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How do you feel board games have changed in the last twenty-five years?
Everyone always refers to the coming of Eurogames a long time back, but I'm wondering about modern games. Where have they come? Where will they go? I'd say the art has gotten better, more eye-catching, but I'm more ambivalent about very recent (last five years) game mechanics.
I think crowd-sourced funding (aka, kickstarter) has enabled an explosion in the board game industry. The barriers to entry for making board games have been greatly reduced, and a lot of new concepts are being explored. That also comes with a large number of flops or even just "ok" games - but there have been a bunch of good games in the past ~10 years. I'm not exactly sure when most people consider the golden age of eurogames, but I'd estimate late 90s and early 00s.
Some examples:
...and so many more. If anything, my problem is similar to my problem with steam and hundle bundle. My eyes and wallet are bigger than my free time - so I end up finding and buying many good games, but have many that we've never played or only played a couple of times. Part of that is that our group often caters to the lowest common denominator with the more casual games, but there are still too many good games to play.
Question. I like things on repeat. I'll play the same board game for years. I've been playing Spelunky for years, I listen to the same song over and over. Which of the games you mention could you see being a game you play more than a hundred times?
Also, what's the draw of Gloomhaven? I've seen a lot about it. Is it innovative,or does it perfect longstanding game mechanisms?
I think the type of games you like to play will also effect things. For me, deckbuilds are both my favorite genre, and the one that sees a lot of replay in my mind. Each playthrough is different based on the available cards and how your deck shapes up. So half the game is the actual game mechanics, half of the game is designing and building the deck on the fly. I have a number of friends who don't like the deckbuilding aspect though, so half the game is lost on them.
Something like Terraforming Mars or Arkham/Eldritch Horror has a lot of replayability as well given the depth of the game, but those are longer games so finding people to play with you is part of the challenge.
I have only joined a friend's playthrough as a guest for a session, so I'm probably not the best one to talk about it. But its a well-done tabletop adventure that does a very good job of replicating a traditional DnD or freefrom tabletop RPG. Your characters change and level up and you play new characters throughout. The group make decisions and does scenarios based on those decision, so one group's experience will be different than another group's. The scenarios that you do change the board and the paths forward. Its not going to be as free-form as a tabletop RPG, but its pretty solid. Its the kind of game where its really nice to have a separate table set aside for it. Similar to the legacy games, its supposed to be a many-session campaign - though I think its easier to "reset".
The combat is the big thing. Each character has a deck of abilities and movements. You get to choose cards for your action, but some things can remove the card from your deck during the mission, so you're on a time limit before you run out of actions. The monsters you fight follow certain rules, and the rules can change each mission. Its well-tuned to be difficult. You aren't going to be able to just kill all the monsters - the mission I played had a number of monsters, but the main goal was to collect things, so it was a mix of killing and kiting monsters to try and reach the goal.
Hopefully someone who has played through the campaign can chime in more. It takes dozens (100+?) hours to complete the whole thing. From my glimpse, it didn't seem to be a huge pile of fantasy tropes. The combat seemed to be pretty well-done. Theres a lot of moving parts, but you're often finding a solution to a puzzle given the tools at hand. Instead of dice, it uses a deck of damage cards that can be modified, so you can influence things a bit and its as inconsistent as rolling a D20.
This is a great question. For my money, I think the "legacy" game thing is a bit of a fad. I really enjoyed my first legacy experience (Risk Legacy) but after Seafall and Pandemic Legacy, I personally started to tire of the "get the same group of people together to play the same roles they're locked into" mechanic, especially with games that provide little to no comeback mechanic, putting you into a losing position for potentially 30 hours of gameplay (looking at you, Seafall...).
I've noticed that a really common trend is using decks of cards to simulate random encounters, in the way a DM/GM would in a pen-and-paper game. Dead of Winter does this fairly well in my opinion, and the Fallout board game has nearly perfected it. Especially since in the latter, you add new cards to the decks based on other encounters, which creates a branching storyline that embeds itself into the random encounter tables. I'm personally undecided on this mechanic though; while it's a decent substitute for a DM/GM for 1-2 times through such a game, after the encounters start to repeat the tendency to meta-game becomes overbearing. Your table may differ, especially if you enjoy playing the same things on repeat. Just my two cents.
One other trend I've noticed is the absolutely insane number of tokens and cards in board games these days. I suppose this dates back to Arkham Horror being one of the first I recall with 10+ baggies we used to separate tokens, but more recently with Firefly and its expansions, the amount of post-game "separate everything back into piles" has become ludicrous. Really not a fan of this one, and I'm kind of surprised that "digital board games" haven't become more of a thing for the adventure game format. Anyone else remember those old board games that came with a VHS of horribly-acted scenes for your random encounters? I guess those were always niche, but I expected those to become more popular for that reason.
Of course, if you're a fan of "playing the same game over and over" there's always Catan. Vanilla Catan with no expansions is either the perfect ideal of a board game, or a complete waste of time, depending on who you ask. I find it depends highly on the people you play with.