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I feel like the depth of a lot of board games gets undersold simply because of how inconvenient it would be to play a large number of games physically. And/or because it's easy at the start to try something complicated, fail to get it right and end up concluding wrongly that only the simple things actually work.

At one point in my life I got in literally thousands of games of Dominion, and I was definitely still not as good as some of the people I discussed the game with online, but in person I could barely find anyone to play with, ever. (In fact, of the people I knew who were familiar with it, few even seemed to think it was any good as a game.)

by xyzzy_plugh3 hours ago|

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I've played a lot of Dominion with people who have played thousands of games. I've even beat them with some frequency (it's not that hard!).

I don't think Dominion is a good game. It's good if you maybe think cubing is good. And it can be a lot of fun!

But as a game? It's not good. If you have no idea what you are doing and are totally unfamiliar, you can even win pretty easily with some luck. But you won't understand why you won, or rather why others lost.

There are many, many games where everyone can read the rules together and be, more or less, on even footing. Dominion can sometimes be that way, but it can pretty easily be extremely opposite of that.

by GoatOfAplomb1 hours ago|

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>If you have no idea what you are doing and are totally unfamiliar, you can even win pretty easily with some luck. But you won't understand why you won, or rather why others lost.

Interesting, this is a _feature_ of poker games like Texas Hold'em. If the losing players didn't go on convincing winning streaks, they'd stop playing. And those winning streaks can convince them they don't need to learn anything else about the game in order to be a winning player.

by SubiculumCode2 hours ago|

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Or another way of saying it, when the default no-thinking baseline strategy can win frequently enough by chance that it becomes difficult to learn from a single game. In this case, just 'buy silver, then gold, then provinces) can win too often just by chance.

by kulahan1 hours ago|

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Board games really get so much better once you get a vaguely-regular group. If nothing else, you can walk in one night and everyone just knows how to play a lot of really great games right off the bat.