Avalon Hill’s home magazine 'The General" made fun of this race towards excess wargame complexity (Campaign for North Africa might have been considered the zenith of this trend) with an Article called “It” which involved a guy visiting his friend for a wargaming afternoon only to find he was no obsessed with a game called “It” - a 1 man = 1 counter simulation of World War 2. The game was so big it arrived on 18 wheelers, the rules were larger than encylopedias (“Parachute preperation phase…”, the game buyer had to rent a warehouse to setup the board and since there were so few copies it had to be play by mail.
Do you still have your copy? It’s become a cult classic and you can easily get a hundred dollars for a used copy.
To illustrate Pleonast’s point: I played badminton with my brother last night. He’s a better player than me, so in almost every game he was ahead from the beginning. And he won all but one game, in fact. It certainly wasn’t random. But in every game, I knew I had a chance of beating him -I simply needed to score points more consistently. And in the last game, I came from behind in the last five minutes and defeated him 23-21. And in a couple of games I nearly did. That wasn’t random either. And every match was fun precisely because that possibility was there.
Now imagine a “Monopoly” version of badminton whereby his points translated into greater difficulty for me. E.g on reaching a seven point lead, he could declare that one quarter of his court were now “out” instead of “in”. Now his intermediate performance has changed the balance of power. Sure, the best player is now more likely to win, and I’m less likely to come from behind to win as I’m defending a bigger area and attacking a smaller one - but is the game better, or more fun? How likely is it that I’d want to keep playing past a ten-point deficit?
Winners should feel vulnerable. Losers should feel like they have a chance. There should be some positive feedback, in that good intermediate performance increases your chances of winning - but too much simply makes the game a stale and predictable procession to victory from the half-way point on - or even earlier.
Another example, one I personally like (because I’m a fan of diplomacy in non co-op games), is Cosmic Encounter, where you can ask people to join in on an attack and share a victory. One time I was going in for the win, but asked around the table anyway. One player, who’d been hammered on all game, decided to join in. Then two others decided to also join and we all shared a four way victory against my largest opponent, even though I didn’t really need the help. Sharing is caring! 
NETA*: Some context: Three players were racing for the win against each other, two players had lost their shot, but could still play kingmaker. It had only become apparent that I was a possible win candidate fairly late game, as I’d played a bit more laid back and not as aggressive as the other two and had less forces and territory (I can never remember specific terminology), with my cards closer to my chest. As it turned out, my cards were my strongest asset.
*Damn edit rule.
Hard disagree here. A well designed app game can introduce new dynamics to a good social game. Xcom is one such example, already discussed. Sometimes the app plays the “Dungeon Master” role too, which frees a player from that role - Descent, Mansions of Madness…
MoM’s app is doubly cool in that role, because it can keep track of ressources and monsters and scenario flags sight unseen, whereas a player filling that slot would have a horrible time keeping track of the movements of monsters & NPCs on parts of the board the players haven’t discovered yet.
And sometimes the app functions merely as an overdesigned deck of event cards/dice roll on a random table - but in that case it still saves setup/shuffling/putting away time and the “cards” will never get lost or bent or chewed by the dog or covered in beer, that’s still a plus
Sometime in the 1980s I ended up with a copy of The Ungame which, according to Wikipedia, “fosters listening skills as well as self-expression”.
So, of course, we played it exactly once.
Arkham Horror is a tough game to play out of the box. I prefer Eldritch Horror, the globetrotting version, to Arkham Horror. Mansions of Madness is, IMHO, with all the miniatures, even worse because of the extensive set up time. Elder Sign, while not exactly simple, is a dice-based simplified version of Arkham Horror that takes much less time to play and can be played solitaire.
Despite it’s flaws, I still like Machi Koro partially because of the concept and partially because of the art design. I mostly play with a pretty casual group, and occasionally like a game where they don’t have to strategize every move and leave some things up to the dice. Yes, there is a broken path to victory, but if all the players are aware of it, they can prevent a player from taking advantage of it by a) preventing one player from getting a monopoly on cheap resources like Wheat Field and Ranch or b) quickly ramping up to two-dice properties.
Anyway, the expansions Harbor and Millionaire’s Row cover a lot of the original’s flaws by a) introducing a limited store mechanic (which can be used with just the original game), b) greatly increasing the number and usefulness of two-dice properties, and c) adding more expensive monuments, which limits a path to victory by focusing on cheap low-number properties.
I recall a Knights of the Dinner Table story with a game that represented World War One on a fine-grained tactical level, packed in a vintage footlocker. Originally, twenty gamers chipped in, with final ownership to go to the winner of the first game. At the time of the story, everybody but Brian and Weird Pete have dropped out, and the game has gone on longer than the actual war.
I’m bumping this puppy to kvetch.
I spent the weekend at a marvelous game day with 25 incredible gamers and had a blast. But the last game I played, and the only board game, was CashFlow. A real nice guy stopped me and asked me if I’d be willing to try it out, and I was feeling friendly so I said sure.
When, at 9:30 he set his alarm for 12:45 in case we hadn’t finished by then, I should’ve noped out of there.
When I saw that I randomly was assigned “doctor” as my role and was already randomly starting the game with quadruple the net income of the player assigned “janitor,” I shoulda said no.
When I realized that the bulk of the game was going to be filling out a financial statement and changing it constantly (every time you take or pay down a loan from the bank, and I was doing one of those things almost every turn, you have to erase and rewrite four numbers in four different places), klaxons should’ve gone off.
But he was real nice, and so were the other players, so I remained.
Some problems:
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GAME DESIGN: To start, it’s a shitty game. Gameplay is a lot like Monopoly, where you roll 1-2 dice and move around a track and land on spaces that usually make you draw cards. So already we’re talking the least inspired gameplay you can imagine. What sets it apart from other “roll the dice and draw cards and move on a track” snoozefests is that there’s a shit-ton of adding and subtracting, and it doesn’t happen simultaneously, so you have to wait while the current player finishes their sheet so they can finish their turn before you take yours. (Sometimes they can finish their recalculations off-turn, but often they can’t). There are very few things to do when it’s not your turn. The person who won our game did so because on her third turn, she drew a random card that let her buy 10 acres of undevelopable wilderness, and then on her sixth turn, she drew a random card that meant the city bought that wilderness from her for enough money to pay off all her debts. Nothing anyone else did came close to having the effect of that one massive swing.
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EDUCATION: Supposedly the asshole who designed it wanted it to teach people financial literacy. So why the fuck does donating to charity make your paydays come twice as fast? Why does the bank charge 10% interest every month? Why can’t everyone buy stock when the price changes, only the current player, but everyone can sell stock when the price changes? It sacrifices major realism–and the opportunity to teach–in order to make minor gameplay gains. Look, the difficulties in real estate speculation are real, but they’re not that banks force you to pay 10% of the loan principle every month.
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FUCKIN GROSSNESS: You start the game engaged in productive labor. I played a doctor, who used my expertise to heal the sick and treat the injured. Another player cleaned buildings for a living–an ill-paid but noble profession. As long as you’re engaged in productive, meaningful work, the game tells you you’re in the rat race, and your goal, the only way to be a winner, is to stop your meaningful work and become a capitalist who lives off investments. If you spend your life in meaningful work, the game ensure you’re a loser. Having children has no effect on the game at all except to make it harder to win. Giving money to charity is a sound financial investment, nothing more. There’s a “divorce” space that makes you lose all your money, and an “audit” space that makes you give half your money to your attorneys and accountants (not, interestingly, to the government–apparently you’ll pay to avoid paying taxes). One real estate card that’s not worth taking mentions that it’s in a “bad area,” so you can be sure to perpetuate redlining. The guy who made the game calls himself “rich dad,” and when you’re on the rich asshole track after quitting your meaningful work, you put “rich dad” tiles down on the properties you buy. The “winner” did so because she’d set her dream, early on, to own a park. But she had to sell that wilderness property she’d bought in order to satisfy the game’s demands. She couldn’t just be a small business owner happy with her little 10 acres of heaven: no, she had to become a slumlord who could pay to have a park named after her.
I have never been more irritated at a game. It’d be great to teach in a “philosophy of economics” class at an undergrad level, as a way to disentangle and examine the underlying assumptions of capitalism, but short of that, it’s not good for much beyond kindling.