Friday Night Shots – Playing Low-Rated Games

Hey there! It’s another Friday night!

Thanks for braving the crowd. I made a space here at the bar for you.

Yes, I was joking. You are the only one here.

For now, anyway!

Have a drink. Whatever you like.

Let me turn down the music (remind me to remove the Vanilla Ice songs from the jukebox one day) so we can have a chat.

I realize the title of this post doesn’t give a full description of what I’m talking about tonight.

The rating system on Boardgame Geek is always being debated, especially as to whether or not it’s worth anything.

I’ll be talking later (maybe next week?) about disliking highly-rated games, but tonight how about we talk about low-rated games that we’ve played?

We’ve played a lot of games. Nowhere near Tom Vasel levels, but still. I’m over 500 now.

There are definitely going to be some low-rated games in there.

Of course, I have to say this about the BGG ratings: since wargamers are a subset of the many gamers that are on BGG, and I’m not sure how many of them actually rate their games there, there are a lot of wargames that are low-rated. That doesn’t mean they’re bad. They might be new, they might a niche product of a niche group of gamers, or whatever.

However, that caveat doesn’t really mean anything in regards to this post since none of the five games I’m going to talk about are wargames.

I do have to say that all five of these games, I fully agree with the low ratings.

They will never be played by me again.

They did kind of feel like that, yes!

Let’s count down from #5 in BGG ratings (from best to worst), shall we?

Yukon Salon (Atlas Games) – BGG Rank: 16,539

I played this at OrcaCon last year with Daniel (Boardgame Feast), our first game together.

We really need to play something else soon.

Anyway, this game is a card game about opening a salon in the Yukon (wow, I understand the name now!) where you get to give great hairstyles to the local bears or beard styles to the local lumberjacks.

This game is…terrible.

At least at 2 players, but I predict it would be the same at maximum player count.

I spoke about how to play the game here, in case you actually are interested.

But yeah, this game deserves its low rating.

AssassinCon (Mayday Games) – BGG Rank: 16,748

This game sounded like a lot of fun when I bought it.

It’s a convention of assassins! You’re trying to eliminate one of the players while avoiding being eliminated yourself!

The game is kind of interesting, but it was killed for me (and thus I sold it to a friend who actually did like it) was how fiddly the whole thing is.

You know who is out to kill you. You know who you are trying to kill.

However, you don’t know what colour either player is.

It uses cards for hidden movement and each round, players place a movement card into a pile. The pile is then shuffled (so you don’t know who placed which colour card in the pile) and all of the movement is done.

Once movement is done, then if you’re in the same room as your target, you can eliminate them!

This isn’t wise if there are only two assassins sharing a space, because then it becomes obvious what colour you are too. But if there are multiple possible assassinations, then go for it!

There is a lot of secret setup in this game. Each player secretly takes a coloured deck of cards. Each player secretly looks at their target card.

We tried to play this game three times, and inevitably (maybe not on the first round, but at least once) somebody saw what was supposed to be secret, making it impossible to continue.

It was way too fiddly for the fun it’s supposed to have.

I’m not sorry I haven’t played this since. I don’t even know if my friend still has it (she hasn’t tried to bring it out to any of our meetups).

Kitten Klash (Daily Magic Games) – BGG Rank: 21,159

How this didn’t make the list of Top 10 Ninjas & Pirates games on the Dice Tower, I have no idea. It has both!

(all of my pics are ninjas, but that’s the faction I was…there are pirate kittens too!)

It’s a real-time card game where you are playing out cards in front of you in three stacks. Your opponent is doing the same.

Remember, this is real-time, so you don’t stop.

Except if you see two colours next to each other! Then you grab both stacks before your opponent can.

After a player is out of cards, you total up all the points from the cards you took (one point for your card and two points for your opponent’s card) and whoever has the most points is the winner (or you can play 3 rounds and total up all the points).

Each round takes 30 seconds, so to say this is a fast game is an understatement.

It’s also exceedingly mediocre. Maybe not if you like real-time games where you may break your friend’s fingers when you both go for a stack.

But for me?

Nah.

3012 (Cryptozoic Entertainment) – BGG Rank: 22,815

This one is a sad one for me.

I actually kind of liked it.

It’s a deckbuilder that’s kind of unique because while you are buying cards to build up your deck, there are two decks of cards that you can buy from in addition to static ally and weapon cards.

However, even if you don’t buy the cards from the decks, you can still use their abilities on the current turn (they just get discarded after your turn).

You will be trying to build up the strength to defeat monsters and increase your level!

While interesting, it suffered from the lack of ability to wipe the static weapons and ally cards from the board. When nobody wanted them, they just sat there.

The interaction in the game was interesting, but it didn’t really go over well with my game group and ultimately the game was kind of boring.

I’d go into more detail if this was an actual review, but ultimately this game got traded away and I hope that person is enjoying it!

Lucky Loop (Queen Games) – BGG Rank: 24,356

And finally we come to the lowest-rated game that I have played.

Wow, is this a bad game.

I explained how to play it (at least a bit) here, but let’s talk about it some more.

Lucky Loop is a dice game about stunt flying.

You play cards to a stunt and when you decide to attempt the stunt, you roll dice trying to get higher than the numbers on the various cards that make up the stunt.

Confused?

Then you must have tried to read the rulebook!

This game made no sense, trying to learn it from the rulebook.

Do you have to try and perform a stunt each turn?

And that’s not good.

Anyway, the lowest-rated game on BGG that I’ve played is also one of my lowest-rated games.

Coincidence?

I think not.

That’s my five lowest-rated played games on BGG.

Are there any games that you enjoy that are low-rated there?

Or just played and…would rather never play again?

Let me know in the comments.

(This post brought to you by Glenfiddich Scotch Whiskey, the number 22,000, and the letter Ô)