I frequently read that people at the time said the plastic minis in Nemesis can detract as much as they can add to the atmosphere, hiding important parts of the board space owing to their sheer size.
TI is often lambasted for taking an entire weekend.
Rosenberg’s euro games are the bane of many a player trying to keep all possible actions in their mind.
Modern kickstarters can arrive in shipping crates worth of stuff, making you rent a lorry just to get your 25 minute party game to a meet-up.
What’s your biggest regret purchase you can readily recall where a game was just “too much”. No matter what specifically it was too much of.
For me personally, my big one was Android: Netrunner. I was excited to jump back into 2-player competitive deckbuilding after I quit Magic The Gathering early in the fourth edition. And it seemed so perfect. No luck involved, known spaces of cards, multiple factions, asymmetry which I nearly always love, it’s all perfect!
On paper…
In reality I found out, yes, for me this is a strictly superior MtG. No downsides. Except that I’m no longer 16, and I no longer want to spend forever creating decks, collecting cards even if they’re not random, or engage with sifting through hundreds or thousands of cards when working on decks. The exact things that made me excited to play MtG-but-better and brought me to buy Netrunner were the very things turning me away from it now.
Still got to sell it, oddly attached to my first-run box + all expansions now that it’s no longer available. But played it like 6 times and that was it. 0 enjoyment. Gave actual MtG a try, even less enjoyment. Tried Keyforge, also even worse. I feel that the entire genre is just a goner for me, and I regret investing so much money into Netrunner. A lot.
Some time ago Dark Souls, later Bloodborne, recently Borderlands. I like playing video games, played all of these titles and was very much disappointed playing the board game versions. It’s just they cannot reach the completeness and scratch the same itch I got when playing the video games. Most of these titles just carry the name, implement some half hearted mechanic slightly like their video game counter part and call it a day. An example of a better video game-board game I recently played was The Witcher. It’s complex, sometimes complicated, but everyone at the table agreed that this game gave a closer example of playing the actual game than the majority of any other video game themed board game. The quest system in particular is of course more shallow than the hour long quests from the video game, but just reading and hearing these tiny stories kicked us back to when we played the video game. That was pretty nice. It felt very nice. Havent seen such a mix of competitive game with so much freedom in what to actual do on the board with such a cool IP like Witcher before and doubt I’ll see something with so much care in a while. And back to topic, there where a lot of big kickstarter games I just couldnt get anyone to play with me to the table, e.g. Tainted Grail, Solomone Kane, … and with board games, I’m really not much of a solo player, it’s the getting together what drives me there, so I was stuck with a bunch of nice looking plastic but nothing to do with it. That’s one of the main factors buying and selling games nowerdays for me, thinking about if can get folks to sit down and play or not. Bought, never played and sold so many cool looking games I’ll probably never experience because of that. One of the bigger titles that comes to mind here was Axis and Allies. I’m still stuck with Root but I like the style of that so much that I wont stop bringing that one up even if we only played it once in about 5(?) years that this is waiting amongst so many other rarely played games. Damn.