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.