What makes board games fun?

I’ve been thinking about a simple question lately, since I started working on Frankenstein’s Flowers: what makes board games fun? It’s a difficult - and highly subjective - question to answer. In this blog series, I plan to delve into the different aspects of board games to work out what makes them enjoyable.

For the first part of this series, I’ll be looking into old board games - board games that don’t have that same “fun” element as modern ones. Don’t get me wrong - you can definitely find enjoyment in these games, but in my opinion they are far, far, inferior to modern board games. I want to know what makes board games not fun, before looking into what elements can make them fun instead.

Let’s start with Monopoly. In case you’ve somehow missed how Monopoly works, you start with 1500 M and the goal of the game is to expand your wealth and properties while bankrupting other players. Monopoly has a few major flaws (and many more small ones) that aren’t present in most modern board games.

First off, chance. Monopoly relies almost entirely on chance. You roll the dice and move X amount of spaces. Maybe you’ll land on an empty property, then cool, you can buy it. Let’s say now you have a set, so you can upgrade it with houses and hotels to collect more rent. Great! Strategy! But to earn money? You have to rely on other people rolling dice, so even more chance. The little strategy it has is almost completely nullified by SO. MUCH. CHANCE. Yes, there is definitely a place for chance in board games, in fact, it’s essential to make games not all feel like chess, but with Monopoly you barely even get a chance (see what I did there?) to choose how you take these chances. 

A game that I think does chance really well is Critter Kitchen. Each round, the locations each have random items from the token bag placed on them. You have ingredients that you want, and you know where they are. You can choose where to send your chefs after this happens. That way, you can strategize around the randomness, knowing in advance where ingredients are. There is one exception to this, though. A special location called the Midnight Merchant, where you don’t know what ingredients will be there until you go there.

Another big problem with Monopoly is feeling like you are going backwards (because often you are). Since all your “points” are the same as the currency you need to spend to progress, or fight off challenges, you are constantly moving backwards. This can also have a big snowball effect, where you lose money so you can’t buy upgrades so you can’t make as much money so you lose more money. It makes the game unenjoyable to play while you are losing. These days, most games have swapped to a scoring mechanism that is separate to currencies, for example Victory Points in Catan. In a lot of games, this can make you feel like you have more hope of making a comeback, so you keep playing, and have a more enjoyable time.

Another old game that I don’t find very fun to play is Cluedo (Or “Clue” in America). In Cluedo, each player rolls dice and moves that number of spaces along the board. Each player needs to work out the murder weapon, location, and the killer. The correct answers are put into an envelope in the centre of the board, and the remaining cards are divvied up amongst the players.

The biggest problem with this game? It is so unsatisfying. Each turn, you roll a dice and can move that many spaces on the board. If you can make it to a room, you can make an accusation. When you don’t make it to a room, this means your turn consists of rolling a dice, and moving, and nothing else. Say you need to go to the Ballroom, so you start walking there from the kitchen. You better hope you get there before someone accuses your character of a murder, because if this happens, your pawn gets moved all the way to the room they made the accusation in. The theme of the game also doesn’t make sense, because you could be the murderer but have no idea it’s you that’s in the envelope.

If you want a detective game, some better choices (from what I have heard - I haven’t played many detective games myself) would be games like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective or Detective: City Of Angels.

The final old game I’m going to talk about today is The Game Of Life. TGOL is another game which relies almost entirely on chance, much like Monopoly. You spin a big spinner in the middle of the board, and move that number of spaces. Your choices in TGOL mainly boil down to picking between 2 cards, or picking between 2 paths.

From looking at older board games, I see a clear trend of why I (and many other people) don’t enjoy old games much: Lack of choice. So many of these games seem to rely mainly on luck, and don’t have much player agency: in the most extreme example of this, see snakes and ladders. Good modern board games tend to mix luck with choice, so games have randomness and unpredictability, and don’t all feel like chess. Be that a market with face-up cards like in Ticket to Ride or Wingspan, or fully random tiles but you choose where to place them like in Carcassonne or Dorfromatik, the right mix of luck and strategy is key.

Next time, I want to look into player interaction, and how that affects games, and our enjoyment of them. Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think of luck in board games and old board games in general in the comments below!