> Are heavy games really 'better' than 'light' games?
To serious board game players, yes, more complex games are "better" because the simple games tend to have dozens of games with almost identical feel. If the game is complex there can be more variety.
> But I don't have time to play games that are very complex and take many hours!
And the authors personal biases heavily stilt things.
This is like saying bigger books are better because more pages = more complexity = more interesting plot. You must be a big fan of the dictionary.
I've found the best board games are often the simplest ones. 2-player vanilla Splendor is one of my favourites and all it takes to play is a deck of cards and a stack of tokens. When both players have a good level, the depth of strategy of that game is crazy good. And unlike chess, it's very approachable for new players.
A board game can choose to engage in a multitude of different ways. A well-crafted simple game can offer as deep a problem space as a more complex one, but strategy is only one form of engagement.
A lot of rules-heavy games like Twilight Imperium, Arkham Horror or Dune use rules to simulate a setting as much as to create a strategic problem space. If you removed rules from these games, you can make them easier to play and possibly keep the same raw depth, but you would lose the setting they were trying to build. I remember explaining to someone recently that almost every rule in the Dune board game was a reference to something in the books.
That's a bad take. Words in a dictionary have no interactions. It's a list of words in alphabetical order and their definitions.
Well crafted board game rules are about systems that interact with each other. You don't have to be rules heavy to have an interesting game, but the interactions between systems needs to be there to be interesting beyond some number of consecutive plays. A lot of lighter games will quickly feel samey if your players are half way competent. You'll simply pickup the patterns, game state and work out the value of each move quite quickly.
Well, here's a more developed (and spicier) take then.
Larger board games are very often mere laundry lists of systems that can be found in many other board games. The longer games tend to have systems that MAKE the game long, rather than cause people to develop a strategy. One example is some mechanics forcing synchronous turns, or even worse, preventing you from preparing your turn in advance. Which gets even worse as the players have to iterate over more and more items in the turn checklist every time.
I have a strong but obviously opinionated dislike for these mechanics, so YMMV. Still, these longer games very often feel "same-y" to everything else because they don't truly bring original interactions between players. Playthroughs don't even always vary because as you re-play the game, a meta quickly develops and settles on a tiny portion of the offered gameplay.
More systems is also more opportunities to get the balance wrong. To fuck up. Which, if you don't tweak the rules preemptively, means the meta settling on an ever smaller part of the game.
Small, highly-focused games tend to develop much more interesting metas. Yes, they're not necessarily as varied in "number of things that can happen", but honestly, sometimes the gameplay elements I see in larger games are so incoherent you might as well play different games concurrently, and turn the whole thing into XKCD/2488.
To be clear, my point is not that shorter/simpler games are always better. It's that "longer doesn't always mean better, and more often than not means worse".
The same does apply to books. You can more reliably draw meaning from an extremely-well-crafted fable, than from a massive heptalogy. Your experience will be wildly different, and there are unique attributes for which you need length in order to achieve. But a rock solid series of books is a much rarer breed than an interesting fable. And a much larger waste of time if you don't end up drawing something from it.
And indeed the same applies to everything else. Assembly-line AAA video games that stuff themselves in a checklist of content to justify their price are often far worse in depth than shorter, sweeter ones (Portal, Hades, whatever). More seasons of Dexter and Game of Thrones ruined extremely deep and interesting works, whereas Breaking Bad crafted a truly unique experience by finishing exactly where the author intended it to. And your next lunch won't be improved by emptying your spice rack on it and overwhelming your palate, but by finding the exact mixes of ingredients that will result in a great meal.
I'm in it for the easy "a-ha!" moments and as soon as it starts to look like a particular game is going to have to become a whole thing for me to keep getting those from it (by moving on to "competitive" levels of play, memorized strategies, et c.), I'm done with it.
Complex games often throw enough variables in the mix to keep things interesting—to me, anyway—longer than simpler games. A lot of times all that's just smoke and mirrors, but it's effective smoke and mirrors.
> Small, highly-focused games tend to develop much more interesting metas.
Right—which is precisely what I don't want. If I need to start deliberately practicing or reading books or something to get better at a game, that's a job, and I don't want it.
[EDIT] Just to be extra clear, I'm not saying this is "the right" reason to prefer a certain kind of game, and I'm very aware that lots of people want the exact opposite: a game they can play for life, taking it very seriously, and never stop improving because the depth of play is practically unlimited. That's just not why I play board/card games.
Interesting. I feel similarly, but I would place my joy in exploration rather than discovery. I'm not interested in discovery, where I take only the rules/components and try to discover the best plays and strategies. I don't have the time or the inclination to endure the dead ends and plays of failed strategies. (Some people love that, they want to find the best plays themselves; not me.) I want a map, a guide, then my joy is in taking that map, and applying it to the game state I'm in.
Thus, I love reading strategy guides, and following instructions. I build Lego sets frequently, but I never build My Own Creations. For me, the fun is in execution. Thus, complex games give me more paths to walk, more levers to pull. Simple games get boring, and often end up in the deeply iterative analysis that you see in Chess/Go: if I do this, then they'll do that, so then I need to do this, etc. etc. etc. Not fun at all for me, and why I largely avoid most abstracts too.
In a related note, this is also why I ended up in SysAdmin, not Dev; I want to implement the awesome programs that other people make; I have little interest in creating something new myself.
Yeah, my joy from games comes in figuring things out, not in recognizing and applying something I picked up elsewhere. Now, you can keep figuring things out even in very deep games, but it requires ongoing study and effort and meanwhile you'll be losing to people who've memorized a whole bunch and aren't (against you, at least) having to figure out anything new at all—rather than do all that, I just play a different game when things get to that point :-)
I play games to feel "clever", not to feel "smart" (for values of smart like "ah ha, I happen to have read and memorized a counter to this opening that you don't know, so now I will crush you"), and continuing to feel clever with a deep game requires more commitment than I care to give to them, personally.
... this is probably a holdover from painfully-typical bad attitudes developed during a "gifted" childhood. It took me a very long time to stop seeing—if only subconsciously—studying as something adjacent to cheating, like "yeah you got an A but you had to study, so, that hardly counts". Looks very dumb written down like that, but it was the rut my brain got stuck in for a long while without my even realizing it. However, in the specific case of games, I haven't bothered to try to work past it, because I'm still having a good time with my approach, and I really do not want to get serious enough about any game that studying & focused, non-play practice becomes necessary to keep getting "I did a clever thing" dopamine hits.
Weirdly, this "preparation is akin to cheating, and at the very least a sign that you have already failed" attitude didn't transfer over into sports, where I was totally fine with (and loved, actually) practice and drilling.
> Thus, I love reading strategy guides, and following instructions. I build Lego sets frequently, but I never build My Own Creations.
Oddly enough, though, that's me too. I had lots of Legos as a kid but rarely built my own thing, usually building from instructions, and then if I did anything else it was typically combining, re-theming, or adding on to, instruction-built sets.
>Interesting. I feel similarly, but I would place my joy in exploration rather than discovery. I'm not interested in discovery, where I take only the rules/components and try to discover the best plays and strategies. I don't have the time or the inclination to endure the dead ends and plays of failed strategies. (Some people love that, they want to find the best plays themselves; not me.) I want a map, a guide, then my joy is in taking that map, and applying it to the game state I'm in.
I feel this really depends on who you are playing with. If everyone is new, I don't mind exploring the strategies. You can learn something and still get a good game. If one person knows the game fairly well, it's sometimes good to play half a game with open hands (if there is secret info) while the one person teaches and gives hints. It's definitely no fun if one person knows a lot of the game and trounces everyone.
This is actually a nice part about board games being more niche than video games. Pick just about any game on a computer and console and it’s been analyzed to death, every secret and strategy found and quantified.
Many moderately popular board games don’t have anything even approaching this level of analysis, some have quite broken combinations and strategies that have never been published anywhere, so even if you’re not the first to figure it out you can feel like you are. I really enjoy that feeling, that your discoveries have not been trampled over and graffitied long before you got there.
Thanks for sharing your view! It's interesting you say your favorite part is the discovery. For me, my first play-through of a game, if it's a decent game I always end a little sad and annoyed that the next playthroughs will probably be a lot better now that "the group knows the rule"... simply because we likely won't play it again, so it feels like I missed out.
Don't worry, there are even a lot of heavy game players who define "heaviness" by complexity of strategy, not the word count of the rule book. I have to admit, I love a very long game, but game length doesn't require rule length.
But if you're not a person who loves intricate, shallow pastiche, you're probably not a person who buys 1-3 retail games every month. Which means that the market shouldn't cater to us. I do wish that BGG still did sometimes, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that BGGs visitorship is shrinking.
I've almost dead-stopped visiting of late, but 1) picking the right selection of geekbuddies can narrow BGG into something that's still useful to find good games and some good conversation about games, and 2) the geekmarket can help you find those games when they've been out of print for a long time.
Here's a less commercial recommendation that gets you a warehouse full of games for almost nothing: New Tactical Games With Dice and Cards, and Dice Games Properly Explained by Reiner Knizia.
Includes dozens of games with variants that thoughtfully explore the spaces of those games, and encourages you to play around with them to discover new challenges. I wish Wolfgang Kramer would start giving away his secrets like Knizia always has.
I didn't argue that merely having rules or more systems is a good thing. If the systems don't work together well, you get a bad game. But it's hard to argue that Splendor is as epic as a good (6 player) game of Twilight Imperium or Pendragon.
more complexity in a board game means a larger possibility space which allows for (but does not necessarily 100% correlate with) increased replayability and more interesting strategy development, both things that seasoned board game players (of which I am not one, but I have friends who are) tend to highly value.
the complexity of a board game is in no way comparable to the length of linear media, aside from the amount of one's own lifetime one has the possibility of investing in the work before being satisfied with no longer engaging with.
Go has also a thousand years of history and is very popular. Even if the basic rules are simple and fast to learn, you still need a long time to learn the game's current meta and reach an acceptable level of ability by today's standards. This is very different from any new game with similar complexity, where you only play against people who invested a similar short amount of time.
Yes, but that's not an indicator of complexity. It's an indicator of the skill of other players.
You can make an argument that the game tree complexity is immense, but that's because people prefer to play on 19x19 boards. 9x9 boards are similar to chess in game tree complexity, and had in fact strong computer engine play ten years before AlphaGo
No, I mean that it mainly is an indicator that complexity for the players does not only come from the rules, but also the explored game tree and the level you get from other players. There are many games similar to go, in terms of simple rules and hidden complexity, but none of them are as successful as go, because they simply lack the history and success of go.
It's a strange feedback-loop that certain things become more successful because they are successful, which enable them to grow into their deepness and fully embrace it, reeling in more people who prefer this.
I would definitely argue that complexity comes from the number of meaningful options available to the player, not strictly rule complexity. Simple rules can lead to complex situations. This has little to do with the skill of the players involved, even two amateurs playing Go are faced with constant decisions that will effect the course of the game. It is indeed the 19X19 board where placement is allowed anywhere therein that gives Go it’s complexity.
it's not about other players, it's about the ability to understand what's going on at all. go is not a "simple game with a lot of depth", even reading the board is a skill
Just here to say, as someone who both worked for a gaming company, has designed games, and has a shelf FULL of things like Fury of Dracula, Root, and Mansions of Madness, I consider myself a serious board/table top gamer.
Light games are great. Ever play "The Mind" or "Exploding Kittens" at a party? Super fun.
Everything is personal biases. If you have the time to set up and play Gloomhaven, great! But many people don't, and that doesn't mean that they're wrong or you're right or that the value they place on the games they play is illogical. If your goal is "have fun with some kids for a half hour" then setting up a solo-play of Mage Knight is a worse choice than shuffling up the Uno deck.
That said: Candyland is both the lightest "game" ever designed and is terrible. It's the gaming equivalent of waiting 10-20 minutes and then each player rolling a d100 to see who rolls highest and wins. /Candyrant
Candyland is a wonderful gaming experience for small children.
You are taking for granted that understanding how to follow game mechanics and taking turns are both acquired skills. It's very rewarding for children to learn those skills and see themselves apply them. The fact that there aren't interesting decisions to make in playing the game is secondary.
The kids are spending all of their mental energy making decisions to follow the game mechanics themselves instead of moving out of turn, jumping to the squares they want to land on, taking extra cards, etc. All that requires a lot more executive function and willpower than we realize because we're so practiced at it, but Candyland is a way for small kids to get that practice.
I think, more specifically, Candyland is even tailored for kids who are old enough to match colors but can't count dice pips yet. For kids a little bit older, there's some game where you roll dice and move cherries into a basket. I wouldn't introduce Terra Mystica until kindergarten, first-grade at the earliest.
For a three-year-old, Candyland is fine. After all that's the target demographic, and for them, every turn is an adventure. Have you tried playing strategy games with small children? Even something like Connect-4 can be a disaster.
I've found bgg's weight to be pretty uncorrelated with whether the game actually survives when players make a sincere effort to win. An illustrative sample of games sorted by weight might be Splendor, Wingspan, Res Arcana, Roll for the Galaxy, Race for the Galaxy, Warhammer 40,000: Conquest, A Feast for Odin, and Through the Ages. Of these, the middle games Res Arcana and Roll for the Galaxy completely collapse under the slightest effort to take them seriously, and Wingspan does less than great (you can just tear your ravens in half though, if you want to make things a bit better). Race, Splendor, and Conquest hold up quite well. I don't know enough about the final 2 games to tell whether they'll still be recognizable after 1,000 plays, but it seems like even if a huge part of the options in those games turn out to be unplayably bad the remainder of the options might still contain some interesting choices.
Yeah. Some of the heavier games are casual, cooperative, relaxing game night affairs, for example Pandemic Legacy (weight 3.24).
Yet Santorini (weight 1.73), despite its cute art style, is an absolute monster of a game when played competitively against strong opponents. Many of the reviews reflect this, with a lot of people comparing it to chess and go.
Honestly, I think you could approximate the weight rating of most games by setting the box on a scale. Other than telling you how many different components you’ll get, the weight rating is only a rough approximation of depth.
Another pair of games to compare is Agricola and Caverna. These ones have very similar weights (a bit under 4) yet they play dramatically differently. Agricola is extremely tight and vicious with competitive play. Caverna, on the other hand, is a victory point bonanza. This has led to a sharp divide in the community, with Caverna having stolen a lot of the ‘thematic’ players from its older sibling.
Edit: I need to add that I in no way intended to disparage thematic players. I love thematic games too. My preferences usually change based on my mood and energy levels. Thematic games are much better on a Friday night after work, with good friends, good food, and tasty beverages. Fierce, competitive games are much more of a Saturday afternoon rainy day type of situation.
Produce-consume ends up not working for almost all starting conditions. A lot of tiles seem tuned for a game where players leave their dice around, particularly as goods on planets, but it turns out you don't really need more than 9 dice. Players spend much of the game fishing for 6-devs, especially 6-devs that reward the player for playing a bunch of devs. If you don't get those, you can try to win with the 6-devs that reward you for playing a bunch of planets, but it's tough. Random access to starting conditions that do something, cheap planets that give red dice, and dev-oriented 6-devs ends up feeling bad, since these tiles are so much better than the other tiles.
I didn't play with expansions because they aren't on the phone app. This might be unfair, because I'm comparing it to Race with expansions.
The entire game industry kinda survives off being the new hotness. Look at the top 100 on BGG. And some of the newer more accessible games will get a ton of ratings that I would argue they don't really deserve.
I've been around the top of the BGA leaderboard for this game. It's mostly about being Witch, buying PoPs in round 1, and trying to grab Reanimate. BGA players taught me that the game contained even less slack than I thought by opening with round 1 turn 1 alchemize, round 1 turn 2 buy alchemist's tower, which I eventually adopted.
It feels like a lot of the variety in the game should come from the 8 cards in your deck, but it can't if you just discard them most of the time.
OK! Well, I guess it comes down to what you mean by "completely collapse". I enjoy the BGA leaderboards, but only got to the top 50 or so when I was actively trying.
I agree that you're going to discard 3/4 of your artifacts, and ~50% of them are almost never worth playing. But I've been continuously surprised by people pulling out wins with PoP/artifact combinations I didn't expect to be viable.
If your definition of "completely collapses" is "some paths are much better than others in high level play", then I guess we just disagree on what makes a good heavy board game.
I do agree with you that Wingspan has a corvidae problem, though; I've never seen anyone but a beginner lose with an early raven.
From my PoV it's not "some paths are much better than others" so much as "almost all of the paths are not worth taking." The game feels really centralized around the 3 best PoPs and some Athanor/Philosopher's Stone gameplans (though other stuff can win and it's always fun to see that). I can't call any mages *blank* in the same way I can call some Roll starting devs blank, but your Druid is just not expected to have a great time against a Witch or Duelist or even a Seer.
This is all subjective, of course. The Splendor designers obviously intended for players who purchase a large number of small holdings to be able to win. Every variant in the expansion works to address this issue. Another player could reasonably say "Splendor has failed because everyone just rushes to buy about 2 big holdings." To me, "Splendor but everyone goes for big holdings right away" is still pretty good at being Splendor. "Res Arcana but you rush a PoP and get like 8 VPs from it and 2 from a monument" feels disappointing compared to the game I thought I would be playing. I'm glad you like it! A friend tells me the 2nd expansion makes a lot of things better, so I'm looking forward to trying it out.
This is not limited to board games. You have the same with tabletop, video games and basically everything. There is always that special crowd that enjoys long, complex stuff. How many people here are proud of their hundreds and thousands of hours game time in something like factorio, civilization, rimworld, in the year-long work they invested in some obscure software-project or something physical they had built?
Some people like the kick of fast success, others like the long-running, slow burning joy. People are just different.
If it were true that complex games were inherently, objectively better we would only see more and more complex games. We don't, and major hobby game producers are constantly putting out low complexity games because, spoilers, some people are playing games to goof around and have fun!
It's just like any other form of entertainment. Think about genre movies. What makes more money, the latest giant Marvel/Disney zip bang popcorn flick, or the deep and complex Oscar Favorite? Why is the Marvel movie making all the money but not winning Best Picture? Why don't complex, difficult stories consistently pull in Marvel level money?
Value is always in the eye of the end user/consumer.
> If it were true that complex games were inherently, objectively better
What are you talking about? Complexity is more enjoyable for some, not all people. And the joy a game brings is subjective, not objective. You can't measure game-quality by saying this has x rules more than other games, so it's objectively better.
> we would only see more and more complex games. We don't
Not true. There is a rise of complex games in the last decades, especially in digital games. But it's still a relative small market, so the number of casual games are rising significant faster, distorting the impression on surface. And there are also several constraints which influence this rise. You can't measure this by simple binary logic.
> What makes more money
Money is an irrelevant metric for this.
And we are long over the point were complexity in moving pictures was a thing of movies. It's now all in series, and the complex sh*t is on netflix, prime video, etc.
> And the authors personal biases heavily stilt things.
Yes, different games fit different needs and situations, but games designed to last six hours are also designed for a very niche audience. Public game/book/movie ratings average out to reflect how widely people find them likable.
If a 15 minute game can make players feel nearly as invested and thrilled as a 3 hour campaign, that's an accomplishment in game design that deserves recognition.
To serious board game players, yes, more complex games are "better" because the simple games tend to have dozens of games with almost identical feel. If the game is complex there can be more variety.
> But I don't have time to play games that are very complex and take many hours!
And the authors personal biases heavily stilt things.