More Games That Disappointed: High-Rated Games

My first article on this topic seemed to generate a fair amount of discussion, so we may as well keep the negativity flowing. With my first article, you may have noticed that the games I considered are all low-ranked titles on BoardGameGeek, but this isn’t always a direct correlation. I definitely have some favorite titles that are horribly underrated on the Geek (the entire Keltis series, for example), and now I’ll be discussing some high-ranked games that I personally don’t find very appealing. I’m sure this article will be a bit more objectionable, so feel free to sound off in the comments and explain your own opinion.

Pandemic – My first introduction to cooperative board games was Shadows over Camelot. That game has a very unique mechanic that changes everything about the game: there may be a traitor amongst you, trying to make everyone else lose. That uncertainty creates a lot of tension within the game, while simultaneously keeping people from excessive table talk and – my favorite part – making sure someone loses. It’s so much more fun to rub your win in someone’s face!

That doesn’t mean that I don’t like purely cooperative games, but for a while I thought I disliked them because my next foray into cooperation was Pandemic - and I hated it. I did give it several attempts, but each time was more boring than the last. I chalked it up to “I just don’t like pure cooperative games” and gave it no more thought…

…Until a few months later, when I played Forbidden Island, which is practically the same game. Although it wasn’t an instant favorite, I enjoyed Forbidden Island quite a bit, which had me wondering why I had so strongly disliked Pandemic. It was really the art and the theme.

Although theme and art are inextricably intertwined, both of them bugged me in their own way. I strongly believe we play games of any sort for a sense of escapism, to enter a universe at least a bit unlike our own. In fact, I’d say it’s essentially the same reason people enjoy the outdoors, or sports, or any other hobby – it’s a break from our normal mundane reality. The theme for Pandemic - curing global diseases – just struck too close to reality for me. Even if we aren’t facing any epidemics, I’ve got enough relatives on enough pills, and I teach enough nursing majors each semester, that the escapism is sucked right out of the game.

However, even with a different theme, there isn’t much escapism to be found in “cube-pushing” anyway. The artwork on the game and cards is technically well done, but it’s very bland, and so are the boring wooden cubes. Taking cubes on and off the board isn’t nearly as thematic as literally having the island game board sink around you. There’s enough of a risk of defeat for the game to have some tension in that sense, but the game’s never intriguing enough for me to care if we lose.

Stone Age – In a way, you could say that everything in a non-abstract board game comes down to theme. First, there’s the theme itself, the “gimmick” that sells the game. Second, the art is supposed to put your imagination into that theme and let you do the rest. Third, the gameplay itself is supposed to be a kinesthetic “feel” of doing exactly what the theme says you are doing, whether that be building empires, fighting dragons, or, in this case… doing manual labor. The theme of this game comes through just fine, but it’s such a mundane one that correctly capturing it is a bad thing.

In Stone Age, you are cavemen gathering resources to live out your life, and score victory points for… doing a better job at farming and building huts than your neighbors. You spend your turns sending your workers out into the fields, forests, and mines, collecting food and resources, so that you can cash them in for victory points. It sounds boring, and it is. On the other hand, I’ve played games of a similar theme and had more fun – Roll Through the Ages comes to mind. Gameplay-wise, the problem with Stone Age is the completely opaque scoring. The point is to do better than your opponents, but your score has so much hidden information that it’s unreasonable to estimate your opponents’ scores, and so much multiplication that your own score is basically hidden to you until the game is over and you count everything up. That would be okay if the game was exciting in other ways, but it isn’t. This is going to sound counter-intuitive, but for a game centered around dice, the dice are so “fixable” that the excitement of dice-rolling is pretty much gone. All that’s left is work.

All of this might have been salvaged into a reasonably fun game if the art made the theme come alive in a more fun, less realistic way. However, the artwork is as drab and boring and mundane as the gameplay. The art is skillfully done, but I just can’t get excited about a world that only exists in green, brown, gray and orange. All of these things come together to form a game that’s all work and no play.

Alhambra - Now that I’ve pointed out my dissatisfaction with two Spiel des Jahres nominees, let’s not assume that means a SdJ winner is a sure bet either – though it usually is. I’ve played ten of them, and Alhambra is the only one that was a disappointment. Unlike the other games I’ve discussed, I liked Alhambra for a while. The problem is that in our crowded world of excellent offerings, this game is just not as good as many others out there.

I don’t care much for the theme or the art, but they’re well-done and serviceable. The problem is that the gameplay, while clever, is far too uncontrollable. It’s too tricky to get the money you want for the tiles you want, while still having the tiles you want around to purchase once you have the money. Furthermore, the arbitrary timing of scoring rounds makes everything far too random, a problem much further exacerbated with more players. There’s not enough control to make the game interesting, and instead it is frustrating. I’ve read that several expansion modules fix some of the problems with the base game, but at the point, this becomes a $70+  MSRP introductory family game, and I know many more such games that are a lot cheaper and a lot more fun. As all of the games I discussed last time show, you can get the theme and art right but still not have a game that’s fun and fair, and that’s the case here.

It’s even harder to articulate my distaste for well-lauded games such as these. It’s an opinion that needs to be heard, though, because despite what the majority says, not every “great” game is for everyone. I’d love to hear what the rest of you think.