Throwing away a board game

It doesn't happen very often, but yesterday I threw my copy of Nova Aetas: Renaissance into the garbage bin. Well, garbage bins, as I properly sorted the plastic from the paper for ecological reasons. Nova Aetas: Renaissance was a 2020 Kickstarter board game, which was supposed to be delivered in 2021, but was actually delivered in 2023. I paid $188 for it, including shipping and some extras. By the time we got around to playing it in 2025, the game design was already thoroughly outdated for a campaign game. Nova Aetas: Renaissance is a campaign game using tiles and 3D terrain for maps, and has a huge box full of plastic miniatures, endless numbers of tokens and cards. That looks great on the table, but as people found out over the years, those games are rather tedious to set up and manage. Modern campaign games are more streamlined, use map books, and don't go overboard with tokens and cards.

We gave Nova Aetas: Renaissance a fair shake, I would say. We played two sessions, for a total of around 10 hours. In that time we managed 3 main campaign story missions, and one side mission. The side mission was the only one we had any fun in. In the first story mission we ended up in a situation where we were boxed in and couldn't move, and as it took several rounds to kill an enemy we had a series of rather boring turns. The second and third story mission we both lost, and couldn't replay because of the fail forward system. In both those mission the objective tokens were randomly distributed on the map, and we just had bad luck of them being in the worst possible spots in both cases. We failed the missions, and felt that we couldn't have done it any better, it was just a matter of bad luck. So we took a quick vote, and decided unanimously to stop playing this game. Life is too short to play unfun campaign games.

The huge and heavy box then posed a new problem: It took up too much shelf space for a game that I didn't want to play anymore, and didn't see me playing in the future. Being big and heavy meant that shipping cost would have been high if I had sold it online, and there aren't any good options to sell second-hand board games anywhere near. The game was far too specialized for a thrift shop. So in the end I decided to throw the game away. Honestly, I should do that more often. Especially with the legacy campaign games I have played through, and won't be able to play again anyway. But it is emotionally easier to throw away a game I disliked.