Biggest Misfire of 2017

Not to be confused with the shelf toad or the outright bad game, the misfire is a game that had all the makeup of something good or even great but ultimately failed to deliver.

The pick for me is really obvious: First Martians. I like Robinson Crusoe a whole lot, I like the hard sci-fi the game was putting forward, but man is this game dull. The app doesn’t do it any favors either. The game is a bitch to learn to begin with but the app might be harder to figure out than the game.

It’s an $80 game that’s already at $24.25 on Amazon. After making fun of a friend for falling for Seafall last year, something that seemed like a sure miss to me all along, I guess I deserve the buyer’s remorse I feel over First Martians.

Ha! Yeah...that one went over like a lead balloon, didn’t it. Terraforming Mars certainly didn’t do it any favors.

The biggest misfire of 2017 was The Last Jedi cuz Leia was in space, right Josh?

Black Barney wrote: The biggest misfire of 2017 was The Last Jedi cuz Leia was in space, right Josh?

The Last Jedi was my second favorite thing of 2017, next to the Switch.

Armageddon by Queen Games.

I had high hopes for some reason. It’s a clusterfuck of astronomical proportions.

Colonial Twilight. I had real high hopes for a 2 player COIN game. In the past I've been very down on COIN games due to the downtime and the complexity of each faction, where you only have a handle on it after 3-4 plays with 4 hours per game. Figured 2 player COIN would eliminate that issue. Well it did. Yet I super hated the core game that was left. The events were aggressively bland (gain 2 resources/eliminate 3 opponent cubes, etc). The actions for the insurgents, the FLN, felt very similar every turn - rally in as many areas as possible then terrorize to pay for it. Repeat the same action 50% of the game. I'll admit I only gave it 3 plays and I still didn't feel like I had a solid handle on either faction.

Josh Look wrote: It’s an $80 game that’s already at $24.25 on Amazon. After making fun of a friend for falling for Seafall last year, something that seemed like a sure miss to me all along, I guess I deserve the buyer’s remorse I feel over First Martians.

These games are like wounded birds that I want to bring home and heal, but they end up growing into turkey vultures that crap all over the house and learn to open the refrigerator.

First Martians looks like it's about as fun working in a nuclear plant maintenance, but, without any of the benefits, namely a salary. Where's the fun here? It's clearly a simulator game, I get that, but, I'm not sure most people want to pretend to be astronauts, shit in diapers and spend all day maintaining critical systems for hours on end for recreation. What's the appeal of this game? Please explain it. Where's the excitement? Do you make scientific breakthroughs if you accomplish the research? Do aliens invade? Do you get to find an alien civilization on Mars? See a robot head? Is it like John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars? What's the appeal here? I'm not sure that I'd buy it even at $24 bucks shipped. Where's the fun in the box?

stoic wrote: What's the appeal of this game? Please explain it. Where's the excitement?

I don’t think it’s an appeal that typically flies around here, but there is an audience for it. It’s like The Martian. Hard sci-fi setting, survival themes with some exploration thrown in, all running in the excellent RC engine now with an app which should be able to provide even more variety and more unexpected stuff to happen in the narrative. It’s not going to appeal to everyone who would rather have aliens be in the game, but to me, on paper, that all sounds great. I think the biggest detriment to the game was that its the same characters in essentially the same situation in each scenario. RC was a vehicle for telling “dessert island” stories. That’s a rich genre, ranging from the standard castaway tale to Treasure Island to King Kong, and that game really did a great job tweaking the fine details game to game to accommodate each situation. Mars is also a setting with a long, rich, varied history in storytelling, but the game stuck with the same thing across each of its individual scenarios and two campaigns. These people are still stuck on Mars, they’re still alone, and their shit is still breaking. No endgame goal ever changes that. So as excellent as the RC system may be in how it gets around nearly all the issues I have with co-op designs, FM proves that the window dressings really can make all the difference sometimes.

^good post, Josh.

FWIW, I adore RC and haven't bought First Martians either.

First Martians is a good one, we're in total agreement there. I think someone into the more scientific theme could get some enjoyment out of it as it does feel as though it captures all of the dull moments of working in a lab.

I'd also like to toss Coaster Park into the fire. Such great potential, such poor execution.

Sorry to hear about Coaster Park. I actually had a "roller coaster marble game" on my list of game ideas for a few years now, and crossed it off once CP was announced.

Maybe I'll wait a few years and try to resurrect the idea with better implementation. My idea was more of a Hot Wheels track setup.

I had two of them.

Alien Artifacts - Always down for a Portal tableau-building game, and this one with a cool space, faux-X theme. I was really hyped about it at first, as it pushed all my buttons. However, it didn't take long before I played three games where a degenerate strategy just ran away with the game, plus tilted it in ways that made it a painful slog for the other players, with no way to do anything about it. I went from playing it 8 times in a few days to having it languish at the bottom of a pile. It's possible that a minor tweak can restore some to it, but I think the damage has largely been done, and I have plenty of games I don't have to tweak at all to make them work.

Tramways - Nothing particularly special about this route-and-deliver game with a deckbuilding element, but something about the look and feel of it grabbed me. I paid too much for a copy after one play and taught it to my group. Almost immediately we discovered that this stupid, weirdo auction it does can create a death spiral for one player that is unforgiving and un-fun. I headed to BGG to see if we were playing wrong and got a lot of responses about the "unique auction" and "delicious tension" and the solution to the death spiral being a) it doesn't exist and b) "get gud". Again, it's possible that some changes can fix this, but I'll just play Steam.

engelstein wrote: Sorry to hear about Coaster Park. I actually had a "roller coaster marble game" on my list of game ideas for a few years now, and crossed it off once CP was announced.

Maybe I'll wait a few years and try to resurrect the idea with better implementation. My idea was more of a Hot Wheels track setup.

A plastic track like that would work much better. CP wants you to utilize skill in flicking the marble down the starting ramp to make some of the larger hills, but it's far too rickety and random to have any reliance on a level of skill.