Top 5 Board Game Pet Peeves

5. Standees

What, you don’t want grey minis in your game? Standees are better than minis because you get color, let’s go through the hierarchy here.

• Painted Minis
• Acrylic Standees
• Unpainted Minis
• Meeples
• Belly Button Lint
• Pawns
• Standees

I’m talking about those cheap cardboard standees that get jammed into a plastic stand. To store them, you probably need to take them out. Then after you’ve played the game five times the bases are ruins on the cardboard so you need to start putting them in sideways. Then you try figure out if you can play the game with Monopoly pieces, realized you got rid of your copy, and just go straight to belly button lint.

But seriously, they suck, it shows off your artwork in a bad way that looks weird because the the machine can’t cut too closely just in case it’s off slightly. So you got a bulky bit of some color around the outside edge. And yes, they do start to breakdown pretty quickly over time. So stop putting standees in your game.

What, they are the cheapest option, tells me your game is cheap. Why do I want to buy a cheap game that a company won’t put the effort into the pieces. I got no faith that you’ll put the effort into making a good game. And don’t worry, standees aren’t the only thing that tells me your game might not be good. Skip ahead to #1 and see that one as well.

4. Enough Room For Card Sleeves

Yes, I’m going to catch heat for this one. And I’m saying this a bit tongue in cheek. I don’t mind if you put room for sleeves into your box and into your storage solution. In fact, if you want to do that for the sleevers because you’re a deck building game and the cards are the game and get handled a lot, do it. But understand that not everyone sleeves.

So how do you work that balance, give me foam. You aren’t shipping the game sleeved. So all your cards are in one little part of the box. Then if you don’t sleeve the cards are rattle around in the box. That space in the box when you ship it is open, so give me foam in that space. I can cut it down to size, or better yet you’ve planned it out well and it’s about the right amount with just a little wiggle room for the cards.

If you sleeve, you throw it away. If you don’t, you keep it in. It’s the best of both worlds. And while my next one is about not wasting space, this is not a waste of space to account for that.

3. Valley of the Shadow of Death

I’m coming after you with this one Fantasy Flight Games. I love a lot of your games, but your inserts suck. So much so that I generally throw them away. And I get it, this is one I overlap with and I new the reason for this before watching the Quackalope video, you do this to make the game look bigger.

Why does a game need to look bigger? Multiple reasons. Firstly, a larger box means you can maybe sell it for me. You might still sell it cheaply, but a Ticket to Ride size box says $40, even if you don’t get as many components. Also, it stands out on a shelf. When it is a in a bigger box you won’t be as apt to gloss over it.

But make good use of that space if you need to have the larger size. Give me a workable insert, not just some cardboard padding out the side. A spot for the five minis in the game to go and the dice. A well for the tokens once I’ve punched them out. A nice spot for the card. Not some random valley in the middle of the box created by cheap cardboard.

2. No Player Aids

I can’t remember which game this came up in recently for me. I opened it up, I started looking at it, and all I could think was, why isn’t there a player aid. Planet Unknown possibly. And Planet Unknown is a pretty simple game. But it would not be hard to put out a turn order for it. And then the game has 5-10 symbols in it. That’s not a big card, give players a player aid, it won’t take up that much more space on the table.

And your player aid doesn’t need to be the greatest detail. But if you use a symbol and I need to flip to back of the rulebook to look at find that symbol, or heaven forbid in the rulebook, then get a page number and flip to that in the rulebook to get the details, that is player aid thing. And really, if your turns take more than three steps or you have more than three options on a turn, give me a player aid.

Finally, give me enough for the player count. (I remembered the game, Tiny Turbo Cars) But back on topic, if a game plays four players, four player aids. No two player aids. Yes, it might make the production a bit trickier, maybe an extra sheet per game for the cards. If that’s an issue, add more to the player aids. But with Tiny Turbo Cars and Planet Unknown, I might go see if there are player aids on Board Game Geek. That’s not the communities job to make them.

1. NSFW Expansion

If you create one of these for your game it tells me one thing in particular. You don’t have a game. Your goal is to get as close to Cards Against Humanity or whatever party game and make a million dollars. Which, let me just put this out there, you won’t. Cards Against Humanity did and more because it was the first. You are the millionth, you get $1.

But really what it tells me is that you don’t have a good design for a game. The selling point of your game isn’t the game, it’s that you have a not safe for work expansion. It’s that your game is edgy and maybe your base version you can play with grandma, but when you want to get a little edgy and spicy, let’s insult people groups we don’t like. Or make sex jokes because we’re in college. Or make fart jokes because we’re four years old.

Final Thoughts

This is a bit tongue in cheek throughout. Each of them is something that I want to see improved upon, and each of them has exceptions to the rule. Some of them are more annoying than others but easier to overlook than others because it doesn’t inform me as much about how much effort was put into the game.

At the same time, I see a ton of game companies out there creating amazing games that skip or miss all of my pet peeves. So if they can do it, why can’t more. And really, if they can do it as a retail company, it means you’re being cheap.

Yes, there is a desire to keep board games at a good price point. Yes, it can make your game more expensive or cut into your profit margin. But if you can create an experience that doesn’t have frustrations, that will grow the hobby more. A good experience is better for your bottom line and will get your more sales than you game being cheap on a shelf.

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So which is better for a board game a standee or minis?

What Are The Different Options?

So, before we dive into maybe why one might be better or not, let’s talk about the different options. I am putting this as standees versus minis, but there are more options as well. There are the flat tokens that you could use, pawns, meeples, standees, acrylic standees, and minis and probably some things I’m not considering that can represent these different items on the board.

Each of them has some benefits and negatives to it. Those will come through as we talk about the different reasons you might want one. And I’m not going to talk about tokens, pawns, or meeples. They work well for some games, especially for tokens when you want a lot of information available to the players without it being on cards next to the game board.

What Are Their Purpose in the Board Games?

It’s probably the most obvious question to ask when thinking about standees or minis. How much do you use them in the game? The more you use them, the better it might be as a mini. If I manipulate it a lot or handle it a lot for whatever reason, it might be a bit trickier to deal with it as a standee if I’m rubbing off the color on it.

Now, that is a printing issue potentially as well. You can print nicer standees that will last longer. But their shelf life for color is going to be shorter than a mini. Granted, they do have color. But when I consider this debate, I like to think about how it is going to be used.

Do You Paint?

Another very important thing to consider is if you paint minis or not. Painting is a hobby that I keep on wanting to dabble into. But for a lot of gamers, painting the minis is almost as much of the hobby as playing the game. It is something that Henry Cavill even talked about on the Graham Norton show, you can see his quote here. But it is very much the case where painting is a lot of work.

So, if you do paint and you do like that side of the hobby, it likely will sway you towards the minis. If you don’t paint, now you need to decide, do you like the color of the standees? Or would you prefer the 3D nature of the minis even though they are going to be grey on the board?

Which Adds More to Immersion?

Really, this is probably the biggest deciding factor for me. Yes, there is a functionality element as well. But a lot of the time I am considering what it does to the immersion in the game. Often times, especially if there is 3D terrain, even if out of cardboard, it might feel odd or break immersion to mix mediums or mix types from 2D to 3D or vice-a-versa.

I think that the theme of the game really makes a difference from what I can tell. For example, standard fantasy, I generally am more interested in minis, at least for some things. Gloomhaven, the mixed medium doesn’t break immersion but I like the minis and I don’t care that I don’t have them painted. Same with Tainted Grail because the world is darker so it doesn’t feel out of place.

On the flip side, if something uses bright and vibrant colors, if I don’t play a character matching that, on the board, it can feel like the immersion breaks. It feel like my piece is not as good as the rest of the world. So a standee might be better there.

So Should Board Games have Minis or Standees?

Obviously, I just made my argument that it depends on the game. I do think that both are a lot of fun, and really good minis can make a game way more amazing. Instead of talking about which is better, both are good, let’s talk about some games that I think work better with minis or better with standees.

Marvel United (and X-Men)

This is one that you might think it wouldn’t matter if it were minis or not. But I think minis are fairly important for Marvel United. A standee or token could work, but you’d lose so much of the art and the dynamic poses that the miniatures bring to the game. The game is so light that it’d feel wrong if it were just little standees. And I think it’d be harder to find the heroes that you want if they were standees as well.

Super Fantasy Brawl

Another one that would be considerably worse with standees. Another lighter game that is probably bigger than it needs to be because of the minis, but the minis make it feel more like you are battling. Without the minis the game would feel very small and very simple. It would still offer the fun choices and good light skirmish game play, but it wouldn’t make for as epic a fight.

Uprising: Curse of the Last Emperor

This is one where I’m glad that it has standees in it. The reason being is that you need a lot of standees on spaces on the board. If you build up troops in one area, you still want to be able to see that area. There is text on them, so until you know the game well, you’re going to want to see everything. Plus, this has not acrylic standees, but nicer standees.

Middara: Unintentional Malum Act 1

This is one where I don’t think I’ll mind the mixed mediums of standees and minis, but because of the anime artwork, I might prefer minis. The game is vibrant because of that artwork, and my grey minis, unless I get better at painting and focus more on that hobby, is going to be a bit boring compared to what the rest of the game offers. Even the tiles in the game are crazy and awesome offering spot gloss on areas where there is water or other things that should shine.

Epic Seven Arise

This is one that I might have backed if I would get only standees. While the minis are very dynamic, it is again that anime art style. You put the characters in their dynamic poses on acrylic standees and the game would pop more on the table. But again, this falls into the category, for me, of being more interesting as standees because I don’t paint. And it would be more vibrant if I didn’t have to paint them.

Those are just some examples that I can think of. Obviously, I don’t even own one of them. But do you have a game you prefer with minis or a game without? And which do you prefer, a mini or a standees? If you were to really get down to it, I think I prefer acrylic standees, at least for a lot of games.

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Like a lot of dungeon crawl-esque games, this game isn’t going to have one central board that you go around. In fact my current thought process is that you will have no central board that you play off of. Instead, we’re going to use what something that I’ve seen in games like Forgotten Waters, Stuffed Fables and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, which is a book.

There are a few reasons for the book, but the biggest is that we want the different levels to feel varied. The amount of tile pieces would be epically high to make a completely varied board. There are a lot in Gloomhaven, and those can seem somewhat limited at times, so to make something feel truly unique for different levels, you’d need a ton of pieces of terrain, and map tiles, and more to really keep it varied, but in this, I want to make it so that each level can be unique. Especially for the boss battle, I want to work with the idea of space in the game. I think that the new Descent game does an interesting thing with that where you build up vertically at times and can push people off of towers and things like that, I want to be able to do that. And some of that can be done with negative space on a map that’s drawn easier than map tiles that just create more random empty space on the table.

Besides the boss battle, it’ll help me be able to change up the level part of the floor, where players can go on quests, fight monsters, shop, and recruit to their guild. I could completely drop off one of them if I wanted, or I could add in additional spots where players can send people to go questing. This will allow each level to again feel different than the previous ones and give hints as to what might be more important for a level, or I really like the idea that some levels might not allow you to do things, maybe like recruit, so you need to plan accordingly, and you might not get that researched or figured out, but you need to have that in your mind that the next level might not have everything you want, or it might mean you can all go questing and pick up story and lore of the world.

But there are going to be a few actual boards in the game. The first will be the player boards. Each character is going to have their own board. This will have their stats as to what they are good at on it. Those stats are going to then influence how good they are at other things. Someone who is average at everything might do okay on all the tasks and tests, but they aren’t going to get the best outcome and I’ll be talking more about that in the future. But players will have ways to keep track of their stats, but along with that, this is where you’ll keep track of skills and equipment, conditions, and things like that which are common for dungeon crawlers. In my mind I want something closer to the Neoprene mats from Midarra versus something like the paper board from Sword & Sorcery. Gloomhaven does it a little bit better, but I want to build even upon that, because I’ve seen some nice custom ones for Gloomhaven that would hold things better. Also, with cool down and tracking skills, I feel like that’s something that Sword & Sorcery tries to do decently well, but ends up not really doing that well, so I’m curious to see how I can improve upon that.

The other board is going to be the guild board, and this one I have more of an idea of what I want on the board. This board is going to be fairly simple. You are going to keep track of a very few things on here. The two primary ones are going to be guild members and morale. Morale is going to be important for a few things, it’ll be about the attrition that you have with the guild or maybe how it’ll grow naturally. The better your morale the more that you’ll also be able to recruit on a floor. The other big thing, as I said, is guild members. Tracking them will be important because as you hit numerical points, that’ll give you more groups of guild members to use on levels. So if you have a ton of them, you’ll be able to cover a lot of ground, but you’ll also be sacrificing opportunities to level up by doing that. Again, building that tension, but also we’re on boards here, so that’s going to be important to track for that reason. Finally you’ll be tracking a few other things, gear level of the guild, statuses that you’ve found, deaths in the guild, and population left in the world. The statuses that you have found as a guild pertaining to the game can influence your options going forward. Gear will make a difference in battle, deaths in the guild will influence left total in the game, so important things, but will be less often you’re checking those things.

For a game this large there was always going to be a bunch of things to keep track of, but I want, with the book for the board, to make it so that part of the game is an easy flip out and play because that’s going to make the game way more accessible to players if they only have to keep track of their own stuff instead of helping set everything else out. I do think that there’ll be some tokens for the boss battle, such as placing on terrain, though I’d love to be able to make as much of that 3D terrain as possible, either 3D molded terrain, but that might be an add-on if it goes to KS or carboard pieces that can be put together to create height and visual appeal. I might pull a bit from what Oathsworn is doing where you can either get minis for the bosses or you can standees as well, but keep the bosses, and any terrain items, hidden away in either envelops with punch out stuff, or something like that, but ways to bring more surprises to the game. But that’s probably something for another time to talk about.

What do you think of the game thus far, definitely still in concept phase with this one, but I’m going to try and tackle some more specifics this week.

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