I’m going to limit this to games I initially thought were/would be great. There are many more that I didn’t have high hopes for, some already mentioned above. I’ll also say that games like Gloomhaven get a pass because they are designed as finite games with endings. If I got to the end, I can’t fault them for ending.
Antiquity: still good, I’ll still play, but the interaction between players is too limited and comes too late in the game.
High Frontier: one play was enough. It turned out to be a very long and drawn out auction game deliberately made very hard to value, then an even longer resolution phase. Just bad.
Fire in the Lake: really wanted to like this at one point. It seems simultaneously both too long, and lacking in the kind of board state development you’d expect from building up and moving troops. Most factions seemed too fluid? I don’t know, hard to pin down why, I just didn’t have any fun with it.
I have gone through a few phases in my gaming life, and as a result many games have come and gone that I was nova-hot on initially.
Catan: Turns out after 200 plays of a game… you get kinda bored. I had a dedicated Catan group that would meet 1-2 times a month, plus introducing dozens of friends over the years, and the games just added up. When I initially sold my copy my partner was very upset… so I bought a new copy, and then we played in 3 more times and she was done with it as well. Oh well.
CaH: Unworthy of the full title lest I summon Those Who Disturb. Played it a few dozen times with casuals, and eventually the “humour” got very thin. One play of Monikers cemented it… I no longer wanted or needed CaH in my life. See also Chez Geek and Munchkin for other examples of this happening.
Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition: I feel this is somewhat unfair, but gosh did I ever love the heck out of TI3. I really like TI2, and I enjoyed but wasn’t crazy about TI1, but TI3 I absolutely adored… and then TI4 came out and TI3 was just immediately and totally overshadowed. How did my #1 game of all time get reduced to this? I honestly don’t know, and yet… here we are.
Other than those, I don’t think there are any games I really loved that I dropped. Much like the TI3 issue, there are games I enjoyed a tonne that were replaced by games that did the same thing but better (see Codenames → Decrypto and Dixit → Mysterium → Mysterium Park), but overall I am very happy with almost every game in my collection with only a few exceptions.
I suppose you could include Mechs vs Minions, but that was much less about our enjoyment of the game, and much more about “We’ve finished the campaign, time for someone else to get to enjoy it!” Ditto with Wander: The Cult of Barnacle Bay.
It’s hard to separate “games I have cooled on” from “games that worked better with my old gaming group”, but I think the two most obvious candidates are Pandemic and Mysterium. I think both are good games but I’ve played so much Pandemic that I wouldn’t choose to play it over another co-op game any more, and I just can’t be bothered to set up Mysterium when I have Detective Club!
I think the computer version has killed real Gloomhaven for me - set up time is as long as it takes to load, and close down is essentially zero. I love the tactility of board games of course, but with Gloomhaven it makes such a difference. I became far more likely to play it on the computer as opposed to just not feeling like I have the energy to get the huge box out and actually finish the mission (something I don’t have to do with the computer version) that it means:
I played it far more than the board game version, and it felt as if I was playing the board game anyway.
I played it so much that I’m kind of done with it now anyway.
I must admit another factor in the cool down of Gloomhaven for me is the difficulty, and how random it is. I also have it on Steam, and even without all the set up, I still find it very frustrating at times when a scenario takes you two or three goes to clear because of a random ooze that keeps suffering mitosis left right and centre. I understand the let’s leave orderly and rethink this once, or maybe twice, but when you have three or four scenarios that “I will go to later”, starts to feel like work, not fun. I blame WoW for that…
I agree, that’s probably why I stopped playing it in part. It’s tricky because once it’s on the screen, shorn of its board game charm, it has to compete with other computer games and that’s tough. I still liked it a great deal even with the inconveniences but I do agree, the unforgivingness of it can’t be mitigated or fudged as you can on the table. But if I ever fudge things in a tabletop game (at least if I do it when I’m playing solo) I feel like the enterprise has become pointless and I feel vaguely bad about the whole thing. Hmm maybe I should have a thread about ‘cheating’ in solo games…