Have you tried Clank! yet? It’s a pretty fun take on the deck-building experience.
Oy. I nearly lost my brother’s love over this game. The rules are written ambiguously, and my brother is brilliant at finding loopholes in rules that allow him to pull of ridiculous cheese. In a single session of the game, he did this twice, requiring opposing interpretations of an ambiguous rule both times, to screw me over.
The first time I assented, because it was brilliant, but the second time I…may not have been my most mature and kind self over the incident.
I’m not proud. I’m also not gonna play that game again.
Not I, but I think my son has, in board game club. (That’s where he discovered Star Realms.)
Usually, if he likes a game at club, he’s gotta get it, to a fault. He didn’t get Clank!
I too like Star Realms - one of the few “gamer’s games” I’ve managed to get my wife interested in. Yet to buy any expansion sets but plan to in due course.
Well, sure - it doesn’t really belong with most of the other games mentioned here, it’s a kid’s game. Roll and move with virtually zero strategy. The mechanical aspect of the game is clever, but very frustrating (especially when playing with a 3-year-old who keeps bumping into the board - admittedly the age recommendation is 6+). It becomes about 19% die rolling, 20% resetting traps, 60% resetting traps that have gone off accidentally, and 1% enjoyment from seeing someone else’s mouse kicked off the board. As you can see, I’m not actually disagreeing with you.
Did anyone ever actually play Mousetrap as a game? It was very good at what it was designed to be.
Another one I heard mentioned on the GWJ podcast and ended up having a lot of fun with over the holidays is “Red 7.” It’s one of those games where the rules are almost comically simple but as you start playing it it rapidly gets pretty deep as you try to figure out what’s in everyone’s hands and plan out your next 2 or 3 moves. It gets my vote for “Best game you can buy for less than $10.”
RoboRally is quite fun. There is an older and newer version. The rules changes streamline the game a bit, but older rules are good, too.
Very good game, maybe not ‘best game ever’.
I like Dark Tower still today. I have one from the 1980’s that still works. It’s a riot to play with kids and it’s relatively quick. My oldest and I have heated sessions of Stratego. I also really love the old version of Axis And Allies from like the mid-1980’s before they added all the complicated rule changes.
We used to play Mousetrap with the kids. Worked surprisingly well. Except the cheese wheel at the end. It took forever to satisfy conditions for attempting to drop the cage on the mouse.
Monopoly if you play by the rules can be an angry type of game. Just never build hotels, as it limits the amount of houses needed to obtain Hotels.
Clue is 123 simple. Just ask the right questions, and throw people off by asking someone for a car you hold.
Yeah, but it means they can likely conclude you hold that card. Every time I’ve played clue, it’s come down largely to luck at the end, because almost everyone has the same two of the three solutions figured out and it’s just who manages to figure out the third one first.
There’s no reason to not be close to winning when someone figures it all out unless you’re not actually paying attention to everyone else’s suggestions.
Then there’s the rare occasion someone just gets lucky on a suggestion and puts it all together really early.
I find Monopoly more strategic than Clue/Cluedo.
Boy, do I know what you mean: it was a fairly long time ago that I played with a co-worker and was gradually introduced to the modules that one by one increased realism (complexity and rules) until by the end I simply wished and wished for a computer to hold the rule books and act as umpire. That was about ten years away…
The finale of this, from the previous post, was that when I moved back to SoCal I became friends with a game designer named Gary Grigsby who had already wirtten what was, in effect, Squad Leader for computer as realistic as could be , that played quickly with pretty good AI and fun scenarios and I was happy at last.
He had written, “Steel Panthers” which is now available for free download. Wheeee.
If the category is all-inclusive, I hereby nominate Chutes and Ladders as the worst board game of all time. Yes, it’s a children’s game, but if you HAVE children, you’ve probably had to play it as an adult. It’s dull as dirt, and there’s no way to surreptitiously cheat to hurry the game along (and let the kid win).
Call me crazy, but I like Risk.
Best: Diplomacy.
Worst: Gotta go with Advanced Squad Leader.
I’ll throw a vote in next to yours for how very unplayable ASL is. You gotta be wary of a game whose rules take up a full three ring binder and you’re supposed to be fairly fluent in them…
Diplomacy also a strong contender for worst if you like having friends. 
Well, the game isn’t called Beginner Squad Leader!
Dominion is my favorite game. It is a race for the best cards, but the fun comes from figuring out what the best cards for a particular kingdom are.
My other favorites are Five Tribes, Castles of Burgundy, and the various versions of Pandemic.
Dominion is also my favorite game. It in fact works at its best with 2 players, but only when those players actually know what they are doing. 3-4 player games are still good if you have them, but tend to play out differently and less interestingly. Dominion also has a problem of most of the game being contained in expansions and the base set being comparatively dull. It’s pretty complicated once you are able to draw from all the expansions, but the essence of the game is finding interesting interactions between cards that aren’t in general very good. For instance, Philosopher’s Stone and Herbalist are pretty mediocre if not terrible cards, but on a board with nothing else high-powered, they work together in at least 3 ways that all build on the strengths of both cards. (Herbalist can return Potion early on to allow you to buy more Philosopher’s Stone quickly, and can return Philosopher’s Stone in the second half of the game. Herbalist gives +Buy to use when you have way more money than for one province which happens when you draw multiple philosopoher’s Stones. Extra buys puts more cards into your deck to power up the Philosopher’s Stone.) There are lot of times you can do some really clever things if you think about them ahead of time enough. And there’s a constant tension between improving your deck an scoring points that isn’t really present in similar games like Ascension.
But it’s also not all that interesting if you’re not really into those sorts of clever interactions and you only have played with some rather bland cards. I can certainly see why people would not like it, though I would expect it to show up more often on Dopers’ best lists than worst lists.
I can’t really say I’ve played games that I actively dislike; there’s usually something interesting in all of them. Chutes and Ladders and Candyland and such don’t really draw any hate from me. They are what they are, they’re designed for young children, and they work fine that way.
The game that I most actively dislike I have never played, only read the rules and wondered “Why are people pushing this at a board game convention?”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCR_(dice_game)