A lot of my friends are pretty serious board-gamers. They own more board-games than they do individual dinner plates or even, possibly, individual pieces of flatware. Some own so many board games that it is extremely unlikely they will ever manage to play them all. They keep buying more, though.

Zzzzzzzz…huh? What? Oh, yeah, I buy coffee or something. Whatever.

While I do like games and will usually try any game once, I’m discovering that my tolerance of such games is somewhat limited the more and more game nights I attend and the wider variety of games I play. I find I get bored easily with a lot of games and, while I can appreciate the strategy involved and often admire the elegance of the rule design, the actual act of playing the game generates the same feeling I get while doing my taxes.

I’ve been trying to isolate my criteria for what makes a good board game, and I’m finding it’s surprisingly difficult. As a basic rule, I despise almost any game that makes the acquisition and management of resources a major gameplay component – Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico, Monopoly, and their relatives. Then again, I really enjoy Illuminati and Innovation, which aren’t too far off such resource management games, so that’s not quite the rule involved. Likewise, while I find deck-building games to be more frustrating than interesting (every game of Dominion I’ve ever played has wound up being a brief, perplexing, and disinteresting experience), I think Thunderstone sounds like a lot of fun. Furthermore, while I no longer have the attention span or endurance to tolerate massive strategy games like Axis and Allies (and its billion spin-offs), I love History of the World and will play Diplomacy anytime someone suggests it. I don’t like Risk, but I do like Risk: Legacy.

I believe I’m beginning to figure the metric out, at any rate. I’ve decided that, while the rules of the game are important, what is really important to me is whether or not the concept behind the game is fun. The prospect of building tracks across North America (Ticket to Ride) sounds unutterably dull to the point where I have no desire whatsoever to play the game unless I’m in a room full of people who want to play and I have nothing else to do. On the other hand, the prospect of being a corrupt politician in a small banana republic and attempting to overthrow El Presidente (Junta) sounds like hilarious fun, so I’ll play that no matter how tedious the rule set is. I’m in the game, ultimately, because it tickles my imagination somehow. I feel emotionally invested in the outcome, even if that outcome is completely random (Betrayal at House on the Hill) or takes hours and hours to finally realize (Robo Rally). The game has to make me laugh or encourage me to talk in a funny voice. If I can look at the board and say “that looks so cool,” I’m in, no matter how poorly the rules are laid out or how predictable the outcome ends up being (Monsters Menace America). On the other hand, a bunch of cardboard chits that explain to me how I’m the richest stock broker in Manhattan is not going to get me going, no matter how innovative and interesting the rules mechanics get.

This, ultimately, is probably due to my obsession with story. I am a storyteller; it’s just about the best thing I do and pretty much the only thing I want to do. Everything to me is a story and, if the story is boring, I’m no longer invested. This goes for almost everything in my life, but especially so for the games I play. This part of the main reason I’ve been playing Warhammer 40K for as long as I have, for all the foibles and flaws in their rule set: I love the world, I dig the story, and I like telling stories every time I play the game. That’s why I plunk down hundreds of dollars a year and spend countless hours building and painting miniatures – it tickles my narrative-bone. Sure the investment is pretty major, but the payoff far exceeds anything that can be accomplished on a Risk gameboard. Risk, meanwhile, has a much more interesting and tangible narrative edge than Fluxx, which, while mildly amusing, is unlikely to get me really invested in play as it is so abstract as to be no more interesting than, say, Crazy Eights or Uno.

So, if you’re trying to peddle a game to me wherein I get to grow crops and sell them in town for horseshoes, call somebody else. Let me know when the barbarians or zombies or zombie-barbarians show up and then I’ll be there with bells on.