10 Board Games That Take Forever to Beat
1. Monopoly
We have no idea why people routinely forget the simple fact that Monopoly is fun for the first 30 minutes and horrible for the following 90. Why? Because the first 30 minutes is when everyone scoots around the board building their empire. The following 90 is spent playing landlord with your friends. And if you’ve ever had a landlord, you know it’s a joyless existence from which there is no escape but death (or bankruptcy).
What’s the bigger risk: attacking your enemy’s superior army in Asia or suggesting a three-hour long board game to your friends? We think it’s the latter, especially considering the only reason anyone wins is because of shrewd tactics and lucky die*. It’s one of those games that everyone feels horrible having played. After the final army has been defeated, everyone needs a little alone time. “Okay, I failed at conquering the world, yet again. I’m going to go read a book in the next room.”
Trivial Pursuit is America’s trivia game of choice. We have no complaints about the format. It’s super rewarding sticking those pie pieces in (when they aren’t stuck). Our problem is inherent to trivia games — the questions are invariably going to be out of date a year after the game comes out. Have you ever opened someone’s closet and seen ten copies of Trivial Pursuit from ten different years? Of course not. After the first one becomes redundant, we wise up and buy games that don’t go stale in record time. For example…
What’s that? You’ve never played Blood Feud in New York? Then you haven’t really lived! (No one has played this game.) Blood Feud in New York, or BFiNY as we like to call it, is one of those games that if you walked in on people playing, you’d think they were building a model Millenium Falcon. There are so many pieces and so many instructions that 90% of the game time is spent explaining and debating. If your idea of a good time is telling everyone to just shut up for one second while you look up a rule, then BFiNY is the game for you. You’ll become a Made Man before you get a room full of your friends to play this disaster of a game.
The great thing about Settlers of Catan is that you can make it about as long or short as you want. Of course the shortest version of the game is still about an hour and a half, but at least there’s some flexibility! The reason it takes so long is that the people of Catan are a peaceable sort. They don’t go to war with one another. They’re the most passive-aggressive pilgrims that have ever run ashore. At the two-hour mark, you’re going to wish for at least one of your townspeople to lose their mind and start burning down cities.
No thanks!
If the reason you’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons is because it requires you to think about things that don’t exist, fret not! Descent: Journeys in the Dark is pretty much the same thing, only it requires about 80% less imagination. Four adventurers take on the roles of wizards, barbarians and rogues as they do battle with another player (don’t say dungeon master) who controls all the monsters in… the dungeon. It’s a big, expensive undertaking that – unlike DnD – can’t be cleared off the kitchen table in under 5 if your girlfriend is coming home from work early.
Now here’s a game that shouldn’t be suggested in polite company. Titan was crafted back in the 80’s when America was going through boom times and people had nothing better to do than snort coke and imagine themselves as a Sauron-like figure moving bands of trolls and ogres around the land. The game itself is incredibly fun – and it can be short if your Titan is eliminated early on – but most of the time you might as well buckle in for four plus hours of unicorn-thumping.
The titular mouse trap is crafted while the game goes on, which means this game shouldn’t take more than a half hour… in theory. Life never seems to go as we plan it, though. The trap pieces never fit together the way we want them to, and more often than not, there’s an essential component missing altogether. So Mouse Trap becomes the Let’s Look Through All the Other Boxes in the Closet to Find the Missing Piece game – which can become a frustrating hour and a half in which everyone comes out a loser.
Puerto Rico is pretty much the same game as Settlers of Catan, it just happens to take place in a real country. By the time you’re done with it, you’ll wish you’d skipped the game altogether and just gotten drunk on piña coladas with your friends.
*Erm, not wanting to be picky but it's one die, two dice. The plural is not die, it's dice- die is singular. Other than that, nice list.
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