Left Hand of Dorkness, I feel your pain. Being stuck for hours in a dead-lost position with no way to do anything is horrible. The trouble is that “give everyone a chance at the end” often translates as “make the first 90% of the game pointless”. That’s why these days I prefer Euro-type multiplayer games - you may be 50 points behind the second-last player, but dammit, at least you can score some points and fell like you’ve achieved something.
Allecher, I share your dislike for Battlestar Galactica. It’s long, slow and the traitor can’t do much to sabotage the team without giving himself away, so he gets to hide, and hide, and hide… In my experience (my old group loved it, and brought it out way too often), about 65% of the time the humans co-op to victory and the traitor can do nothing, 25% of the time the humans lose to the game system and the traitor is irrelevant and the other 10% the traitor actually gets the chance for a good backstab - which means that the other 4-5 people at the table get to play for 3 hours and then get slapped with what one game-designer described as “the unfair instant-death scenario.”
Plus, it has the pernicious rule that a player may only find out he’s a traitor half-way through the game - leading to everyone stalling until they can be sure what side they’re on.
But the one game on my flat-out-will-not-play list is Betrayal at the House on the Hill, I can see how some people like it in a sort of visual-novel way - just accept you have no agency and go with the flow. As a game well, imagine a Snakes and Ladders variant where every turn, instead of just throwing the dice, you throw three dice in different colours and cross-reference the results in a hundred-page rulebook to tell you where to move…
I solved that problem with the Firebug by drawing a few extra shortcuts on the board. (There’s one or two - can’t recall - built into the regulation game. We played with four or five of them, total.) Sped things up enormously, because it tilted the balance between things that move you forward and things that move you back, much more towards going forward.
Made the game a lot more tolerable, because even though the winner was still predetermined, at least it took only a short time - probably less than 10 minutes per game, on the average.
Is this the game that was based on James Clavell’s book, “Shogun”? If so, I came into the thread specifically to mention it and several of the other games that were based on his books. I think I was given Shogun, Tai Pan, and King Rat, but it was way back in the 1980s. I remember [del]playing[/del] trying to play all of them, but it was an exercise in frustration from the get-go.
I couldn’t tell you which one of them was the worst, though, but they are each up there in my book.
Certainly the feeblest board game I have ever played, is one discovered (in UK, my country) a few years ago: a “retro” re-issuing of a game devised and marketed in the mid-1930s, called Coronation Scot, in tribute to the real-life introduction at that time, with much fanfare, of the then fastest-ever express train service – bearing that title – to run between London and Glasgow.
Premise of the game, is for up to four players to race each other from London to Glasgow along the principal main-line rail route between those two cities --that being, in the nature of railways, an utterly unrealistic thing. Said rail route set out on the board in a sort of elongated S-shape, with four parallel tracks for the up-to-four players; with 78 intermediate stations, of various degrees of size and importance. Players throw the dice and advance their respective pieces, the appropriate number of stations’-worth. A dozen or so of the stations feature instructions saying “go forward to” or “go back to”, X station. Something of a “period” curiosity; but, especially to me as a railway enthusiast, to the nth degree “lame” and lacking in realism.
My brother and I, having played this game, set about trying to devise an adaptation of it which would be more gutsy and exciting, and closer to how railways are in the real world; but we didn’t get all that far with the project.
Yeah Candyland and Chutes and Ladders are activities with the trappings of a game. Games require decisions that effect the outcome and both of these have none of that.
Interesting, the family and I love this game. All turns are free-agency, up until the betrayal mechanic sets in, then the rules for that particular haunt scenario determine what your future strategy will be, but (generally) you are still actually playing your strategy out on the fly and adapting to changes.
Not sure about the rulebook part you mentioned- everything is straightforward until you have to read your scenario, which then might throw a monkey wrench, but generally it is all fairly intuitive. Oh, and no dice in the game at all, just movement based on character speed.
I can think of three different solutions to this problem:
I’ve seen some folks whip from behind to win Settlers of Catan, due to some clever use of resources and cards to earn a bunch of points quickly. Their final turn is predicated on careful planning in early turns.
In a game like Castles of Mad King Ludwig, each player has secret victory conditions. Build lots of circle rooms! Build lots of incomplete rooms! Build lots of tiny rooms! You play the game carefully, building toward your secret conditions, and even if you look behind on the track, you can still win once the secret conditions are revealed at game’s end.
In Smallworld, it’s simpler: your points are hidden. Sure, a careful player can keep mental track of how many points every other player has, but it’s such a good drinking game that who has time for that?
I’m sure there are other solutions, and a lot of times there are combinations of these (Catan’s cards contain secret victory points, for example). But in all these cases, careful play throughout the game can allow a player who looks like they’re in last place to zoom ahead in the end.
I also love the game but it’s definitely not for anyone who want’s a “fair” experience. I get why it can be maddening for some people since you will often end up in no-win situations.
There is dice to start the haunt (and possibly in battle?)
When my kids were the age where they liked Candyland and Chutes&Ladders, my work-around involved subtly cheating to make sure they’d win and I’d lose, all in a timely manner.
Pretty sure I’ve never told them, absolutely certain I never will.
That is the one I dislike for the “irretrievably behind” factor even though it isn’t a very long game. If your opponent has all the numbers covered and you don’t then at most you will stay even for awhile before eventually falling even more behind and losing.
I like it better than straight-up Mafia because it isn’t entirely about whoever has the highest charisma. The one time I played I won as the Cylon in a mixture between the two – I was able to make us fail several tasks by playing low cards rather than negative cards and thus keep my status in doubt. But we needed luck as well because they successfully jailed one of the traitors whom I thought was not a traitor. (Although I continued to vote either low negative or low positive when the question of release came about.)
I came one turn away from hyperspacing us at the most inopportune moment but they figured me out right before that. We won anyway due to a little bad luck on their part.
That said, I still don’t especially like it because it’s a Mafia game. But it’s better than Werewolf.
krondys I may be maligning the game, but I’m sure I remember that every time you go into a new room (or in my case usually try to go into a new room) you get a random event of the “throw a dice to see if you get loot/throw a dice to see if something bad happens” type.
And you can’t play any sort of strategy because the first part of the game is completely random - yes, you can choose whether to go into this random unknown room and have that random event or go into that random unknown room and have that other random event - and it’s irrelevant anyway because you have no idea what will actually turn out to be useful when the betrayal finally happens.
Then after about an hour of random blundering around, the plot kicks in and one player is randomly chosen to win or lose.
Ludovic - I suspect that’s how it’s meant to be played. But the group I was with had come up with the strategy of “before every task, hold a 5-minute discussion to decide whether we need to pass it. If yes, everyone throws in enough cards to make sure the task cannot fail even with a traitor playing negatives. If no, no-one plays any cards at all”. So the opportunities for sabotage are limited to trying to suggest bad plans, while trying to avoid suspicion of Deviation from the Collective.
(Incidentally, it wasn’t a case of the most charismatic person playing everyone’s turns for them, they just did everything by collective decision).
Hmm, I like that version of Shogun, though my play was with similarly experienced players. You can get bad luck from the cube tower though, and strategy is tough and if you lose a lot of territories not sure you can catch up and I can see that being unsatisfactory.
Did you just play the original version or did you play it with the expansions? Because the first expansion really improved the game. The big fix was they changed the card set-up. Instead of having all cards available, there’s now a random set-up. You always have a choice of ten cards to buy but the cards are always changing. So you can no longer just follow a simple strategy like buy a radio tower, then buy a cheese factory, and then buy ranches on every turn after that. You have to build a plan around what cards are available on the table and the probabilities of when cards might appear.
I’m not a huge fan of hidden role games and traitor mechanics. But if you like that kind of thing, you can see how somebody would enjoy Battlestar Galactica. The most interesting twist is that the players don’t know what team they’re on until halfway through the game. So in the first half of the game you have to play in a way that keeps your options open.
I’m in the middle on the tower. I don’t hate it but I can see why some people do.
I feel the main problem Shogun has is its pacing. You have spend ten or twenty intense minutes planning out your moves. And then you sit back and essentially follow the script set by those planned moves for twenty or thirty minutes.
The game that holds a special place in the black depths of my heart is Ticket to Ride.
I know that it’s one of the most popular games of all time, but to me it is the perfect storm of everything awful about Euro-style games. You sit there and make lines while other people make lines. Some of their lines might interfere with some of your lines, but for the most part don’t worry about it and make your lines. At the end of the game, everyone looks to see who had the best lines. And don’t forget about the expansions, which give you way more potential lines to make. Aaaaghhhnnggnh.
BSG’s biggest problem (at least in the base game) is that it’s not balanced unless you’ve got exactly five players - two Cylons and three humans. And I agree that the cards can go badly for one side or the other and really screw with the pacing. And you can count on new players always drawing a Cylon card and immediately giving themselves away by mistake.
Still, it’s given my group some of its best “oh holy shit!” moments across many years of boardgaming.
Definitely problematic. I always gave new players a talk about not doing that - BSG falls entirely apart if all the humans aren’t playing to win during the first half. Everyone is secretly hoping they’ll be the Cylon, but everyone has to play to win from the very beginning.
