What Makes a Board Game Good?

The plot

A friend sent me a link to Chris Farrell's *Illuminating Games* Substack recently. He has been following it closely, finding it pretty well aligned to his own tastes. So I went in curious... and came out a little rattled — in the best possible way.

The twist

Farrell is a hard-nosed critic with a coherent and very different take on board games. Some of my favorites took hits. Endeavor: Deep Sea — a game I've genuinely enjoyed — gets filed under "meh, tension-light, inauthentic." SETI shares a shelf with Wingspan and Ark Nova in what he'd call the anodyne-solitaire-y bucket. It all stung a little. But his reasoning is compelling.

His core complaint with Endeavor is that the game is built around mechanics of economic exploitation, dressed up in scientific discovery and conservancy clothing — a clash that's dissonant to him. He lays out a strong and articulate case and yet... it didn't affect me nearly as much. And I feel that gap is worth sitting with for a moment.

Farrell's North Star seems to be Molly House, which he calls the most interesting game of the last five years: a collaboration that produced something genuinely different about how people relate to each other, not just another capitalism simulator with a fresh coat of paint. The larger argument — that modern boardgaming is overwhelmingly about building and optimizing economies, and that this framing is a creative dead end — is one that resonated with me. He sets a standard for himself that feels both somewhat idealistic but also kind of inspiring. And it made me ask myself: so what's *my* standard?

My honest answer

I'm a social gamer. I agree games are more than simply systems or packages to be evaluated in isolation. I think a good board game earns its place at the table as a social experience first.
And not just at *a* table — at *my* table. With my people. On a Tuesday night when some are just out from work, others got their kids to bed 20 minutes ago and we have anywhere between 2 to 4 hours before someone calls it. A game that can't deliver in that context has little value to me; it means I may land differently than critics optimizing for artistic ambition, mechanical depth or cultural value. That's my bias and I'm comfortable with it, but it's worth stating to calibrate expectations.

What it means in practice

• The experience and game arc has to be legible. I don't mean simple — I mean you should know when you're doing well and why. The disc economy in Endeavor: Deep Sea clicking into place mid-game, your submarine finally doing real work — that's both legible and relatable. What Farrell experienced as dissonant, I experienced as both useful and satisfying shorthands. This feedback loop that provides both a sense of purpose and progression feels criminally underrated.
• The theme has to be integral to the experience This is where Farrell's authenticity argument lands for me — not when theme and mechanism are less-than-perfectly matched, but when the theme is so superficial you could reskin a game as space exploration, medieval trade, or ocean conservation without much any change. The theme doesn't have to be the whole game or even front and center, but it has to be load-bearing. I can live with uneasy compromises but the connective tissue has to exist for the game to be immersive and/or intuitive.
• People have to want to come back. This is a simple and undefeatable metric. Did your group ask to play it again? Did someone say "next time I want to try doing more X"? That "next time" energy is the whole thing. A game that earns a second play is doing something right.

Agree to disagree

I relate to Farrell's point that the hobby has a volume problem and a creativity problem. Too many games are saying the same thing in slightly different boxes. The lack of diversity in who's designing — and therefore in what experiences get made — is real, and it shows in the creative range of what reaches shelves. These are fair criticisms and I'm glad Farell's making them loudly and eloquently. But I think there's a version of that argument that slides into snobbery without meaning to. A game that allows people to share an experience together, bond and feel clever for two hours isn't lesser for it. The question shouldn't be whether a game is transcendent, but rather if it's honest about what it is and delivers on its promises. I think SETI and Endeavor: Deep Sea check these boxes. They can simultaneously be "not the most original games ever made" and "genuinely good at what they do" without being summarily dismissed as *inauthentic* or *anodyne*. I think it's actually detrimental to the broader point.

So: what makes a board game good?

For me, it has to earn its place at my table, within fairly narrow constraints — it will exclude a swath of games like solo or legacy campaigns for no better reason than I don't or can't consistently play them. Chris Farrell is asking for games to mean something beyond the table. That's a beautiful standard to hold the industry to, and a narrow constraint in its own right. There's plenty of room for games that don't clear that bar to shine brighter on a random Tuesday night. Both perspectives are valuable to the hobby at large, but figuring out which one follows your own inclination will let you find the gems in the proverbial haystack. Ultimately, after reading the post, I can say Molly House climbed up a few notches on my short list of games to play... and that Pax Pamir was already ordered away!

Cheers,
Ady