The board game hobby is a wonderful, passionate and opinionated bunch, which occasionally devolves into circular firing squads. Here are five recurring grievances that often come up and are worth paying attention to — not to solve them, but because each one says something interesting about how we relate to games.
-
1. AI-generated art
Few topics clear a room faster. The objections are partly ethical — displacement of working illustrators — and partly aesthetic, with a recognizable AI sameness that experienced hobbyists can spot immediately. What's interesting from a design perspective is how much board game art carries the identity of a game. Players bond with a game's visual world. When that world feels generic or uncanny, it creates a distance that no amount of clever mechanics fully bridges.
(Full disclosure: this blog uses AI-generated illustrations along with fair use and public domain images. It's a considered choice for a one-person operation with no illustration budget and limited time.)
-
2. Mandatory companion apps
The complaints aren't really about technology. They're about trust — specifically, the worry that a game's long-term playability is now dependent on a server somewhere staying online. Designers who reach for apps to solve problems that cards or tokens could handle tend to get the most pushback. When the app genuinely does something groundbreaking that the physical components can't, the community is considerably more forgiving.
-
3. Runaway leader with no catch-up
A game that's effectively decided two thirds of the way through but requires everyone to finish it anyway is a reliable source of quiet resentment at the table. The design insight here is that players tolerate losing much better than they tolerate irrelevance. A catch-up mechanism isn't charity — it's what keeps everyone engaged until the last turn.
-
4. Quarterbacking in co-ops
One player solving the puzzle out loud while everyone else executes instructions or spectates is such a common trope that it has its own vocabulary. Designers have been wrestling with it for years — hidden information, simultaneous action, communication limits — with mixed results. It's worth noting that the problem is rarely the person doing the quarterbacking. The game usually made it possible, if not inevitable. It's something I've been thinking about in the context of Argonauts — if you're curious, this designer diary entry goes a little deeper into it.
-
5. "Did you play it wrong?"
The reflexive response to any negative experience with a beloved game. It's meant kindly, usually, but it lands as dismissive and somewhat callous. The design observation underneath it is real though: a rulebook that routinely produces misreadings is itself a design problem, whatever the game's other merits.
Honorable mentions go to: box sizes that require their own shelf, Kickstarter exclusives that make the retail version feel like a demo, and insert designs that fit perfectly until you sleeve the cards.
Cheers,
Ady
0 Comments