Shitty board games and Cards Against Humanities Bickering

[eldaec]

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)

[Mazakiel]

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. 

[lamaros]

Trading wise you could level those complaints at Catan too.

[jgsugden]

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. 

[eldaec]

Trading wise you could level those complaints at Catan too.

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.

[MrHat]

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.".

[Paelos]

Monopoly raped your childhoods. Which I find really funny.

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

[tazelbain]

Monopoly is the lutefisk of board games.

[Phildo]

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.

[IainC]

Monopoly raped your childhoods. Which I find really funny.

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

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.

[Paelos]

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.

[Samwise]

That was a good goalpost-shuffle there.     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?

[Jeff Kelly]

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.

[Jeff Kelly]

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.

[IainC]

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.

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.

[Samwise]

Warhammer has a horrible setup time.  

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

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.

[jgsugden]

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...

[Goreschach]

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.

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.

[Paelos]

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.

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.

   

Go read the boardgame thread and ask for some real games.

Dude... I mean really dude. They are trying to help you. Most of the games we play aren't "war games". Games about trading resources, planning train routes, setting up power infrastructures. You could say that Monopoly is about Real Estate Investment, but really no, its the game you play with your eight year old cousin because its playable by eight year olds.

Broaden your board game horizons.

Have you tried Carcassone?  It's about the closest gateway drug to becoming a boardgame geek there is. 

I've slowly gotten my family into TTR, Carcassone and Catan.  I think I'm getting my kid Castle Panic for Christmas, looks fun.

You know what games sucks and I can't stand playing it?  Clue.  Especially the newer version with the hours rules and all that bullshit. 

Settlers of Catan is the game I'd put up as an example of a Monopoly-style "acquire and build" game done well.  It's easier and more accessible than Monopoly in many respects, because you don't have as much crap to keep track of.   At the same time, though, there are more opportunities to make interesting choices, which makes it more of a game IMO.

That said, I can understand how if you've made a family tradition out of playing Chutes and Ladders, it's less about the game itself and more about the fact that you're sitting around a table doing the thing you always do.  I think it's kind of a shame that the "classic" family board games are mostly terrible as far as games go, though.

Power Grid is a better Monopoly.

Cards Against Humanity is a million times better than Apples to Apples and exactly the same.

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. 

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

[Samwise]

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

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.

[Paelos]

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.

[Nevermore]

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.

[Hawkbit]

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. 

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

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.     From two fucking years ago, no less.

[Trippy]

Monkeys never forget. Or is that elephants?

[Yegolev]

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?



Regarding setup times, there is a game which I enjoyed setting up more than I enjoyed playing it:

[Paelos]

Monkeys never forget. Or is that elephants?

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.

[Teleku]

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.

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.   

[Paelos]

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.

[Ironwood]

I hate this time of the month too.

[Ingmar]

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

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.

[Samwise]

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

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.

[lamaros]

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.

[schild]

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.

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.

[Samwise]

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.

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.

[MahrinSkel]

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