Some of the most popular games get the least respect from game enthusiasts
wsj.com
wsj.com
1. Sure, tic-tac-toe is a fantastic game for someone who needs to learn the "rewards of thinking ahead and taking the opponent’s strategy into account". Game enthusiasts (or indeed anyone above the age of 12) are very unlikely to need this lesson.
1> However, there is an interesting variant of tic-tac-toe[1] so disregarding the game completely isn't fair either.
2. People don't dislike Monopoly because it has dice. Risk has dice, and is incredibly popular. People dislike Monopoly because it is designed to be a game that is not fun to play for all but one player.
2> The game was designed as an anti-capitalist, anti-monopolist lesson.[2] When the rules are set up just right, only one person will be the winner and the other people will spiral into a negative feedback loop and quickly run out of all their money. That's the entire premise of the game: if you have a lot of money you can easily get more. Of course a game which is designed to distress 3/4 people playing in a session is not going to be very highly rated.
That said, I do think there is one popular game that gets very little respect from (at least western) game enthusiasts: go[3]!
Probably known in these circles as "the game computers can't yet beat top humans in" it's an abstract strategy game for two players (like chess) – with incredibly simple rules. You can learn the rules in a few minutes (literally) but it will take you weeks to even start feeling like you know what you are doing, and years before you're competent. The strategic and tactical depth is vast, much deeper than any other game I've tried.
[1]: http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/06/16/ultimate-tic-tac-t...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_board_game_Mono...
I guess I would have to disagree with your characterization of go as not respected. I've never heard any of the game enthusiasts I know talk about go in anything but the same reverent tone you use to explain why you like it. Who are you hanging out with?
"The queen, which can move horizontally, vertically or diagonally, is nothing more than a combination of the rook and the bishop, making it an inelegant redundancy."
Whoever stated that has never played chess to the level they should before even attempting to comment on the game.
Chess would seem to me to be one of the ultimate games for humans; it's simple enough to teach a child, but few adults can come close to mastering it.
Even the term "chess master" is a bit of a lie. To be a "chess master", you'd have to know the perfect solution move for every board configuration- forget openings, gambits, tactics- that's child's play compared to truly mastering the game. People called "masters" are just really damn good- not perfect.
In comparison, I am a "tic tac toe" master. I know that I can fail to lose at the game if I try.
What is the name of this strange country where players who are not just starting out don't know the rules of chess?
This ruleset would be prohibitivly tedious, but (in Japanese scoring) if you play with the rule that passing requires you to give your opponent an extra captured stone, then the game become equivalent to one where players were required to capture all the stones they thought were dead.
This is even simpler under Chinese scoring, where you would not even have to give your opponent pass stones.
However, because players are lazy, their is no reason to waste time killing dead stones.
Having said that, I can think of 2 inelegences that you did not mention:
Komi, where we give White extra points just because Black was winning to often.
The overtime rules in timed games.
The game ends when both players have passed in succession. Each player may pass whenever they want. That's it. It's super clear. Figuring out when you can safely pass? That takes years of study. But essentially it is a strategic decision, not part of the rules. You can pass throughout the entire game, it would just be a really dumb strategy.
Regular players make counting points more advanced than it has to be in the interest of speed (similar to how mental maths tricks can be very advanced ways of computing simple sums or products).
The score is determined by the number of pieces you can put down on the board. That's it. (From this follows, of course, that empty intersection your opponent has solidly surrounded is probably not going to count toward your score because your opponent can kill whatever you try to play in there.)
You score by counting the number of unoccupied points in your territory and adding the number of your opponent's stones you captured, + the "komi" that the second player gets to make up for going second (usually 6.5 for a full size board). (A common technique is to place all the stones you captured on empty points in your opponent's territory, so that you're subtracting the number of your captures from their territory). The only possible ambiguity there is around what constitutes territory; if you like then as a beginner you can just make the rule "unoccupied points in regions surrounded entirely by stones of your colour", which will make for a few tedious turns at the end where you fill in the last few gaps but won't change the scoring at all.
/Played chess reasonably seriously at one point and I still enjoy it occasionally, but let's be honest about its flaws
Smells like nonsense stemming from the "mathematical left-brain, artistic right-brain" myth.
En passant and castling may seem inelegant to you, but to me they make it more interesting. Also, Chess is an Olympic sport, you can find people almost anywhere ready to play with you, and it has a rich history. The board and pieces are a chance for art that I've not seen in Go. I'd rather play a game that is interesting, but basic, that models the complexity of life and its political and caste dynamics, and that's fun to play on any level. It also enlightens us to the fact that humans cannot beat computers at strategy when computers are given sufficient time and resources (because we can't).
Depends where you are and on your circle of friends.
> The board and pieces are a chance for art that I've not seen in Go.
That seems like making a virtue of necessity. I always found the fancy carved sets harder to play with than a basic one, though YMMV. And there are certainly beautiful antique Go sets, though it's maybe a more austere kind of beauty. But you can play it with a pen and paper and a pile of paperclips and staples if you have to, which is a bigger advantage to my mind.
> I'd rather play a game that is interesting, but basic, that models the complexity of life and its political and caste dynamics
Go is more basic than chess and at least as interesting, and grounded very much in politics. It reflects a culture in which control over territory is the most important thing (farmland is scarce in Japan), and is all about the subtle nuances of power projection - the difference between occupying a place and controlling it.
> and that's fun to play on any level.
Huh? It's much easier to have an interesting beginner game of Go than Chess - the rules are simpler and there are not really any openings to memorize, no four-move mate or Queen stampeding around the board. Even as a complete beginner in Go, your tactics may be poor, but you're playing the same strategic game as an expert. It also has a much more practical handicap system - between club-level chess players even a pawn is a massive advantage, so you can only have close games between players of very similar ability, whereas in Go a player who's two ranks ahead can just take a two stone handicap.
> It also enlightens us to the fact that humans cannot beat computers at strategy when computers are given sufficient time and resources (because we can't).
That seems a bizarre thing to base your choice of game on.
chess.com
> I always found the fancy carved sets harder to play with than a basic one
Me also.
> That seems a bizarre thing to base your choice of game on.
It was a response to a criticism, not basis for choosing to play Chess.
Plenty of equivalents for any number of games.
> It was a response to a criticism, not basis for choosing to play Chess.
Fair enough. In that case I'd say: computers aren't yet better than humans at strategy in general; real world conflict doesn't have an openings book (which is where computers get a lot of their advantage in chess) or indeed an endings book, and in that sense go is a better reflection of the state of the art, and the way computers gain an advantage in go will be closer to the way they will gain an advantage in real conflict.
Yes, that computers are better than humans at rote memorization is a fact worth remembering - but playing a game of rote memorization is still an unpleasant, anti-humanistic experience.
The queen is absolutely the wrong thing to pick on, though. Castling would be an obvious example, but my go-to is En passant. The pawn double-move is obviously inelegant (sharing the problem with castling that it may only ever be a piece's first move), but it inarguably makes the game better. If you've ever tried playing without it, you know that it makes the opening both faster and more interesting.
However, the pawn double-move introduces a strategic problem where a pawn can sometimes skip past another. The en passant rule is thus introduced as an obvious fix for that bug.
It would be problematic to have either of these rules without the other, and neither is particularly elegant, but the combination improves the game a lot.
See also: the infield fly rule in Baseball, the shot clock in any sport that has a shot clock, I'm sure anyone can name several more.
I've spent that last thirty years playing and watching board games enter what seems to be their golden age, and have introduced scores of people to the games I love, and have had friends do so in kind. Almost universally people say something along the lines of, "Wow, that was fun. It's nothing like the games we played as a kid." Often followed up with "Where do we buy this?" They don't play the games from their childhood anymore because they're boring and they didn't know there were alternatives. Now they'll play board games as adults and enjoy themselves. Beats the Hell out of TV.
And the rating system on that site is in question of late due to a presently controversial number 1 game: Pandemic: Legacy. The rating system is highly subjective and many suspect is prone to "flavor of the week," ratings by people who don't take time to read the scale and objectively rate the games they play.
Monopoly could be rated so lowly because it is a popular opinion on the site that it's not a good game.
That being said I don't think the classics are disappearing or that they're bad games. A game like Mancala is seeing a resurgence as a mechanic in many popular games today. I think we can learn something from what made these games endure for so long and are starting to incorporate them into new games.
Don't let the rating system on boardgamegeek dictate what we think is a really good game until the objectivity problem gets sorted out.
update: An example of a thread that comes up every now and again: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1512907/new-rating-system-n...
But I certainly wouldn't let a rating system dictate what I think is a good game.
It seems to me that the rating system on BGG is skewed towards what the community thinks is presently a good game. I think Monopoly would rate much higher if we were rating based on merit instead of opinion.
I think most game enthusiasts and critics can see the importance and position Monopoly has had in gaming history. But in terms of what we like right now I don't find it very surprising that Monopoly or Checkers rank low in BGG's system. It's a system that favors novelty (over a longer term than "The Hotness" but still... flash in the pan games like P:L have been rising high, quickly, and with greater frequency)
It has to be played with around 4+ people. They need to trade favors along with their land. With enough players, the favors owed last long enough to make a difference.
The randomness simply makes negotiation power the main focus of the game. E.g. if you land on a rival's hotel and go broke, a rich ally can pay you premium on your land. You'll realize early on that everyone is either going to be doomed or super-rich, so it's worth being diplomatic really early on.
When someone starts to snowball into a monopoly, they have to start laying low, while the others have to encourage the others to pile pressure. The players have to notice this trend early, at the point where it makes sense to 'blacklist' certain players.
It's a game with about as much depth as Settlers of Catan, without having to worry about too much complexity.
Ironically, Balance of Power is an actual game, and it's single-player.
From Wikipedia[0]:
> The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903,[1][4] when American anti-monopolist Elizabeth (Lizzie) J. Magie Phillips, created a game through which she hoped to be able to explain the single tax theory of Henry George. It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)#Early_history
I still prefer most designer board games to Monopoly, but I don't think it is worthy of the condescension most board game enthusiasts regard it with it.
When I have an opportunity to play board games with people I will always want to play something that I think is fun, exciting, or new. Monopoly is none of those things to me. For some people it probably endures primarily out of nostalgia, or a lack of interest in other options, but there are so many better options for new board game players.
I expect other articles from the author to include "Why don't wine enthusiasts like $3 bottles of rotgut? I mean, it's really popular with winos" and "why do people like listening to musical bands? Toy xylophones are popular with kids, and teaches them hand-eye co-ordination, rhythm, and so forth."
I mean, the author lionises tic-tac-toe as providing some deep life lesson, when in actuality, even the author's target demographic gets bored of it in very short order.
That said, games also say something about the societies that play them. Monopoly's popularity in spite of its unfairness speaks to that. Playing it, and winning, reinforces a certain fantasy about becoming a property owner. The casual player believes: "This is how life works."
For Monopoly, mathematicians have worked out winning strategies. I think it has to do with a high chance of people landing in jail and the odds of landing on fields when starting from jail.
What makes a game interesting to most people is how much randomness there is.
Human brains are built to dole out reward hormones when they make predictions and, followed by a period of uncertainty/expectation, their predictions come true; OR fail in such a way that they gain enough information to improve future predictions.
Having too little randomness can (if there is little complexity) mean that predictions always come trivially true, which does not trigger the reward mechanism.
Having too much randomness disables the triggering by way of a "teaching failure". (Though it still leaves the way open for the success trigger, thus addictions to gambling.)
So in order for a game to be good, it needs to strike a certain balance between simplicity/complexity and determinism/randomness.
I've played a few games where someone managed to win after only a couple of turns, or I just roll busts over and over, but there are still plenty of opportunities for strategy in between those wild swings of good and bad luck.
Because it often makes it unfun. Not always, of course, many of the highest rated games on the Geek also have random elements. But in the case of, say, Chutes and Ladders, the entire outcome is random. Might as well flip a coin and call it. Why spend the time going up and down the board?
For monopoly, a big crime is that it takes a long time to lose. You can spend an hour with no chance of winning, kept alive only by random chance.
These are not 'unworthy', they are just boring in comparison to many other games. I think people avoid the 'other' games not because they have some deep subtle appreciation for the merits of the 'bad' games, but because they haven't come across better options. It is rare to find someone who likes Monopoly who can describe another game with the same theme (not counting Star Wars Monopoly!).
...and when the first player loses, they have to sit by and idly watch while one player gains a larger and larger advantage, only waiting for the rest to lose.
I think the boardgame geek top list is a bit biased, because it was made by gaming geeks who might tend to prefer complicated game mechanics.
Okay, you have to be into heavier games to be into Brass, but heavy Euros are hardly the be-all of board gaming.
[edit: Yeah, I take back the 'I don't think so' - on reflection - there is a bias towards heavy games at the top, but I don't think that's why Monopoly, Parcheesi et al are low]
The things I dislike about Monopoly:
* Not too much strategy involved. The player who wins is usually the one who buys a lot of lands early.
* It's long. Even the shortest games last over 90 minutes. However the winner is decided much earlier in the game. There's very little you can do to prevent an early leader from taking the game, and you have to sit there watching them bully you slowly for several hours.
* The theme sucks. "Buy land, make more money". I don't find that particularly fun.
* The good elements of monopoly are often found in other games that don't share the same bad elements (I'm thinking of Settlers, but there are others too).
That's testable. Simulate a few tens of thousands of games based on some criteria (players always buy properties they land on if they can afford them, players will mortgage their portfolio to buy properties if it blocks another player, etc) and see if the person winning on round n where n is an early round is the same as the person who's winning at the end of the game. It certainly sounds like it's true. It'd be interesting to see how early you can abandon a game and still know who'd have won.
Monopoly's lack of fun comes from the player elimination, which is a crucial part of the game. People dislike player elimination (because it feels mean), and include stuff to avoid it, (fines go in the middle and are collected if you land on free parking, for example). These house rules turn a 1 hour game into an interminable 5 hour slog.
If you have a group of people who are happy with the concept of player elimination, and who play to win, and you avoid the house rules, Monopoly becomes somewhat fun. But there are very many much better games.
No. The game is, just kill me and win. Stop trying to prolong it.
Much like a CGI face can approximate a human closely enough to be just far enough off to be repellent, an individual board game can approximate the ideal of a really good game yet end up so far off the mark that it lands in the uncanny valley of dislike.
Most of the general public doesn't like political activism, and the game being invented as a piece of propaganda, more or less, it not going to appeal to most people because its propaganda, and even worse, some of why the game sucks might have been required for propaganda purposes. And that circularizes the argument for the general public, see why political propaganda is bad, it made the Monopoly game suck by dumping to the bottom of the uncanny valley therefore propaganda is bad.
In summary I'd theorize that game appeal follows an uncanny valley curve and unfortunately right at the bottom of the trench is where you'll find Monopoly.
Granted that's not how most people would rank games especially if they get played only once a year or on the occasional family meeting. I would also rank "A few Acres of Snow" very lowly but it's still reasonably high on BGG despite being solved/broken.
There's also many people on BGG who have a "mission" of getting people to play less boring games. I'll gladly rank Monopoly lower than its true value because in relative terms I want it to lose as much ground as possible. It's also noteworthy that they have different categories (overall ranking, strategy games, family games, war games etc.). The family games ranking is very useful when buying games for the occasional game night (Monopoly replacement).
There's also the (sometimes artificial) divide between thematic games (commonly referred to as Ameritrash) and strategy focused games (commonly referred to as Eurogames). Both archetypes are great fun for me but some people prefer a rich story and immersion (say Imperial Assault where you play a bunch of Rebels facing off against the Empire) and some want their games to be more pure optimization exercises. Like I said I love both types but this shows how hard it is to produce a unified ranking that makes everyone happy.
And of course their algorithm is far from great (imo). Some games stick around for sentimental reasons or because they are hard to get, it's odd that they don't unify versions of games etc. Same guess for the UI which is quite horrible (once again imo).
The second to last paragraph is a direct analogy with programming where outsiders think the best programmer is the one generating infinitely complex code, but for people actually in the field the criteria is the reverse and the best programmer solves the problem with the least complex code. Of course this is somewhat political and some lisp-ish functional-ish languages are more aerospace "simplicate and add lightness" than other more grindy languages (java, cobol, whats the difference...)
A gaming insider's view of the last paragraph is the lead story in the latest "C3I Magazine" is by the COIN series designer explaining the virtue, measurement, and minimization of complexity as a series of games develop. On a slightly tangential topic, C3I Magazine has an interesting although probably unscalable solution to the magazine industry crisis.
Game design techniques are refined with time it is only normal that "classical" games get to the back rack as games develop to be more subtle, simple and refined.
Well, it's not simple.