I frequently read that people at the time said the plastic minis in Nemesis can detract as much as they can add to the atmosphere, hiding important parts of the board space owing to their sheer size.
TI is often lambasted for taking an entire weekend.
Rosenberg’s euro games are the bane of many a player trying to keep all possible actions in their mind.
Modern kickstarters can arrive in shipping crates worth of stuff, making you rent a lorry just to get your 25 minute party game to a meet-up.
What’s your biggest regret purchase you can readily recall where a game was just “too much”. No matter what specifically it was too much of.
For me personally, my big one was Android: Netrunner. I was excited to jump back into 2-player competitive deckbuilding after I quit Magic The Gathering early in the fourth edition. And it seemed so perfect. No luck involved, known spaces of cards, multiple factions, asymmetry which I nearly always love, it’s all perfect!
On paper…
In reality I found out, yes, for me this is a strictly superior MtG. No downsides. Except that I’m no longer 16, and I no longer want to spend forever creating decks, collecting cards even if they’re not random, or engage with sifting through hundreds or thousands of cards when working on decks. The exact things that made me excited to play MtG-but-better and brought me to buy Netrunner were the very things turning me away from it now.
Still got to sell it, oddly attached to my first-run box + all expansions now that it’s no longer available. But played it like 6 times and that was it. 0 enjoyment. Gave actual MtG a try, even less enjoyment. Tried Keyforge, also even worse. I feel that the entire genre is just a goner for me, and I regret investing so much money into Netrunner. A lot.
I LOVE that netrunner is being maintained by a community organization and I love most aspects of netrunner but when I actually tried to play it I bounced off pretty hard.
I think the thing that broke it for me was the fact that you just have to memorize which Icebreakers goes to which Ice (a fracter to break a…code gate?). Every time I would bring this up with players they would just assure me it takes a bit to memorize but I threw multiple of my games just from confusing this. I suggested to the local netrunner group I was trying the game at that the ice and icebreakers should be color coded, or have symbols or at least something on the starter set to help new players and everyone kind of reacted like “yeah I guess but honesty why?” and in that moment I realized netrunner is for a very specific kind of person and I am not it.
Honestly, there are too many good board games to sit there trying to memorize fiddly bits like what icebreakers go to which ice. Yes it is pretty simple but you have to hold that in your head and I can’t do that very well and the fact that the game designers just couldn’t empathize with that or care about it (the likely retort being “if you can’t remember those rules this game is probably too complicated for you”) didn’t make me feel welcome as a player.
I’ll stick with complex board games that give me every tool possible to remember their rules easily.