Topic of the Week: The Tail Ends of Value

Boardgames
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Sorry for the delay! Injured nanny has a tendency to squeeze every aspect of the work week.

Question: What are your examples of the tail ends of value?
Meaning: Games that deliver the best value per dollar of cost, and inversely, the worst.

This can be intrinsic, just dollars to game ratio. Examples of good value, Innovation 3e could support hundreds of sessions on a $15 investment (if it’s your flavor), BattleCon War of Indines cost me $16 but has like 18 fighters and 5 game modes that you’ll never get to the end of. Examples of bad value might be Aqua Garden or Foundations of Rome which are $150 for a filler.

It can also be personal. Unicorn Glitterluck has EARNED ITS MONEY in my household. As has London 2e. I also bought Sidereal Confluence: Bifurcation on the assumption that it would not see many reprints. I’m likely to never play the content inside, though. At $20 it was not a bad intrinsic value but it will still likely be a worthless purchase for me.

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Lost Cities has to be the record-holder in my collection, in terms of low cost and high hours played. Also wins in the personal category, because I got an old 1990s-edition from a charity shop for basically nothing.

Cascadia probably wins something for being a reasonable price point that is able to be played in most groups and most player counts, so gets a lot of use.

Much as I love it, Nemo’s War was hugely expensive for a game that is nowhere near as story-rich as it pretends to be.

And Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth is a frustratingly simple and limited game for the BIG price tag, especially for its same-price expansions or way-too-expensive tiny mini expansions.

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Lost Cities and Star Wars the Deckbuilding Game have definitely been the best “bang for my buck” as both are sitting at nearly 200 plays for $25-35 each.

Worst I suppose would be every game I have purchased but not played yet. :slight_smile:

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Rallyman GT is not only my most played game, but I didn’t pay full price for it 'cos I was doing some work for the publisher at the time. :slight_smile:

Sea Salt & Paper rapidly took over from Red7 as my game for “I have a few minutes with a friend, let’s play something”.

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This just feels like another opportunity to brag about my £6 crokinole board (the cost of two raffle tickets) :laughing:

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I want to preface this that while I am mostly talking about number of plays here, I think that value is not just per game but also per “fun”. So it’s both quality and quantity of plays that I feel give good value. And of course the top games provide both. But the ones at the lower end are usually lacking in BOTH before I consider them a “bad investment”. I am also omitting the category that I call “collectibles” games I have quite a few games that I am just “happy to own”. Some of those I don’t even aspire to play or know it is highly unrealistic to ever get to the table before retirement.

Another note: 3 of my most played games, have rarely seen the table because they are played mostly in digital forms (Daybreak, Hardback, Terraforming Mars). I still value their physical copies highly for the rare occasions they will be played on the table. TM is actually one of my most expensive games I would guess due to the number of expansions, deluxification and the playmats I got last year.

Current “value” highlights:

  • Best Value ever for money: Sprawlopolis. I just logged my 101st game yesterday. It’s not getting old and it cost me a total of about $20 (with KS shipping). Naturopolis is the other one from the series that I have played quite a bit. Agropolis not so much.
  • Closely followed by Cascadia which for slightly more money managed to get to 70 logged plays, some of those were even multiplayer games and so value is even better. And I am definitely not done with it either.
  • Unsurprisingly, next is: Spirit Island. Not a cheap proposition as I went all-in on the Kickstarter offerings. I’ve probably spent several hundred moneys on it total. But I have logged 70 plays and that does not include the dozens of plays I had before that. There are even some multiplayer games in there though mostly solo. It’s not going to get old ever. It’s got tremendous replayability.
  • Planet Unknown is probably also quite good value for money: a) it saves me from buying more polyominoes games. It’s just so good for me and b) it plays and has played quite a few games with a full complement of 6 players.
  • Just One is definitely our most played party-game by a very wide margin and is not getting old either.

These all have in common that they have incredibly high replay value and I enjoy them a lot.
There are probably a few more and some “up and coming” games like Beacon Patrol or Harmonies. The listed ones are those that come to mind first. Older games that saw a lot of play before tracking and that are worth a mention: Terra Mystica, Pandemic, Carcassonne, 7 Wonders, Star Realms

Now the ones that are expensive and have high cost per play and where I feel I did not get value for my money and probably have very little chance in ever improving on this. To make this part of the list the game needs to be a kind of disappointment and the expectation that this is not going to change in the future near or far:

  • 7th Continent including the expansion–saw a couple of attempts to play this but failed to realize its potential for us and I expect it to not be played ever again but because it is my partner’s game, I cannot get rid of it
  • Dwellings of Eldervale giant kickstarter all in that saw a total of 2 plays with a total of 3 players before it went to the back of the shelf (didn’t help it arrived just before the Jagged Earth Spirit Island KS)
  • Mind MGMT after the not quite cheap game arrived I realized we don’t like hidden movement games enough to play this
  • Moonrakers I tried liking this. And I even went for the expansions and superbox. But this is not going to see the table over other games and I should just go and sell it. It was early in my KS career when I was still prone to falling for previews… and it was pretty expensive overall. Especially considering the additional cost in “stress” because both separate KS had trouble with the delivery.
  • Sadly, I think I have to add Root to this list. I like it in principle but even with the various clockworks it is never going to see the table as a solo over other games I own. And multiplayer in my circles … is not happening. Since I bought several expansions (2 total) before realizing it wasn’t meant for us, it comes to quite a bit of money for very little play.
  • John Company 2e is probably also one that I should list here. It’s not disappointing per se but I won’t be playing it and having learned the rules and seen it up close I very much prefer Pax Pamir 2e or Oath from the Cole Wehrle offerings and it’s not quite as collectible as some of my other games on the “not going to play it” shelf.
  • Sleeping Gods not a cheap game and I called it quits unlikely to return during the first campaign at around game 3. I have learned that exclusively story driven games are not for me.
  • Tamashi Chronicles of Ascent not cheap Kickstarter that got old before I was halfway through the campaign. The gameplay just isn’t anything I care to repeat.
  • Voidfall Superbigbox with lots of plastic and due to bad rulebook, terrible insert and having to compete with other Euros and other spacegames it is quite unlikely to ever provide good value for the cost. I am willing to give it still the benefit of “possibly when I stop buying games or retire this might see the table” so it is the least worst of the games in this list…

TL;DR almost all my all-in big kickstarters failed to deliver value for money. Big surprise.

PS: for replayability even though the value has not yet been realized on my table: Imperium:Foo.
PPS: ong big KS that delivered value for money was: Zombicide. I played this so much and quite a few big multiplayer games as well. It seemed expensive at the time but compared to now… it wasn’t all that much.

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Innovation - what do you mean a £15 small box card game have given me so many crazy plays?

El Grande - 20 Euros and a lot of plays

Chicago Express - it was £25. Top 5 banger

Arboretum Z-Man edition - it was £20. Back in 2018 I’ve been called silly for paying 20 quid for a card game. So many fun plays. Oh how things look different now…

Dominant Species - being one of my oldest games in my possession, by default, it manage to rack up plays-per-pound

The Estates - same as above

Bohnanza - £15. Beeeeaaaaans.

Concordia - bought for standard price back in the day, but it used to be my fave and manage to get a lot of plays from it

Bridges of Shangri-La - acquired for 17 quid. Another banger.

Mottainai - bought the mini and deluxe, plus Wutai Mountains expansion, on separate occasions for under 40 quid total. worth every quid.

Kansas Pacific - jeez. £13. Only 2 plays yet I think this is one of the best games I’ve played.

Pax Renaissance - Sure. It was like 50 pound something. But dived deep into it. Really deep. BGA plus BGStats tells me that I have around 200 plays of this game. Albeit most of my plays were from online - not sure if that counts. But hey. There’s depth here.

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Potential:

Cthulhu Wars - I spent ridiculous amount of money on this stupid game. I won’t be surprised if the total bill is nearly £1000. But from the amount of plays and enjoyment and discovery we get from this, it’s one of the potentials that could make CW pays of itself.

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Expensive

Kingdom Builder fancy pants edition - I bought the Big Box 2nd edition for free thanks to company loyalty Amazon giftcard. but this one cost a hundos and haven’t got enough plays.

Guards of Atlantis - very good but haven’t scored enough plays

a lot of 18xx games that I didn’t get to play much.

Feudum - the base game + boatloads of expansions. Not enough plays.

and some Kickstarters (unsurprisingly) that I don’t care about mentioning them.

EDIT: it seems that the lesson of the thread here is that crowdfunding sucks most of the time!

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Now that I have a bit more time, as far as bad value goes, the top contender for this is Batman: Gotham City Chronicles. I didn’t even go “all-in” on the initial campaign, so I’m only out $185 rather than probably $300 or so.

This was a game I was certain I would love. I love Batman. I heard great things about the Conan game system. A mix of the two was a surefire hit!

Then instead of a romping dice chucker, people got a Batman simulator with a mess of skills, rules, and flowcharts, boards with multiple heights that required a reference sheet to interpret instead of printing them directly on the board, scenarios that are so tightly balanced that unless the hero players pick just the right characters and equipment they are almost guaranteed to lose, and even if they do, a few bad rolls will ensure the loss.

The complaints:

“This area has hindering terrain of 2, so it is going to reduce your movement. Oh wait, you have that skill, so you get ignore up to 2 points of that, so you’re fine. But there are three enemies, so they will reduce your movement going through that space. Oh wait, you have that skill, so you get to ignore 2 of them. That icon means x, that one means y, and that one means z. Oh wait, I mean v. Sorry, those two look almost identical.” It just bogged down in minutiae.

I have gotten it to the table 3-4 times, only once with other players, and I picked the easiest scenario and map to run for them. We thought they had lost, because they just ran out of action points when the timer ran out, but I realized that, similar to my example above, one hero had a skill that would have allowed them to ignore hindering enemies, meaning he didn’t need to spend as much energy to move, giving him enough to attempt to defuse the bomb, which he did, giving the heroes the win. My solo games have all been crushing defeats for the heroes where I just played both sides as optimally as I could. Usually due to horrible dice rolls. I mean, Nightwing has a bunch of free rerolls on attacks and even with those he was whiffing over and over again and just got pummeled down. It was ridiculous!

My solos were all on the first scenario in the book, To Sink a City. The villains always managed to arm all 5 bombs on the first or second turn. Meanwhile the heroes have just 7 rounds to disarm 4 of the 5 bombs, and only one of the three characters is really good at doing it. And since the heroes need to roll a 6 to disarm one (compared to the 3 the villains need to arm them), it’s really easy to fail. Yes, the scenario can be won, but from what I see, it’s either a total blowout by the villain player, or a knife-edge victory by the heroes. And from all the complaints, that’s how most of the scenarios are balanced. Once you get players experienced with the scenarios, they have a higher chance of going either way, but the learning curve is so disheartening, most people don’t want to replay the scenario they just got slaughtered on.

Anyway, rant over. Lots of money spent on a game I want to love, but will likely not see the table enough to even enjoy. Should probably try to sell it. I do like the minis though and they would be a fun painting project if I ever get the time again to do such things.

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Having played 2580 games, I reckon my BGA subscription is my best value game purchase.

Worst value is almost certainly our family dive into Star Wars Destiny when the boys were just the wrong age to be seduced by booster packs

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The cheaper small box games I’ve played many time and are my favourites are Hanabi, Love Letter and 6 Nimmt! I think of those Hanabi would be my number 1.

RoboRaly and Attika both bought in the early 2000s for mid level prices with a ton of plays under my belt are now very good value.

Mottainai is another great pounds per play. Like @lalunaverde I have Deluxe, Mini and Wutai. I used to play on lunches at work. That has stacked up the plays significantly. My current place with only a half hour lunch doesn’t really support this. Sad times. This game also scores big with @yashima point about how much you enjoy it. That might put this top of my pile.

Another similar to Mr Verde is Cthulhu Wars. I spent close to £500 on it. Still I’ve played many games. I want to play many more and have barely scratched the surface on it. The multiplicative combinations of factions, maps and player count is huge even before you add in independents. That’s not even taking in to account differing players’ styles and the strats you can draw from each faction. So, so good.

The better sell on expensive games is Spirit Island. Have all the content to date. I love it. Only online games were during pandemic times on TTA and well over 100 games in. Every adversary beaten at level 6 and yet I don’t know for sure I’ve played with every spirit. The card draw, the boards and adversaries give you differing challenges each games. With how different each spirit is it’s no where near running out of legs. I think with hours played this will be the best value. Also love it so the quality is top level too.

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Agreed, BGA is absolutely great value for money. Even though I mostly play the same games over and over… I have quite a few… it‘s worth it just for the one friend I am usually playing with. Plus the work-break solos I get in…

Btw another value drain on some games’ value is „bad UI“ this includes all kinds of things like

  • taking up more space than it should,
  • taking more setup or tear down than is in line with game length complexity.
  • bad rulebooks that make learning or retaining the rules unnecessarily hard.

Games that waste my time or my (shelf-)space… are bad value.

Right this moment I am thinking of the space wasting Guild of Merchant Explorers—I have fun playing this solo on BGA. It‘s basically Kingdom Builder: The Solo Experience. But it is a 40+ quid game in a standard square box and that is bad value for money despite being fun to play (on BGA) because it‘s a glorified R&W game that pretends to be a main course when it is nothing more than a starter or maybe a soup (though it isn‘t cozy so probably not a soup).

@Acacia: while I am at it. I checked what I originally paid for the OG Aqua Garden Kickstarter—by today‘s exchange rate it came to about 50€ and I believe this got some additional cost in shipping and taxes that probably made it more of an 70-80€ game. I am putting it on the collectible shelf because of the rarity and cuteness but found gameplay mediocre at best. Overall: not great value for money and I definitely wouldn‘t back the KS again. It was my experimental phase.

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Getting back to intrinsic value, it’s easier to think of things that are priced over what you are getting:

  • Pretty much any Splotter. Dollar to gameplay, great. Dollar to box… eh.
  • Silver. MSRP $25 for what is essentially a deck of cards. Want the whole series? $100 for four decks of cards (Amulet, Bullet, Coin, Dagger). I love this game but hunted hard to get it for something palatable.
  • Let’s throw Innovation Ultimate in there. $90 for 12 decks of cards (at kickstarter). I mean, better than Silver (in all respects) but yeesh.

On the tremendous value side:

  • Castles of Burgundy 1e used to sell for $27. It was hard to not buy it at that price.
  • Hansa Teutonica Big Box? Now that I think of it, it is pretty component light but all those maps and all that game…
  • Spirit Island packs a ton of content
  • Heat: Pedal to the Metal…they did fill up this box nicely

No doubt there’s more but that’s what comes to mind.

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Agree. I’m now considering SOME Werhle’s games to be bad value for money. Not the costly production alone, but the secondary costs too. You have to commit to Root or his other games, otherwise you just spend like hundreds of cash on fancy Kallax decoration. The only way Werhlegig would make me back their games would be a 2nd edition An Infamous Traffic - without a doubt his cleanest design and without the KS-style clutter - assuming 2nd edition changes would be acceptable.

It didn’t helped when Wyvern and I does this broken record thing of “I’d rather play CW instead”

If I actually stop faffing around and just cull down to 20 mid to heavy weight games, Splotters are such a good value for replayability.

RE: Spirit Island - I would be totally into SI but I would just play Wyvern’s copy. If I end up doing solo gaming, then yeah

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Other games I feel I have definitely gotten my money’s worth are Lords of Vegas, Lords of Waterdeep, Ethnos, Jaipur, Batman Love Letter, Kingdomino, and Azul. They don’t all hit the table super frequently anymore, but all have at least a couple dozen plays or more.

Games that I am happy I own, but probably haven’t provided a good cost/play ratio are Firefly, Imperial Assault, TI4, and Unmatched.

Reasoning

Firefly and TI4 have exactly 1 play each, but I own the base and nearly all expansions for both, which cost quite a bit. I really enjoy the games though, and hope to play them again sometime.

Imperial Assault has hit the table a number of times, as we got at least halfway through the main campaign with our friends, I played the Legends of the Alliance base campaign solo, and then the Hoth campaigns with my wife and her brother. That said, I own virtually everything for it as well, but hope to use the Imperial Commander fan app to play the rest of the content.

Then there’s Unmatched. I love the Unmatched system! Very simple to learn, but the large cast of characters allow a number of different play styles to emerge. The minis look good, the art is great, and it’s just a ton of fun. However, while I own all of it, I play it very little as my wife doesn’t care for it that much and I have not had the opportunity to introduce it to our friends.

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Although this isn’t really my field I wonder whether “UX” is worth bearing in mind - “a person’s behaviours, attitudes, and emotions about using a product, system, or service”. That doesn’t just have to be bad components or an over-complex setup, though they’re certainly in there; I can also find myself irked when rules hold back what’s clearly the fun part of the game until one builds up a certain amount of boring activity, particularly if it’s easy to someone else to reduce that stockpile.

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Two games really stand out personally in terms of value to game sessions: one old and one newer.

  • Statis Pro Football was a gift from my father bought during a business trip to New York back in the mid 1980s. It probably cost him around $30 back then but it was played at least 100 times within the first 10 years of ownership and still comes out for a solo game every couple of years. The ability to download (unofficial) cards for recent NFL seasons keeps it fresh.
  • Maquis is my favourite solo game, picked up for $25-$30 but has had at least 20 playthroughs using most of the mission options in the box (although I’ve yet to try the hardest ones yet).

I’m not sure about the least value games in my collection yet. I play so rarely these days and still have a dozen or so that I’ve yet to play so techincially all of those would fall into that category until I play them and decide whether to keep them or not.

Looking tangentially, my least value in gaming has to be my collection of D&D 5e books: I have about 20 core rule books, source books, campaign settings and adventure books covering the combined 2014 and 2024/5 releases and, while they are a great read and spur my imagination strongly, I have yet to play either of the rulesets properly (i.e.; with other people). And, surely, the best value gaming anyone could ever get is to buy a cheap deck of standard playing cards, which offers so many possible games for just a few pounds/dollars/euros.

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Been either very lucky or done some good research, but the vast majority of games we have have, so far, earned their keep (still have a few unplayed that are unknowns, of course). Particular shout-outs go to:

Patchwork, which is STILL going strong and got us into this hobby;
Pandemic, our all-time favourite game and something that greatly helped Maryse when she’d just gotten diagnosed;
Ticket To Ride Rails and Sails, with the number of games we’ve played with our buddy Yvan;
Everdell, just love that game.

Two games come to mind that have NOT earned their keep, though:

Robin of Locksley: Duel of Thieves, which was just entirely uninteresting and is, so far, the only game we’ve given away;
Arkham Horror: Third Edition, Maryse bounced HARD off it and while I do wanna try it solo again, it’s just SUCH a pain to set up…

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My personal list:

Best Value
Railroad Ink. In my case, the lush Green challenge edition. It is small enough that it comes with us on holiday but still regularly gets played at home.
Spirit Island. I only own the base game and we’ve been gradually cranking up the difficulty of the adversaries. We’ve probably played about 15 times, are nowhere near done, and there’s still a spirit that my wife has never even tried.
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. We had so much fun playing through the campaign that when we finished we started again with the two characters we hadn’t picked.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1. Perhaps a controversial entry? We finished the campaign in, I think, 13 games and are unlikely to ever play with the contents of the box again. It remains the greatest board gaming experience I’ve ever had, I’d be constantly looking forward to playing it again, and I still sometimes fondly recall certain events and situations that occurred.

Worst Value
Dungeon Lords. Taught it, everyone enjoyed it, we meant to play it again but somehow never did.
Descent: Second Edition. Had fun with this but we never finished a campaign because it was displaced by the new hotness of Imperial Assault.

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