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A friend told me Kickstarter is ruining his gaming social circles and he's right
- Erik Twice
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1) We were meeting less often
2) He was meeting less often with another gaming group
3) Bad kickstarter games were the cause
And he's right. I've been meeting less often with him and a Kickstarter-buying friend because I don't want to play bad games anymore. My enjoyment of meeting to play has gone down massively because isntead of playing a couple nice games, we play poorly tested crap once and then move on to more poorly tested crap. Going from Fury of Dracula, Terraforming Mars and Chicago Express to playing the average Kickstarter once is a massive downgrade.
My friend also complained about not being able to say anything, because criticism of those games is taken personally. And it's true. In general, game owners don't take it kindly when people criticize the games they bought, but it's significantly worse with Kickstaters. Part of this is the larger personal involvement of patronage or preordering compared to buying, but the other part is that these games tend to be very poorly tested and, hence, have more to complain about.
I must admit this is also a recurring issue at the club. I may be a whiny elitist, but I never wish I would have stayed home when the resident classic eurogame fan invites me to play, while I often end up doing so when the Kickstarters hit the table.
Thoughts?
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Instead of opinions of games we get opinions on components.
I’ve also encountered someone claim that criticism of board games are personal attacks against their designers.
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- Sagrilarus
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Erik Twice wrote: One of the people I play the most with just sent me a message telling me to write an article about "How shitty kickstarter games ruined my friends circle". I asked him what happened and he told me he had just realized the following:
1) We were meeting less often
2) He was meeting less often with another gaming group
3) Bad kickstarter games were the cause
And he's right. I've been meeting less often with him and a Kickstarter-buying friend because I don't want to play bad games anymore. My enjoyment of meeting to play has gone down massively because isntead of playing a couple nice games, we play poorly tested crap once and then move on to more poorly tested crap. Going from Fury of Dracula, Terraforming Mars and Chicago Express to playing the average Kickstarter once is a massive downgrade.
My friend also complained about not being able to say anything, because criticism of those games is taken personally. And it's true. In general, game owners don't take it kindly when people criticize the games they bought, but it's significantly worse with Kickstaters. Part of this is the larger personal involvement of patronage or preordering compared to buying, but the other part is that these games tend to be very poorly tested and, hence, have more to complain about.
I must admit this is also a recurring issue at the club. I may be a whiny elitist, but I never wish I would have stayed home when the resident classic euroga,e fan invites me to play, while I often end up doing so when the Kickstarters hit the table.
Thoughts?
This happened before kickstarter, but to a lesser extent. There were less bad games, and you had trouble finding them let alone buying them.
I walk away from games I don't want to play because my group is about seven people usually and I can. I often am pulling out an old game with good specs and "relearning" it because I don't get to play old games more than once every five years. Often someone joins me.
Part of the hobby now.
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- san il defanso
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Partly that's because they are populated by more than just people I know, which is fine, but it's not nearly the communal experience it used to be.
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thehardtimes.net/harddrive/new-board-gam...-4p4UNrVW9IipRNlpnc8
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n815e wrote: I am noticing that the number of review videos is being overcome by unboxing videos.
Instead of opinions of games we get opinions on components.
I’ve also encountered someone claim that criticism of board games are personal attacks against their designers.
Every time you watch an unboxing video a kitten dies .
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- Michael Barnes
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I quit playing with one of my regular groups (10+ years)) because it became a weekly Kickstarter showcase with 2-3 people showing up with whatever shipped that week and an aspiration to get it played... even if it means fumbling through a badly written 50 page rulebook and sorting through piles of components at the table. Then the next day - “well, we played it wrong”. I got sick of playing first scenarios of campaign games.
But along with those games, there was also a weird psychology brought to the table. Nobody wants to be the one to tell the guy that the $300 they invested a year ago in an entire product line’s worth of garbage content was wasted...and that nobody wants to play it next week. There’s this weird sense that you are playing something just so somebody doesn’t feel bad about their buying decision. It’s a strange kind of social pressure...in some ways, it’s almost this narcissistic kind of thing- “I bought this big expensive game and you all are going to play it with me”. That’s not really exclusive to a Kickstarter game I guess, but it’s amplified when every week a new $300 pledge is on the table.
TBH, the only regular group I play with is made of folks that barely buy games. They play pretty much what I bring. And we play and replay the games we all really like. We aren’t searching for anything. We know what we like to play. Some nights we spend 0 minutes in rules explanation. There is never any pressure to appease someone that brought their $300 pledge.
I can’t imagine going to a public game night in the Kickstarter era...
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- ChristopherMD
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My first few years in the hobby were wasted on hundreds of "meh" games that would only get brought out once then onto something else next week. I used to log my plays and think it was like only 1 in 10 sessions were replays of the games I actually wanted to play. Imagine wanting to get Tigris & Euphrates on the table for a second or third time but first you have to play 20 different bland Euros.
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- san il defanso
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- san il defanso
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But when you are kind of guessing at what will be big, you are really just adding to the fractured nature of the hobby, because you're basically writing about completely different games from everyone else. Again, not good or bad but definitely different.
It doesn't help that so many publishers are loathe to comp copies these days. It just means that you need to either wait longer to review something that becomes popular, or curate some more by way of what you purchase.
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