Not sure if this has been done before…but here goes:
Best: Monopoly…I know it takes a long time, but if you win, it’s glorious!
Runner-Up: Life (or was it officially The Game of Life?) Any game that features a car with pegs, you have to give it it’s due. Plus, if you wound up being the doctor–with the 100K salary, you would probably end up winning.
Worst: Risk. Never liked it.
What is the worst board game you have ever played? from a month ago.
I’ve always liked both Monopoly and Clue. My wife kicks my ass in Clue each time we play and I end up feeing like a lobotomized chimp. There’s a trick to winning, I just haven’t figured it out yet.
The trick to playing with kids is to make notes of what they choose to suspect. They usually aren’t devious enough to suspect cards they actually have, so you can assume they DON’T have anything they suspect.
Sometimes you can narrow down a pretty solid accusation in just a few rounds.
Eta: corollary to that is to sometimes name a card you actually have as a suspect.
I gave my daughter my Clue tips recently:
These ar what I’ve figured out. I’m sure there are more tips.
My favorite is Suburbia.
The worst game is Handyman. It’s all luck. It’s infuriating to travel back and forth seemingly endless turns before you can land on exactly the store you need. Then after you complete a job, you draw one more card which randomly tells you sometimes “Nope you goofed up the job, you get less or even no credit.”
Complete honesty. I tossed all of the real bad outcome cards from our set so the game would not drag on and on.
The best is Pandemic.
The worst is Arkham Horror. Fifty minutes of setup, ten minutes of apocalyptic doom.
Stranger
another vote for Pandemic as the best, plus you can’t beat the simplicity/complexity of chess or the tactile pleasure and gambling opportunities of Backgammon.
Worst? I hate Monopoly and Cluedo,
I will almost never pass up a game of Brass, but I hesitate to call it my favorite. (I would not choose it as my desert island game) My recent play of La Granja reminds me of how much I like it. Le Havre is probably my favorite 3 player game.
TLDR: I like variety and have a hard time choosing a favorite.
Worst for me is probably Werewolf. early in the game it is quasi random. I like getting killed early so I can play better games 
I acknowledge that is fun for others though.
Brian
Coming from a family of farmers & graziers “Squatter” was played at a near professional intensity.
If you got caught in a drought without having acquired a haystack to mitigate you copped a withering look of scorn from the patriarch!
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Best: Squad Leader in its original version. A fun, playable squad-level WWII wargame.
Worst: Squad Leader in its final version after umpteen revisions and “improvements.” I don’t know if there is another game that has as many rules as Squad Leader came to have. Playing became a boring search through the rule book a lot of the time.All the hundreds of rules were added to cover every possible action and do things like reproduce the fog of war. About half the people I played with were rules lawyers, so that exacerbated the issue.
Hmmm, tough one.
Worst is anything that relies on randomness/luck.
Best is hard to pin down. Unlike Stranger, I really like Arkham Horror, but it definitely is quite a time sink (setup especially).
Pandemic is absolutely great, especially the Reign of Cthulhu version.
For great gameplay and easy setup, I like Splendor, and it is equally good for 2-4 players.
Of the games I currently own, my favorite is probably Lords of Waterdeep.
A game I am extremely good at but despite is Trivial Pursuit. I cannot remember the last time I lost - my head’s full of stupid shit - but the game (unless they’ve changed the mechanics of it and I missed it) is just drab and pointless; rolling the dice takes far, far too long and largely gets in the way of the game. There are so many Roll Again squares you’re just better off ignoring them.
I shall send you my 9 year old then. Somehow she’s figured out how to play quite well. She’s taken to beating me a lot when we play. Not sure how she figured out how to play so well, but she did. She can figure out everything while I’m still trying to get my second.
I’m glad she’s smart enough to beat me, I’m just worried she might be able to figure out how to kill me and get away with it one day.
Fields of Green is an excellent farming themed game that came out recently.
I don’t mind the time or elaborate setup, or even a very challenging game that you lose nine plays out of ten, but to spend a vast amount of time prepping the game only to be killed on the first round by some spawning hellmouth makes it feel like a pointless waste of time. At least give enough balance so that there is time for a little bit of trash talk before the world is consumed by Hastur. I get that it is supposed to be akin to the experience of playing the Call of Cthulhu role playing game—and it is certainly possible for your Investigator to go insane or have his face melt off at the first encounter with some unknown dread—but at least you can turn that into a farce of revolving ad hoc investigators.
And of course, there are the people who have read through the entire deck and know the answers so as to ‘beat’ the game. Also, many of the answers are (or at least were) either subject to interpretation or incorrect outright.
I have yet to play it with a group but I purchased Dead of Winter after watching the TableTop playthrough and it seems awesome. I’m just not sure I can put together four or five people who are up for a three hour game.
Stranger
Well, that’s a good point; every set has, in effect, an expiration date of “however long until you read all the cards.” Hence the constant issues of new cards.
The original game’s trivia questions were often extremely ill-conceived. Not only were some wrong, but some were just brutally written and almost impossible for even an informed person to answer, or were simply unfair.
Of course, the questions in the original set were slapped together by a couple of friends. Writing good trivia questions isn’t as easy as it sounds. Writing six thousand of them is very much not as easy as it sounds and I don’t mean to rip on Haney and Abbott, but as game mechanics go it sucks pretty badly.
I used to love Star Fleet Battles back in the 80’s and early 90’s, but our group was completely ruined by Mr. Rules Lawyer who would slow down every single turn and try to convince us to play scenarios that were equal on points, but he’d get to play his beloved Federation and have it keenly set up so that his advantages nullified his enemies strengths. Like setting up the Klingons or Kzinti with 8 gazillion points of drones only to arm the Federation with a ton of phaser gatlings. Or his side with the most modern ships and the other side with the oldest. ‘But they’re the same points!’ :rolleyes:
The original game’s questions were also often plagiarized. The game makers simply copied questions and answers from a previously published book, without paying the author or publisher.