I’ve wondered if there is a strategy to how close you should be to other players versus being alone, and how adventurous you should be in seeking power-ups. And how they interplay with each other, i.e. how much you need power-ups as the big bad versus a party member. So if you are going it alone you will be hoping to be the traitor because they do better alone, but then you need to know if the traitor is helped or hurt by seeking power-ups.
The only reference I could find to this being a thing is in New Mexico, not Nevada, and it’s that it must be resolved by a “Game of chance” so it COULD be no-betting poker in theory but could also be just flipping a coin.
Hey, I never said it was true. I said it was a thing I’d heard.
Jutland was pretty bad–tracking tons of different ships for a battle in which not much happened.
Guns of August had problems as well, as the map was pretty much all of Europe, so the Western front was about 10 hexes long. So you then spend the next four years occasionally taking hexes off of stacks and replacing them with others.
Darkover is perhaps the worst, based on the book series. Since it deals with psychic powers, conflicts were resolved by two people staring at each other and chanting “One, please don’t burn, two, please don’t burn…” until someone lost the staring contest.
I don’t think Monopoly is the worst game, and I think it can even be a fine game with the right ruleset. However, it does have the distinction of being almost strictly worse than another popular boardgame.
I maintain that Settlers of Catan and monopoly are the same game. The meat of both is rolling dice and trading resources. There are game specific skills, Catan requires a bit more spatial skills, Monopoly statistics, but in general, I would say that the dice rolling and trading decide much more of the game than knowing when to buy houses/when to go for longest road. Catan is better because it is a lot more trading than dice rolling, and it doesn’t have player elimination. I haven’t played many games of Monopoly where there was more than 2 or 3 trades. and I haven’t played many games of Catan where there was less than 2 or 3 trades per round of turns. I’m not sure it’s any less determined by dice than monopoly, since better rolls means more stuff to trade, but more trading means you are doing meaningful things more often. The advantage of no player elimination is obvious, though both games do have players eliminated from having a reasonable shot of winning part way through the game. I suspect that’s unavoidable for any resource-gathering game without adding Mario Party mechanics. Wait, this post should have been about Mario Party.
So, Mario Party is the worst board game. It is 90% Candyland, 10% minigames, and at the end you roll a dice, if you roll a 6, the person in 3rd place wins.
I’d play. I think though you’ll have to distinguish between ‘worst on release’ and ‘worst even after it was ostensibly patched.’ I loved Fallout New Vegas, but I came to it after the GOTY edition was released. So most of the game nuking bugs had been controlled if not eliminated. AIUI, it was absolutely, ridiculously buggy on release.
Which was the video game that had an infamous bug that not only could crash your game and system, but could conceivably corrupt the rest of your hard drive?
Assuming that’s not just an urban legend, that’s not an example of a bad game, that’s an example of a bad operating system. No OS should allow any application program to be able to do that much damage, especially considering that there are some programs out there deliberately designed to do damage.
Pools of Radiance: The Legends of Myth Drannor. Not the original SSI Gold Box PoR, but an attempt by UbiSoft to revive the franchise in 2001. The uninstaller could delete some of your system files if you’d installed it anywhere other than the default location. Ars Technica’s review from back in the day.
My usual RPG group occasionally plays Betrayal Legacy when we aren’t able to run our usual RPG campaign on a game day. It’s effectively the same game but you play scenarios one after another, each scenario taking place at a different time period in the same house. Each player plays a family (you pick the family name and crest/color at the beginning) and for each scenario you play a different generation of the family. The choices you make and the events that happen affect future scenarios as you build a history of these families and the house.
For example, you find a crossbow and manage to kill someone with it, that crossbow now gets a sticker with your family crest and is an heirloom. In the next scenario if you find your grandpa’s crossbow, it has bonus stats for you because you are a descendant. The deed to the house passed from family to family, and grudges develop that lead to conflicts later, and so on. It has been a blast.
The downside to the game is that it’s pretty expensive (anywhere from $50-75) and you pretty much can only play it once, as you have to use up stickers, write on cards, and dispose of things after they are used up. So it’s an investment. But you can play it over a long session and it’s an amazing experience. I really dig it.
This may be a city law somewhere in Nevada, but Nevada state law says that ties in statewide or “district” elections are broken either by vote of the state legislature or “by lot.” Technically, a game of stud poker could be considered “by lot.”
At the Nevada Democratic Caucuses, if there was a tie in determining which candidate received a County Convention delegate, it was broken by a card draw (high card won; ties broken by the suit order used in bridge).
Wasn’t there a game mentioned somewhere on SMDB that consisted of:
(a) The board is 101 spaces, numbered 0 through 100;
(b) Each player starts on 0;
© Roll a die - on a 6, advance one space; on a 5, remain where you are; on a 1-4, go back to space 0;
(d) The first player to reach space 100 wins?
I worked out that it would take a very, very long time just for any player to get to space 10.
The Crying
The odds of successfully getting to the tenth space, from space 0, are 9,765,624 to 1.
The odds of completing the game are such that were every human on earth to play the game nonstop, no one would win before the heat death of the universe.
This game sucks.
The expected number of rolls needed for a player to reach space 10 is 14,648,436.
The expected number of times reaching space 10 needed for a player to reach space 20 is also 14,648,436.
The expected number of turns to reach space 100 is about 4.5 x 10^71.
Betrayal is still fun to play, even if you occasionally get screwed. Some of the scenarios are better than others, though. The players have a greater chance of beating the traitor the longer they can go without triggering the haunt. As items are uncovered, the players need to use the high-speed member of the party to ferry items between players to balance out items (i.e. one player doesn’t hog all the weapons) and optimize usage (items that require knowledge go to the player with the highest knowledge, etc.)
I would say the worst board game I have played is a dud called Innsmouth Escape. It’s a one player vs the rest game, where one player is trying to rescue their captured fellow Miskatonic U students wit secret movement and get to the edge of the board and out of Innsmouth, while the other players play hordes of Deep Ones. It’s incredibly unbalanced against the solo player, and the cheap jack production values didn’t help. (Every piece of art in the game is clipped from the cover painting, although there are lots of Deep One plastic figurines I’ve used in other games.)
;):p:D
I know all there is to know about the crying game. I’ve had my share of the crying game.
I know I’m in the minority but I hate Fluxx. It’s basically a disguised version of War that makes you think there’s a strategy to winning. And then someone changes the winning condition and your plans all go to hell.