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Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

We are living in a board game and card game Renaissance. For those outside of "the hobby", there are thousands of new titles being released every year. Some challenge the notion of what it even means to be a game. Even in the party game space, there is a lot of innovation. It doesn't matter what kind of game you like, there is one from the last 10 years that is your "perfect" game. If you hop on to BGG or the right Discords, you can find it fairly quickly. There is also LOTS of online playtesting happening with groups like Break My Game where you can play games still being designed. Additionally, I'll mention Board Game Arena which has digital implementations for over 1200 games.

[Source: I've been designing games as a hobby for the last 10 years)

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I’d argue we’re past the peak though.

These days far too many board games are designed to appeal on Kickstarter with needless plastic minis and content. All that time and effort could have gone to play testing and improving the game but instead you get 2kg of plastic that doesn’t improve the game in anyway, increasing costs, and day one expansions or bonus content that’s often mediocre.

For every truely innovative game out there, there’s many more that look great and have incredible table presence but are throughly mediocre rehashes of the something else and rely purely on hype or great art.

Now you see people backing KS or buying 2nd hand games specifically for scalping, and Kickstarters preying on people with FOMO.

Also you can no longer trust Board Game Geek ratings.

The good news is, the vast majority of what’s really good, is probably already out there and available new or 2nd hand for a fair price.

If you wander around the gencon halls this seems less true than people think. The number of innovative things or even kids ish games that are actually pretty interesting for all is _expansive_. The smaller stuff just doesn't get all the marketing splash.

I came back from last year with a few things but one of the hits was a physical area control game with just cards. The 2 play version is a pack of cards.

That’s even worse then. I’ve never bothered to go to cons. But this means that almost none of the games that deserve attention get any air time.

In theory BGG should help here, but I agree there are discoverability issues. Not sure what a better plan would be though, the margins on some of the small games are not that great. Outside of working on distribution deals with big stores, going to cons with a booth and word of mouth ends up being the main way...

Agree 100%. This hobby jumped the shark probably 5-10 years ago.

Thanks to crowdfunding, there are deluxe editions of games all the time being announced for $400–500.

Games ship with "6 expansions in box" which sounds great and like a ton of replayable content, until you realize that they're poorly playtested, lack balance, and add a confounding (and sometimes contradictory) number of rules.

As you noted, games come with a ridiculous number of minis and trinkets and baubles that drive the price of new games well past $100 in many cases.

As the industry has gotten larger, many publishers are turning more toward bankable IP as opposed to innovative concepts. Or, they're releasing a bajillion reskins of the same game (looking at you, TtR, Azul, Pandemic, 7 Wonders, etc..) This is not unique to board games by any stretch. But it's a sign of an inflection point.

I'm not saying there aren't good games being released. I'm saying they're harder to find and getting drowned out by the shameless cash grabs and lazy IP-based games.

Go find some of the classics by Rosenberg, Knizia, Feld, Luciani, and others. You'll get a lot more bang for your buck.

> Games ship with "6 expansions in box" which sounds great [...] until you realize that they're poorly playtested, lack balance, and add a confounding (and sometimes contradictory) number of rules.

Hot take: I have never played an expansion that I liked more than the base game.

I won't argue that. There are a handful that I think improve the experience (some of the early Carcassonne ones, for example) but they are by far the exception rather than the rule.

We're living in a renaissance in terms of the quantity of board games being released, but personally I am finding a declining number of titles I'm even remotely interested in each year, and many of the titles I am interested in are remakes/reprints of older titles!

I think with the increased public interest in hobby board games, the pursuit of profit has lead to some really negative changes in the games that tend to get published.

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