Boardgames - like Wargames but worse...

This is responding to a discussion in comments on a previous post ("why no boardgames or RPGs") and a parallel discussion I was having with my kids; who like me are unwilling participants in my wife's love of boardgames. So here goes. A rant article with little effort to appear even-handed in my coverage :-P

1.The toys suck.

I have a giant elephant with archer turrets. You have some wooden blocks.

You have a flat painted map on a piece of cardboard. I have a towering ancient city. 

We are not the same.

Even little kids know the difference. Unfortunately my 10 year old discovered this early and now rejects his expensive LEGO as not cool enough in order to use my equally expensive but much more fragile dad toys.

Boardgames can be cool too!  No they aren’t. They are wooden meeples and painted bits of cardboard about stuff like birds. If you insist on regarding painted 2D cardboard as artistic or cool, then I suggest a visiting a museum. Or collect Magic cards, if you want to ease storage as well as faster removal of your money.

But some hybrid boardgames - like Kingdom Death - have epic models! Well, if that’s your kink I’m not stopping you but a) a single 28mm model for $50 is GW territory b) it is still abstract, yet also very complex, token heavy with lots of book-keeping (see below). There’s better ways to get a cool toy fix.

 

With wargames, the toys are better.... 

2. Boardgames are better if you just want have a worse experience to play, not paint!

a) The hobby aspect is kinda vital to wargaming so you are obviously a filthy casual – the sort of person who takes their Toyota 86 to the track but can’t change the oil and should be thus gatekept

b) if the key aspect is ease of play – can I present videogames? Your humble mobile phone has you covered if you are not a member of the PC master race. But wait - people rarely play boardgames on their phones or PCs because – they’re not very fun!

The myth of the all-in-one expensive convenient box… You know who does this in tabletop wargames? Games Workshop. They also charge $300+ for the contents of the box. If you don’t enjoy the idea of working out a fun army and prioritise instant gameplay over hobby elements, I refer you to my point about mobile phone games.

If the box does have cool toys in it, expect to play more, for less quality. If it’s full of wooden meeples and printed cardboard, expect to pay a surprising amount anyway.

The boxes aren’t all that convenient, either. I can usually fit quite a 3-4 armies in the same space taken by a single boardgame. Given you can choose your own mini boxes, (unlike boardgames) they can be chosen to fit optimally in what is available.

If the best thing about a boardgame night is the players… can I just say lots of people can make anything seem cool. Even sports like volleyball. I mean, just hitting a ball over a rope and not letting it touch the ground? No wonder they introduced a bikini beach version. 

But boardgames were invented so socially inept people could pretend to interact while distracting themselves from the terror of conversation. A nerdy safe space, making it easy to gather the socially awkward. So if having lots of players is the selling point of a boardgame… ..who are you attracting?

On the other hand, playing regularly is often impossible. Then your 300 boardgame collection is worthless. That ‘ease of play’ and ‘everything in a box’ is pointless. In contrast, wargames have a vast ‘out of game experience’ – you can be having fun even when you’re not playing – collect, paint, kitbash, list-build, terrain.... Some boutique wargames even focus on this.

You’re lucky if you can play, though. Boardgame rulebooks are awful. They are incomprehensible pieces of folded A4. If you don’t have “that guy” to teach you you are screwed. Contrast this with your choice of glossy coffee table book or full colour digital PDF. Even the worst wargame rulebooks are leaps ahead of the best boardgame rulebooks (and RPG’s - but that’s a topic for another day…)

When you do play, boardgames are not as cinematic or memorable. My kids remember rounds of Hunt Showdown (PC game) from months ago. They recall specific incidents from wargames from years ago “the time we teamed up against dad and chased his Uruk Hai off the table” “When dad climbed over the wall with the goblins but we killed his troll...”

….You know what they don’t remember? Boardgames.
At best, it’s always a general observation about the game itself like “Cockroach Poker? That’s the one where mum loses cos she can’t lie well.”

3.Boardgames are about lame topics

Laying down tiles in a mosaic pattern. (grouting tiles!)

Birds, eggs and habitats (birdwatching! Even less cool than stamp collecting!)

Collecting wood, grain, bricks and sheep (chores!)

Trying to stop a disease (I’ve lived through COVID, so pass)

While these are a testament to people’s creativity imagination (and the wide spectrum of what people consider ‘fun’) I present to you an 8ft metahuman in armour sawing an alien in half with a chainsword. Yes, a chainsaw sword. I rest my case.

What about war board-games? Axis and Allies? They have boring toys and are too abstract. They are like proper tabletop wargames with the cool factor dialled down.

Even the ‘cutsiest’ wargame is cooler than a boardgame. Quar? Anteaters fighting WW1 with messenger squirrels driving mobile home tank tractors? Rather easily competes with Ticket-to-Ride's building abstract train lines.

4.Boardgames are too abstract

My 10 year old even recognizes this. He removes the RISK men off their official board and builds them bases out of LEGO so they can shoot and grapple hand to hand rather than swan about in an abstract way, zipping across a black line on a world map from Alaska to Siberia.

But you use Go as a good rules example all the time!

A bikini is also great example – e.g. of how to show everything while covering the minimal required. But I don’t wear a bikini either (except on dress up night). Go is a great example: of minimal rules, maximum strategy. But black and white pebbles on a square board still sucks. It was fine in 2000BC before injection-molded plastic.

5. Boardgames are the worse aspects of wargames

Collecting and arranging tokens? Counting up scores? These are the worst aspects of wargames. Sometimes, with boardgames, they are the whole game. It’s like saying the best part of motorbike riding is putting your helmet and all your gear on or off. In a boardgame you're sometimes literally a worker in an assembly line, maximising productivity. It’s busywork.

Board games align more with the competitive “meta” aspect of wargaming – which is what most people claim to enjoy less than narrative play and memorable moments. In fact boardgaming has slowly infiltrated wargames which were – originally – some dudes with an umpire mostly ad-libbing, with cool unexpected things being randomly added. Winning may be salvaging some troops from an unwinnable battle - not an even battle over points. Popular-but-bad games like 40K actually edge in to boardgame territory.

Boardgames are more about winning or losing than cool narratives....

“No they are not!” “Insertname is a great co-op game”

Boardgames tend to be either a (a) largely random (b) social engineering or (c) an optimally solvable puzzle. I see this with family – after about the fourth play though a meta (optimal) playstyle has emerged; once they notice it* the game tends to be abandoned. It’s like those citybuilder PC games. Once you’ve ‘solved’ the game there’s not much point lingering if there isn’t the hobby aspect (collect, paint models, build terrain etc.)  *No, I wouldn't point it out to a 10 year old, to sabotage the game because that would be wrong.  While wargames are a puzzle too the board (terrain) and often the sides (pieces) are usually random enough - usually the "meta" is to build around the strongest pieces. 

Tape measures are messy. Line of sight and coherency is not precise. There isn’t a grid or hex where figures are precisely fixed. Wargames are more fluid and ‘real’ than the sterile abstraction and ‘gameiness’ of boardgames

Boardgame gameplay can be very samey. Boardgames have exploded in popularity (and become more mainstream) but also stagnated. Often new games are just old ones with a bit added or removed. I can say to my wife “x is just the drafting phase of y game but with cavemen cards instead of a pirate theme.”

Of course you can claim this about wargames, but unlike boardgames they are not relying solely on gameplay mechanics but tend to be driven by the fluff/background/universe. No one is doing a deep lore dive into the Sagrada universe. No one is making a movie about Monopoly (OK they did about Battleships but the only thing in common with the grid game is the word ‘battleship.’)

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...I could go on (and I might) but this is actually a pretty long rant already and I've had my fun and want to go skateboarding. I may pop back on and add more to this; so bear in mind this is subject to change, if I decide to more seriously expand on the topic.

Obviously this is pretty tongue in cheek; but the actual aim is it might provoke interesting discussions:

Can wargames learn anything from boardgames? Are there concepts and mechanics that would benefit/could be borrowed?   Or are boardgames just irremediably lame?