Why Your Favorite Game is Garbage

Now that the clickbait title has gotten you here, let me tell you about a great timeshare opportunity I have for you.

So I’m kidding about the title. Sort of. But it’s true: your favorite game is garbage. Don’t believe me? Let me add two words to that sentence: Your favorite game is garbage…to someone.

Ah, ok, so there it is. The thesis statement. But being denizens of the internet, a lot of us need to hear that sentence. But hang on, let me add one more addendum.

Your favorite game is garbage to someone…for legitimate reasons.

A bit more controversial, no? We get very, very territorial about these things, so I want to unpack that statement a bit.

The Fun of Being a Reviewer

Don’t believe me when I say a lot of people need to hear this? Try being a game reviewer.

I write scathing reviews, and I write gushing reviews. But mostly, I write reviews that have both some positive and negative aspects. Things I like, things I don’t like. And importantly, things others may or may not like.

But as soon as your reviews hit an audience, you’ll hear about the negative stuff. It doesn’t matter if 90% of a review is positive and glowing. The 10% will become the topic of debate.

To lend some perspective, a lot of this has to do with the delivery system. I cross-post reviews from my website onto Board Game Geek, and when a review goes up for a game, anyone who is “subscribed” to that game or forum gets a notification. But who is going to subscribe to receive updates to a game’s page? It’s invariably gamers subscribed to their favorite games. No one is subscribing to the games they hate or are indifferent to.

So the early wave of comments are from people who are reading a review of their favorite game(s). Some will have played it hundreds of times. Naturally enough, they’ll agree with the positive stuff and disagree with the negative comments.

This isn’t everyone, granted, and many comments on my reviews are appreciative, even when something’s negative. But there’s still a lot of debate over the negative stuff.

So when I say people need to hear that their favorite game is trash for someone, I speak from experience.

The Story of Inis

Inis is my favorite board game. Or it’s at least the one that I say is my favorite, when asked. There are a handful that could legitimately be my favorite at any given time. In any case, I’ve reviewed it, and the review was appropriately glowing.

I had played numerous times with people who clearly had a good enough time, but it wasn’t their preferred type of game. That’s expected with a game that involves direct conflict.

But then I played with a friend who hated Inis to the point of becoming visibly angry. He even won the game, but it didn’t matter.

His reason: the kingmaking and bashing the leader. See, Inis requires that you take a “pretender token” on one of your turns when you have enough victory conditions to end the game. But this also puts a bullseye on your back for everyone else to try to prevent you from completing the win. So it’s an explicit, almost Munchkin-esque (his words) “bash the leader” exercise, and he can’t stand it. And in bashing one supposed leader, you might be kingmaking another.

And…it’s a fair criticism. To be clear, I don’t think it’s like Munchkin, a game that has several flaws not present in Inis. But if I’m being honest, yeah, you’re trying to sneak into the win by being the 2nd or 3rd person to claim a pretender token, after the others have been beaten down. And you should absolutely expect to be targeted at some point.

I thrive on the overt antagonism, and love the metagame aspects of this, wherein you have to “win,” but in a way where you have a backup way to win once you’re stopped, or some sneaky way to avoid notice until everyone has burned their powerful abilities while preventing someone else from winning. The strategy transcends the game’s actual mechanics, because you’re monitoring the flow at the table between players. For me, it’s glorious.

But for my friend, quite legitimately, that same element is garbage. And I can’t tell him he’s wrong, because he’s not. It’s just a difference in preferences.

Back to Reviewing

So when I say that in my reviews, I try to think through who will or won’t like a game, I’m not just paying lip service to the idea. I’m thinking of me and my friend and Inis. For one of us, it’s a Top 10 game. For the other, it’s a gaming nightmare.

That’s a useful personal example, but we could find 1,000 others like it.

For the record, there are plenty of games my friend and I both enjoy. We wouldn’t play games together if our tastes didn’t overlap at least a fair amount. But every game group will eventually encounter something like my Inis example if they play enough games together.

One of my favorite activities with games is to go on Board Game Geek and look at ratings for games. I don’t much care about the ratings themselves (on a 1-10 scale), but people will write comments. Some are low-information snippets like “awesome game!” or “boring,” but others are informative mini-reviews.

So I look at longer comments for the 1’s or 2’s, then the 9’s and 10’s. What separates them? Why is one person’s favorite, another gamer’s garbage? Then I look at the middle ranking comments, to see the comments that are usually a mix of the two extremes.

I don’t always agree with many comments, but the perspective is enlightening.

Be Excellent To Each Other

As evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of gushing “10” ratings and comments, vitriolic 1’s, and the mentality that fuels them, we are tribal, territorial creatures sometimes in board gaming. We want to make sure our favorites are shown their proper respect, and push down those games that didn’t deliver for us.

Defining one’s tastes, and using that knowledge to inform your gaming decisions, is wonderful. It’s what reviewing games is all about (ideally, at least). But giving in to anything more agenda-driven is, I think, a mistake, not just for ourselves but for the hobby. “Game X is Garbage” and “Game X is Perfect” are, potentially, both true statements. Therefore, both statements are irreparably flawed without ample context.

In truly coming to understand that, we can liberate ourselves from the need to foist our opinions on anyone, and rather, discuss amicably how and why preferences vary, and what it means for our gaming.