It's similar to imdb for movies, its a place full of opinions. I take everything with pinch of salt, but it's the best review site around
A big difference between movies and boardgames is that it's (for the most part) a group activity. And to make matters even more inconsistent, whether a group will take to a game or not will also depend a lot on who actually teaches them the game and how that person goes about it.
Definitely agree on this. I was teaching a few different people at different times how to play Wiz-War over the holidays (I had recently made my own copy from a printables PDF I found on the BGG site since it's not really for sale), and I definitely took different strategies with my twelve year old son than I did with other people that I was teaching, because I knew more or less how much they might put up with in being screwed over by the game (because a lot of the fun of that game is screwing people over or getting out of being screwed over), and how much I dawdles after I did so to give them opportunities to find a way out of their situation. That seemed to work well, I think the people I taught the game to enjoyed it, and I could definitely see how someone more interested in winning could give someone a really shitty first experience in that game.
Coup vs Resistance is, surprisingly, a very good barometer for the kind of group a group is.
Coup’s deception is confrontational. On every turn you facedown an opponent and challenge them to a guessing game directly. The game relies on you deceiving others to perform actions optimally. If no one lies or no one confronts anyone’s lies, the game ends very quickly.
Resistance’s is less confrontational. Your goal is to evade detection and deceive the group as a whole. In addition, not everyone needs to lie. If you aren’t assigned the role of a spy, you are spared the act of deceiving the group.
I have found that this results in two polar opposites of player groups. A group of players who aren’t confrontational in nature find Coup lackluster because everyone just settles into an optimal or suboptimal strategy and the game ends without much fanfare.
Resistance on the other hand, bores players who want to challenge each other. Be dealt the wrong role and they find themselves just sitting around for 15 minutes. Yes the accusation and voting rounds provide some entertainment, but it just isn’t the same.
This is all anecdata of course. I like both games, and admittedly I might be stuck in some kind of local maxima due to my own personality and personal history defining the kind of people I play games with.
As a final parting thought: Coup with a mix of highly confrontational and pacifist players also never goes well either.
Apparently has one high up in the top 100 list somewhere.