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Single-Use Games - the board game hobby's throw-away attitude (tabletopgamesblog.com)

submitted 2 days ago by AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works to c/boardgames@sopuli.xyz

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Let’s be honest. Most of us in the hobby buy games that we play once or twice or in rare cases, three or four times. In fact, the term “shelf of shame” is a thing, describing games that people have bought but not yet played. The thing is, these games sit there unplayed for months on end and may never see the welcome sight of a table, let alone a board game table. So in this article, I want to look at this a bit further and investigate why we don’t play the same games more than a handful of times.

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[–] ZDL@ttrpg.network 5 points 2 days ago

A lot of the games I play only once or twice are "cute" and "fun" the first one or two times, then get very ... predictable. And naturally some are just games I don't like at all. I play them once, then never pull them off the shelf again.

Some games I really like, even after multiple plays, but they're too much a chore to set up. Or they're too hard to get the right number of players together for. Or they take more time than I usually have. Or they take more space than I can spare.

Then there's the "new shiny" problem. I could play some games over and over and over again, but the people I'd play with have seen this new game and they want to try it. And so many board games are being published weekly (it seems) that there's ALWAYS a new shiny that keeps people running toward them.