it on its way to the leader?

Oh wait, I am thinking of the orb in Crash Team Racing.

Is Glasgow the exporter or the importer of these cunts?  I had always assumed these guys were bred in and escaped from rogue labs at a nearby university.