The Biggest Disappointments

Which games have disappointed you the most? The games that you were excited to finally play, and yet were poorly received by everybody at the table. What went wrong?

Cosmic utterly bombed the two times I've played it. Played with too few players, I think, and people who didn't appreciate the wheeling and dealing aspect.

Cosmic utterly bombed the two times I've played it. Played with too few players, I think, and people who didn't appreciate the wheeling and dealing aspect.

Missile Command. It should have been awesome. But it wasn’t.

From back in the Dawn of Time - Tempus. That was going to be the Holy Grail '90-minute Civilization' game. It turned out to be a 90-minute snoozefest, that had any resemblance to Civilization baked out of it.

My first play of Cosmic Encounter bombed because players didn't get the interaction element. Oddly, the one time I played Cosmic with a group of non-gamers, it went really well.

Blood Feud in New York flatlined with my group. Players were annoyed by all the math and the fiddly movement rules, and we stopped after an hour.

My first game of Android was disappointing. Five player game that we halted after seven hours due to one player with extreme analysis paralysis.

I talked my family into playing RoboRally, and we quit after a few turns because my dad was so frustrated about programming his moves.

My original gaming group was unable to continue playing The Hills Rise Wild, because they couldn't accept movement rules that incorporated a tape measure. They kept accusing each other of fudging the movement, even though the rules actually permit a bit of fudging.

Shellhead wrote: My first play of Cosmic Encounter bombed because players didn't get the interaction element. Oddly, the one time I played Cosmic with a group of non-gamers, it went really well.

This is a very interesting observation I have found to be true on and off as well. Sometimes the hyper interactive games work better with "non-gamers" of the right type, I think just because life is such a social negotiation in general that they wouldn't think to bring anything else to a game.

Le Havre was heart-breakingly bad and boring to play. I loved what I had heard about it, i loved the instruction manual, and was shocked with how lifeless it was.

Machi Koro: I'd heard great things about it. It literally felt like a anti gateway game. It turned off the majority of players to wanting to try something different.

Doctor Who: Time Clash~ limited to one doctor, no immersion, gameplay is boring.I wanted to like it based on the IP and still couldn't get over the hump.

Battlestar Galactica. I wanted to like it, not least because everyone here and at BGG were raving about it. But I also really liked the systems and it just seemed like a great package. But it totally fell flat with our group. The motion sequence felt rushed. There didn't seem to be any real advantage to being the Cylons and it (ahem) alienated part of the group to feel like they were playing half a co-op and half not. I got them to try again but it had the same effect the second time, so I traded it.

Black Barney wrote: Le Havre was heart-breakingly bad and boring to play. I loved what I had heard about it, i loved the instruction manual, and was shocked with how lifeless it was.

I find it more entertaining than Puerto Rico.

For me it was Massive Darkness. I thought it was a no-brainer.

Turns out it was ... too much of a no-brainer.

Secret Hitler bombed at my table. It looked great on paper, so I did the free download print and play version. But my role-playing group found little to discuss during the game, even when voting. The cards just happened to favor the non-Nazis, so the game ended with little conflict and no fun.

Star Trek Fleet Captains

The production values were rock bottom. The tiles were of the cheesiest card stock, the miniature ships were brittle and several of them arrived broken. For the price which was $100 in a day when board games did not cost $100 this was inexcusable.

It was boring and non immersive. I kept waiting for the fun to start but it never did. I was just going to set it on fire but instead sent it off to an unappreciative fellow F:AT member.

An utter P.O.S. of a game.

Then came Ascendancy and I saw what a real Star Trek game looked like.

My disappointment with Inis is already recorded in that thread, but my first gaming disappointment was Fluxx.

My wife and I had been going out to open play at a local shop for a few weeks and getting more and more excited about gaming. Finally I picked out Fluxx. There were so many variants! It had to be good!

The first card we drew forced us to play an extra card every turn. We literally had to play every card we drew when we drew it. A few turns later I won. I thought we had missed a rule. We had not.