According to boardgamegeek.com which has a ranking of 18,694 games, the 18,694th best game is tic tac toe.
The only winning move is not to play.
I didn’t even consider tic tac toe, Candyland, or Snakes and Ladders because those games are to teach children how to play games. It’s unfair to judge them by the standards of real games.
Risk isn’t a very good game, either.
Back in the 80s there was a board game called Poleconomy. It was invented in New Zealand, but I played the Canadian version. It was like Monopoly in that you tried to buy properties - actually they were all corporations, not real estate,. and they were real companies who’d apparently paid a little money to be in the game - but it also had a parallel game where you tried to be elected Prime Minister. My best friend was a huge political nerd and desperately wanted this game to work, but it just didn’t.
Space Base is much better than Machi Koro IMHO. With MC you can have turns where you get nothing (or go backwards). In SB you will always get something. Still plenty of luck but it feels better to mak SOME progress.
Any long game with player elimination is bad IMHO. Unless you lose on purpose to get into a better game 
Brian
(Duplicate Post)
How about that game where you take turns kicking each other in the balls, and the winner is whoever lasts longest?
Risk isn’t actually a bad game. It’s a pretty good computer game. Its problem is just that it was invented before the computers to run it. Take out all the tedium by automating the die-rolling and counting of armies, and a game lasts maybe a half-hour total.
For a couple of serious answers, Martian Chess, invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and that weird checkers game with the multi-level plastic board invented for Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Star Trek one, either side can trivially easily force a draw, and nobody can ever win, unless their opponent does something colossally stupid. The Martian one, though, actually manages to be even worse: Not only can both sides easily force a draw, but if your opponent isn’t willing to draw but you are, you can trivially easily force a win.
I work in an elementary school and have to play a lot of Candyland. It improved immensely when I accidentally “lost” all the candy cards into the trash can. No more getting almost to the end and then someone draws the Cupcake card and ends up back at the beginning and has a tantrum.
Also, Guess Who is awful for kids with any kind of language or cognitive disorders. Such a deceptively simple-looking game with nice pictures and a fun board, until you try it with children who don’t have a solid understanding of various vocabulary (e.g. blonde=yellow, ‘red’ hair=orange, beard vs. mustache), yes/no questions, negation, etc. and it falls apart. These same kids can grasp games like the aforementioned Candyland, or Zingo, or Chutes and Ladders, or Hi Ho Cherry O, or Trouble, or even Memory, but Guess Who is a real bugaboo.
Tic Tac Toe is the stupidest, most pointless game of all.
American football is the most evil game.
Not that I would know personally, but buz kashi has nothing to recommend it. Repulsive.
Bullfighting, cockfighting, dog fighting, and bear baiting are not games, not sports. They’re nothing but organized crime.
For anyone else not familiar with buzkashi, it apparently consists of men on horseback dragging a dead calf or goat around a field, while fending off opposing men and horses with whips and sharp boots. It sounds like the sort of thing that Scott Adams would have invented for Elbonia, but so far as I can tell from a quick Google, it appears to be real.
With the Australia strategy the goal is to merely last a long time. The likelihood of the game being called without a winner is quite high.
For modern games that I’ve played more than once I’d have to agree with Machi Koro. Even with the expansion (maybe there are others but I’m talking about the one where it can potentially increase the roll to 2D6), it is possible to get into a situation where it is highly unlikely that you will be able to move ahead, only halfway through the game, if your opponent has all the numbers you have and additional ones as well.
I keep hearing this. I wish it had been a free update.
Well, if we’re talking about games invented for fiction, Quidditch is an incredibly dumb sport.
Oh, we always played to the bitter end, no matter if it needed to be continued the next morning.
Strip Texas Hold’Em.
Strip Poker should be played with the barest rules of Poker, basically high card wins no betting losers take off an article of clothing, simple as that (if you want to lengthen the game then use the rule where only the person with the worst hand takes off an article of clothing), the moment you start to introduce betting into the whole thing you kind of defeat the whole point of it, especially when you make it so that you only take off an article of clothing once you go bust and use an article of clothing to “buy back in”. The only time I was able to play in a public game of strip poker if was Strip Texas Hold’Em and it took absolutely forever to get through so that by the end you were more exhausted than anything.
I work in a preschool, and the kids absolutely LOVE Candyland. Love, love love it. They are lukewarm on chutes and ladders.
I forgot about Life! Man, that game sucks! Everything from the spinner that never worked right, to rules that were ambiguous (at least to a bunch of kids), to “What the heck is an almshouse?”
Yeah. Few people realize that Free Parking is the most landed on space, so that “lottery” gets won a lot. Or that frequency of getting landed on radiates out from Free Parking. So the orange monopoly is a GREAT starter. If you get that one, and it’s the first or second monopoly, you have basically won, as long as you aren’t careless. The Boardwalk/Park Place monopolies get landed on not so much. Yeah, they can bankrupt people pretty quick, but someone has to land on them first.
I played Uno in college as a drinking game. I recall it being a pretty good game. When i recall it at all.
Best laugh I have had today.
Seriously. All the other players exhaust themselves, but it makes no difference, because it’s really just the Seeker vs. the Snitch. It’s like two different games are going on at the same time, and only one counts.
I wonder, though, as an American, if I’m missing something. Is there some ridiculous UK sport that was being parodied?
We do top first (any order) then once that’s filled in, do the bottom (any order)
It has shades of Cricket where you can play a 4 day long game and still have it end in a tie, the ultimate futility of it all.
It’s in a different class of games, but Musical Chairs is one miserable game of making every child into a loser with one non-loser at the end. Russian roulette for kids.