Game Design Question #2

[freetrav]

This isn't really about your opinion on game design, but on games themselves, although I will be using the answers I get as input data for a potential game-design project.

What games do you think aren't as good AS A GAME as their commercial popularity would indicate, and, conversely, what games do you think are better AS GAMES than their commercial popularity would indicate? Since it's hard to define criteria (other than commercial popularity, i.e., copies of the game (or its equipment) sold) for how good a game is, please explain how you made your evaluation(s). I'd like more emphasis on board games (e.g., chess, checkers, pachisi, snakes-and-ladders, goose, Monopoly, Scrabble, etc.) than on other styles (cards, dice, etc.), but comments on those other styles will be welcome as well, as such comments may provide additional insight into what people think makes a game "good" or "bad".

Comments

[dmmaus.livejournal.com]

Let me open with Monopoly as the classic example of a game that is not as good as its popularity might indicate. It has a very low level of decision making and player interaction - 90%+ of your turns have no decisions to be made at all. It eliminates players along the way, meaning they have to sit around doing something else while the remaining players keep playing, making it fairly antisocial and potentially boring. The endgame is interminable, even when one player has a clear lead - from a given position it may be obvious that you have a 90% chance of winning, but that chance doesn't get resolved quickly... you have to sit around rolling dice dozens of times. Prolonged inevitability is something to be avoided in game design.

Another example bad game is Cluedo (a.k.a. Clue in the US). While the idea of a deductive game has potential, there is no real deduction as such - it's more of a bookkeeping exercise. The dice movement serves no purpose except to randomise things and frustrate players who want to get to the next room to do something actually related to advancing the game. The deduction mechanics are clunky in that it's to your advantage to make poor "guesses" to hide information from other players. And the theme integration is very poor - you can win the game by revealing yourself as the murderer, a fact that you didn't actually know at the start of the game.

For games that are better than their popularity indicates, take almost any board game produced in Germany. These game designers know how to design games that don't fall into the same old traps as mass-market American/British games. Yet they remain obscure to much of the general public, who perpetuate the cycle by buying their kids Monopoly, resulting in another generation who think board games intrinsically suck.

Sorry, I got a bit ranty there. :-)

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

Monopoly was the first one I thought of too!