Against popular opinion (popular games you hate)

Boardgames
1

I finally played the crew last night and… meh. We played about 10 missions with 4 players and 1 mission was ok as it forced extra interaction but otherwise it fell flat with no one wanting to pick it up again.

There was a feeling that some missions were too easy due to card draw and others were extremely hard. This kinda ruined the fun and the theme felt so completely superfluous that I would have been as happy if it wasn’t there and the cards had some lush art.

As the crew is a bit of a darling I think I’m in the minority on this one. I’m wondering if there are any other Classics / popular games that didn’t hit the right spot with you fine folk.

Don’t think we have this as a topic (I’m sure an admin can help if I’m wrong.

9 Likes
2

I’ve played a reasonable amount of The Crew too, probably 30-40 games I guess, and while I enjoyed it at first I eventually came to a similar conclusion… the difficulty of the missions, especially as you progress through the game, is hugely dependent on which cards you draw for the objectives - hugely in the sense of ranging from trivial to actually impossible. Consequently, as the objectives became more convoluted, winning them felt like just trying and trying again until we lucked out on the card draw. After a while we weren’t learning anything; we all knew what the optimal plays in each round should be, and did that, except when we made the odd mistake which just made us all feel stupid. Started to feel like a chore in the end.

6 Likes
3

Terraforming Mars is a bloated monstrosity with terrible art direction

MicroMacro is fundamentally boring. I did one case and had more fun spotting quirks in the giant picture. There was no feeling of ‘connection’ in the case, just find a thing, find another thing.

Bärenpark is boring with obvious choices, there’s no tension in choices like Patchwork

Everdell is very pretty but it does nothing that I can’t get from other games

They’re the ones that spring to mind

7 Likes
4

Didn’t enjoy The Mind at all. Maybe it loses something solo.

15 Likes
5

I must admit 7 Wonders has let me down every time I played it. It is OK, but I don’t see how it is above something like Citadels, for example.

Race for the Galaxy is another one that , like 7 Wonders, I think suffered from a bit of playing it against people that has played it a million times and I had a poor teach. I still don’t get the strategy, or which are good cards and which ones aren’t, at least not fully.

Great Western Trail let me a bit down, although I have played it only once. I had the feeling that it ended when I was starting to get it. I definitely need to give it another go, but from what I saw, I was a bit puzzled about how high it is on the BGG list, for example. Top 20 seems a tad much in my opinion.

And finally, Puerto Rico and without getting in the colonization issues, I think it shows its age. With a re-edition, and perhaps a change of theme (like Blue Lagoon did with Through the Desert, kind of, not that I think the Knizia’s needed that kind of change that much) it could really go up a notch or two. I must admit I dislike those square cardboard pieces full of small writing, let alone the dull art.

5 Likes
6

In general I don’t like to be negative about games – if you enjoy it, great, and don’t let the fact that I don’t diminish that – but on the other hand I think there’s some need for thoughtful criticism, to say that this game does a thing well and that one does it less well even if not everyone wants that particular thing, and of course there’s a lot of commercial positivity about crowdfunding anyway.

Left brain against right?

This is a thing in boardgames which keeps niggling at me (see my comments on PanLeg 1, and more trivially beat-your-own-score solo modes for random-input games like NMBR 9). I don’t want no randomness at all but I want to be able to feel I could overcome it.

Terraforming Mars says “here are five cards, each of which might be valuable if certain other cards turn up later – choose one!” (And the more expansions, the more deck dilution.)

Scythe looks like a 4X game but is a constrained-action Euro. It’s probably a decent example of the latter but I’m not very fond of the style and it feels like a bait-and-switch.

OK, let’s go through the BGG top rated games…

Gloomhaven, not played, is basically a dungeon bash. RPGs give me a dungeon bash if I want it and so much more when I get bored with bashing dungeons, which I did by the end of the 1980s.

Pandemic Legacy Season 1 eh it’s OK but I didn’t find anything to love the way a lot of people clearly did.

Brass: Birmingham, not played; Martin Wallace games always seem to have this same niggle of here’s a normal thing you could do but you can’t because you don’t have the right cards.

Twilight Imperium 4th, not played, had and sold 3rd, for me just Too Much, too many things moving in different directions, combined with that sense from Monopoly that there’s a point at which it’s obvious who’s won but you’ll be playing for another couple of hours to grind out the details.

I’ll stop now.

4 Likes
7

I nearly posted last night, but felt a bit awkward. As @RogerBW’s over that I’ll join in too.

Everdell, so linear. Played once, game had no mystery or depth to me. Really confused about the enthusiasm it generates.

Firefly. A really tedious 3 hours. I found no choices and didn’t feel like I was on an adventure. Move around and stiff happens to you that’s all pointless me being there. A simple bot would do the same. This for me is the biggest of a genre that I consider to be ‘occasionally guess while mainly being a mindless cog in the games internal logic engine’ also includes FFG stuff like Eldritch Horror, Arkham Horror and many others I get no story vibes from.

Gugong, I really like a modern euro, I think more so than many others here. This one had tons of buzz and why? The interaction was so forced in that it was annoying. Some weirdly balanced race bits don’t make a game interactive, they just throw weird grit in an MPS.

Concordia, oh my. Annoyed, bored and perplexed at it’s popularity are my feels every time I play it. Accidental getting in the way and arbitrary draw of scoring cards. Woop.

Probably many more but let’s not whinge too much.

2 Likes
8

I’m not sure there’s any games I’d go so far as to say I hate. There are three that spring to mind that I enjoyed much less than my friends at the time. I’m not sure how popular they remain in 2022:

  • Agricola. I played it once and had no desire whatsoever to play it again… but the same thing happened with Puerto Rico, yet when I did eventually play it again I had a much better time with it.
  • Dominion. It was fine but I never found it particularly inspiring even when it was first released. I’ve heard it gets more interesting with expansions.
  • A Game of Thrones: The Card Game. I had a friend who was obsessed with it and a few others who played. It never did anything for me but I’m not sure I can put my finger on exactly why.
1 Like
9
Looking at BGG Top 100, if it's a modern Euro, it's a chance that I dislike it. I have to hide it in details because it's shamefully long. I think why I like this modern Euro is more interesting to talk about but that's not the point of the thread
  • Brass: Birmingham - why did they turned a fairly unique game into a Euro-efficiency design left me scratching my head
  • Terraforming Mars
  • Castles of Burgunday
  • Great Western Trail
  • Arnak
  • Wingspan
  • Viticulture
  • Everdell
  • Maracaibo
  • Ark Nova
  • Clans of Caledonia
  • Anarchrony
  • Lords of Waterdeep
  • Troyes
  • Raiders of the North Sea
  • Lorenzo
  • Isle of Cats

That’s for the Top 100. It’ll get way longer if I extend it to Top 200 or 300

Twilight Imperium - too long for what I want. It fills the niche of negotiating and threatening and cajoling. But I want it to be 3 hours, not 6. With 6 hours, I’ll pick any 18xx game.

Quacks - I got tired of it after many plays. Which is funny because I was the one who introduced it to my group and my group was enamoured with it (which is great). There are other push-your-lucks that I prefer. Also, I prefer the way you build up your tavern in Taverns of Tiefentahl

Azul (and other games like Sagrada) - this is an issue more on how much I played this and now I’m done with it. Playing it on advanced mode is still tolerable, but people usually don’t do that.

Five Tribes - way too tactical for my taste

7 Wonders - another one where there’s strategic scoring, in theory, but the drafting makes the game a crapshoot. With 7 players, I’d rather just play party games like Goodcritters

BSG - never seen the show and I found the game boring due to it. I was never immersed. But not the fault of the game.

Dominion - I recognised how strategic it is, but I can’t tolerate not doing anything when 3 people do their own thing one by one. Fortunately, DXV created the masterpiece that is Kingdom Builder

Eldritch Horror - dice chucker that draaaaaaags on for soooooo loooooong

Pandemic - base game is too easy now. I’d rather play the spin offs like Iberia. Beaten Pandemic Fall of Rome at the highest level + variants. Never saw the need to play it again.

Star Realms - during the past few years, I went from “this deckbuilding games are sooo coool” to not hot about them at all. The so-called Realms games or Shards of Infinity dont work for me now. That’s why I asked the forum to help me with this geeklist

Welcome To - I don’t like roll and writes/flip and writes.

MTG - I played this with friends who wanted to try the big game that is MTG. Never worked with me. I found other games like Ashes or Netrunner to be more interesting.

2 Likes
10

To clarify not a thread for hating on games (although the titles a bit clickbait-ish) but rather games which surprised in that they did not click with you particularly after a lot of love from others who’s views align with your own (not as succinct).

I think we’ve got a group here who I trust not to dogpile.

Watergate is another one that I can see the game and the cleverness but felt like a solid understanding of the deck was needed by both players for the game to be the cat and mouse it’s meant to be.

2 Likes
11

Erm, games you burnt out on don’t seem to qualify for this to me. ‘I like this popular game so much that I played it enough that I lose the joy and see flaws’.

I see games as ephemeral so not liking something now doesn’t seem to me a game that’s disliked overall. Gloomhaven was one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had. I shudder at the thought of playing Frosthaven as I am soooo bored of it. However if I take in to account the fun had getting to that point it’s one if my favourite games. So in terms of my enjoyment I’m close enough to think ‘yeah, number 1 on BGG, not far off’. However I never want to play again so nowhere near number 1 for me currently. So I don’t think Quacks counts as well as a few others on your list as you did enjoy it for a time.

I don’t wish to have a go, but it does strike my as an interesting divergence of opinion that I hope add something interesting to this thread

5 Likes
12

My unpopular opinion, Terraforming Mars is really good!!

I don’t like Space Base, there’s no game (granted I played too much Machi Koro when my kids were younger).

I prefer Yellow and Yangtze to Tigris and Euphrates. I like the looser play of it.

Bandido is ridiculous, you either win within 10 turns or it’s impossible.

I found both Concordia and Teotihuacan to be quite dull and have happily sold them both.

Partially influenced by my wife not liking them much I’m ready to move on from Through the Desert and Root.

And Scythe. Never played a game that felt more like putting information into a spreadsheet

6 Likes
13

I think it was long overdue to have a thread talking about games we don‘t enjoy as much-hate is maybe too strong a word but if I’ve ever met a community able to be nice while “hating” on a game then it is this one. As expected you’ve all been nuanced and polite with your dislikes and as such I never had a problem with the thread. So keep it like you always do and this will add some valuable opinions to the forums for people looking to check out games (I totally use the search function to see if a game I am interested in has been mentionned!)

Most of the games I don’t dislike as much as I just find them bland and boring and I am not excited to play. There are very very few games I would go out of my way to avoid playing so here’s my list of

Boring Games according to me

Disclaimer: I didn’t bother to look up synonyms for boring. So this word will be repeated for almost every game that follows.

And inside here the epic list with explanations!
  • I was just thinking about „Our friends probably want their copy of Micromacro back, I should play a few more cases…“ when I saw it on this thread. I advise playing through as many cases as you can in one sitting because getting it out again feels like a chore somehow.
  • I fully agree about Bärenpark @raged_norm, I found it a bit boring and my copy resides at a friends house. They still think I want it back eventually, I will have to disabuse them of the notion. I have far better polyominoes games. Even… the next one was better
  • My City–just listened to SVWAG gushing about it on podcast and while it is a classic simple Knizia design the campaign style made it hard for me to enjoy. For one: the campaign feels too long and a lot of the games just didn’t add much. The “base” game that is replayable after the campaign is too simple and uninteresting (especially after the campaign). Tom Vasel (am I allowed to quote DT-Tom here? Just wondering after “our” Tom was dissing on the Dice Tower in his collection video) said something along the lines like: play the campaign until you get to variant you enjoy and then repeat that one. Maybe that is the way. I generally found My City underwhelming. There are far better polyominoes out there. (I recommend looking at Uwe Rosenberg games, he has a bunch of good ones–Cottage Garden is my personal favorite)
  • Aeon’s End. I like the card play but I dislike the boss-fight style. I enjoyed the app more than the game and sold it–with a bunch of regrets. I wonder if one could make a non-coop version in this style of deck-builder. I think and how weird is that (I love coops), I might enjoy that.
  • Through the Ages: impossible to convince anyone I know (not even myself!) to play this after it is set up on the table. Too much stuff, too fiddly, the app handles all of that and the app is great! I know this is not exactly hating. I still don’t get how this gets so far up the Top 100. It is a good game but not that good.
  • Arkham Horror the Card Game: I may have mentioned this a few times but we found it a) too random and b) too Cthulu and I tried to build a modified deck with some huge MtG nostalgia and failed to grok the card play and sold it, sad that it didn’t click. I am sure I could have tried harder to grok the game and I might have enjoyed it. But I am also a completionist for games and I am glad I never got into this nightmare of expansions and expansions and …
  • Teotihuacan: I learned the rules, twice, but somehow was unable to internalize them or what I would have to do to play well. I just couldn’t see the point.
  • Isle of Skye: probably a stand-in for alle the Alexander Pfister games I tried to like and didn’t (I have yet to try GWT). This game is an unnecessary complication on the Carcassonne style of tile laying. And as much as I love Terra Mystica, round end goals are just “meh”. Or probably I am bad at playing to them… so I also don’t like:
  • Cartographers: It has to be the round-end goals because this is a polyominoes roll and write and I love polyominoes, how come I don’t like this game? Everyone else does apparently? I found it fiddly to draw this stuff and maybe I would like it more now. But there are so many other better R&W games, why go back (copy lives at friends who know I don’t want it back)
  • Chronicles of Crime: Fiddling with my phone in a game so fuzzy that you can solve a case while overlooking important clues… I think crime solvers are not my thing. Remind me not to buy any more of them. Sold after playing through 6 cases or so and not wanting to try another. This game along with Awkward Guests convinced me that I apparently don’t like games with apps.
  • Welcome To…–turned same-y quickly and the card flipping felt tedious after Railroad Ink. To my surprise the Moon version fares much better with me. The changes are small but well-done.
  • Tiny Epic… something. I once played Tiny Epic Galaxies at SPIEL and was fascinated by how much punch it packed and maybe I should have bought that. I later got Zombies and it was just a fiddly experience both component and rules-wise and it never wanted to fit in the box again. As much as I complain about empty boxes… a game should take up exactly as much space as it needs and the compression here makes the game suffer.
  • Res Arcana: bought for the name (Tom Lehmann), sold for the boring. It also came with recommendation from the one guy at FLGS who gives me recommendations. I played my partner a couple times on the physical copy and then a friend on BGA and… neither time did it really click. Yes, there are a lot of individual elements I like but I’d rather play Ares Expedition for the engine building and Seasons for the card play (I have no idea why these 2 games came to mind as comparison, but it is what it is…)
  • (7 Wonders) (not duel though)–I have a copy with ALL the expansions, a wood insert, metal coins, sleeves etc. And I am not playing it nor am I going to play it. A) friends have a complete copy, too, and I would only play to indulge them and B) it’s too much now and C) I have played it too often and I can have Duel if I want the feel of it or Sushi Go or Flourish for the drafting. Not going to try Architects if I can help it. I am done with this. Not going to sell though, just going in my “Collector’s Display” like the next one:
  • (Wingspan): the Oceania expansion killed this one. Too much and the engine building suffers. All my recent plays of this were an exercise in frustration, you expect there will be combos but somehow no… either it is too difficult to play and we all suck but even the winners rarely get to a point where their board feels satisfying and how terrible is that? I will still play to indulge others but I won’t propose it. Probably going to sort the cards and put the expansions separately. Because I know someone will request to play it.
  • Canvas: it’s just a bit boring? But unique and nice components don’t make a game?
  • Viticulture: oh my. I will keep this game because of the theme, and my partner likes it and it is so inoffensive I can get it to the table but I like other worker placement games so much more. This is just a bit on the boring side–I am just never excited to play this. Have yet to try the board with the 4 seasons and other cards from expansions. (This seems to go for almost all Stonemaier games, beautiful games that others seem to enjoy far more than I do, the only one I am even considering playing right now is Red Rising which nobody but me seems to like)

TL; DR: Micromacro, Bärenpark, My City, Aeon’s End, Through the Ages, Arkham Horror LCG, Teotihuacan, Isle of Skye, Cartographers, Chronicles of Crime, Welcome To, Tiny Epic XXX, Res Arcana, (7 Wonders), (Wingspan), Canvas, Viticulture

This is all for now. Might think of more games, I mostly just checked my sold games and sell-stack for now. There are other games that have not quite convinced me… yet but I’ll give them a chance before listing them here.

As for previously mentioned games: I still enjoy the Crew but now prefer Crew 2 which seems to handle the difficulty level cranking up better and tackles the issue with “unsolvable” round also better IMO: because unsolvable situations seem to become more obvious. Yes, there are unsolvable rounds. That’s ok for me and apparently for my group as well.

edited: put games in ( ) to signify that I used to really enjoy these for a good while before I started to dislike them as @EnterTheWyvern proposes above that those should not count.

5 Likes
14

Marvel Legendary is the one that comes to mind initially, especially given how much in currently enjoying Marvel Champions. I actually really enjoy deck builders, but thematically Legendary never made sense to me and it never felt like heroes and villains going up against each other. The rule turning what is clearly a co-op deckbuilder in to a competitive one is awful, and the set up of tear down never felt worth it. Some people have told me certain expansions really bring the game alive, but if the base game doesn’t work for me I’m not going to bother investing anything else. If I want a quick deckbuilder, I’ll go with Star Realms. If I want a great super hero co-op, I’ll play Marvel Champions.

2 Likes
15

Hate is a strong word, I don’t think there’s a game I HATE (mmmmmmmaybe Monopoly, but even that has its place). But in the spirit of the thread, here are games that didn’t land for us:

  1. Arkham Horror: 3rd Edition. Move somewhere. Read card. Roll dice. If lucky, something good happens. If unlucky, something neutral/bad happens. Lather, rinse, repeat with, honestly, very little tension or challenge and way too much rules overhead for the gameplay, which is basically a pen-and-paper RPG (AD&D, for example) without the RP that would give the dice-chucking meaning. I was VERY disappointed, I really wanted to like this one. Love the atmosphere of it, the art is gorgeous, but it’s just… Boring.

  2. Race For The Galaxy. The iconography is the opposite of helpful and the rulebook is impossible. Cool concept, badly (to us) executed.

  3. Smallworld. Just so much cross-checking all the time and the tiles on the board are hard to parse. Also, we have other games we’d rather play than this, which keeps it away.

  4. Wingspan. Very pretty, one of the prettiest games we own. But we have other games that are comparable, at least partly, that have hit WAY more (the aforementioned Terraforming Mars and Everdell, two of our favourite games ever). Don’t really know why. On paper, we should like this.

I also have a bad feeling about Ghost Stories, really didn’t like my solo learning play, but I recognize that the circumstances were far less than ideal, so not counting it (yet).

Seems about it. All of these games were purchased on the recommendation of friends whose tastes I trust. They just didn’t work for us. It happens.

3 Likes
16

For me there’s “I don’t want to play this ever again” and close to that “I’ll never suggest it but if good friends are playing it I’ll go along with them to be social”.

5 Likes
17

Codenames - For the life of me, I just don’t get it. On no less than 4 occasions have I tried to understand why it’s so beloved and it’s just absolutely boring. I don’t know if it’s just the wrong groups or what, but I get so confused when folks heap praise on it. I get it in theory, but it’s been an absolute slog every time and we didn’t end up finishing the game.

4 Likes
18

My first few games of Codenames seemed a bit bland as well. I must admit I only really got behind it with repeated plays–with the same group. But we didn’t get it out all that often anyway. It only really took off for me playing it online on the webapp because it as literally no setup time anymore and it was the easiest game to set up for a digital meeting… plus the feature you only get to have when playing online: chatting with the other spymaster on the side!

2 Likes
19

The one that’s gonna cause outrage that I don’t get on with is Sentinels of the Multiverse (at least before the reissue).

Also Pandemic is overrated.

Also Werewolf. (Although weirdly I think I’d love Blood on the Clocktower).

2 Likes
20

Even as a fan, I can see that not everyone will like it. (And I think part of my fandom is a nostalgia for occasionally reading comics as a kid but never getting seriously into them, that whole feeling that there’s a huge background out there that I’ll never really know about – which is why I’m not listening to the designers’ podcast which goes to fill it in.)

3 Likes