Every year the website BGG publishes a Geek Preview list of all the games at the Spiel Essen. People can then give thumbs up to the games they are most interested in, which results in a fairly democratic list of the most anticipated games at the fair. I am looking at that list, and would like to mention three games out of the top 5 in "hotness" on that list: Queen Alice, Avalon: The Riven Veil, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance - The Board Game.

What I notice, and suspect has a lot to do with how anticipated these games are, is that all three of these games have a great table presence. You look at a photo of the game when it is set up, and it looks very interesting and like something you would like to play. What I question is whether that translates to actual fun playing. If we look back at these three games a year from now, did the people who bought them actually play them a lot?

The reason I am asking myself that is that I backed one of these games, Avalon: The Riven Veil, on Kickstarter, and already got my copy. It is even the medium deluxe version, with shaded miniatures instead of cardboard standees, and an expansion adding a 5th player faction as well as plastic token replacements for cardboard material in the base game. So with that game being so anticipated at the Spiel, and me not going there, I thought this was a good week to play Avalon.

The first attempt of that was pretty catastrophic. The 90 to 120 minutes play time printed on the box are a complete lie. It takes a full hour to just set up and explain the game rules. And then we played 90 minutes with 4 players, and barely got through one season, with the game having a short 2 season and a long 3 season option. And that was with using the most barebone rules, for example without asymmetric player powers. I am going to play Avalon again today, with people who all looked at the rules or played before, and for our 4-player game with asymmetric player power and 3 seasons I think it will still take us 4 to 5 hours.

From what I can see about Queen Alice, it is also a game that takes a good amount of time when played with 4 players. Kingdom Come: Deliverance - The Board Game is even worse, with the general recommendation being to play it either solo or just with 2 players, as a 4-player game is extremely long and ends up having huge downtime for each player, while waiting for the other three to do their turns.

Now I see a lot of things in Queen Alice and Kingdom Come: Deliverance - The Board Game that interest me. I think these would be fun games to play. And I think it will be fun to play Avalon this afternoon. However, I consider all of these games to be hard to bring to the table. They are all games in which it would be really good to only play with people who already know the rules, and who will bring a certain degree of commitment to the table. None of these games is playable or fun with a more casual crowd or even with experienced but unprepared gamers on a board game night. And in my experience, the games that have that much of a barrier to entry end up getting played a lot less than the games that you could just bring to any table without requiring that much preparation from your fellow players.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 9:26 AM Permanent Link