Re:Scythe, the most-hyped board game of 2016, delivers
by dogma1138 on Sunday July 31, 2016 @06:21AM
(#12196342)
I actually find that the opposite works for most cases.
The best board games are the ones that are either a take on "common social games" or have a fairly simple ruleset.
The problem with complex rulesets is that they tend to make rounds very long which when you combine it with 4-6 players makes games drag for considerably longer than they need to be.
The worse games are the ones that try to mitigate that with multiple victory paths often partially RNG based or silly "sudden death" rounds after an arbitrary round count to force games to last no longer than 60-90min.
Sure you can point to games or systems like D20 but even then the core ruleset is fairly simple and uniform and the rest is just ad hoc that can be used rarely or not at all.
The one thing you need for a good board game is to have decent strategic depth with mechanics that induce interesting social dynamics, a lot of games try to implement the former by making it complicated by design and forget the latter.
The problem with complex rulesets is that they tend to make rounds very long which when you combine it with 4-6 players makes games drag for considerably longer than they need to be.
The worse games are the ones that try to mitigate that with multiple victory paths often partially RNG based or silly "sudden death" rounds after an arbitrary round count to force games to last no longer than 60-90min.
Sure you can point to games or systems like D20 but even then the core ruleset is fairly simple and uniform and the rest is just ad hoc that can be used rarely or not at all.
The one thing you need for a good board game is to have decent strategic depth with mechanics that induce interesting social dynamics, a lot of games try to implement the former by making it complicated by design and forget the latter.