WARNING: I don’t do spoiler-free reviews. If you want spoiler-free, this is not the blog for you. I did it, everyone. I finished a legacy game. And let me tell you, it was quite the roller coaster ride! Boring one minute, frustrating the next — I never knew what to expect! I now totally understand the appeal of stopping in the middle of a game to fiddle around with stickers and scratch-offs and to punch out new components. And I totally understand the appeal of having to read new rules every time I play a game. And I TOTALLY understand the appeal of having to undo all the work I did in previous games because of a TOTALLY epic plot twist. Ah, Legacy! A revolution in tabletop gaming! Surely, much has been said about the gamification of the boring parts of life, the chores. But Legacy games are the truly brilliant inverse of that: the chorification of games! Genius, I tell you! Genius! Alright, now that that’s out of my system — and likely the majority of the folks reading this are incensed — let’s get real. Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is not a good board game. At best, I would consider it competent. It “works”, I suppose. Never before in gaming has a contrived narrative structure and gimmicky mechanical bait-and-switches led to such undeserved adulation as this. I mean, according to the users of Board Game Geek (which seems to be about 95% of the board game enthusiasts in the…
Betrayal At House On The Hill is one of the first board games I ever loved. It is also one of the first I ever hated. Like so many modern board game neophytes, with maybe a game or two of Dominion and Catan under my belt, my first impression of Betrayal At House On the Hill was one of delight and wonder at its seemingly infinite possibilities. The idea that a game’s objectives and victory conditions could be different every time it was played was mind-blowing. My friends and I played it many times over the first year or so I owned it, alongside a steady diet of titles from an increasingly wide selection of other games I’d been acquiring at a somewhat embarrassing rate. We began noticing something odd. We enjoyed every other game we tried more than Betrayal, aside from the rare massive whiff (which will remain nameless until I review those as well). Fast-forward roughly six years, and oh how tastes change. To say that I now consider Betrayal At House On the Hill to be a bad game would be a massive understatement. It is abysmal. Awful in every regard. A masters class unto itself in how not to make a game. The illusion it had cast me under has long since faded away, and it is abundantly clear that the true nature of its sprawling, open-ended design stems not from ambition, vision, or cogency — but simple ineptitude. When I dislike a game and am collecting my thoughts on it, I always spend a decent…