The Worst Boardgames of 2021. Box Of Regret Award Winners!

0:00 I'm back again today for another list. A delicious list. I love making lists. And this is going to be the worst board games that were released of 2021, 5 years ago, the Boxer Regret Award winners. Now, what I did, this isn't my personal opinion. I obviously didn't play the thousands of games that were released in 2021, but I went to Board Game Geek, one of my favorite websites of all time. I went to their board game rankings and you have to have at least 25 people rank your board game for it to enter into the board game geek ranks officially. Now, the worst so uh the worst games that you'll see period on the board game geek rankings to set a perspective of the numbers that we're about to talk about is all the way down here at 3,00 3,191 which is shoots and ladders. All right, so let's get into it. Our worst game of the year. We're not going to beat around the bush. It's an antilimactic one a little bit. It's Uno all wild with a 30,088 ranking. People truly hated this. I did a review of it. Wasn't great either. Uh and the bottom line was it felt more like an expansion, but it was its own standalone game and that's really what killed it for it. We're not going to spend too much time on it because, you know, it's Uno and you're not surprised at all to see that this was the worst game released according to board game geeks that year. If you ask Walmart board game buyers, I'm sure they might have a different opinion. But let's get on to quote unquote our style games, the hobby games. So, the worst hobby game of the year. And this one also with a bullet.

1:30 There was only two games I saw that were rated below 30,000 from 2021. And this one was a real gut punch. Dune House Secrets. Now, this one wins both the worst hobby game of the year and the biggest disappointment because obviously you're LIKE, "WOW, WHAT WHAT WHAT happened here?" Dune House Secrets is based on Dune, the immensely popular series. There's some muchbeloved board games in that universe. They got the intellectual property and it's based off of Detective, a modern crime board game, which is right. It's a 335 game all the whole time. Once again, the 1enters would be uh was it be one three 30 3,000. So they're like a 1enter of the 1enter. That's like a highly super highly rated game. And so how did it fail? What happened? Well, to find that out, we always need to go to one place and one place only. And that's the board game comments. And you go down here to around the threes because this is really really where people aren't just being jerks. They just didn't like it. It's not the worst, but it's not great. Lower your expectations. is you could probably get some enjoyment out of the staggeringly light gameplay. First of all, I think the story of the game isn't good. I give it an eight. Let me explain and warn you why I rated it a three. In principle, the game is a short choose your own adventure style game. If this would be sold as a smallbox game like the Cosmos Escape or Adventure Time titles, one of those Adventure Titles is a great one, by the way. For about 10, it would be nearly okay. The problem is that there are many components and mechanics wildly tucked in the gameplay without any meaning other than to try to justify a hefty 40 price tag. Here's

3:02 examples. Here's a second example. There's a third example. This is why you go to the threes and not the ones. You can go to the ones if you want to get the unbridled rage. But the general consensus was it wasn't really Yeah. Not really a game. The writing keeps it being from being a one. But yeah, so they released pretty much just an adventure that you could go on. Is this a game? We have a horrible experience with this one. So, the worst game of the year and the biggest disappointment undoubtedly goes to Dune. House secrets. Congratulations for your powers box. Moving on to the worst solo game of 2021, sitting at 27,716. We've dropped 3,000 uh three we've I guess we've gone up 3,000 in the rankings. That's Andor story quest dunle puffade. 60 to 90 minutes is based in the Andor universe. It's from the cosmos. You know this all is sounding good. But as always, let's go to the comments and find out why this one didn't hit the mark. Go down to those the threes. The choices are irrelevant.

4:07 Luck mitigation non-existent. That's not great. And the story borderline boring. All in all, waste of time. While I very much like those types of adventure games, this game has not enough depth nor enough cards. A solo adventure of other manufacturers easily crosses 600 or 700 parts with a decision at the end. This here doesn't have a book. It has cards instead. That's nice for the followup. Used cards go on a separate stack so you don't have to search them again, but it just kills the depth. 106 cards and not enough for what 700 little paragraphs can transport. Nice idea, though. I am thinking about a solo adventure book with bookmarks now. This game has two chapters. Okay, cool. But yeah, so the target market for this game just was like, this one didn't hit the mark. Not enough choices, not enough meat. And I imagine they were excited, right? Wonder if this one potentially had a had a nice designer. No, first- timer. First timer. Uh, yeah, because Yeah. Andor Cosmos putting it out.

5:01 Disappointing. Biggest solo disappointment of the year. Next, we have the worst mass market face plants. So, let me give this one a a little little And this one is actually shared by two people. Two separate games took this award. This was for the one where we got the shot. We got the shot that every board game designer wants. We're in Walmart. We're in Target. We're in Meer. Like, we made it on top of the hilltop. And uh we put out just a Oh, man. Really? That was what we put out there. And we got two awards here. First, we have Disney Sidekicks, which is right 29,154. Very, very bad. Sidekip steps into the spotlight to and I remember seeing this one at Target and I saw it on clearance and then it went on clearance for quite a while and this one definitely has to be a huge disappointment for one major reason. It's designed by Eric Lang who's one of the greatest game designers of all time. Like if you look at the board game geek ratings 52 63 153 215 250 327 puts out a lot of great games. Also made the Dilbert game too. Fun fact, right?

6:03 So they had high expectations for this and it was Like, but why? Why was it that? And the next one is a completely different story. I'm excited to talk about the next one. Owned because sale, hated, gave away to people I don't like because I wouldn't torture friends with that mess. That one's great, but not descriptive of why it was bad. Not a kids game. Pretty rough. So, biggest drawbacks to this game is the ambiguity of the rules. Yick. Even the length of the video is not that helpful other than setup. Better clarification is needed. So, they felt the need to put the link to go to the video and then they oofed on the video after oofing on the rule booklet. Wow. Kudos to you spin masters. There's no scaling difficulty other than adding more cards harder to the danger deck. This game is more about rescuing villagers and hope you lucky enough to get to the heroes before you lose. Other issue is punchout tokens don't fit in spade trots trade spots. That's annoying. Also, small size of many of those towns make them easy to lose, especially with kids. seemed like somebody took the game horrified and then just tried to make it better air quotes by making it more complex. More is not always better. Highly unbalanced the rule book. It leaves so much ambiguity for edge cases. We just ended up angry playing this game. Been there.

7:21 Surprised this got green lit. Feels incomplete. Didn't evoke much feeling like Disney sidekicks. Felt generic to us. Other games like Villainous seem to leverage the theme much better. We've kept some okay games because of a Disney theme before, but not this one. It's bad. That's a banger. That is a banger. That's okay. So, but once again, they're sharing this award with Fireball Island: Race to Adventure. Now, this is a whole different situation. This is when they took the immensely popular Fireball Island big gang buster on kick kickstarter, I think it was, or game found. They released a huge edition of it. This is a different edition. was released in 2021. That is actually a much smaller box and people didn't love it. But let's find out in the comments why people didn't love it. As always, we have to our threes. This is something of a dexterity game for small kids. It's not helpful right now. This is a target version of the game. It felt like a game that you would find at the bargain bin at Save AOT. The low production value and faulty marble rolls eliminate and any fun that might otherwise come from this game. So bad. I like that. Just so bad. I don't have time for this. How bad $8 on clearance to Target. Gave to Goodwill. A cheaplym made budget imitation of the far superior curse of VOR version from 2018. Nowhere near as good in materials or fun to play. Avoid like the plague and spend the extra for the real thing. And it is a very fun game. By the way, I took that one into my classroom. I borrowed my buddy Brandon's copy that he got on Kickstarter, I think it was. And it it

8:52 went over like gang busters. And yeah, if it doesn't work the way you want it to, like, and I say this, I've done tons of reviews for old games. It's very simple. Gimmick games can work. A thousand% of a gimmick can carry a game. Period. But if THE GIMMICK DOESN'T WORK, THEN obviously the game is not going to work. And it's just But you know what? Goliath does not care because Goliath is Goliath just like Spin Master is Spin Master. And um but yeah, those are the two biggest market just face plants for us in the hobby. Now, moving on. International. I didn't forget about you. The worst international game goes to Kamakiki, family's greatest tea time with a 29,988 ranking. Not quite creeping into the 30,000.

9:40 And these are a lot of people playing on BGA. I'm going to guess because it's the first one's BGA. As for the simple game that it tries to be, rules are quite weird and confusing. It is set collection type of game, but luck element in the game gives you no options. Just play card and hope for best. And yeah, with with that title, that feels like one of those ones where yeah, language translation on a rule book like could like that could kill a game. Poor rules, weak push your luck set filler. Do I risk them going? I've played it more to the point I've won, lost, and also drawn and lost on a tiebreak. You need the right cards via luck to draw and think if your opponent blindly draw them then play and hope they can't finish BGA. So yeah, they it's just it's it's one of those ones that probably shouldn't have gotten uh manufactured yet because it needed more time play testing it seems like. But under the guise of being a children's game, right? And children's games do get rated notoriously hard, but there's any more blood one. It almost feels mean to rate this. It's not trying to be my kind of game at all, but sometimes games don't try to be for me and yet are amazing like Hoola Hippos redeeming feature. This is Yep. And that was what I was saying with that ages five plus that falls. A lot of times it's like the kids game where it's like, "Yeah, you didn't even try to wow anyone with anything you did. You did the bare minimum." And I would much rather you take a swing in a kids game, right? At least be memorable. So yeah, disappointment. Disappointment. So I was going to say that that this next game was the worst kids game of the year. No, actually it's the worst kids game. Why didn't you just reprint it award? And that's for Jumanji. Let's just check the

11:11 ratings. 29,988 and this one 30,000. So this is still the worst kids game released and the worst. Why didn't you just reprint the game? Cuz this is not the Jumanji you remember from your childhood or from the movie, which actually was a relatively funish game I remember as a kid. And that's probably what a lot of people were expecting when they got this, which I'm going to guess plays a role in it. But let's check out the 91 comments. Head down to the threes. Has very low pre-re replayability, but did enjoy the one playthrough. I would recommend playing if someone knows nothing about it once. Okay, not great for a 20 to 60 minute game if it's like, "Yeah, I don't ever want to play that ever again." But hey, someone else might like having fun playing it once. Uh although I can see the appeal of the game for children. The little screen in the middle and the imagination from the challenge cards.

11:57 Even then, I found the gameplay to be rather boring. We never ran into any consequences. The paths were too short and the challenge seemed like an afterthought. At this level of difficulty, there are plenty more games that offer much better play. And I wonder if they have didn't have different variants in the rule book. When I say this all the time, the kids games decided to put variants in the rule books. Let's so the game will scale with the kid as they grow and the family in childhood memories. Bad game, silly task, boring gameplay. I think this game is viable for parties as cards instruct players to do weird activity challenges in the room, but certainly this is not a game you would play on a regular basis. So yeah, just people are like, "Hey, I wanted you. You just gave me this weird thing where one of them I remember reading one where was like they had to find an orange in the room or something. So yeah, disappointing. Now we have two more categories left. Three more categories left. Right. Next Kickstarter. We didn't forget 2021 Kickstarter in full bloom. Worst Kickstarter game of 2021. Now, I do want to put an asterisk on this. I think there might have been one or two that were rated worse, but they were so small that I was like, "Yeah, I feel like that's a little bit punching down." Like it's like, "Yeah, you're supposed to."

13:02 And some of them were like they just didn't ship out the game. They sent out a print and play. But this one is out. You can go buy it. I wouldn't recommend it as these people would not. That is Silverwood Grove. Released in 2021 and raising $144,000 Australian dollar. But let's see why people didn't like it. I'm in the I'm in the twos. Wow. We might get some real negativity here. I normally click on threes, but we're on twos. This is what you get when you try to replicate Ever. Dale, this game as a whole is fine. The votes are good. Easily one of the worst set of instructions I have ever seen. Uh, no. No, I added the I have ever seen. I ever seen. Um, well, I just tried to grammatically correct it as I read it out loud. Lack of FAQ in the documentation, I think, shows the true downfall of the game. Lack of play testing. Yep, that happens a lot with Kickstarters. Kickstarter backer. This rule booklet is abysmal. The game is basically unplayable. I've seen some comments you can download an FAQ and a community edited rule booklet. NO ONE SHOULD HAVE TO do that to play a game, whether it's a Kickstarter or a retail game. definitely will steer clear of any future projects from this creator. Worst rule book dot dot dot four dots. Love the artwork of the concept. Failed execution. I'm curious. Did they I I want to see was this the the the did they Oh, they they switched to puzzles.

14:16 Is that what they did? They switched to puzzles. Like we suck so hard at writing rule books that were just switching to puzzles. Okay. Well, good for them. Oh, no. They don't Let It Die. They published that one though because I actually I think that was a different That's a great game, by the way. It's a very fun game. Well, good for them. They found they felt they found that writing rule booklets wasn't their thing and they went into puzzles. But hey, it's still launching. That's the beauty of Kickstarter. Like that right there is fascinating to me, right? Like if they had just released that game, say 15 years ago, and people went out, they bought it at Gen Con, it was the new hotness, they took it home, and everybody's like, "This sucks. We hate this game. This game is horrible." That company is probably dead, right?

15:02 There's not a second chance. I wouldn't say most likely. Maybe maybe there is because they sold so many of them, but I don't know. It just it's just it's amazing that Kickstarter is able to to breathe these companies into life, right? Like that's they're making puzzles. Good for them. 11 12 Kickstarters. But next next award, the the This is a weird one. The And by the way, if you have any suggestions for awards for future videos of this, please let me know in the comments below. give some snazzy names because if I get to 20 likes, I'll do this for some other years. Keeping it up. But the don't put your name on the box award. And this is for the game where it'd probably be higher rated if the person who pub who made it didn't put their name on the box. And that is Topen Fever. And you say, "What?" And I say, "It's ooey Rosenberg's game." You say, "Oh."

15:51 And yeah, people were expecting more because you know it's u Rosenberg and this one apparently is not good at all. At least according to the comments but let's get into them. I somehow lost them. There they are. 60 comments. People are passionate. People are feeling it. Go down to those threes. Five players. Five plays long because I have the rule for myself of giving every game five plays before rating and deciding what to do with it. But this game I will avoid in future. In theory, it's more interesting than yatsi. In theory, it's more interesting than yatsi. Not a great start because there are more rules of potential strategies. In practice, there's no sensible way to strategize ahead. When lacking luck, this one is more frustrating. With luck, it's not more appealing. This has just cemented for me that I do not like dice chuckucky yatsi style no real mitigation games that last longer than about 10 minutes. Also, reducing the size of the dice. And this is a general statement for all games, not just this one. Not everyone has shovels for hands. And if I'm not having rolling six to seven dice, it's always pointless. I love that. I don't have shovels for hands here. I've never heard that expression. I want to use it. This game feels like an epic troll on ooey fanboys.

17:00 I don't know why the is but this game being designed as an an incredibly quote unquote inside joke is the only possible explanation I have for why this game was published under his name. Huge disappoint Rosenberg. This is more of less a Yatsi variant which is less fun. And these are the threes. Imagine those ones. What do they have to say? Uh let me know in the comments. Do you want me to go to the ones for this? I feel like we should. It feels right. But our final award and this one this one is is with a slam dunk. The worst publisher of 2021 according to the games they rated. And Amigo was on a tear of getting terribly rated games as they not only had one, not two, not three, not four. Yeah, it was four. It was four games rated 25,000 or less released in 2021, which once again, that's like really bad. 29,249 27157 25161 uh and then 27573 and that is rough for different so we had to pin fever we had silent planet we had milestones we had help and we're not going to go into why all of them did that but for the year you go

18:31 check it yourself you look at the worst games that were published during this time period their name pops up an awful lot and if you want to check it out. You go into the Board Gamegeeek advanced features. Uh I'll leave a link down to you and this will this will let you because yeah these are uh just for that year which also is kind of astounding by the way how many games were released in that year. I will say though they did have one huge hit and I imagine it made everything good and that is Magic Mountain ranked 4,38 and it is still spectacular. If you have family honestly we sat there at Origins adults and played this at the demo table just we did it over and over again. It's so fun. You pick up these little witches, you the marbles go down. It's great. Delightful opening ending of the night filler weight game. Highly recommend Magic Mountain, which so I want to say they got that out of it. And plus, they had don't llama dice 3578. So they were just throwing everything against the wall to see what would stick. And uh you know, I got to respect it and it worked, right? Let's let's be quite frank. They got I'm guessing if they treat it right an evergreen right for quite a while that's going to be a game that's going to be uh one that people are going to want. And if if you if you have to make a whole bunch of games to find the one well then why not? Uh but there you go.

19:45 There is Bowers Box of Disappointment for 2021. Like I said, let me know what you think about it in the comments down below. If you want to support the channel, please consider clicking on that subscribe button down below. Also consider supporting the Patreon for only a dollar a month because it really does help me out an awful lot. And quick show note, there will be an upcoming game found that I'm going to be running in the next few months uh to purchase like Kickstarter critiques and like gift them kind of like more digital stuff just to help pay for convention coverage and whatnot. So keep an eye out for that if you want to support the channel. Have yourself a good one. Byebye. That works better when Yeah. It's slow computer. I'll upgrade some equipment if you know that's like Yeah. Bye. I said buy. Click. I clicked it. It's still here. EB's still going. I clicked end.

20:32 It's just such a slow uh everything. This is This is This is kind of ridiculous. Are we still Is it not ending? Wow.