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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

I caved to socializing with my friends that were into "game nights".

What I learned is that the board game scene is ridiculous and obtuse. That's after learning there is a board game scene at all.

Insanely complex and stressful games where it isn't clear if you are competing with the other players as opposed to competing with surviving the mechanics of the game itself. Where you need an entire round of reconciliation just to understand what the "score" was, for the slight gratification of knowing who won.

I can appreciate a game, I just don't think I can appreciate why this is a scene at all. How often is anybody playing these games? Why do people feel like they can make and launch board games themselves now, aside from enthusiasts pre-ordering a single run of a game on Kickstarter that nobody else will ever buy?

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Board games have a number of interesting problems to solve. As a designer, you are often trying to simulate a particular kind of 'interesting' system in a way that's fun, engaging, and simple enough to run by moving a few pieces of cardboard around (while perhaps slightly drunk). It's a fascinating design space.

Occasionally a new game comes around with a fascinating new core game mechanic, which often solves a core design problem in an entirely new way. And then you'll see a few years of other games imitating the initial innovation... Often the 'originator' game may be pretty simple, to show off the new technique, and the followers steadily add complexity. People who play a lot of board games tend to pick up rules faster, due to knowing a lot of common mechanics already, and have a higher tolerance for complexity.

Here's four great games which are pretty easy to learn and solved a problem in an interesting way.

Settlers of Catan: Introduced 'early stopping' via victory points to avoid having 'dead' players stuck at the table, waiting for things to draw down. (Think of how terrible the end-game is in Risk or Monopoly.)

Seven Wonders: It's really awful playing a turn-based game with more than four players... What if everyone takes their turns at the same time?

Dominion: The best part of magic the gathering is building your deck, but - because of the CCG format - the playing field is really uneven. What if building your deck was part of the game?

Hanabi: The worst part of cooperative games is that guy who just tells everyone what to do. What if you hid some really important information from each player, so no one can run the table?

> And then you'll see a few years of other games imitating the initial innovation... Often the 'originator' game may be pretty simple, to show off the new technique, and the followers steadily add complexity. People who play a lot of board games tend to pick up rules faster, due to knowing a lot of common mechanics already, and have a higher tolerance for complexity.

Thanks for that explanation! Yes, it seemed like there were some scene assumptions and complications that I had no idea existed.

Very different from the time tested Monopoly and Scrabble. Now everything has phases, multi-variable resources, multi-variable point systems dependent on the phase, etc.

Its just hard for me to discern where any of this came from, why people are aware of some of these mechanics, and which games just have really bad designs and bad product market fit - if the whole scene is just indie producers winning a popularity contest once on a crowdfunding site. There is a real skepticism for me on whether any set of rules or mechanics is "good" or just absurd - due to that last observation.

> What I learned is that the board game scene is ridiculous and obtuse.

That's what you took away from your brief encounter, but I'm not sure it's something you (should) have learned as the general case.

> Very different from the time tested Monopoly ...

Monopoly is truly awful.

It's been around a very long time, and is still a regular in supermarkets and postoffice shops, but nonetheless it's long been eclipsed, and to people who've played basically any other half-way decent board games it's a sadly regrettable mystery why it's still cited as an archetypal board game.

> Now everything has phases, multi-variable resources, multi-variable point systems dependent on the phase, etc.

This is why I think your experience into the 'board game scene' was a little skewy. Not everything has all that stuff.

There's myriad games with comparable complexity to Monpoly, but far superior mechanics and replayability.

And go just a little upwards in the complexity scale (Monopoly has a complexity rating of 1.64 / 5 on BGG [0], and an overall score of 4.4 / 10) you'll be well rewarded on the boardgame experience front.

> Its just hard for me to discern where any of this came from, why people are aware of some of these mechanics, and which games just have really bad designs and bad product market fit - if the whole scene is just indie producers winning a popularity contest once on a crowdfunding site.

Your conclusion at the start of that sentence is based on the evidently false premise at the end of it.

[0] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1406/monopoly

It would be helpful to suggest a couple?

Machi Koro is one of my favorites. Easy to learn and play. It's a bit like Monopoly but has some turns mid-game where you can't depend on early game properties and instead make rolls that can compound from them.

For a deception-type game, Secret Hitler has a beautiful official boardgame but you can print out the assets for free if you wanted to try it out. Coup is also a good and easy deception game and extremely fast.

Illimat was backed by The Decemberists and has a fun, ouji-like theme to it. It uses a modified deck of cards and has 4 quadrants that players "plant" and "harvest" cards from. Your main objective is to collect goal points from clearing these fields, and obtaining tokens/tarot cards.

Azul is a very pretty boardgame and has a Spanish/Middle Eastern inspired theme. Players need to pick tiles for their murals strategically and gain points from certain chains.

Sushi Go is my go-to (puns) for new comers and is a deck building game. Get the party edition for max replayability and contains the base, but if you want to try it go for the base. Careful playing it with beverages because spilling can occur and there are A LOT of cards.

Try to buy boardgames from local shops rather than Amazon or big box stores. Workers there can also help you choose a game if you have ideas!

The boardgame field is immensely diverse today and there's something for everyone IMO. We're living in a golden age of options, much like video games in the past 20 years.

Yeah examples would be far more interesting than this lecture.

It is absolutely comical to find that there are people passionate enough about board games to respond as if we were talking about geopolitics.

There is not really much I can do with your rehash, but if there were examples of pivotal games, their mechanics and offshoots that would be more useful.

Fair enough.

In the general case, if you're genuinely interested, hop onto Board Game Geek - they're the definitive community site for all things board game related. They offer an advanced search feature where you plugin your preferred number of players, complexity (based on user evaluations), and other features, and can then sort by whatever. The 'board game rating' is an algorithm, much like HN's, that's mildly secret, but is generally regarded as being pretty good.

In the specific case of my experience -- I'd suggest Splendor as a good example of a game that's faster to teach someone than Monopoly, but less frustrating, more fun, usually ends in closer-run games, and can never devolve to a multi-hour battle of who can tolerate the most tedium.

There's a bunch of games with similar mechanics that I'd happily recommend eg. Century Spice Road, which is a less abstract than Splendor.

If you or the kids like the pretty, then either Sagrada or Azul are about as complex as Monopoly, but a) look gorgeous, and b) don't result in people not talking to each other the rest of the weekend.

For two players, things like Jaipur, or (a bit heftier, but not onerously so) Seven Wonders Duel. For really easy to learn, fast to play, with sophisticated longer term strategy options, Hive.

[0] https://boardgamegeek.com/advsearch/boardgame

I appreciate that!

Similar to you noticing my Monopoly example, in some other fields I also point out how certain common understandings are usually the worst examples of those things. It was refreshing to be on the receiving end of that, I didn't have another way of articulating what I experienced.

There are far more board games with simple rules and mechanics than ever before in history. You can build a collection of 100 games that can all be explained in 10 minutes and where a first time player can compete with people who have played 20 times.

Yes, a lot of board game people like complex games. But if you want games that are equally as elegant as Scrabble, there are oodles of choices.

You could also try having six or seven of the recent novel mechanics at once, and then you get Terra Mystica. Not that it isn't fun to play, but for the rules, best to have a couple hours and a pot of coffee.

>The worst part of cooperative games is that guy who just tells everyone what to do

I'm always conflicted when it comes to cooperative games because of this. The goal of the game is to win, and you have to win as a team. So debating decisions would be for the best. It just never feels like much of a debate. One player spots the optimal move and points it out. You lose agency on your own turn. I certainly want to make my own moves to some extent. But of course I also want to win. Especially in how brutally difficult most of the cooperative games I have played are. Such as Eldritch Horror or whichever Warhammer Fantasy card game. Going against the group seems foolish.

Yeah, co-op games really need some hidden information (or something) to make it interesting. Another common fix is to have a traitor, but I feel that undermines the co-opness.

Hanabi is really brilliant, though!

As someone with over 500 games (and way more expansions), I think your friends put you in over your head. It's akin to any other hobby. If you put strong-tasting craft beers into the hands of an in-experienced beer drinker, they'll have a similar experience.

There are hundreds of "gateway" games and thousands of fantastic middle-weight games with elegant minimalistic rules which are still thinky and satisfying. Otherwise, there's millions of lighter games, which just act as a prop to get together and socialise without being the center of the night.

And as someone who made and launched a game "by myself" (with a friend) that sold ~1000-1500 copies, why would anyone make anything? Why make a JS library that only 1000 people will use when FAANG can have a team do it? Pure creation, the enjoyment?

Perhaps, but I think thats too reductive, I was able to learn the mechanics and compete and win sometimes on my first exposures. I would say this group of friends was the right level of competiveness for me, as I would go to other gamenights with different people and sweep the floor with the players such that it wasn't even fun for anyone else.

I think I'm just not into it. Although maybe you have more experience with the likelihood of getting people into things with a more gradual approach even if they weren't challenged?

I recall seeing something similar during a "sudoku" craze 15 years ago or so. I never played, and the people I worked with never played, but when they did they would solve it so fast and wonder what the craze was about. I was shocked and asked them if they knew that people coveted that level of skill with championships and cash prizes. They just weren't into it, and it always made me think about unsolved problems or records or genius, if problems weren't even interesting to the people with the cognitive abilities to solve them.

But yes, even when I was writing my post I could see how the same could said for any other hobby. Not so different than video games. I just wasn't aware board games had gone that elaborate direction.

I have a lot of fun with friends playing games like this.

Sometimes learning the rules can be tedious and annoying, but the more you play different games the more you see the same mechanics come up and it makes it easier. For us, the highs are worth the lows. We aren't the only ones either, the market is doing well: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/board-games-market-...

You and your friends might be better served with a more casual game...or maybe it's just not your thing.

mmmm, that's interesting, how does one make recurring revenue in this market?

I saw that the event closures substantially affected these growth metrics, what does that mean? are people playing so intensely training for events that they ruin their board games and have to buy additional copies? are the events causing the most interest in certain board games? are the events selling that much of the board game on the spot?

I don't know anything about this market aside from small teams launching new games on kickstarter and occassionally one of those getting a distributor for perpetual sales.

I think it's like movies and videogames - something new that comes out is interesting and novel, and a subset of old games are good enough that new people joining the scene will want a copy

As for recurring, designers and publishers are always releasing new games and expansions. Games like Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer, and Magic the Gathering are always releasing updates that encourage updating your materials. There are a few popular game awards, and the top x games from those tend to sell out everywhere.

There are some game shops that encourage playing but I don't know that I'd call it successful...just not enough money moving to justify the space.

That sounds like my experience with Agricola. The person who introduced it to me was very enthusiastic and friendly but I found it just a miserable experience.

That said, I play and enjoy a lot of games. Many of them are more social and lighter, and all are more directly competitive/interactive. It sounds like, while of course board games just may not be for you, it's also possible your tastes didn't match with the group you were with.

That said a lot of people tend to like games with no direct competition. These are derisively called "multiplayer solitaire", and a few times I've played some games like this by mistake and been mystified as to what's interesting about them. Recently, partly due to the pandemic, the "roll-and-write" genre, which is basically all like this, has been experiencing a burst of popularity. So a lot of people seem to enjoy it.

It's not as solitary, but Gloomhaven, the number one ranked game on BoardGameGeek, is a very expensive game with a typical session taking four hours, and by the admission of its fans a large chunk of the gameplay time is setup, teardown, and bookkeeping. I played it once and I can't imagine what anyone sees in it, but there's demand so more games like it end up on Kickstarter or whatever.

It's frustrating to see something I can't enjoy at all be the top of the industry in some ways, but the nice thing about games is they're quite diverse, so it's not that hard to find something more to my taste. I just have to keep in mind that some people have very difference preferences and that's not always communicated clearly.

Agricola was an early peak for worker placement games, but it definitely has rough edges. A huge number of the occupations and improvements are garbage, making entire huge decks seem like afterthoughts. It also only really hums if players clearly understand the flow of the game and can proactively plan and interfere with the plans of other players - but this is only feasible if everybody at the table has played many times. The game is also unbearably slow with 4+ players, even if everybody knows how to take their turns quickly.

I think Gloomhaven is loved for somewhat similar reasons. It is a better cooperative tactical combat game than many others but I think that it really developed a following by being one of the first giant kickstarter games. This meant that the game could expand to be unreasonably large - 100 or so scenarios, like 20 playable characters, and riding the wave of legacy-style games with permanent changes to the game over time. It therefore hit at just the right moment when really nothing else like it existed on the marketplace. Since then, there have been a lot of other enormous boxes with far too many miniatures funded by kickstarter so it feels a little more bland today.

People who play the complex games grow into them over time. Most people learn and enjoy checkers before they learn to appreciate and play chess.

The people who successfully learn to play and enjoy a game like Twilight Struggle or Die Macher or Terra Mystica are likely well-versed in the jargon of board games and well-practiced in several types of game mechanics. So over time, the die-hards will tend to play more and more complicated games, as they’re readily able to understand and use these mechanics. So yes, games are getting more and more complex.

However, what is inarguable is that board games have on the whole improved dramatically over the past decade. IMO a ‘modern classic’ like Catan is outdated, imbalanced, long, random, and frustrating compared to the current crop of ‘gateway games’ that are on the market. Games today are shorter, more engaging, more elegant in their designs, and higher quality than what one might have seen in a US department store in 2010, which were basically the same random and frustrating games of the past like Monopoly, Life, Risk. Furthermore, old games that were utterly utterly brilliant and fun (Cosmic Encounter) get continued rereleases and updates.

Anyway, it’s just a fun way to stay social.

Thanks! I thought I was perceiving something like that but I wasn't sure, glad to see it is a likely more fun or at least more engaging way to stay social than board games of the past.

There's a pretty wide variation in how complex board games get. On the one hand there's games like "The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Dice Building Game" which I haven't managed to play at all due to how complex a game it is. On the other hand there's games like "Patchwork" which is one step above snakes-and-ladders complexity-wise.

The complexity of the rules is fairly orthogonal to how "deep" a game is though. I've now played patchwork a fair few times and I've not yet found a specific strategy that aproximates optimal.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that you might just have had a single bad experience. I'd recommend trying again with different games. There's something out there for everyone.

I think games like seven wonders which is one of those where there does need to be a calculation of the score at the end of the game do this to avoid players feeling left out if they know they've lost and there's potentially twenty minutes of game left. The other way this is handled (and 7 wonders applies this too) is to make scores more swingy in the later rounds.

Spot on. I love my friends, but I don't love learning a new set of bullshit rules every time I socialize with them.

The ideal board game is easy to learn while being difficult to master.

Your friends put you through the ringer of what I imagine were overly complex games -- some people are into those, but I agree, they are not fun :)

Kanban EV, Brass: Birmingham, Feast of the Odin

Examples of recent games I've played which meet that easy learning / hard mastery blend

There is the subset of Spiel winners which are board games which have simple rules and usually are short, with however incredible depth. Check those!

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