TOP 10 Board Games RUINED by ONE thing!!!

1K views!!! Thanks guys you are awesome!

I have a few but I'll mention one: Ready Set Bet. I love Ready Set Bet but the calculation of points after each round, slows the pacing down to a crawl. A ton of calculations and the distributing money to all the players was just way too slow with 6+ players

Cosmic Encounter shines with the right players. We had a game a month or two back where one guy could have one with others, but decided to sabotage them at the last minute so he could taste victory alone... which then led to another guy almost winning, and me being slingshot from last place to winning the game due to a combination of my powers and others seeing my position as no threat. It's a great game with selfish people.

I often think about what ruins traditional board games and quite often it is down to one mechanism. For instance, Cluedo (or Clue for anyone in the US) is actually a great game at its core but the roll and move mechanism just ruined it for me as a child. The very fact that you could miss a turn to start a rumour just because you rolled poorly is such poor design. I know a lot of people house-ruled it out but it really shouldn't have been there to begin with. Don't know whether it has changed in subsequent printings but my fix was that you don't use dice at all but could just move to adjacent rooms or use secret passageways.

Great discussion. Apologies for the late post, but I'm going to say Root has been ruined by bad teaching every time for me - even though I've watched all sorts of teaches and playthroughs prior.

You can play cosmic encounter without shared victories unless an alien power requires it.

I think having one overpowered faction in a game like this is a good thing. It can be given to a new player to even things out. It can be an AI player to compete alongside other players. Or it can just not be used for a group that is experienced. Having varied strengths in a game serves as a handicapping system. The better players get the weakest factions the newer weaker players get the stronger factions.

Fun video! It’s interesting to see a “truthful opinion” about some of these games which the fan boys are constantly foaming over! Too many people don’t want to admit they just spent $100 on a game they will only play once..

Tile tearing is real. I hate it and that's why i use a hobby knife when unboxing new games. Live and learn!

The Turnover rule in GW Bloodbowl. Makes the game completely unplayable.

I really enjoy "Smash Up", but I agree that constantly counting damage on each base was annoying -- which I why I use cubes. Each player has cubes in his/her own color to signify how many of the damage points are theirs on each base. I also have base boards (which came with one of the expansions, I don't remember which -- perhaps one of the "big boxes"), on which you place your bases in play, each which has a number track around the edge on which to place a counter. Either is an easy fix to this problem if you otherwise enjoy the game.

Nemesis allows a player who is eliminated to take control of the aliens, so I dont think its particularly a problem that there is player elimination. Its very rare that more than one player would be eliminated early on. From my experience, players are mindful that if other players are eliminated too early, nobody will survive, but I get that if you are playing with a particular crowd it could end up that way.

The one game that is above all others on the frustration scale is Hostage Negotiator. Ugh, what a drag.

Great idea for a list and a good list (thanks for the warnings). It would be nice if you could recommend a house rule to potentially fix each issue, or perhaps it's broken beyond any hope. Thanks. The "Skull" entry is not limited to that game. Any game with punch boards can suffer from this. But, not all tokens are hidden in the game, and therefore not as much of a concern. Two things I do to mitigate the tearing is: punch them out back-to-front, and punch them out slowly. I have torn a few tokens, and as long as the torn piece is in good shape, you can carefully glue it on. Might not work perfectly for a hidden token though, such as in "Skull".

My play group are in the middle of a gloomhaven campaign and we just did a scenario in which there are a lot of monsters and allies. Much of the game was spent going through the motions of the automated monster turns and it absolutely killed the experience for us. Each round was taking 45+mins and everyone was completely switched off by the time it came to their turn. Hasn't quite ruined it for us but definitely playing some shorter games at our next game night!

I hated the Time Stories games, because of the mechanism where the punishment for running out of time is to go back to the beginning again and redo all the stuff you already did, only more efficiently. It's an interesting idea to use the time-loop trope of a character who gets their day optimised because they've been through it so many times already, but it's not actually an enjoyable experience to have.

Completely agree with what you said about Scythe, Dwellings of Eldervale, Paperback, and Cosmic Encounter (I haven’t played the others). I also dislike player elimination and dice combat. I like Scythe more than the others in your list, but I’ve noticed that faction imbalance is a common thread in Stegmeier’s games (Tapestry, e.g.). Here are some of mine: BREW. You wouldn’t expect a game with this many Euro mechanisms and pretty art to be this mean. BROOM SERVICE, REVOLUTION, etc. Almost as bad as the “random dice luck determines everything” is the “players make choices in secret, reveal, then cancel each other out if they match” kind of luck. SEPTIMA does this too, but that’s not the only thing I disliked about that game (I also didn’t like how the action loop was too predictable). CINQUE TERRE: Why do unfulfilled contracts take negative points? Their ability to be fulfilled is determined by a dice roll at the beginning of the game. You start with a contract, and if the dice are unfavourable it’s not worth as many negative points, but it’s not worth as many positive points either, and as soon as you complete a contract you get another one. HUES AND CUES. The hues on the cards don’t match the hues on the board due to bad component quality, so you have to look it up on the board, surrounded by other colours. Huge fail! KLUSTER: This game is beautifully elegant in its simplicity. But I’m easily startled, and don’t enjoy being startled, so this game is just torturous. (Similarly, I also don’t like READY SET BET because of all the sudden yelling.) MERCHANTS OF THE DARK ROAD: Why are there extra hardships for the person who starts a quest when anyone can follow a quest and get almost as much benefits and no risk (they just miss out on the track placement)? For us it turned quickly into a game of chicken because no one wanted to start their own quest. OCEANS: Those predators can get so swingy. You can literally get ones that are so strong that you are passively killing all your neighbours’ species and they have no way to catch up. PULSAR 2849: I’m not convinced that structures are ever worth going for. They require so much of an investment and you have to dig so deep into the pile to get decent ones that if you’re the only one going for structures you’ll definitely lose. That’s all I can think of at the moment!

Nemesis is a horror game. In horrors people die. What do you want from designers? To hand over participation trophies? :)

Skull is in my top 10, but... Yes I agree, i can play it 6 player really cause of the same component issue. I need to buy second copy....

Great video and fellow Australian content. Subscribed 😀 disagree though with 2 of your choices. Scythe - Stonemarier even notes in green in rulebook that the Rusviet may seem broken but under normal circumstances their repeat action can't be chosen (or not the best). You can't say a game is ruined in this sense because you could just not play with it (why play Scythe at 5). Your play of it may have been ruined by it cause the other player seems Op but you are too. It's actually not the factions that are broken..it's actually your chances of winning playing optimally with their faction + player boards. Some combinations are worse than others. Bgg has some posts. It's essentially solved. Still a great game though. Skull - Yeh it was ruined by you. It's not the game so abit unfair to be on the list cause you didn't mention it's not the game's fault. If it was a list of funny circumstances that ruin a play. Sure. Maybe buy a cheap 2nd hand 😂 just dont buy the pink version cause some tiles are miscentred (so yeh producrion fault). Anyways keep it up!