When Titans Fall

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Have any "Classics" crashed and burned when you introduced them to your gaming group? No judgement here, just curious.

Cosmic has for me pretty hard.

In my experience, Cosmic Encounter does worse with established gamers than with everyone else. I think the average hobbyist has a narrow idea of what games are and how they should work and react negatively when Cosmic doesn't go that way.

Beyond that, the most common issue with Cosmic is people inviting everyone. That's going to lead to a bad game so I try to stress how allies get more from an alliance than you do and so on.

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But, to be honest the biggest issue is not that games fail. It's that people fail games. The average boardgamer seems compeltely unwilling to learn how to play a new title and will dismiss it after the first play if they didn't play it correctly. And the better games don't tend to be the best on their first play. So we are stuck playing safe, conservative titles where everyone can't do no wrong.

I've never had a classic crash and burn, but I tend to be very aware of a potential mismatch between players and game. For example, I'm not going to bother bringing out Acquire for my AmeriTrash gamers, and I'm not going to bring Fury of Dracula to the monthly hipster boardgame group that tends to prefer party games like Cards Against Humanity.

Though not a classic, one of my all-time favorite games is The Hills Rise Wild, and it totally crashed and burned with my old high school gaming group. Two of them hated that the game uses a tape measure for movement, and they kept accusing everybody of fudging their movement. We stopped playing after a few turns and I packed it away while they complained about how the game would be fine if I drew a hex grid on the map tiles. Before and after that incident, every game of The Hills Rise Wild with other gamers was fun.

Trying to think of others... I've had Battlestar Galactica and War of the Ring go over like a lead balloon.

Erik Twice wrote: In my experience, Cosmic Encounter does worse with established gamers than with everyone else. I think the average hobbyist has a narrow idea of what games are and how they should work and react negatively when Cosmic doesn't go that way.

Specifically, I think that some established gamers hate the destiny draw, because they want to control which race they encounter. And other established gamers hate that more than one player can win. On two occasions, I have taught non-gamers how to play Cosmic Encounter, and they enjoyed it.

Back in the 1980s we played a LOT of Illuminati and it was almost always great -- lots of deals, betrayals, reversals, and sudden grabs for victory in all-or-nothing battles. It was a fabulous game (we liked it even more than Cosmic Encounter).

Forward twenty years and I introduced it to my group of Euro-gamers. It fell flat as a pancake. None of the players could see any point in helping (or hindering!) their opponents. An absolute disaster. Although I mostly blame the players for this, the game does require that you bring the right attitude so it's not entirely blameless either.

Greg Aleknevicus wrote: Although I mostly blame the players for this, the game does require that you bring the right attitude so it's not entirely blameless either.

Yep. CE is similar and so are games like Diplomacy and Dune. If you don't come into them willing and/or able to communicate (negotiate, compromise, etc.), the game will suffer or simply not work at all.

Greg Aleknevicus wrote: Back in the 1980s we played a LOT of Illuminati and it was almost always great -- lots of deals, betrayals, reversals, and sudden grabs for victory in all-or-nothing battles. It was a fabulous game (we liked it even more than Cosmic Encounter).

Forward twenty years and I introduced it to my group of Euro-gamers. It fell flat as a pancake. None of the players could see any point in helping (or hindering!) their opponents. An absolute disaster. Although I mostly blame the players for this, the game does require that you bring the right attitude so it's not entirely blameless either.

On the podcast So Very Wrong About Games, this comes up regularly. Mark Bigney tears his hair out because he'll play games with Walker, the other guy on the pod, and if they require more than a little negotiation or metabargaining, Walker just won't engage in them and lose. It's very funny, and it doesn't just apply to AT dudes on a map, Walker like won't trade much in Sidereal Confluence and lose miserably.