Category: Rants

A Quick Rant on 1 Star Board Game Geek Reviews

A while ago, a friend of mine had just released a game, and was doing what all board game designers (as far as I’m aware) do post game release: stare in frustration at the ratings on Board Game Geek.

The particular source of his frustration was a that the game had been rated with a 1 by someone who clearly didn’t own the game, and couldn’t have possibly played the game at the time. Shortly after he mentioned the whole thing to me.

We quickly discussed various reasons that players will do this, and there was a smattering of the usual ones. Review bombing a game for ideological reasons. Rating a game that is rated “too highly” to bring the score down. Fights or problems with a publisher.

It was at this point that I asked him if he’d just asked this person why they’d given him a 1. He had not.

So messaged them. I’ll be referring to the rater as “Tim.”

Reaching Out

After looking at the profile for a bit, I quickly noticed that it had a very odd distribution of ratings. Virtually all of them were 1’s, with a smattering of 7-10’s, but the 1’s MASSIVELY outweighed the 10’s.

So I messaged Tim, and asked them about their rating system for games. After a brief back and fourth, they responded, and I found their answer surprising.

The Big Surprise

The first thing was that Tim was not a single person, and instead was a group of players who used the account to collaboratively track plays and games for their gaming club.

The second was that when they “rated” a game, they were not rating it based on playing it. They were giving a rating based on how they felt as a group, and if they wanted to order it for the group. So a game that wasn’t bad might receive a 1 for the reason that nobody in the group was interested in trying it. This was especially common for games that the group considered too simple, or didn’t have the right player count.

There’s also one specific quote I want to pull out from their response, that I found quite telling.

Regarding the not yet released (games) – we consider ourselves enough experienced so we do not need to play the game to know that it is not for us – one text or video review is more than enough.

This is not an approach I would ever take, but I appreciated the clarity, and I think it gives insight on why this person had such a high number of low-rated games.

I thanked them for their response, and moved on.

The Takeaways

The general vibe I have gotten from designers when discussing what I’d generally consider to be unusually low ratings is a sense that they’re being targeted in some way or another.

There absolutely are folks in board game spaces who do what I’d call “hateful reviews.” The folks who hate others based on their sexual orientation, gender, race, etc. The whole nine yards. And because they exist in board game spaces, they also exist on Board Game Geek. And they will rate games badly as a way to harass and attack people.

There are also folks who are picky or petty. They’ll rate a game low because a component was damaged. Or because it was rated too highly. Or it was shipped to reviewers before Kickstarter backers. Or any number of a variety of other things that I’d personally consider mundane and irrelevant to the experience of the game.

But I think there is also a third category of folks who are just doing their own thing, and see nothing wrong with rating a game that they do not personally like much as a 1, and moving on.

Does this usually ruin that designer’s day? Yes! Do I have any idea how to fix this problem?

Not a clue.

I don’t think many board game players recognize the impact ratings have on a game, or the folks who make them. At the same time, I’m not sure publishers and designers are interested in asking the less vocal folks who rate games weirdly why they’re doing it, when all available evidence (to them!) labels those folks as hateful or petty.

PAX East 2025 – Day Three Quick Thoughts

It’s day three, and I’ve somehow managed to make it to the finals of the Omegathon. That fact is starting to become mildly overwhelming, but for now I’m gonna focus on other things before it becomes all consuming.

Anyway, day three.

I took today pretty slow. After showing up and looking around for a bit, I met up with another friend. I spent some time showing him around the show, and a bunch of the stuff I already liked, meaning I spent less time looking at new things today than I would have otherwise.

Still, before it was time for the Omegathon round of the day, I did get a chance to try out Don’t Wake The Beast and play a bit more Cappy and Tappy. I also played some Dining Deck, a two player co-op prototype deck builder. Dining Deck was interesting, but frankly pretty unpolished. I also played a bit more Re:Match!

And then it was time for the Omegathon. I’ll recount the events in greater detail later, but suffice to say, I’m now in the finals! So in less than 24 hours I’ll either be a champion, or swearing revenge for next year. Either way, it’s been an incredible PAX East, and I’ve had so much fun (and also stress) competing.

After that I got some food, and then finally got a chance to play some two-headed giant with a friend. We did reasonably well, finishing 2-1 overall.

More tomorrow, and Cryptid Commandos for the win!

PAX East 2025 – Day One and Two Quick Thoughts

Long time readers will know that I do daily writeups and wrapups of what I saw, and what I played during conventions. Unfortunately, I’m a bit busier this year than I normally am. So allow me to offer a brief and undetailed account, written in a mild fugue state, just around midnight of day 2.

First up, I’d like to explain the business: I’m competing in this year’s PAX East Omegathon.

Sorry, let me say that again.

I’M IN THE FUCKING OMEGATHON! AND I’VE MADE IT SEMIFINALS (after being carried in F-Zero by my awesome teammate)!

Anyway. More on that post show. But suffice to say: any extra energy has been redirected from writing to the Omegathon for the moment. I still want to document my thoughts, so let’s get started.

Day 1

Day 1 started off with the first round of the Omegathon. More on the full experience post show, but the game was F-Zero X. I practiced a little once I got the game list, but I was still quite bad. Fortunately, my partner practiced a ton. Between my mediocrity, and her excellence, we won our round and advanced.

This was followed by hitting the show floor, and just generally browsing. I’ll be honest, it feels a bit weaker this year. There are a lot of repeats, and also a lot of gaming-adjacent stuff. Chairs, dice (god, so many dice), and not as many games.

I want to make a special callout to Elden Ring Nightreign having this cool-ass inflatable geodesic dome thing that you can go inside and… not the play the game? It wins first prize for “Wow, I wish this was more interesting!” I don’t know why I would want to watch an hour of streamers playing a game that I can’t play, but whatever.

I did get a chance to finally learn and play Crokinole, so that was fun. I don’t know that I can squeeze and entire post out of Crokinole, but I might try since I’ve been playing a lot at the show.

Crokinole was followed by something I’ve been looking forward to for years at this point: A chance to play Re:Match, the new name for Brother Ming’s Sento Fighter. I’m hoping to do a larger writeup on the game post PAX, but for now all I’ll say is that I’m excited.

Finally, there was an opportunity to play in a Starter Deck Gem Blenders tournament. I’ve always had a hard time refining my thoughts on Gem Blenders, and playing a competitive event seemed like good way to grind some more matches. So I did that, got to finals, and split the pool.

Then I played out finals for fun and lost, but it’s okay since I already got half a booster box.

Finally, I went up to the Jonathan Coulton concert. I stayed for the opening set from Paul and Storm, but then decided to go back down the show floor and just relax.

Day 2

I spent most of the morning practicing Push Me Pull You, a game that truly has some of the sound design of all time. After that, and some intense rounds in the Omegathon, my team came out triumphant, leaving me with the rest of the day spend futzing about.

I started my futzing with Crokinole, before moving over to UnPub.

UnPub has been interesting this year. I played a bunch of stuff, but none of it so far was super memorable—except for one thing that was memorable for… less than great reasons. That said, it’s a work in progress. I have nothing to say about an unfinished game anymore then I’d comment publicly on an unfinished painting.

On the flip side, though, I got to play Tournament Arc again! I wrote a bit about this in one of my PAX Unplugged writeups last year. It’s still just as funny and enjoyable as it was then, except now it’s launching a Kickstarter shortly! So more on this one later, but for now just know that it’s good. If you’re at PAX East, you should check it out.

After that enjoyable experience, I tried to sign up for some 2-Headed Giant MTG. That… did not work out. It was an incredibly frustrating and frankly, incredibly stupid experience. I’ll get into this post-PAX most likely in a full rant post. It was that bad.

For now, I just want to note that it’s not the fault of individual staff of supervisors at the Pastimes booth as PAX East, but it was still incredibly dumb.

So instead, I just went and played in another Gem Blenders tourny, won another half of a box, played some Wavelength, before finally heading out.

Tomorrow is another day of Omegathon, so wish me luck and I’ll edit this post into something more coherent after the show. But for now, I just need to sleep.

The Player Experience of Puzzles in Blue Prince

I was gonna put this in my Blue Prince write-up, but it’s kind of its own thing, so I’m pulling it out real quick.

While playing Blue Prince I wasn’t hitting the same wall of frustration I’ve hit with other puzzle games like Type Help or Return of the Obra Dinn, or even things like Braid and Escape Simulator.

I think Blue Prince is uniquely designed to prevent puzzle game frustrating. It uses its new dual roguelike/puzzle structure. It’s also interesting enough that I want to talk about it for a bit, and make my best guess about how the design of the game leads to avoiding this common emotional experience that I’ve found in other puzzle games.

There are three main elements that make Blue Prince less frustrating than other puzzle games.

1. Puzzles in Blue Prince are a bit easier than puzzles in many other dedicated puzzle games.

This doesn’t mean they’re not challenging, but that they’re not quite as a evil as they could be. Instead, the difficultly is placed into finding the puzzle.

2. The roguelike nature of the game. Most of the games puzzles are self-contained… But many puzzles require combinations of multiple rooms and other manipulations, so it’s not always possible to find them on any given day. The result is that sometimes if you find yourself stuck with a puzzle, you’ll run out of steps, and be forced to take a break.

During that break, you’ll play the roguelike portion again, and get to experience some level of success and enjoyment, so that by the time you return to the puzzle that blocked you before, you’re not feeling frustrated.

3. Finally, because of the type of game Blue Prince is, you don’t need to solve all the puzzles to make forward progress. Solving puzzles helps! But unlike many of the games above, in order to get to the end of the game, you don’t actually have to solve very many things, if any at all. Instead, you mostly need to collect information.

SMALL SPOILER

In fact, I think it’s mechanically possible to find Room 46 on Day 1. That said, I don’t think anyone is actually capable of doing that completely blind, but I bet it can be done, because you mostly just need to know what you need to do, and how to do it. But it’ll also still be a challenge, because it relies on being a very effective drafter.

I have a very specific memory of absolutely losing my mind at Return of the Obra Dinn, and that one moment colored a lot of my experience with the game. But because of the way that Blue Prince is set up, the game actively prevents you from ending up in the sort of fugue/frustration state of just raging at a puzzle that refuses to be solved.

I only ended up slamming my head into a wall over and over when I actively chose to do so. If I didn’t want to, it was entirely possible to avoid any given puzzle and return to it later.

In This Essay, I will

So let’s put it all together.

First, the game splits the satisfaction of puzzle solving into two parts: spotting the puzzle, and then solving it, but cranks down the difficultly of the solution part.

Second, because the game is a roguelike, it actively forces you to restart in situations where you hit a wall, or cannot make progress on a puzzle, diverting your attention from a frustrating experience temporarily.

Finally, it minimizes the number of puzzles that are truly needed to make forward progress, with many providing bonuses or hints, but not stacking them in a truly linear fashion.

The end result is that making progress is mostly dependent on collecting information, not necessarily solving puzzles.

A Quick Caveat

I’m writing this having seen the credits for Blue Prince, but not having done… well, quite a large number of things actually. I have around 50 pages of notes for this game, and I suspect there are a huge number of things I haven’t put together yet!

So it’s possible I’m wrong about a few things above, especially the difficulty of later puzzles. But I still think the rest is a pretty fair observation about the roguelike nature of the game, and nature of forward progress lets Blue Prince avoid some of the frustration the genre is known for.

What makes me crowdfund a project?

I’ve been spending money on a lot of projects last week, and I thought it might be interesting to briefly talk about why I’m crowdfunding those specific projects. I have a pretty specific set of standards when it comes to crowdfunding, and so far, they’ve (mostly!) kept me from being burned. They’re also a little different between video games and board games. So what are they?

The Rules

Obviously, I have to want the project to succeed. But even then, I tend to run it past these small internal checks first.

  1. The developer or publisher has delivered another project.
    This doesn’t have be another game in the same genre, or even another fully produced project on their own. It doesn’t even have to be the same scope. For example, when I backed TemTem, I suspected it was likely to fail (or at least not quite meet the hype). But Crema Games had released Immortal Redneck, so risking $20 wasn’t too big a gamble.
  2. If they haven’t released anything, there must be a fairly extensive demo, or playable prototype.
    This is more common for board games than for video games. Usually, by the time a board game gets to the crowdfunding stage, there was a “playtesting it on Tabletop Simulator or Screentop” phase. But if possible, I want to play the game before backing it.

Why these standards?

Rule number one is designed to filter out two groups of people: scammers and dreamers. Scammers are simple enough to understand: if something is too good to be true, it probably is. Dreamers are a more complicated group. Being good at marketing and pitching (the skills crowdfunding rewards!) is absolutely not the same as being good at game development. Or working with manufacturing partners. Or managing international shipping regulations. Or any of the other dozens of things that need to happen behind the scenes to actually get a board game to your door.

Rule two actually serves a bit of a different purpose.

I buy things because I want to have fun. The goal is to exchange money for enjoyment. That said, I’m not too picky about the order in which that exchange happens. If a game developer makes a fun game I can play in Tabletop Simulator and I have fun playing it, I’m willing to give them some money.

The Projects I backed

So now that I’ve set out these little rules, let’s look at all the projects I backed, and see how well they align.

Pond by Brother Ming

This one is entirely a “previous projects” back. Brother Ming has a strong track record of consistently delivering, and I’ve really enjoyed some of his game designs. As such, it’s the sort of thing I’m willing to take a chance on, even if I haven’t played the game myself yet.

Space Lion 2: Leon Strife

Just like Pond, this sort of a legacy back. I very much enjoyed Space Lion, I spent a lot of time playing it with friends on Tabletop Simulator before it released, and Solis Game Studio successfully delivered it.

Super Battle Mon – Ranger Packs

This last one is a little bit more on hopes and dreams. I backed the original Super Battle Mon campaign. The cards came in recently, I played it, and it was a ton of fun, so I’m putting up some money for the expansion. I’m optimistic it’ll fund at a reasonable price-point, but I mostly just want to see some more Super Battle Mon cards.

So all these projects are going to succeed?

I have no idea. I sure hope so!

To be frank, I have some worries about all of them.

Pond looks excellent, but has a high number of components and additional pieces, all of which could drive the cost up significantly if the current tariffs stick around. Space Lion was a bit of a niche game in the first place, and hasn’t hit its funding goal yet. Super Battle Mon has hit its funding goal, but is still sitting at a wildly low amount of money for custom printing of a TCG.

In short: None of these projects is a given. That’s the risk of crowdfunding. But for all of them, I want them to succeed, and I’m optimistic that they can, and will.