Feeling it - Board Game Components

I actually kind of like the paper money visually for sure, and tactilely. And its denomination is static, whereas poker chips need to be reassigned their values depending on the game.

The paper money that comes with the game looks like part of the game instead of the poker chips which appear as a bolted-on object intruding in the mix.

Gary Sax wrote: edit: it goes without saying that I have become wealthier too since I was a dirtbag grad student; that might also be driving this.

Well if you're going to humblebrag your own comfortable financial status, then the rule is Gary Sax now has to buy each of us a new game. I, for one, will be choosing one with a load of blinged-out tactile enhancements!

On the topic of game money, flinging around the stacks of paper bills in Millennium Blades is great fun. Having to assemble all of those wads of cash was... less fun. But worth it.

I am, to a degree, a fan of games that have something in the box that doesn't serve much of a real purpose. For example, the mountain standee that came in one of the Epic Spell Wars games. It didn't do anything, other than be ridiculous.

Other great components of note: the monuments you assemble in Lords of Hellas, the Rambo knife round tracker in Rambo, and the infection scanner in Nemesis.

The paper money thing is useful in games where you make tons of transactions but it's by far most important in games where you *must* know, at all times, how much money your opponents have before doing actions.

hotseatgames wrote: ...
Other great components of note: the monuments you assemble in Lords of Hellas ....

Yes ! (I have recently dry-brushed mine, as a non-painter, and they look fantastic as monuments now)

hotseatgames wrote: ...
and the infection scanner in Nemesis.

And YES ! This is a brilliant part of the game ... and I saw something similar done in another review of a game, Middara perhaps, where they have a large campaign book and all the secret or 'not to be read at this stage' is in the same colour-mix hidden format and you had to hold a 'scanner' over the text on the page to read it.

Art is more crucial to me than components. I'm not completely indifferent to the heft of a fancy poker chip or the wonderful texture of the debossed map tiles of Space Hulk 3rd, but the right art can do a much better job of establishing the setting and tone of the game. Painted miniatures can enhance a game, but most people never get around to painting their minis, and those unpainted minis add almost nothing to my enjoyment of the game. The unpainted minis can even potentially create a bit of confusion, depending on the size of the minis and the amount on the table at any given time.