I agree his choice for Connect-Four is kind of an odd duck (though it is a great game) for that replacement. There are, of course, dozens of better games that could have been recommended.
Ticket to Ride is ātoo complicatedā? Iām not sure youāve ever played it if you think that. It doesnāt even require reading skills. I have to say that Iāve never met these people who only played those four games as you describe. No Yahtzee? No Snakes and Ladders? No game of Life? No Stratego? No Risk until High School? No Ants in the Pants, Bedbugs or any of a dozen other such games? No Chess, Checkers, Scrabble, Othello, Trivial Pursuit, Mancala, Backgammon, Connect 4, Battleship or Pictionary?
People are NOT afraid of rulesā¦what people donāt like are unclear rules or games that take a long time to learn to play. Games like Forbidden Desert and Pandemic arenāt more complicated that Monopoly, theyāre just being sold by smaller companies with small marketing budgets. Games like Pandemic and Catan sell well when they get into places like B&N and Target (15 Million copies of Catan games and over a decade of still being sold certainly says something).
There are even versions of Monopoly that arenāt badā¦the problem with the core game is that it DRAAAAGS after the mid-game and the game can reach a point where everyone already knows the winner, but they can delay him for a long time from actually winning. The stories of people abandoning a game of monopoly when it got tedious are legion. It stops being fun and starts being a chore.
Thatās one of the better Cracked listicles.
Iāve actually lost a friendship over Monopoly. I was playing with some of my old high school buddies and one tried to convince me to enter a partnership (a home rule that allows you to pool properties in order to put houses and hotels on sets that are complete between the two of you; you can later dissolve it, although you then have to sell the houses, and you get to waive rent for each other when you land on the otherās property). When I refusedāI was in a much better position than himāhe sold all of his property to a third player for a dollar. The friendship was already beginning to fade before that, and itās not like we give each other the silent treatment, but it was really the beginning of the end.
I really like the new card, actually. It is a really effective symbol. Gets all of the meaning into the space with a minimum of extraneous b.s. Also, hand drawn syle of line work keeps it from being too cold and impersonal. I donāt know, it works for me.
Eurogames like āTicket to Rideā certainly arenāt as complicated as things like āAdvanced Squad Leaderā, but they are still far more complicated than standard Parker Brothers/Milton Bradley games. I certainly have geeky friends who play Eurogames with me, but even the more complicated Milton Bradley games are too complicated for the mainstream. I remember getting āAxis and Alliesā (a not very complicated MB wargame, but more complicated than Risk) for Christmas in the 1980s. I tried to play it with my parents but they took one look at the fact that the game wasnāt simple enough to have its rules in the inside cover of the box and said āforget itā.
The rules to chess or go can be printed in a much smaller space than the inside cover of a board game box. The complexity of a game is not measured solely by the length of its instructions.
That depends on what you mean by ārulesā. Yes, the minimum rules of legally placing stones or moving chess pieces arenāt very complicated, but to play the games seriously you have to read and memorize books of hundreds of pages containing joseki or openings. These might as well be called rules even though they are more like theorems based off the axioms of the basic rules.
True, but you donāt need to know those rules to play your very first game of chess.
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Iāll admit, Iāve never tried the expansions. But the base game is too much based on how the dice come up for my tastes.
For two players I like Dominion, Innovation, and Jambo.
Or even your 100th.
Iāve heard good things about dominion!
Dude, āTicket to Rideā is less complicated than Monopoly. It can be taught in about 2 to 3 minutes. You only have one of two things to do on your turn, put down a track or draw a card. Maybe youāre thinking of some of the variants which add a few extra rules, but compared to the real estate trade of Monopoly, itās a LOT simpler. Axis and Allies is on the other end of the spectrumā¦a game that could take hours to play with lots of rules and fiddly bits. King of Tokyo is basically Yahtzee with meaningful choices and a better push-your-luck element. Alien Frontiers, I will give you, is not as easy as some of the others. But of all the games to pick, TTR is the worst one to hitch your āitās too complicatedā wagon to. Itās ease of play has made it one of the biggest gateway games into board gaming around.
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