Games you have cooled on

Boardgames
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I am shamelessly stealing this from the video I just watched (a Dice Tower Top 10) because I think this is a valuable debate to have. With all of the excitement we have for shiny new games, it doesn‘t often get mentioned when we just stop playing a game or don‘t like it as much anymore.

Sometimes the novelty wears off, something better comes along, something turns out to be less than stellar over may games or maybe you or times and designs have changed and outpaced an old favorite.

But most reviewers and commenters rarely go back to check out the games they previously gushed about.

So let‘s hear some examples of games that did not stand the test of time: for you! I would like the focus to be on the games you like less than you did but because you will do it anyway feel free to post opposite examples as well (whatever you define as opposite: games you warmed up to or games that you did not cool on and are still enthusiastic about).

And while I feel like this community doesn‘t need a reminder that just because you have one opinion on a game someone else may have another, it still belongs in a place where I am soliciting what are essentially negative opinions.

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(Edit: Not a real answer, to be clear – I have not even played this game…)

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I think I finally understand how you obtained your title, sergeant. (No, that‘s a lie, I knew, I just didn‘t expect the Punnish Inquisition here)

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ICECOOL sounds like High School.

It’s a game about penguin students playing hooky!

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Beyond the Sun - I have played the basic on BGA for approx 15 plays (I’m ready to be disowned, guys! I’m ready!) I might give the advanced mode a crack, but I am done with this game.

Brass: Birmingham - I was incredibly fond of Quinn’s review of old Brass. I mean, c’mon! He fell down the canal! I was eager for the new Bham edition. 5 plays and I was done. Too simplistic, yet even more complicated to learn than Lanc. WTF. Lost respect to Roxley as a studio on any future redesigns they’ll do. The redesign of Metropolys aka Skyrise makes me uneasy.

Clans of Caledonia - the market is so fun, but found that most factions strategically converge on one path - contracts fulfilment; using the market as leverage.

Concordia - Not enough opaque stuff going on. Pick a Gods combo and you’re done. Used to be my fave Euro as it’s so light and easy to play yet plays as a mid-weight. Played it for around 30 plays I think?! Also, I always recommend the Salsa expansion. The base game is a bit skewed towards the low value resources.

Samurai - I love Knizia titles, but I am getting tired of left-right binding problem if it’s too strong to my taste. Samurai is just that.

Isle of Skye - I used to love this one, but I realised that you can get good at calculate VPs and find that each tiles (since you can only buy ONE tile) has an intrinsic value. Ergo, there’s always an optimal solution, when it’s your time to buy. :frowning:

TI4 - Wowed by it at the start. After 10 plays, I’m sick of the plodding early game that takes hours and I’m sick of the “Balance of Power committee” by late game. Granted the criticism of the latter manifested because of my group, but the game incentivises such behaviour. The expansion somewhat fixed the former, at least. I’d rather play an 18xx instead, if I can game for 6 hours.

I’m sure there’s more, but this is what I found when I had a quick look back at my BGG comments

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I certainly have a mental box for “I don’t really want this any more, but that’s because of the way I specifically feel about it rather than because I think it’s a bad game in some absolute sense”. (I feel a lot happier about selling games if I think of them that way!)

Alien Frontiers – liked it enough to go all-in on the 5e Kickstarter, but the Thing It Gets Wrong (your turn requires a fair bit of thought, but you can’t really start doing that until you see the game state at the end of the previous player’s turn) irked me more and more.

Among the Stars – I mean, it’s fine and I’ve had good times with it. But I just look at it on the shelf and think “I’d rather play…”.

The Awful Green Things From Outer Space – it’s still fun but game design has moved on and I can get the same degree of fun with a lot less faff.

Black Orchestra – I’m OK with the theme which I know puts a lot of people off, but after a few plays it feels very much as though the game is won or lost in the item setup and the event deck shuffling, and the bit with humans involved is just working out the predestined course. (I continue to enjoy the other game of Philip duBarry’s that I’ve played, Revolution!.)

Burgle Bros – probably the game I felt most positive about out of this lot, but somehow it palled on me; I’m not sure whether that was because each game felt about the same or because of the randomness. (The more a game is affected by randomness, the shorter I want it to be.)

Colony – this is an example of both. I didn’t think much of it on first play; then I played it a bit more and enjoyed it enough to buy a copy; then I burned out on it, because I started to feel there wasn’t enough mitigation of the dice luck.

Dead of Winter – I know I’ve played it more than the one time I logged on BGG, but I think this was more a gradual decline in enthusiasm. I loved the idea of a Crossroads card that would affect a specific character… but somehow that never actually seemed to happen.

Pandemic – nothing wrong with it as such but Flash Point gave me more of the stuff I liked and less of the stuff I didn’t.

Quantum – I regret getting rid of this just a little, but I found I was never enthused to pull it off the shelf.

Secret Hitler – some interesting ideas but I just like The Resistance better.

Suburbia – my main error was buying the 5★ expansion which nobody should ever play with because it dilutes the game too much. But while I still mildly enjoy it the bookkeeping is a faff and some of my friends are AP-prone in a way that can seriously hang up a game.

Tales of the Arabian Nights – it turns out there are only so many times I want to spend several hours being a cork on the seas of fate.

Zombies!!! – it is what it is, and while I’d rather play this than Zombicide the random layout just lost its appeal.

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Oh yes, Letter Tycoon – the process of learning to get good was quite fun, and I got up to #5 ranked on BGA, but when I was playing at high level we were all nearly as good as each other, and too much came down to who managed to buy the B and J score-multiplying letters first.

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Codenames – The strategy is the same every game (which is fair, since it’s a family-weight game). I get the feel-bads when I can’t come up with a clue for more than 2 cards.

Evolution – at one point, this was my #1 game. I still like it, but it’s probably not in my top 10. Mostly to do with the group-think for carnivore/intelligence cycle.

Mysterium – I was pretty hot on this when we first played it. But the gamification elements that make it competitive instead of cooperative never work; we tend to just play full-coop with houserules.

Splendor – action efficiency wins every time; beyond that, it’s just a matter of luck.

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I’m glad to hear there’s a B-J strategy

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I fear that very few of my stupid jokes will ever actually live up to that title, but I did cause sufficient pain one day in the original Poorly Described Plots thread for it to be bestowed upon me : )

(“Dumb jokes are their own reward” is my philosophy, so I’ll take this opportunity to just apologise for them generally.)

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Same. The game feels clunky 6 years after I first played it. I still love the storytelling and immersion though

Nine Tiles Panic - really really fun game, until you realised that you can score just fine and might even win if you stop paying attention on the scoring cards and just build an errorless town. After that, I just can’t unsee it anymore.

Looney Quest - it’s our group’s fault. We blitz through the whole thing in one bored session. Playing the maps again wasn’t compelling. But for a while, it was an amazing experience.

Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn - I used to play this “seriously”. Nowadays, I’m a casual, so I just pick up Summoner Wars if I want a game like this.

Quacks of Quedlinburg - I really don’t know why I lost the desire to play this again. I used to have great fun with this.

Star Realms - I used to play this loads. I then suddenly stopped liking deckbuilders.

Ganz Schon Clever - I used to be eager with roll & writes as it was a new thing back when GSC showed up. Now, everyone and their dog designs roll & writes.

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I don’t think I’ve ever played this seriously competitively; for me the primary game is the clue-guessing bit, and the betting is just an add-on to introduce some tension into the endgame.

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We haven‘t played this in a while. Would still be fun though I think. What I failed at was getting into the expansions. I guess if we played this often, I‘d be bored of the cards by now. Also never got into the Hero Realms thing.

  • I cooled a lot on Roll & Writes as a genre, I still like a few of them. But overall I am far less keen on buying any more. Weirdly, the last one that I bought that pushed me over on this one was a decent one from Paolo Mori called Rustling Leaves (you may have seen the SUSD Review).
  • There is a whole group of games I just played too often: Ingenious, Istanbul, Kingdom Builder, Smallworld, 7 Wonders, basic Pandemic, King of Tokyo, Flash Point. If someone really wants to play, those are fine. I used to really want to play those. Now they are just fine. Also Kingdom Builder has Winter Kingdom as a more complex sequel available…
  • Games that depended on a particular group: Arkham Horror & Betrayal at House on the Hill
  • Games in which I just cannot stomach the „humor“ anymore: Kalimambo‘s poop jokes are only funny for so many plays. But what is far worse is how much I initially enjoyed Cards Against Humanity. I must say though in the initial games the humor was still pretty fun and harmless but it took only a few games to become horrible.
  • I have the game and campaign for Zombicide 2. But for some reason I just don‘t want to play anymore. I used to play the original version all the time solo, with groups… but these days I have so many more interesting solo-able games and I am really not into minis. I have 3 huge boxes of basic Zombicide (3 because I managed to put each season‘s expansion content into the base box)
  • Coop games that I feel we solved: Hana-Bi, Isle of Dr Necreaux
  • Alchemists—I like the deduction component so much but the game around it is so fiddly and I feel like I have better Euro games and so I am loath to play even though I made an insert that really helps with setup
  • Too hard part 1: 7th Continent: not sure to include this after my partner‘s initial enthusiasm for it we quickly noted how difficult and plodding this is. To this day we have not finished a single curse and the whole „you can save the game“ thing just makes for really tedious setting up the next session.
  • Letter Jam: the rules don‘t stick and the teach is horrible. I really like word games and cooperative word guessing deduction is great but having to relearn and reteach all the time is bad. But now I have coop-Hardback
  • Too hard part 2: there are a couple other (semi-)cooperative games that we kept losing until the fun had left the building:
    • Ghost Stories. Ghost Stories has a decent and somewhat simpler solo mode but with both expansions there is just too much fiddle and when I want to hurt my brain and actually have a chance at winning I can now play Spirit Island.
    • Obscurio: I love games with Dixit cards and this one has round ones and is incredibly pretty and has a library theme which should be awesome. But I have yet to win a game unless I am the traitor. It is staying because of the prettiness… for now.
  • Takenoko: at some point I figured out there was some kind of optimal strategy. It‘s a pretty game and the ideas in it are lovely but of the three types of contracts one became a clear favorite
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I have no play count of this, but I have played this to death due to one of our club members wanting to play this repeatedly on BGA. She’s one of the econ clique who plays trains with me, so I always say yes. It’s only fair. :joy:

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For me a lot of euros fall under fun until I’ve seen the puzzle then I cool on it when there’s some finessing maybe plus possibly some luck of the draw.

A recent example, as I just sold it, is Bora Bora games 10 and 11 I was near perfect using some different routes. This followed an initial winning streak then a losing streak where I pushed the weaker strategies. Learning as much as possible there I put it together and next play I was bored. Played again recently and the time delay has just got me to a point where I’m frustrated by my lack of sharpness and too bored by it to get it back.

Euphoria was an early example and a bad one as I got bored after game 10. One friend’s enthusiasm made me play another ~10 games and I now hate the idea of playing to the point I can’t even politely play. Really taught me when the magic goes that I should just stop.

The list includes Santa Maria, Gnomes of Zavandor, Aquasphere, Barenpark, Dice City, Isle of Skye, Lords of Waterdeep, Three Kingdoms Redux, Yedo

Round House was excellent and a really sad one as it was lovely and packed with good ideas and fun things to do but it fell to a dominant strategy.

Poseidon I enjoyed game 1, game 3 was tedious and I’d no linger recommend it as an intro to 18xx as 18Lilliput exists. 18Lilliput is just more fun and has enough as a stepping stone to be a better intro to the world despite being further from the 18xx base rules than Poseidon.

Startups was fun but got annoying to me around the luck of the draw being stringer than the joy from plays as they’re just not clever enough. It’s also not as funny or as quick as a round of Love Letter.

Raptor can be my example of 2 player game issue. I quickly had played more Raptor than the people I played my copy with as I played all the games and they each tried it out so git discouraged often. Great game but 2 player games for me are now coop, nonsense or miniature wargames.

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I honestly think that’s fine. 15 plays is way more games than I’ve played of some games I own. There’s some fun in the advanced mode but it’s not massively different. I do hope the expansion includes some wildly different starting positions

Back on topic

Quacks of Quendlingburg - it was fun for a while but the core PYL element isn’t that exciting (to me) compared to the shared schadenfreude of something like Incan Gold or the tragedy of the commons in Derp Sea Adventure (another one I cooled on, as you can get hosed by poor dice rolls)

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Not that I have been in the hobby for so long, but already can see shows of cooling down on some games for me:

  • Gloomhaven: Such a good game, but such a tedious set up. Which would be all right if it wasn’t for the fact that after a while, many of those set ups I will have to repeat due to failing at completing the scenario. I know there are inserts to help with this instead of the gazillion baggies I use, but I refuse to pay what would be the price of another game to improve this one marginally. I guess having mainly soloed it doesn’t help. Having a game group that campaigns it might change that.

  • The Tiny Epic series: started great with my first (Dinosaurs), then played Galaxies once and liked it, and after that I got Pirates and hated it. I have Dungeons still in shrink. And Pirates I will trade as soon as I can. I think the concept is great, but not all games click.

  • Roll and writes in general. Lost the magic a bit. We used to play Welcome To a lot, and I still would play it on offer, but I would not suggest it any more. Funny enough, I am willing to get Fleet: The Dice Game and would play Hadrian’s Wall any time you ask. But simple ones have lost their appeal for me.

  • Big dudes on a map kind of games. Not that I have played that many, but the lack of enthusiasm in my game group for area control has sort of stuck on me as well. My last play of Kemet: Blood and Sand being a tad disappointing may be at fault here as well.

  • Games that I played on e-versions: I sort of avoid this now (besides Lords of Waterdeep, or Oceans which I still love). The simplicity and easy pace that support gives very often trumps tactility and set up. I know I will happily play on the app games like Twilight Struggle, but I cannot see myself sitting down to do all the upkeep for a few hours on a board these days. So I try to avoid playing new games this way so the experience is not damaged for me.

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Funny that you made this thread, as my FLGS’s Facebook just yesterday put up a post asking people what games they love that they thought they would hate! :slight_smile:

On topic, Dead of Winter is one I don’t see myself reaching for much anymore. It’s just a bit too long and fiddly, though admittedly some of the length in our games may be due to our kids causing interruptions. They cause delays in pretty much all our games.

Legendary Marvel is also one that isn’t coming out very often. I’ll still play it if someone were to suggest it, but if I want a card based game involving superheroes, at this point Marvel Champions is my go-to. And Tyrants of the Underdark has very similar card play, but with area control rather than the co-op city defense of Legendary.

King of Tokyo is still fun to pull out now and then, but King of New York has not appealed in quite some time, and it is probably going on my sell pile.

7 Wonders and even the Duel version just are not really clamoring to be played either. Don’t mind pulling them out if someone else wants to play them, but I don’t see myself suggesting either.

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This should have been top of my list. One of the greatest games I’ve ever played, I’ve played it over 200 times. However I gave away both my copies as I’m done with it. On the point of the organiser, it’s more than a marginal gain from a good one. Dropping set up time from about half an hour to 5 minutes is amazing along with the same gain on tear down. If you end up with a group just spend the money, it’ll really elevate playing Gloomhaven. I wouldn’t have played so much without one.

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Most of the games my wife and I cooled on are games one or both of us were almost immediately less enthusiastic about. Smallworld, Ankh’or, Hostage Negociator, Arkham Horror 3rd Ed, Wingspan, The Loop, Caverna: Cave Vs.Cave and Fox in the Woods Duo come to mind.

Actually, the only game we cooled on after a lot of plays I can think of would be Onirim. We just got much better co-op games.

But we tend to play in cycles. Right now, we’re fairly obsessed with Everdell, but we’ll get to something else eventually. Something new or old.

And just because we’ve cooled on a game doesn’t mean we won’t change our minds. I bounced HARD off Mr.Jack New York initially, but I love it now.

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