[thom]

I think you should play modern board games, but can we agree that there are both good and also heinously bad lessons to learn from them? Far too many board games want to be computer games, and seem to think it's trivial to have 20 different piles of crap to set up at the start, and then a dozen different pieces of state to track in your little corner of the table during what will inevitably be a complicated five-phased turn. If your board game takes hours to learn and set up, and then half an hour to put away again at the end, I am just going to invest my time in a proper TTRPG that better repays the investment.

[order-matters]

>Far too many board games want to be computer games

very concise way to nail the root cause of this problem. I dont think it is intentional. I am developing my own board game right now with my brother, currently playtesting with close friends with solid results, and due to growing up with video games I cannot tell you how often we have had to confront the urge to add a state tracker here or a system there or maybe if we use cards with stats on them then .. etc. because a lot of our love for games has been influenced by video games. We managed to overcome that and keep things fun and simple, but we also have the luxury of working on this over the past couple years in our spare time and not pressed to meet a deadline or other corporate constraints. By that I mean when we hit a wall that could be solved quickly by increasing the games complexity, we are able to step away for a while until a good idea hits us.

there is certainly some room to bridge the gap between video games and board games, to have systems the players dont need to learn but operate in the background while still enabling tabletop interaction - but i dont see how to do it on a budget, so maybe a future project. we need projector enabled coffee tables to get popular in general or something maybe

[glimshe]

I reject anything that has an excessive "weight" on boardgamegeek. The vast majority of high "weight" games are board games wanting to be computer games, as you correctly pointed out. Of course, "high" is subjective but I got burned too many times by thick manuals with tedious set up that makes me want to not play the game before I even open the box.

[allturtles]

I think the lesson to learn from this is that different people are different?

While most people are repulsed by the complexity of extremely heavy games, others will luxriate in them. There is a whole 40-year-old community built around Advanced Squad Leader, a game with rules so complicated that there's a 135-page tutorial to teach the Starter Kit version of the game [0]!

The board game industry creates many very mainstream games with wide popularity, and many games across a large number of niches that each have their own narrow appeal.

I think this is great!

[0]: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/40482/jay-richardsons-asl...

[almostdeadguy]

I think there has been a shift in what kinds of games get published that privileges a slim set of experiences that are possible in board games and risks narrowing the range of what people think a board game is capable of. I agree there’s a vast range of different player types and psychological rewards people get out of playing games, but I personally find myself increasingly uninterested in new game designs, because the designs I like are harder to sell to impulsive buyers, players who don’t want to play a game repeatedly, or players who will have difficulty playing games again if anyone has a bad time (which I totally get! But it means designs that might prompt negative emotions are not sought by many publishers). I wouldn’t even say “heavy” games are the problem (I disagree with OP about high time commitment being a problem, there’s many games like that that deliver commensurate value to me).

[pkal]

The article doesn't sell it that way. "You should play modern board games if ..." would be a different claim. The premise

> They provide interesting puzzles to solve, and you work in a technical role - some part of your brain must find that appealing

is something I do not relate to at all. Almost every time I am in a situation where I play board games, my intuition is to think about how you solve the game so that one side always wins or break the rules so that everyone loses, but almost never am I actually interested in investing the energy to get invested in the game itself, let alone the rules.

[allturtles]

> he article doesn't sell it that way. "You should play modern board games if ..." would be a different claim.

Indeed, but neither does the article try say you should play games with "20 different piles of crap to set up at the start, and then a dozen different pieces of state to track in your little corner of the table during what will inevitably be a complicated five-phased turn", which is the comment I was responding to. It doesn't actually recommend any specific games at all, but those types of games are really a small subset of modern board games (of the games mentioned in the article, I think only Twilight Imperium and maybe Labyrinth would qualify).

> is something I do not relate to at all. Almost every time I am in a situation where I play board games, my intuition is to think about how you solve the game so that one side always wins or break the rules so that everyone loses, but almost never am I actually interested in investing the energy to get invested in the game itself, let alone the rules.

Okay, great, you have learned that board games aren't for you. This article is aimed at people who haven't tried modern board games: "I chose to introduce them to the world of modern board games in an attempt to encourage some of them to give them a go."

[almostdeadguy]

100% agree, I think the past 10-15 years of changes in the hobby have been profoundly negative.

- The trend towards videogame-ifying board games

- The trend towards "cozy" games, i.e. games that are not interactive, have no potential to produce negative emotions, and focus on a solitary optimization puzzle.

- The kickstarter-ification of games that focus on early release exclusives, excessive plastic, aesthetics over game design, etc.

I really urge players today to look at some of the games from the 90s to early 2000s if they're interested in getting into the hobby. Seek out some of the "classic" hobby games. Even some games predating that are fantastic, but you will also run into a lot of over-the-top simulationist war games during the 80s period.

[nogha]

I agree. I generally bounce off those sort of games.

I gravitate towards games that have simpler rulesets with deep gameplay. I’m a big fan of Reiner Knizia but also Phil Walker-Harding and David Thompson.

[MikeTheGreat]

Hey! Hey! Some of us _enjoy_ Axis And Allies! /s

Humor aside, you're not wrong - spending an hour setting up and then 10 minutes per player to actually play was a lot more fun when I had a lot more free time