I think this article blows past several important points – perhaps unknowingly.
1. Sure, tic-tac-toe is a fantastic game for someone who needs to learn the "rewards of thinking ahead and taking the opponent’s strategy into account". Game enthusiasts (or indeed anyone above the age of 12) are very unlikely to need this lesson.
1> However, there is an interesting variant of tic-tac-toe[1] so disregarding the game completely isn't fair either.
2. People don't dislike Monopoly because it has dice. Risk has dice, and is incredibly popular. People dislike Monopoly because it is designed to be a game that is not fun to play for all but one player.
2> The game was designed as an anti-capitalist, anti-monopolist lesson.[2] When the rules are set up just right, only one person will be the winner and the other people will spiral into a negative feedback loop and quickly run out of all their money. That's the entire premise of the game: if you have a lot of money you can easily get more. Of course a game which is designed to distress 3/4 people playing in a session is not going to be very highly rated.
That said, I do think there is one popular game that gets very little respect from (at least western) game enthusiasts: go[3]!
Probably known in these circles as "the game computers can't yet beat top humans in" it's an abstract strategy game for two players (like chess) – with incredibly simple rules. You can learn the rules in a few minutes (literally) but it will take you weeks to even start feeling like you know what you are doing, and years before you're competent. The strategic and tactical depth is vast, much deeper than any other game I've tried.
> That said, I do think there is one popular game that gets very little respect from (at least western) game enthusiasts: go
I guess I would have to disagree with your characterization of go as not respected. I've never heard any of the game enthusiasts I know talk about go in anything but the same reverent tone you use to explain why you like it. Who are you hanging out with?
"The queen, which can move horizontally, vertically or diagonally, is nothing more than a combination of the rook and the bishop, making it an inelegant redundancy."
Whoever stated that has never played chess to the level they should before even attempting to comment on the game.
Chess would seem to me to be one of the ultimate games for humans; it's simple enough to teach a child, but few adults can come close to mastering it.
Even the term "chess master" is a bit of a lie. To be a "chess master", you'd have to know the perfect solution move for every board configuration- forget openings, gambits, tactics- that's child's play compared to truly mastering the game. People called "masters" are just really damn good- not perfect.
In comparison, I am a "tic tac toe" master. I know that I can fail to lose at the game if I try.
Chess is an inelegant ruleset. The en passant rule is an extremely obvious bodge, castling is a special case and the rule wording had issues as recently as the 1970s. A sibling has already mentioned go, which is far more elegant and humanistic (I understand it involves substantially more left-brain use). High-level chess as practiced today involves a lot of rote memorization which is very anti-human (part of the reason computers are better at it now).
/Played chess reasonably seriously at one point and I still enjoy it occasionally, but let's be honest about its flaws
The queen is absolutely an inelegance from a rules perspective. That seems to be kind of the point: rules elegance is neither necessary or sufficient to create a good game (though, arguably, it helps: see Go). Having a single piece with far more offensive power than any other is interesting, which is good in actual gameplay.
The queen is absolutely the wrong thing to pick on, though. Castling would be an obvious example, but my go-to is En passant. The pawn double-move is obviously inelegant (sharing the problem with castling that it may only ever be a piece's first move), but it inarguably makes the game better. If you've ever tried playing without it, you know that it makes the opening both faster and more interesting.
However, the pawn double-move introduces a strategic problem where a pawn can sometimes skip past another. The en passant rule is thus introduced as an obvious fix for that bug.
It would be problematic to have either of these rules without the other, and neither is particularly elegant, but the combination improves the game a lot.
See also: the infield fly rule in Baseball, the shot clock in any sport that has a shot clock, I'm sure anyone can name several more.
The real problem with chess is that it takes a lot of time and effort to become even vaguely competitive. It's not a boardgame you can pull out for a group of naifs and all start having fun together.
I think the proof is in the pudding. I've played hundreds of hours of chess in my life, and I set chess aside as a special case, but as for the rest of the traditional board games, they become boring once you've played highly rated games on boardgamegeek.com. Monopoly is a good example. It feels crushingly dull and random (yes, even with wheeling and dealing) to the point that I would call it an anti-game - it actually removes fun instead of creates it. A better title would be "Death March."
I've spent that last thirty years playing and watching board games enter what seems to be their golden age, and have introduced scores of people to the games I love, and have had friends do so in kind. Almost universally people say something along the lines of, "Wow, that was fun. It's nothing like the games we played as a kid." Often followed up with "Where do we buy this?" They don't play the games from their childhood anymore because they're boring and they didn't know there were alternatives. Now they'll play board games as adults and enjoy themselves. Beats the Hell out of TV.
And the rating system on that site is in question of late due to a presently controversial number 1 game: Pandemic: Legacy. The rating system is highly subjective and many suspect is prone to "flavor of the week," ratings by people who don't take time to read the scale and objectively rate the games they play.
Monopoly could be rated so lowly because it is a popular opinion on the site that it's not a good game.
That being said I don't think the classics are disappearing or that they're bad games. A game like Mancala is seeing a resurgence as a mechanic in many popular games today. I think we can learn something from what made these games endure for so long and are starting to incorporate them into new games.
Don't let the rating system on boardgamegeek dictate what we think is a really good game until the objectivity problem gets sorted out.
Simply commenting on the title, but it struck me that you can probably say “Some of the most popular $X get the least respect from $X enthusiasts” — examples of X that come to mind are music, food, wine, ….
Monopoly is such an underrated game. It's about negotiation and alliances. I think their biggest mistake is calling it Monopoly, implying it was one person killing off everyone else. It might be more interesting if it was called Balance of Power.
It has to be played with around 4+ people. They need to trade favors along with their land. With enough players, the favors owed last long enough to make a difference.
The randomness simply makes negotiation power the main focus of the game. E.g. if you land on a rival's hotel and go broke, a rich ally can pay you premium on your land. You'll realize early on that everyone is either going to be doomed or super-rich, so it's worth being diplomatic really early on.
When someone starts to snowball into a monopoly, they have to start laying low, while the others have to encourage the others to pile pressure. The players have to notice this trend early, at the point where it makes sense to 'blacklist' certain players.
It's a game with about as much depth as Settlers of Catan, without having to worry about too much complexity.
Monopoly was originally created to show the dangers of letting a business become a "monopoly". That is until the Parker Brothers started making it and marketing it as a game.
From Wikipedia[0]:
> The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903,[1][4] when American anti-monopolist Elizabeth (Lizzie) J. Magie Phillips, created a game through which she hoped to be able to explain the single tax theory of Henry George. It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies.
I think part of what exacerbates the negative perception of Monopoly is that most people don't play it according to its actual rules. Instead the game has been collectively "house ruled" in ways that make it take much longer and tedious to play, with one example being the rules around unowned property acquisition.
I still prefer most designer board games to Monopoly, but I don't think it is worthy of the condescension most board game enthusiasts regard it with it.
> Monopoly is such an underrated game. It's about negotiation and alliances. I think their biggest mistake is calling it Monopoly, implying it was one person killing off everyone else. It might be more interesting if it was called Balance of Power.
Ironically, Balance of Power is an actual game, and it's single-player.
There's a lot less chance to do mutually beneficial trading than in Settlers. There's such a leap in value from getting a set that you can rarely pay a fair price for it (if players play to win, the first to get a set will very likely win). So say you "blacklist" the player who's in the lead - fine, but what does that actually mean in practice? At best you pool your resources to king-make for one of you.
Someone recently posited a theory that really stood out to me: when a better version of a board game comes along, the old one simply becomes obsolete. The game that they were referring to in particular was Secret Hitler, which they felt obsoleted Werewolf and The Resistance.
When I have an opportunity to play board games with people I will always want to play something that I think is fun, exciting, or new. Monopoly is none of those things to me. For some people it probably endures primarily out of nostalgia, or a lack of interest in other options, but there are so many better options for new board game players.
That's one of the things these articles don't really take into account: games, much like movies, tv shows, music, etc. evolve and crossbreed. Some good games could become virtually unplayed because they were so great that the following generation of game designers took the mechanics they liked in them and used them to create new games.
I was kind of thinking that about Resistance also recently (that it's pretty much obsolete), but after playing "Deception: Murder in Hong Kong". It still has the bad guys of Resistance, but there's a silent moderator giving clues for the good guys to figure out who they are, and there are actual murder weapons and clue cards that the good guys can use to help make their decisions. It's more interesting than "okay he voted this way this round, he must be a bad guy!"
Weird article. "Why do games enthusiasts dislike these games? You know, the games that are great for teaching children some supposed lesson or other?".
I expect other articles from the author to include "Why don't wine enthusiasts like $3 bottles of rotgut? I mean, it's really popular with winos" and "why do people like listening to musical bands? Toy xylophones are popular with kids, and teaches them hand-eye co-ordination, rhythm, and so forth."
I mean, the author lionises tic-tac-toe as providing some deep life lesson, when in actuality, even the author's target demographic gets bored of it in very short order.
Art is at its best when it presents questions. If our games declare random winners, or can be played perfectly to a predictable conclusion, they have stated a definite answer about strategy, and lack room for further investigation, which is distasteful to enthusiasts.
That said, games also say something about the societies that play them. Monopoly's popularity in spite of its unfairness speaks to that. Playing it, and winning, reinforces a certain fantasy about becoming a property owner. The casual player believes: "This is how life works."
I don't see why a factor of chance makes a game unworthy. We want to learn for real life from games, and real life is full of chance. And there are strategies for dealing with chance, like hedging your bets.
For Monopoly, mathematicians have worked out winning strategies. I think it has to do with a high chance of people landing in jail and the odds of landing on fields when starting from jail.
There are many things I dislike about Monopoly but the randomness isn't one of them. A good deal of games I love have a big chunk of luck/randomness and I'm fine with it.
The things I dislike about Monopoly:
* Not too much strategy involved. The player who wins is usually the one who buys a lot of lands early.
* It's long. Even the shortest games last over 90 minutes. However the winner is decided much earlier in the game. There's very little you can do to prevent an early leader from taking the game, and you have to sit there watching them bully you slowly for several hours.
* The theme sucks. "Buy land, make more money". I don't find that particularly fun.
* The good elements of monopoly are often found in other games that don't share the same bad elements (I'm thinking of Settlers, but there are others too).
Monopoly's lack of fun isn't because it uses dice.
Monopoly's lack of fun comes from the player elimination, which is a crucial part of the game. People dislike player elimination (because it feels mean), and include stuff to avoid it, (fines go in the middle and are collected if you land on free parking, for example). These house rules turn a 1 hour game into an interminable 5 hour slog.
If you have a group of people who are happy with the concept of player elimination, and who play to win, and you avoid the house rules, Monopoly becomes somewhat fun. But there are very many much better games.
An element of chance is fine, if it allows interesting decision making. Good games of chance indeed involve strategies like hedging your bets. But with Monopoly, 90% of turns involve literally no decision-making - you roll, move along, and pay out or not. Occasionally you have a tough call to make about whether to buy a property, or how many houses to buy - but those are the exception rather than the rule. 90% of the game is essentially you doing bookkeeping for the game.
"A factor of chance" does not make a game "unworthy". Particularly, you're looking at this as a binary decision of worthy or unworthy.
What makes a game interesting to most people is how much randomness there is.
Human brains are built to dole out reward hormones when they make predictions and, followed by a period of uncertainty/expectation, their predictions come true; OR fail in such a way that they gain enough information to improve future predictions.
Having too little randomness can (if there is little complexity) mean that predictions always come trivially true, which does not trigger the reward mechanism.
Having too much randomness disables the triggering by way of a "teaching failure". (Though it still leaves the way open for the success trigger, thus addictions to gambling.)
So in order for a game to be good, it needs to strike a certain balance between simplicity/complexity and determinism/randomness.
> I don't see why a factor of chance makes a game unworthy.
Because it often makes it unfun. Not always, of course, many of the highest rated games on the Geek also have random elements. But in the case of, say, Chutes and Ladders, the entire outcome is random. Might as well flip a coin and call it. Why spend the time going up and down the board?
For monopoly, a big crime is that it takes a long time to lose. You can spend an hour with no chance of winning, kept alive only by random chance.
These are not 'unworthy', they are just boring in comparison to many other games. I think people avoid the 'other' games not because they have some deep subtle appreciation for the merits of the 'bad' games, but because they haven't come across better options. It is rare to find someone who likes Monopoly who can describe another game with the same theme (not counting Star Wars Monopoly!).
An interesting aspect of Monopoly hate not discussed so far is the analogy with computer graphics / VR "uncanny valley".
Much like a CGI face can approximate a human closely enough to be just far enough off to be repellent, an individual board game can approximate the ideal of a really good game yet end up so far off the mark that it lands in the uncanny valley of dislike.
Most of the general public doesn't like political activism, and the game being invented as a piece of propaganda, more or less, it not going to appeal to most people because its propaganda, and even worse, some of why the game sucks might have been required for propaganda purposes. And that circularizes the argument for the general public, see why political propaganda is bad, it made the Monopoly game suck by dumping to the bottom of the uncanny valley therefore propaganda is bad.
In summary I'd theorize that game appeal follows an uncanny valley curve and unfortunately right at the bottom of the trench is where you'll find Monopoly.
BGG rankings are essentially based on the idea of "how likely/eager would I be to agree to a game of X". By that measure tic tac toe deserves to be ranked very lowly. Same goes for Monopoly for me it's mostly a boring long grind with very few interesting decisions. Once you've understood that some squares are reached more often than others it's also closed to solved imo...at least there's a very good standard strategy.
Granted that's not how most people would rank games especially if they get played only once a year or on the occasional family meeting. I would also rank "A few Acres of Snow" very lowly but it's still reasonably high on BGG despite being solved/broken.
There's also many people on BGG who have a "mission" of getting people to play less boring games. I'll gladly rank Monopoly lower than its true value because in relative terms I want it to lose as much ground as possible.
It's also noteworthy that they have different categories (overall ranking, strategy games, family games, war games etc.). The family games ranking is very useful when buying games for the occasional game night (Monopoly replacement).
There's also the (sometimes artificial) divide between thematic games (commonly referred to as Ameritrash) and strategy focused games (commonly referred to as Eurogames). Both archetypes are great fun for me but some people prefer a rich story and immersion (say Imperial Assault where you play a bunch of Rebels facing off against the Empire) and some want their games to be more pure optimization exercises. Like I said I love both types but this shows how hard it is to produce a unified ranking that makes everyone happy.
And of course their algorithm is far from great (imo). Some games stick around for sentimental reasons or because they are hard to get, it's odd that they don't unify versions of games etc.
Same guess for the UI which is quite horrible (once again imo).
"Complexity can be the result of elegant design" LOL its always the opposite. More detail below:
The second to last paragraph is a direct analogy with programming where outsiders think the best programmer is the one generating infinitely complex code, but for people actually in the field the criteria is the reverse and the best programmer solves the problem with the least complex code. Of course this is somewhat political and some lisp-ish functional-ish languages are more aerospace "simplicate and add lightness" than other more grindy languages (java, cobol, whats the difference...)
A gaming insider's view of the last paragraph is the lead story in the latest "C3I Magazine" is by the COIN series designer explaining the virtue, measurement, and minimization of complexity as a series of games develop. On a slightly tangential topic, C3I Magazine has an interesting although probably unscalable solution to the magazine industry crisis.
It is pretty obvious to me that this is a natural trend in a lot of areas of entertainment.
Game design techniques are refined with time it is only normal that "classical" games get to the back rack as games develop to be more subtle, simple and refined.
[+] [-] kqr|10 years ago|reply
1. Sure, tic-tac-toe is a fantastic game for someone who needs to learn the "rewards of thinking ahead and taking the opponent’s strategy into account". Game enthusiasts (or indeed anyone above the age of 12) are very unlikely to need this lesson.
1> However, there is an interesting variant of tic-tac-toe[1] so disregarding the game completely isn't fair either.
2. People don't dislike Monopoly because it has dice. Risk has dice, and is incredibly popular. People dislike Monopoly because it is designed to be a game that is not fun to play for all but one player.
2> The game was designed as an anti-capitalist, anti-monopolist lesson.[2] When the rules are set up just right, only one person will be the winner and the other people will spiral into a negative feedback loop and quickly run out of all their money. That's the entire premise of the game: if you have a lot of money you can easily get more. Of course a game which is designed to distress 3/4 people playing in a session is not going to be very highly rated.
That said, I do think there is one popular game that gets very little respect from (at least western) game enthusiasts: go[3]!
Probably known in these circles as "the game computers can't yet beat top humans in" it's an abstract strategy game for two players (like chess) – with incredibly simple rules. You can learn the rules in a few minutes (literally) but it will take you weeks to even start feeling like you know what you are doing, and years before you're competent. The strategic and tactical depth is vast, much deeper than any other game I've tried.
[1]: http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/06/16/ultimate-tic-tac-t...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_board_game_Mono...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)
[+] [-] thraxil|10 years ago|reply
I guess I would have to disagree with your characterization of go as not respected. I've never heard any of the game enthusiasts I know talk about go in anything but the same reverent tone you use to explain why you like it. Who are you hanging out with?
[+] [-] purpled_haze|10 years ago|reply
"The queen, which can move horizontally, vertically or diagonally, is nothing more than a combination of the rook and the bishop, making it an inelegant redundancy."
Whoever stated that has never played chess to the level they should before even attempting to comment on the game.
Chess would seem to me to be one of the ultimate games for humans; it's simple enough to teach a child, but few adults can come close to mastering it.
Even the term "chess master" is a bit of a lie. To be a "chess master", you'd have to know the perfect solution move for every board configuration- forget openings, gambits, tactics- that's child's play compared to truly mastering the game. People called "masters" are just really damn good- not perfect.
In comparison, I am a "tic tac toe" master. I know that I can fail to lose at the game if I try.
[+] [-] lmm|10 years ago|reply
/Played chess reasonably seriously at one point and I still enjoy it occasionally, but let's be honest about its flaws
[+] [-] amalcon|10 years ago|reply
The queen is absolutely the wrong thing to pick on, though. Castling would be an obvious example, but my go-to is En passant. The pawn double-move is obviously inelegant (sharing the problem with castling that it may only ever be a piece's first move), but it inarguably makes the game better. If you've ever tried playing without it, you know that it makes the opening both faster and more interesting.
However, the pawn double-move introduces a strategic problem where a pawn can sometimes skip past another. The en passant rule is thus introduced as an obvious fix for that bug.
It would be problematic to have either of these rules without the other, and neither is particularly elegant, but the combination improves the game a lot.
See also: the infield fly rule in Baseball, the shot clock in any sport that has a shot clock, I'm sure anyone can name several more.
[+] [-] heydenberk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cognivore|10 years ago|reply
I've spent that last thirty years playing and watching board games enter what seems to be their golden age, and have introduced scores of people to the games I love, and have had friends do so in kind. Almost universally people say something along the lines of, "Wow, that was fun. It's nothing like the games we played as a kid." Often followed up with "Where do we buy this?" They don't play the games from their childhood anymore because they're boring and they didn't know there were alternatives. Now they'll play board games as adults and enjoy themselves. Beats the Hell out of TV.
[+] [-] agentultra|10 years ago|reply
And the rating system on that site is in question of late due to a presently controversial number 1 game: Pandemic: Legacy. The rating system is highly subjective and many suspect is prone to "flavor of the week," ratings by people who don't take time to read the scale and objectively rate the games they play.
Monopoly could be rated so lowly because it is a popular opinion on the site that it's not a good game.
That being said I don't think the classics are disappearing or that they're bad games. A game like Mancala is seeing a resurgence as a mechanic in many popular games today. I think we can learn something from what made these games endure for so long and are starting to incorporate them into new games.
Don't let the rating system on boardgamegeek dictate what we think is a really good game until the objectivity problem gets sorted out.
update: An example of a thread that comes up every now and again: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1512907/new-rating-system-n...
[+] [-] toothbrush|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joezydeco|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muzani|10 years ago|reply
It has to be played with around 4+ people. They need to trade favors along with their land. With enough players, the favors owed last long enough to make a difference.
The randomness simply makes negotiation power the main focus of the game. E.g. if you land on a rival's hotel and go broke, a rich ally can pay you premium on your land. You'll realize early on that everyone is either going to be doomed or super-rich, so it's worth being diplomatic really early on.
When someone starts to snowball into a monopoly, they have to start laying low, while the others have to encourage the others to pile pressure. The players have to notice this trend early, at the point where it makes sense to 'blacklist' certain players.
It's a game with about as much depth as Settlers of Catan, without having to worry about too much complexity.
[+] [-] colejohnson66|10 years ago|reply
From Wikipedia[0]:
> The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903,[1][4] when American anti-monopolist Elizabeth (Lizzie) J. Magie Phillips, created a game through which she hoped to be able to explain the single tax theory of Henry George. It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)#Early_history
[+] [-] SeanBoocock|10 years ago|reply
I still prefer most designer board games to Monopoly, but I don't think it is worthy of the condescension most board game enthusiasts regard it with it.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
Ironically, Balance of Power is an actual game, and it's single-player.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)
[+] [-] lmm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zikes|10 years ago|reply
When I have an opportunity to play board games with people I will always want to play something that I think is fun, exciting, or new. Monopoly is none of those things to me. For some people it probably endures primarily out of nostalgia, or a lack of interest in other options, but there are so many better options for new board game players.
[+] [-] jclos|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anywhichway|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cableshaft|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|10 years ago|reply
I expect other articles from the author to include "Why don't wine enthusiasts like $3 bottles of rotgut? I mean, it's really popular with winos" and "why do people like listening to musical bands? Toy xylophones are popular with kids, and teaches them hand-eye co-ordination, rhythm, and so forth."
I mean, the author lionises tic-tac-toe as providing some deep life lesson, when in actuality, even the author's target demographic gets bored of it in very short order.
[+] [-] chipsy|10 years ago|reply
That said, games also say something about the societies that play them. Monopoly's popularity in spite of its unfairness speaks to that. Playing it, and winning, reinforces a certain fantasy about becoming a property owner. The casual player believes: "This is how life works."
[+] [-] facepalm|10 years ago|reply
For Monopoly, mathematicians have worked out winning strategies. I think it has to do with a high chance of people landing in jail and the odds of landing on fields when starting from jail.
[+] [-] babarock|10 years ago|reply
The things I dislike about Monopoly:
* Not too much strategy involved. The player who wins is usually the one who buys a lot of lands early.
* It's long. Even the shortest games last over 90 minutes. However the winner is decided much earlier in the game. There's very little you can do to prevent an early leader from taking the game, and you have to sit there watching them bully you slowly for several hours.
* The theme sucks. "Buy land, make more money". I don't find that particularly fun.
* The good elements of monopoly are often found in other games that don't share the same bad elements (I'm thinking of Settlers, but there are others too).
[+] [-] DanBC|10 years ago|reply
Monopoly's lack of fun comes from the player elimination, which is a crucial part of the game. People dislike player elimination (because it feels mean), and include stuff to avoid it, (fines go in the middle and are collected if you land on free parking, for example). These house rules turn a 1 hour game into an interminable 5 hour slog.
If you have a group of people who are happy with the concept of player elimination, and who play to win, and you avoid the house rules, Monopoly becomes somewhat fun. But there are very many much better games.
[+] [-] lmm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mithaldu|10 years ago|reply
What makes a game interesting to most people is how much randomness there is.
Human brains are built to dole out reward hormones when they make predictions and, followed by a period of uncertainty/expectation, their predictions come true; OR fail in such a way that they gain enough information to improve future predictions.
Having too little randomness can (if there is little complexity) mean that predictions always come trivially true, which does not trigger the reward mechanism.
Having too much randomness disables the triggering by way of a "teaching failure". (Though it still leaves the way open for the success trigger, thus addictions to gambling.)
So in order for a game to be good, it needs to strike a certain balance between simplicity/complexity and determinism/randomness.
[+] [-] sago|10 years ago|reply
Because it often makes it unfun. Not always, of course, many of the highest rated games on the Geek also have random elements. But in the case of, say, Chutes and Ladders, the entire outcome is random. Might as well flip a coin and call it. Why spend the time going up and down the board?
For monopoly, a big crime is that it takes a long time to lose. You can spend an hour with no chance of winning, kept alive only by random chance.
These are not 'unworthy', they are just boring in comparison to many other games. I think people avoid the 'other' games not because they have some deep subtle appreciation for the merits of the 'bad' games, but because they haven't come across better options. It is rare to find someone who likes Monopoly who can describe another game with the same theme (not counting Star Wars Monopoly!).
[+] [-] VLM|10 years ago|reply
Much like a CGI face can approximate a human closely enough to be just far enough off to be repellent, an individual board game can approximate the ideal of a really good game yet end up so far off the mark that it lands in the uncanny valley of dislike.
Most of the general public doesn't like political activism, and the game being invented as a piece of propaganda, more or less, it not going to appeal to most people because its propaganda, and even worse, some of why the game sucks might have been required for propaganda purposes. And that circularizes the argument for the general public, see why political propaganda is bad, it made the Monopoly game suck by dumping to the bottom of the uncanny valley therefore propaganda is bad.
In summary I'd theorize that game appeal follows an uncanny valley curve and unfortunately right at the bottom of the trench is where you'll find Monopoly.
[+] [-] kriro|10 years ago|reply
Granted that's not how most people would rank games especially if they get played only once a year or on the occasional family meeting. I would also rank "A few Acres of Snow" very lowly but it's still reasonably high on BGG despite being solved/broken.
There's also many people on BGG who have a "mission" of getting people to play less boring games. I'll gladly rank Monopoly lower than its true value because in relative terms I want it to lose as much ground as possible. It's also noteworthy that they have different categories (overall ranking, strategy games, family games, war games etc.). The family games ranking is very useful when buying games for the occasional game night (Monopoly replacement).
There's also the (sometimes artificial) divide between thematic games (commonly referred to as Ameritrash) and strategy focused games (commonly referred to as Eurogames). Both archetypes are great fun for me but some people prefer a rich story and immersion (say Imperial Assault where you play a bunch of Rebels facing off against the Empire) and some want their games to be more pure optimization exercises. Like I said I love both types but this shows how hard it is to produce a unified ranking that makes everyone happy.
And of course their algorithm is far from great (imo). Some games stick around for sentimental reasons or because they are hard to get, it's odd that they don't unify versions of games etc. Same guess for the UI which is quite horrible (once again imo).
[+] [-] VLM|10 years ago|reply
The second to last paragraph is a direct analogy with programming where outsiders think the best programmer is the one generating infinitely complex code, but for people actually in the field the criteria is the reverse and the best programmer solves the problem with the least complex code. Of course this is somewhat political and some lisp-ish functional-ish languages are more aerospace "simplicate and add lightness" than other more grindy languages (java, cobol, whats the difference...)
A gaming insider's view of the last paragraph is the lead story in the latest "C3I Magazine" is by the COIN series designer explaining the virtue, measurement, and minimization of complexity as a series of games develop. On a slightly tangential topic, C3I Magazine has an interesting although probably unscalable solution to the magazine industry crisis.
[+] [-] jld89|10 years ago|reply
Game design techniques are refined with time it is only normal that "classical" games get to the back rack as games develop to be more subtle, simple and refined.
[+] [-] cwyers|10 years ago|reply
Well, it's not simple.