Worst New-To-You Games 2016?

What were the worst games that you played for the first time in 2016?

Relic - I can take or leave the Warhammer 40K setting, but this game sucked. Long, slow, repetitive, with almost no meaningful decisions. I lost almost every single fight and never had a decent chance in most of them. I realize that this is just a re-themed Talisman, except that I vaguely remember playing Talisman once and enjoying it more than this.

A Study in Emerald (2nd edition, I guess) - Though not as ugly as the first edition board, this was still a somewhat unattractive game. The gameplay felt too abstracted for the theme to mean anything. There were some interesting cards, but I won big by ignoring them and just focusing on the cities. No interest in playing again.

I played a game called sequence that was miserable at Christmas with family.

Dream Home is bland, boring, and shouldn't exist. Nothing going for it.

Quartermaster General: Victory or Death provoked a strong negative reaction out of me. This review drew some attention from the publisher.

I really don't like Dr. Eureka.

Crazy Karts is another that really gets to me and produced such poor experiences. Negative review here .

Crazy Karts is rubbish. Totally agree.

The Mystic Vale expansion was garbage too. Didn't add anything new really.

Bottle cap Vikings was fucking TRAGICALLY BAD. I feel like my IQ is just now recovering from the massive dose of WTF

Fireteam Zero was the worst game of the year by far. It is pretty much a one game argument against Kickstarter.

The Others was a little better.

Terraforming Mars. God did I hate playing this game. Head down, calculate how to turn resources into other resources into points. Ignore other players except the total symbols on their played cards. Heavy optimization, VP salad, engine building. Long. The only interaction is in the form of take that asteroids that are completely random and unpreventable and rob a player of one type of resource. Half the cards you draw each round are unusable for the first half of the game, leaving you little to do some early turns while other players with better card draws jump ahead because they have actual cards to play.

I can almost understand the praise this is getting from the euro crowd. As a euro, it has a strong theme, is sci-fi, and the art on the cards looks good. But the gameplay, dear god I'd rather work on spreadsheets at work because at least then I'm getting paid for it. Somehow the asteroids as the main form of interaction make the game worse because they cannot be planned for and cannot be prevented, they just randomly destroy resources and are somewhat rare. The other interaction, claiming the awards or scoring bonuses, just involves a quick scan of the other players' tableau cards, nothing more. And the map is even less interactive than a worker placement game and denying resources since once terraformed and claimed the better spots are gone for good. I played the game once and would leave a game day if this was my only option. Far too solitary of gameplay with typical turn resources into other resources into points, albeit with a pretty sci-fi theme.

Vast- The Cave Management Game(tm) was pretty boring and had factions/characters that operated differently in a functional but unfun way.
The Last Friday- Imagine a mashup of Letters from Whitechapel, Psycho Raiders and Fury of Dracula that eschews everything interesting that those games do.

Dishonorable mention- Scythe, New Angeles, Archaelogy, Terraforming Mars, Medieval Conspiracy, and The Others

I played a bunch of samey-assed Euros that I couldn't care less about (La Granja, Marco Polo, some kind of marrying off daughters bullshit). I played a couple half-baked Kickstarted junk that never needed to exist in the first place (another goddamn roll dice simultaneously until someone yells thing). I played some stuff that is probably pretty good but just not for me (SW Rebellion, which was a pretty unenjoyable experience for me.) There was also the Atlanteans expansion for Imperial Settlers which effectively killed off the base game for me.

I can't really think of anything that stood out over (under) everything else as the worst of the worst.

Splendor was new to me this year. I played a few games and did alright. Most boring example of the German penchant for passive-aggressive game design. Bollocks to it.

At Origins, Pete introduced me to Octo Dice. Maybe next year he will pour sugar in my gas tank. I'd enjoy it more.

Some Kickstarter game in a small box based off of an Adult Swim show that I haven't watched brought over by that one guy

Jexik wrote: Some Kickstarter game in a small box based off of an Adult Swim show that I haven't watched brought over by that one guy

That guy really gets around.

The Networks

You buy cards that go in card slots and can hold other cards. The amount of points those combinations generate can go slightly up or down over time, so it's better to keep some for only a single season and others for maybe two or three. There are five seasons total. Some cards produce money and other cards cost money. There are some action cards. Player interaction is purchasing cards that another player probably wanted and jockeying the best time to drop out of the round.

There. That's The Networks without the theme.

The cards that give you money are Advertisements, and the cards that cost money but get you points are Stars and Shows. Different Shows can support different numbers of Shows and Advertisements. Shows do better slotted into particular timeslots.

That's The Networks with the theme.

I absolutely do not get the appeal. It's just putting together nonawful card combinations and getting a tiny little VP engine creaking along.

Joking Hazard - meh

Salem - the deduction game, not the hidden roles one. Your score for the first two turns istotally random, and there's no way in Salem to catch up from that.

Sheriff of Nottingham - I don't think it was bad so much as it was disappointing. I think the moral of the story for me is "don't treat Wil Wheaton's videos as game reviews". They made Sheriff look like it was as much fun as you could possibly have in a game. The reality of the game, with two people that don't like bluffing games, was considerably less exciting.