Does anyone actually play this game for fun?

[Meeplelowda]

No game is fun if you can only win by employing the exact same meta as everyone else.

I may agree with you in that I don't find a game fun if there is one dominant strategy that you feel handicapped if you don't play. But first, that's a me thing (and you I guess), and it's perfectly fine for other people to think it is fun for them. Second, if such a dominant strategy exists, then that's an issue with the game's design and I don't fault someone from using it. Either it wasn't discovered during play testing, or it was discovered and they decided not to adjust rules to address it.

[Romain672]

I once played soccer, but when the other team tried to score, I reported them for 'unsporting behavior.' Like, have some class!
Last time I played chess, my opponent captured my bishop. I asked them if they came here to make friends or to ruin lives.
I was in a game of Risk, and someone actually invaded my continent. Real 'friend' move there.
Once played Connect 4, and they just kept blocking my columns. Clearly someone forgot the true meaning of 'friendly game.'
In my last game of Catan, someone actually built a road to cut me off. I’m pretty sure that’s against the Geneva Convention.
Tried a bike race, but then someone passed me for first place. I immediately checked the rulebook for courtesy violations.
I was playing Starcraft and my opponent Zerg rushed me. I guess they missed the tutorial on mutual respect.
In Hearthstone, someone used a card combo to wipe my board. Very toxic. We were supposed to be building trust, not decks.

And yet most of your examples misses the point imo.
Soccer, Connect 4, Starcraft, Hearthstone are 1v1 game with high interaction, and no possible goal outside of winning.
Risk have as a mecanic of invading others. I don't know the game enough to know what incentive players to not play defensive, but you will get nothing interesting if you stay defensive.
Bike race is not a good example.
Catan is the only one which is a good example. If someone cut you off because they want a better spot, that's fine, that's the game, they were faster than you. If they cut you off because you are winning, I would said that's fine too (but I think already we could have players who don't find that fine). If they cut you off because that make them just slightly weaker and you extremely weaker, that's another story. They try to win indirectly by annoying other players. Is it fun to be annoyed? I think we would agree that it is not. So should you do it? And here we got the competitive aspect going.

Carcassonne is the same thing, you can have fun building your cities, taking your long roads, and so on. You don't have to play against other players to have fun on the game.

I will not develop more since I put lots of links in my post of the first page, but I find that way too many people just don't understand the other side.

[Kaladry]

Yeah we have a house rule of no blocking. Some of the expansions or other versions also prevent it by allowing you to take a meeple back from the board if you don't place one.

In general I find many players on BGA too cutthroat and toxic. People aren't here to have fun, they're here to win by any means necessary at the expense of others' fun.

[Ceaseless]

I once played soccer, but when the other team tried to score, I reported them for 'unsporting behavior.' Like, have some class!
Last time I played chess, my opponent captured my bishop. I asked them if they came here to make friends or to ruin lives.
I was in a game of Risk, and someone actually invaded my continent. Real 'friend' move there.
Once played Connect 4, and they just kept blocking my columns. Clearly someone forgot the true meaning of 'friendly game.'
In my last game of Catan, someone actually built a road to cut me off. I’m pretty sure that’s against the Geneva Convention.
Tried a bike race, but then someone passed me for first place. I immediately checked the rulebook for courtesy violations.
I was playing Starcraft and my opponent Zerg rushed me. I guess they missed the tutorial on mutual respect.
In Hearthstone, someone used a card combo to wipe my board. Very toxic. We were supposed to be building trust, not decks.

And yet most of your examples misses the point imo.
Soccer, Connect 4, Starcraft, Hearthstone are 1v1 game with high interaction, and no possible goal outside of winning.
Risk have as a mecanic of invading others. I don't know the game enough to know what incentive players to not play defensive, but you will get nothing interesting if you stay defensive.
Bike race is not a good example.
Catan is the only one which is a good example. If someone cut you off because they want a better spot, that's fine, that's the game, they were faster than you. If they cut you off because you are winning, I would said that's fine too (but I think already we could have players who don't find that fine). If they cut you off because that make them just slightly weaker and you extremely weaker, that's another story. They try to win indirectly by annoying other players. Is it fun to be annoyed? I think we would agree that it is not. So should you do it? And here we got the competitive aspect going.

Carcassonne is the same thing, you can have fun building your cities, taking your long roads, and so on. You don't have to play against other players to have fun on the game.

I will not develop more since I put lots of links in my post of the first page, but I find that way too many people just don't understand the other side.

The rulebook tells you what the goal is. Sure, in Connect Four you can do things like create diamonds, in soccer enjoy kicking the ball in random places, it's no different than the likes of Carcassonne in this respect. These so-called other goals mentioned are equally arbitrary, made up by the one thinking of them. And they are free to do that, but they do not have the right to force anyone else to. A player can just make whatever they want up and say, "this is what my definition of fun stuff is for this game," but they have no right to say "you're banned from doing anything not on it". We see users try to tell players in rated pools that they cannot do this loosely defined concept of "blocking" because they don't like it. There is a word for this attempt at forcing players not to perform perfectly legal blocks, and that word is cheating. It is a violation of the letter and the spirit of the rules. One of the most important things about these threads is to demonstrate that we do not condone cheating on this website and we fully support the right for players to play by the rules of this game, to enjoy this game as it was meant to be played. They're free to block and not to block without worrying about other users harassing them for it.

[Romain672]

I think at one point what can define what's fair and what is defined by the play of others.
They are all arbitrary because you can't define a strict line between what is allowed and what isn't. In Azul, that's much more complicated because many plays impact directly the other player.

Some weird plays you mentionned does not make you directly closer to victory. Sure with some players you can do/let them do whatever you want, totally forget the rules, play twice in a row and have fun with it.

In soccer, that impact directly the game. You have ~15 others players which expect you to try to make a goal, and if you start doing random things which directly impact them that will not be fine.
If everyone has a ball, then yes you can do anything with it, lose the game, and that will be okay.
If there is only one ball, and you start to hide the ball, keep it for one minute, that will start to immensively impact others players.
That's the main difference of all those examples, so yeah they are really different.

"And they are free to do that, but they do not have the right to force anyone else to." => Yeah we agree on that, even if you take my civ 6 example from the Azul subforum in my first post in page 1 of this subject, I would said that complaining about it start to be tricky, especially if there is nothing to win.
Doing something which can be considered unfair, and can totally change how the game is played (passing 20x in patchwork, playing fasting in stone age, playing with conventions in hanabi...) is tricky to manage imo.


I will add that many of those complains would not be in my category, and should not be done imo. You just red thumb the player, and move on.

[Todd Bannon]

The thing about game design, though, is most games that say they are designed for 2-4 players are actually play-tested for 3-4 players. Yes, you can play them with 2, but you lose a ton of strategy. The only reason the 2 player metas are so dominant is because you can focus all your effort into disrupting a single player. You can't get away with that once you get to 3-4 players.

So I don't fault game designers when players develop a dominant meta when they play with 2 players.

And this is also the reason I prefer most of the 2-4 player games on BGA with 3-4 players, not 2. Unfortunately, if I want to play arena, I don't have a choice.

[Ceaseless]

I once played soccer, but when the other team tried to score, I reported them for 'unsporting behavior.' Like, have some class!
Last time I played chess, my opponent captured my bishop. I asked them if they came here to make friends or to ruin lives.
I was in a game of Risk, and someone actually invaded my continent. Real 'friend' move there.
Once played Connect 4, and they just kept blocking my columns. Clearly someone forgot the true meaning of 'friendly game.'
In my last game of Catan, someone actually built a road to cut me off. I’m pretty sure that’s against the Geneva Convention.
Tried a bike race, but then someone passed me for first place. I immediately checked the rulebook for courtesy violations.
I was playing Starcraft and my opponent Zerg rushed me. I guess they missed the tutorial on mutual respect.
In Hearthstone, someone used a card combo to wipe my board. Very toxic. We were supposed to be building trust, not decks.

And yet most of your examples misses the point imo.
Soccer, Connect 4, Starcraft, Hearthstone are 1v1 game with high interaction, and no possible goal outside of winning.
Risk have as a mecanic of invading others. I don't know the game enough to know what incentive players to not play defensive, but you will get nothing interesting if you stay defensive.
Bike race is not a good example.
Catan is the only one which is a good example. If someone cut you off because they want a better spot, that's fine, that's the game, they were faster than you. If they cut you off because you are winning, I would said that's fine too (but I think already we could have players who don't find that fine). If they cut you off because that make them just slightly weaker and you extremely weaker, that's another story. They try to win indirectly by annoying other players. Is it fun to be annoyed? I think we would agree that it is not. So should you do it? And here we got the competitive aspect going.

Carcassonne is the same thing, you can have fun building your cities, taking your long roads, and so on. You don't have to play against other players to have fun on the game.

I will not develop more since I put lots of links in my post of the first page, but I find that way too many people just don't understand the other side.

Something else I should mention. You talk about "being annoying" yet throw out entirely arbitrary examples. Someone blocking you is no more or less objectively annoying than someone scoring a ton of points from say, a giant city. At least the blocking is a part of interactive gameplay, the city just scoring huge points is a bit of a one-sided affair. That said, it's just subjective. This "annoying" is fiction. The scoring and disruption is all done on the board of a zero-sum game with rules all players engaged have agreed to. One player blocking off another player's play is nothing more than a continuation of that agreement. Someone being annoyed in-game by an opponent scoring lots of points or being disrupted is fine, that's part of the game. But it's not real. The losses from being blocked are only real on that board, and the reactions to it are also part of that fictional setting. Someone carrying being annoyed about that to the real world is someone who cannot tell the difference from fiction and reality.

[Ceaseless]

The thing about game design, though, is most games that say they are designed for 2-4 players are actually play-tested for 3-4 players. Yes, you can play them with 2, but you lose a ton of strategy. The only reason the 2 player metas are so dominant is because you can focus all your effort into disrupting a single player. You can't get away with that once you get to 3-4 players.

So I don't fault game designers when players develop a dominant meta when they play with 2 players.

And this is also the reason I prefer most of the 2-4 player games on BGA with 3-4 players, not 2. Unfortunately, if I want to play arena, I don't have a choice.

It's generally the other way around. 2 player games are pretty much where the real strategy is. The more players you add, the more it's player politics and chaos. Actual strategy is less relevant, even in games supposedly designed with more players in mind, the natural edge of 2 player almost always comes out ahead. This is also one big reason Arena tends to be dominated by 2 player votes. Having a dominant meta is 3-4 player is trickier because actually playing well isn't the most important thing to win. It's generally stuff less in your control, such as the other players cancelling each other out, whether accidentally or intentionally getting good draws not affected by them, etc.

[Jolcia999]

The world is not fair? Well that's life Everyone plays to win, we all have different strategies. I had to adopt mine multiple times. And guess what? I've learned a lot thanks to that - gained different perspectives. First person who stole my big city in Carcassone? My ex-boyfriend on his second play... I have never realized before (playing with other people) you can gain points by someone else's effort. I had to rethink my way of playing and started to pay more attention not to give many options to be robbed

[Mr_Magic]

People moaning about this kind of thing are generally people who just don't like losing.

Complaining that Carcassonne is too cut-throat is bizarre. It's what the game is about! if you want to just place tiles and make a pretty picture go do a jigsaw.