10 Reasons Board Games Are Better Now
⬇️ BUY THE GAMES
==================================================
I give ten reasons why modern board games are so much better than the classic board games most of us played growing up.
==================================================
🛒 Amazon links to buy:
1️⃣Carcassonne –
2️⃣Ticket To Ride –
3️⃣Catan –
4️⃣Pandemic –
5️⃣High Society –
6️⃣Heat: Pedal to the Metal:
7️⃣The Resistance-
8️⃣Isle of Skye –
9️⃣Onitama –
🔟Sniper Elite: The Board Game:
11. Cascadia –
12. Clank! –
13. Dead of Winter –
14. Sagrada –
==================================================
RELEVANT LINKS:
Top 10 Gateway Board Games –
Ultimate Gateway Board Games Guide –
Top 10 Board Games for Couples –
==================================================
SUPPORT THE CHANNEL:
📃 Get the monthly newsletter:
💷 Make a one-off donation:
==================================================
FOLLOW ME:
♟️Board Game Geek:
Facebook:
Twitter:
Instagram:
==================================================
Actualol is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
“Original Dungeons and Dragons Basic Rule Book – 1981 – Plus 2 Dugeon Modules” by Jennie Ivins is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit .
I cannot believe Wingspan didn't even get a mention!
Just wanna comment what you said about chess. While it is true that every game starts in the same setup, all games eventually come to a position that has never been reached before, or at the very least, that neither you or your opponent have reached before. So while memorization is an important part of the game, real time strategy is too, same was as it is for catan when you need to come up with the best strategy after seeing the board.
2:40 i believe this is the most light hearted delivery of a joke about the inevitability of death ive ever heard. OR i misunderstood this reference and just went way darker than was intended
This video is gold for someone studying game design.
Older versions of Life were better than the modern release. There were more points where you could take a risk and gamble on squares you might land on later in the game.
19:31 you havent played with my family. We will make a move that doesnt benefit purselves just because we know that it will get in the way of someone else's plan.
Idk… If I'm not destroying my friends, then what are we even doing?
What is the game you're playing underneath the EIGHT transition?
Going to jail is not necessarily punishment in monopoly, it can be the best thing
Back in the early 90s we played lots of Scotland Yard. We kids really had fun teaming up to hunt our father. And since Mr.X moves in secret our father could make moves that didn't make it obvious to us that was cheating in our favor when we read the game horribly wrong.😂
I grew up way later and I played all the old board games but 0 of the new ones am I just to young to play the new one?
Come on don't be so harsh on Monopoly I think it's hilarious that after just one game everyone is angry except for greedy rich winner 😂
Also if you compare Monopoly (patented 1904) to Man, Don't Get Angry (developed 1908) monopoly is much much better board game
To each their own, I suppose. I'd rather play The Game of Life, Clue, 13 Dead End Drive, Chess, The Buffalo Blizzard Game, Candy Land, and a whole host of other games before touching a more modern one (and I've tried plenty of games originally created and published after 2010).
I will contend that Monopoly forever has, and likely forever will, suck. Though, I enjoyed playing the Jr. Version when I was a kid.
Regardless, I STRONGLY object to the notion games look "better" nowadays — particularly modernized reprints of classics…
nah I'll defend elimination games with my dying breath the victory is just so much sweeter. If you're always out early in elim games that's a you problem excuse me while I tear this shit up
A better than they ever been
British Jim Carrey has some good points.
So modern games basically have more pieces? Hmm.
Werewolf is far more fun in text form. Either forums or Epic Mafia.
If you love accuracy so much, go play an economics textbook
You are from same country as Boxed Meeples?
Catan is probably my favourite board game of all time.
How long it takes to play depends on the people you with. I generally don't play these games anymore is because every game was hours and hours of frustration dealing with some people. Games would advertise that they are played in 45 mins or less, and we'd be there for 3-6 hours. Some of those games took 45 minutes to set up, or you needed three large tables or all the floor space in the living room. The kickstarter games drove me nuts. They would spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on a game you wouldn't pay all the way through. Also, if it was from a particular game company, it was a play once and can't play it ever again. Even if it wasn't from that game company, most friends were trying to get every game made and have us play it. So, it was pretty much one and done.
In a game like Scrabble, blowouts are not as dependent on skill. You could have two unevenly matched players, but if one player gets mixed tiles and the other gets all vowels or all consonants for a couple of turns, it evens out. Conversely, you could have two evenly matched players, but if their tiles are unevenly distributed, you could still have a blowout.
And I don't think player elimination is such a bad thing. Fewer players means fewer turns, so once players start to get eliminated, things go more quickly anyway. And it's not like you're stuck at the table just watching people play, necessarily. You just leave the table and go do something else. 🙂
Wrong
Nice work, thanks for the video!
Monopoly was not designed to be fun. It was literally designed as a satire to mock capitalism and shitty landlords. Its baffling to me that somehow it got turned into the most iconic and popular board game of all time. The original creator is probably shaking in his grave rn. Also useless random RNG is the worse mechanic of older games. I love good RNG, games like binding of Isaac and any card games with RNG regarding your draws is always fun as no two games are quit the same, but having your actions dictated purely by a D6 or two is just terrible. This is why I hate clue, literally the dice has no business being in this game yet you they managed to force it into the game to make people skip turns trying to get to another room :/
"I don't want your character, I want your 5 bedroom house" Lol upvoted for the savage commentary.
Ticket to Ride is exactly the game that I thought of in terms of not knowing your ranking. The first time I played it I thought I was doing really well (at least for a beginner), until it came to tallying up the scores.
A couple of recent favourites in our household are Ukotoa and Doomlings. In Ukotoa each player is trying to save two colours of sailors from being eaten by the sea monster who is destroying the ship. The catch is that your colours are shared by the players on either side of you so it's both competitive and co-operative. For example, in a simple 3 player game player A is red and yellow, player B is yellow and blue and therefore player C is blue and red.
It also has that "no two games are the same" element in that you can choose the setup of the board (tiles which make up the ship) and as the game progresses the board shrinks with players influencing how quickly the ship gets destroyed.
In Doomlings your aim is to have the best adapted Doomling at the end of the world by collecting trait cards. There's some flexibility in the game length by changing the number of catastrophes before the end of the world. There's some (good) luck in that it depends which ages come up in that game and when and also in which traits you draw. There's also a handful of cards which let you give or take another players traits, including ones you can play out of turn. Some cards have their value determined by state at the end of the game, so they may sometimes be a great move and at other times fairly useless. There's even one card that deteriorates in value as you collect traits and you can't discard it once it's played.
Modern games I personally dislike are Fluxx and Tsuro. With Fluxx, the rules change every round and sometimes several times a round, which makes it impossible to plan your turn – it's like a film where every scene is a new twist (it's no longer exciting). Whereas Tsuro, I got eaten by the sea dragon very early in the game because of an unlucky dice roll (too early in the game to have avoided it) and had to sit and watch the others play for the next half an hour.
Have you ever heard about random chess? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess
WOW! Thanks for all the great game recommendations!!!❤
great video!
It is to note that Monopoly usually drags out so long because it is rarely played by the actual rules. Its original intention was to highlight the unfairness of monopoly capitalism, so the rules are exceptionally unforgiving and should ensure a quick player elimination. But as it turned out, the base rules of capitalism are way too harsh for a familiy game, so many players use house rules to allow for milder compensations, loans etc., slowing down the inevitable outcome. When I played my first game of "real" monopoly with my guys, we planned for a really long night, but the game was over in like 2 hours – not much longer than a game of Catan.
I actually like those random dice elements that you mentioned in, for example, Monopoly. Certainly, it's a pain to lose all of your progress, but otherwise, why would you play against someone who's so much more skilled than you that you've no chance? There's a reason for the stereotype assigned to chess that people can't often find opponents. A random element levels the playing field, especially if it could nearly eliminate a player who is otherwise much more skilled than you. Edit: Somehow, you agree with this in point 7? I feels like you've take two contradictory positions here.
ı love this old school board games
The video gets there, but I do think it's funny to have a cold open about "well if you haven't played board games in a while you probably don't know these games" while showcasing games that are between 15 and 30 years old 🙂 all of which are now also very much outdated.
8:13 I laughed at Ticket to Rode scoring example as we’ve had games where the point spread is pretty massive. I beat my Grandpa twice this weekend (which is surprising he usually leaves us all in the dust)
Great content
Its pretty fair to say that games like Catan and ticket to ride are the monopoly and life of right now. Which is a good thing because games keep improving. They continuously evolve and even though games like settlers may have been the start of when things started changing but they are kind of old news now. My gaming group moved on from those games back in 2017 when we attended pax unplugged. They just keep getting better.
i dono, catan games can last a long time and I honestly dont like the game that much. I'd rather play monopoly
I think there is a notable exception to the player elimination rule that some of the more popular modern games use, and its this rule: "If you are going to eliminate a player, you better eliminate everyone else quickly" the three most notable games that employ this logic are exploding kittens, coup, and godsforge. Godsforge has a mechanic that makes all the other players take damage when a player is eliminated, exploding kittens is designed so that the bloodshed mostly happens in the endgame, and the defuses help you make it there, and coup is so fast that being eliminated will only last at worst for the next few minutes. This is in contrast to monopoly and risk, where the players can spend tens of minutes, up to even hours eliminated from the game.
Really fun and interesting video! Always something I've wondered about, even tho I was born after 2000
board games are video games, but they help you get laid.
starfarers sucked. too complicated and indecipherable which did not at all match it's flashy eyecatching exterior that entices basic casual players.
We have the Oregon trail game, card game not computer, but it is annoying. It is so much luck, most of the time you die from dysentery. You just sit there and do nothing when you die and it is annoying. It is slightly better than your playing as a team instead of competing but it could still be better.
Also everything thanksgiving or winter our scout troop gets together and we play monopoly and the game lasts until dinner, between 5 and 8 hours. By far the longest games of monopoly we have ever played.
Also escape rooms are amazing.
it feels like you were doing good in a board game so your family decided to use the catch up mechanic called colluding and then you lost
Easy to learn and tough to master is the biggest driver in my opinion.
My top games right now: Dune Imperium, every game comes down to the last turn and so many ways to win. Caverna, Wingspan and Ilse of Cats are super fun, you have your own board.
Anybody else die a little inside when he rolled the dice directly onto the Catan game board?
Monopoly is an exception i think because iirc, it was created by a woman who wanted to explain the dangers of property monopolies and how the rich controlling everything is bad. sadly that subtext has been lost to history. I could be misremembering though
As a chess player I would argue that outsmarting your opponent is the whole premise of the game. You say that it's not fun playing a weaker opponent but that's why you play online against people your level and it never seems like your out of your league.
So, dumbed down.