My wife and I were very excited for Botany when we found out about the campaign. It’s beautiful, the theme appeals to both of us and the price seemed reasonable. However, after diving in a bit and learning about the gameplay it quickly became obvious to both of us that it wasn’t a game we were going to actually enjoy playing.

Botany’s wonderful charm was absolutely decimated with nonsensical mechanisms and random mishaps that ended feeling like you have to house rule the game to death as part of the grieving process for us. It was really sad

The sheer amount of games out there is fascinating. It's always nice to have a rapid fire roundup, even if they aren't always sterling examples. Botany 100% deserves a better version: what a great idea!

I love Unboxed, it's such a unique experience and playing the actual game is almost an irrelevant part. The conversation about how things come together is engaging for me and everyone I've taught the game to.

I'm happy that you played these games, so that I don't have to.

I own and have played Botany. I feel the same, so much potential and developed barely past the first stage of adding mechanics to a game. It feels like they set a goal to have three mechanics: moving, collecting, and estate building and then rounded it off with RNG and dice rolling for variety and luck. I hope that maybe there will be an expansion some day that adds some decision making or complexity to game. Maybe around other resources needed to travel or in order to build your estate. With some thought, an expansion with a few resources or decks of cards and a rulebook could save this title.

Also, I would say that Botany is an excellent example of an amazing, well run and very polished kickstarter campaign and…a disappointing end product. That’s not to say there aren’t people out there that are going to enjoy it. But at first glance it appeared to me a beautiful medium weight Euro, which it is very much not.

Pirate’s Flag really should have been tweaked slightly and put on mass market shelves as a vastly improved Candy Land.

I already had a feeling that Botany would be very light and based on a lot of luck. Not necessarily my cup of tea, but decided to back it anyway. It was exactly how I thought it would be. I have to say that I’ve mostly played it solo, and there you have more control over the things you do. Whereas with other players it really is all based on luck and very unbalanced. So I’ll stick to playing it solo, as I do love the theme and the art. I hope they will think of some ways to make it more intriguing, because they could have done so much more with it! Maybe some fans will come up with some nice improvements on BGG 😄

You know what all those games have in common? Laziness. Themes that are abundant with mechanisms that are common. It's like they took two grab bags, one with themes and and one with mechanisms. Everybody pull a tile from each bag and make a game!!!! So I guess Unboxing wins the round, ending up being very Meta.

Botany was definitely a big disappointment. I agree with everything you said. One other terrible feature is that the ending can be abrupt such that if someone can’t get back in time when it is triggered they don’t get anything on their ship. I won the game I played due to that. So glad I didn’t back it on KS though it looked and sounded so good.

Three games I played that made me sad. 1. Indika 2. Slay the Princess 3. Signalis Not board games and not what OP meant by "sad", but video title reminded me and I happened to play these all back to back (they are very good games) while I happened to be depressed and it was kind of a mistake (I don't recommend doing what I did).

Got Botany for my wife and we enjoy it. My favorite game is Eldritch Horror and Botany is like an extremely light competitive version of EH. It is random but there are ways to mitigate it like in EH and we enjoy the theme very much because it really does feel like you’re a botanist researching plants.

Your description of Pirate's Flag gave me traumatic flashbacks of Zimby Mojo

Botany sounds interesting with some house rules. Drafting the original cards and then having cards ,face up, equal to the number of players +1 to choose when getting new plants. For the events I would shuffle the ones that affect everyone in one pile and flip one when after the each full round of play where everyone has taken a turn(possibly a secondary ending if that event deck runs out of cards). The other events I would have drawn when that player's reputation increases. I also would limit the take that where you could only affect the people sitting next to you and only twice per game (so 4 negatives Max).

Kraken Skulls is very light and very random. I backed it for a fast filler for meetups before or after the 'main event' games. It went over well, despite it being crazy, but it's a fun dice roller fest once in awhile. Not one I'd play all the time though.

We play Botany and we love it. It is an awesome game. There is luck, like there is in almost every game in existence, but there is plenty of mitigation through character powers, cards, and just getting good.

Unboxed looks like it wanted to be City of Six Moons, but didn't dare to go all the way

I enjoy Botany, but it is a light game that reminds me of Ticket to Ride with set collection.

What happened to the judgement hammer? Guess you stopped doing that?

The Kraken Skull game looks like it might work with older elementary age kids. The Prate's flag game looks like a younger kids game if it weren't for all the text on the cards. Nice looking ship pieces though!

Sad Vasel doing the hobby a favor by calling out sub-par games. Keep up the hard work of keeping mediocre games off shelves!

UnBOXed sounds like the board game equivalent to Stephen King writting about a novelist (sounds like it was designed for designers).

Botany has been a huge let down for everyone in my circle who got it. I think the prepledge they ran made a lot of people back who didn’t realize the type of game it was

With some careful editing, I think Mike can pull “Merchant’s Cove, a very good game” from the audio here. 😂

Pirates Flag seems like game for 3-6 year old kids. But it has text on cards! Why would you do this?

I felt the exact same way before and after playing Botany. Took the words right out of my mouth. 4/10.

Unboxed would be more fun IMO if it was just a boxful of components and you're encouraged to make your own games with it, perhaps with some guidance

Botany. Great, successful campaign. End. Haha

I really liked the glossy cards of Pirate's Flag, but yeah, the game seems very bad

I almost fell asleep at the explanation of The Pirate's Flag game. Holy moly, that game is awful. 2/10 for me, because it has nice artwork

The Pirate's flag is a kids game, not a strategic game.

I didn't understand the expectation from 'Unboxed'. It sounds like the benchmark is Zendo. Does it give you an interesting way to deduce rules? that's it. I wouldn't expect the actual games to be good.

Tom you really need to get over your hatred of random and Luck in games and just have fun with it gezz.

Love the title change! Way less pretentious than “5 Games I Played, So You Don’t Have To.” Especially when some games just didn’t work for you and that to title pushes away people who would actually like those games more than you. 😊

Looks like some AI art and public domain art as well in these games. I think they're fine in prototypes but for production i'd rather have poor but consistent art then those.

Would unBOXed be more fun if you just started with rules? Perhaps, House Rules? 🤔

All of these look like Target fodder

At this point, if ur a euro game and u have "random events" ur game sucks ....