The Game That You Don't Play Anymore

Is there a specific boardgame that you played a lot in the past and no longer play at all? What happened?

For me, the game that I don't play anymore is Car Wars. I loved it until I finally hated it.

I grew up in Indianapolis, a town that is passionate about cars. The Indianapolis 500 dominates the news cycle every May, for the entire month. And there were always some lesser forms of racing available, like drag races and stock car races. By the '80s, there were monster truck pulls and demolition derbies. Classic car shows at the fairgrounds. Stuff that probably any city has, only in greater quantities. So Car Wars was a very appealing boardgame for Hoosier gamers. You could do races, but most people wanted to also shoot and blow things up, and crash into each other.

When Car Wars came out, I had already been playtesting my own homebrew game for over a year. My original working title was actually Car Wars, but I later changed it to Freeway Melee. It didn't make any sense, but Freeway Melee sounded better. Anyway, I snapped up Car Wars, and by the time I was halfway through the rules, I knew that Freeway Melee was an inferior game that would never be published. But I was very excited to play anyway, because Car Wars was released just weeks before I took Driver's Ed.

At first, we played Car Wars a little bit. We just had the freeway sections from the original release, and they weren't very interesting. But the truck stop map was good, and then the town map from Sunday Drivers was amazing. AutoDuel Quarterly magazine started up, and introduced some neat ideas, maps, and scenarios, and we especially had fun with the Road Warrior-inspired map and rules variant called Chassis & Crossbows or something like that. And the releases kept coming, and we played it all: the off-road vehicles and map, the Hammer Downs, the hexagonal maze, the gas-powered vehicles. We had great fun with a really small map called the Octagon by playing a Steal the Bacon scenario.

But there were problems. Custom vehicle design was a long, mathy prelude to each game, and nobody's car ever got audited before a match. Some people were a little sloppy in their movement on the map, even when using the turn key. The collision rules were a mess, and the gas-powered engines were practically ruined by the careless introduction of the flame cloud ejector. We were having fun, but Steve Jackson Games was cranking out more gadgets for the game at a reckless pace, and the rules arguments were legion.

Car Wars spun out of control and crashed for our group in 1990, nearly a decade after we started playing. One guy set up a huge, complex, multi-level map on a pool table, and invited everybody over for a huge team match. We ended up with seven (!) two-player teams, and the only guy present who had never played before was made the referee. Rules arguments erupted, and the ref made biased decisions in favor of the host and a couple of other close friends. The match ended by midnight, but the rules arguments literally continued until sunrise. I haven't played Car Wars since, or even felt the urge in the last 27 years. I moved away in 1991, and on the rare occasions that I am back in Indy, we never even talk about Car Wars.

I suppose my best example of this is the game that brought me into this hobby, Descent: Journeys in the Dark. We played this game to death, and eventually just got sick of it. Part of it was fatigue, and the other part was seeing how most scenarios devolved into futile slogs just to clear a room. Road to Legend solved a lot of that, but then you were on the hook for a lengthy campaign, which brought its own problems.

I don't miss it.

I used to play Aton a lot. Like exhaustively. Good two player game.

But after you play against the same opponent hundreds of times, and explore each of the four win conditions just as exhaustively, it becomes less about strategy and more about who has a '4' left in the draw deck at the end of a round. But, it took that long playing it to realize that flaw, so its still a good game. It just needs a tweak of some type to fix that randomness that likely isn't experienced by the vast majority of its players.

M:tG count? I played it from Visions until Prophecy. I loved it, especially for the organized play. But the birth of my daughter took all of my spare time. I'm the type of player who needs to play a game a lot to get good at it. No spare time meant no reps. No reps meant I sucked, so I stopped. Sold all my cards to my money-grubbing brother for pennies on the dollar just to get them out of the house.

Last Night on Earth. IWe played it a buch with the kids when they were in middle school. Got my money out of it. Haven't played it in 8 years. The game just seems a little too simple yet fiddlly at the same time now.

Battlestar Galactica. I haven't played it since my first trip down to Atlanta, back in 2011. I played it at Malloc's house, probably with some but not all expansions. It was was a fine game of BSG with some good people, but I remember walking away from that game and saying, "Wow, am I over that."

Now I played that game at least once a week for quite some time when it first came out. I was interested in hobby board games up to that point, but that is the game that pushed them up to my primary hobby. It did things that I didn't know were possible in a tabletop game up to that point, and I used that angle to get other people I knew into the hobby. It worked. We'd play at my apparentment after work, and I don't think many nights at the local game store went by without it hitting the table. I used to go with a guy I worked with, and I remember a night where we decided to start a game at 11:30 PM. Both of us had to be at work at 6, but we looked at each other and said, "Screw it, it's only sleep."

I think overplaying it is what really killed it, or maybe the expansions which aside from the Cylon pursuit board did nothing to benefit the game, and I'm not sure how I'd react to it now if I had to play it. I do think Homeland gets to the point in a much shorter period of time, even if it does fly by the details (unnecessary they may be) and has a theme that makes me a little uncomfortable. I kind of want to revisit BSG but the metal resistance to actually do so is absolute.

It kind of pains me to say it, but this is where I find myself with Battlestar Galactica. I played SO much in that first year, maybe as many as fifty games. It was a constant fixture at just about every game night. The expansions might have had something to do with it. The two I played had their strengths, but ultimately I felt like they just added too many variables that could fail and make the experience suck. More than that, I played a lot with the same people, and we got very good at reading each other. If the Cylons played less than a stellar game, the humans tended to win every time. I've trotted it out a couple of times in the past couple years with just the base game, but I think it's time has passed for me entirely.

It was an unforgettable run, but I think I've seen about all the game had to offer.

ALL OF THEM. I used to play a ton of Puerto Rico, Twilight Struggle and War of the Ring. I'd blame no longer owning the games, but that's not it cuz I still have Puerto Rico and others and never play those either.

Robert's post helped clue me in as to why, because I'm playing a ton of M:tG but in the digital format (Magic Duels). So i must have replaced the live gaming with the digital variant (still playing with actual people at least, I didn't replace them with bots). If good board games get ported to Xbox One, I'm sure as shit going to play them.

Munchkin. It was a fun game for a while and got me into 'The Hobby'. I hate the game as much as I hate CAH. It takes so long for what it is. The Munchkin feeling was replaced by Red Dragon Inn some time ago. I can't wait or my wife to let me sell off our innumerable Munchkin cards.

We used to play Runebound a lot with another couple. That was supplanted by Merchants and Marauders. The only reason the Runebound box gets opened is to get the miniatures for use in Dungeonquest since I made crossover cards for the heroes.

I'm another MtG veteran. Came in right around Revised and left around Urza's Saga. I love the game and miss it, but it's a type of thing I'm not interested in doing anymore (deck construction).

Heroscape. I went on TRIPS to play that game
and now I don't own any terrain and only have a handful of models.

Star Fleet Battles. The more the game increased the complexity the more I checked out, preferring a tighter, tactical game than the kitchen sink approach that FASA seemed fascinated with. At one point we played a battle with eight or ten races split onto two sides, each with every damn rule in play and it became apparent to me that I just didn't care anymore because I just couldn't stay qualified to play competitively. I was not going to spend the time reading all the exceptional cases.

The rest of my group soured on it shortly after, for the same reason and for one other -- there's no stacking limit and it became apparent that stacking 50 ships one atop the other made the game just plain stupid. They tried house ruling it but at that point the game was done.

I'd love to pull out the basic set and play again.

Talon, which is blessedly simple and straightforward, has every appearance of spiraling down the same complexity hole. GMT has produced just a little more content but the "community" is pumping out additional races which match the races from the original game. It appears they are intent on rebuilding the dogpile, and I think GMT is going to lose control of the ruleset. I'm purchasing the expansion coming out because it is just so damn inexpensive -- $25 I think -- and doesn't add very much complexity, just some more ship designs and point values. But I get the feeling playing this at a convention will start with a review of the 75 special house rules that will need to be in play to handle the Kzintis, Romulans, Thorians, and Alopecians. Then we'll discuss each special weapon . . . cloaking devices . . . tractors . . . wild weasels . . .

Sagrilarus wrote: Star Fleet Battles. The more the game increased the complexity the more I checked out, preferring a tighter, tactical game than the kitchen sink approach that FASA seemed fascinated with. At one point we played a battle with eight or ten races split onto two sides, each with every damn rule in play and it became apparent to me that I just didn't care anymore because I just couldn't stay qualified to play competitively. I was not going to spend the time reading all the exceptional cases.

Some of my Car Wars crowd were also big fans of Star Fleet Battles. For them, the game became more about the rules debates than the battles on the tabletop. They reached either the apex or nadir of play around the time that they perfected The Technical Enema. The proper way to deliver The Technical Enema is to dramatically halt play as you read out loud an obscure rule that disallows whatever your opponent is trying to do at that moment. You must trace your finger underneath the words as you read them, and you only read the part of the rule that supports what you need at that moment. Then you triumphantly slam the rulebook shut so that nobody can easily challenge your rule quote without going to the trouble of looking it up again.

Unfortunately, The Technical Enema works in any complex game. So after they ruined Star Fleet Battles with The Technical Enema, it was imported into our games of Car Wars. Fortunately, Car Wars was less complex than Star Fleet Battles, and the real problem was the newer weapons and accessories which hadn't been playtested well enough for game balance.

So many. I was an M:TG tournament player from Arabian Nights through Invasion, but then hung it up because it was too time-consuming and I'd been distracted by... Warhammer 40K Third Edition. At one point, I owned 8 or 9 40K armies, a half-dozen Fantasy armies, a half-dozen BFG fleets, 3 Epic Armageddon armies, 3 Necromunda gangs, 2 Mordheim gangs, and 2 Blood Bowl teams, all of which I painted myself. To say that I was "into it" was more than a little bit of an understatement. I finally decided I'd had my fill and moved on. I was sorely tempted by FFG's Runewars game, but I just don't really have the time or opponents for it.

But I guess I can say "all of them", too. I rarely play anything, anymore. I had a regular thing going with The Others for a few months and that's fizzled out, too. So they just sit on the shelf. The one that kind of sticks in my craw is X-Wing. I picked up everything for the first three or four waves but then realized that I just don't do well with collectible stuff anymore because I end up collecting and then not having the opportunity to play. So stuff that I've spent a ton of money on just sits on the shelf until something new comes out and then I just play the new things for a few games and the old stuff still sits on the shelf. I loved the game, but without a regular group, it joins everything else in not existing.

Jackwraith wrote: a half-dozen BFG fleets, 3 Epic Armageddon armies, 3 Necromunda gangs, 2 Mordheim gangs, and 2 Blood Bowl teams, all of which I painted myself. To say that I was "into it" was more than a little bit of an understatement. I finally decided I'd had my fill and moved on.

Still got any of these?