Board Game Arena

I like depressing games sometimes.

On BGA:

Expedition: Northwest Passage--exploring in the wake of the doomed Franklin expedition? Yeah, that's depressing!

In the Year of the Dragon--basically, only one positive event can happen in this game (a fireworks festival). The rest is Mongol invasions, plague, taxes, drought, decay. You usually lose or send home most of your household by the end of the game. It's brutal. I like it a lot.

Dungeon Twister--there's something visceral about a game whose entire point is killing the other person's pieces, whether for points or to get them out of the way to make a run for the exit. I haven't decided whether I like this game, it's a lot more mean-spirited flinging a fireball into the face of a Thief than say capturing a rook in chess.

[I also find Quantum depressing but largely due to the way its total lack of balance encourages aggressive, mean-spirited play; thematically it's got a nice vibrant space-opera vibe.]

Off BGA:

Definitely Galaxy Trucker. Build a spacecraft and spend the second half of the game seeing it shredded by meteors or ransacked by pirates and slavers. Every so often you lose enough of the ship it breaks in half and you have to pilot the pathetic remaining chunk or just give up. Actually, a lot of times it makes more sense to give up a flight halfway through if things go wrong.

nandblock wrote:In the Year of the Dragon--basically, only one positive event can happen in this game (a fireworks festival). The rest is Mongol invasions, plague, taxes, drought, decay. You usually lose or send home most of your household by the end of the game. It's brutal. I like it a lot.

i think that hanging out with the ladies and geeks are both non.depressing parts of the game ... but it's a matter of play now .. pay later lol. live for today !

i agree with the rest of your list. K2 can also be potentially depressing ... watching your peons fade away helplessly.

K2 is the most depressing game, for me, just like senatorhung said.
Climbers' death is horrible.

senatorhung wrote:K2 can also be potentially depressing ... watching your peons fade away helplessly.

K2 can be especially depressing when the game ends and you have a climber at the top of the mountain with only 1 acclimatization point remaining. He surely won't survive but who cares because you won the game and can just leave him there!

Much like its historical reference, Thermopyles is one of the rare games where not only the word "depressing'' but also the word "hopelessness" creeps in and through the gameplay from start to finish.

From the limited top values of cards made available compared to the higher enemy cards, to the limited amount of support dice available, to the constraints on how and when additional cards are made available, to the limited times a player can position themselves into a position for a remote chance at winning, the common theme of play is "why?"

As there are several interpretations on "depressing":

For context (core material of game), agree on the Expedition:Northwest Passage comment above and Thermopyles...

For gameplay (lack of hope), see Thermopyles again...

For atmosphere during play as a broad note...ANY game where the (fill in name here) game cogniziti feel the need to tell other players their moves are "poor", "stupid", "would never do this if one knew how to play", and other comments to generally degrade the playing experience during a game...for some reason here this appears quite often in Saboteur - not a general condemnation, but what's up with that?

Reports are that Thermopyles is one of the most avoidable games on this site, yes.

I was not speaking in the original thread of specific games where players behave poorly, but games that are inherently a bit of a downer because of their theme or mechanics or both. Sometimes one can leaven the other: Vlaada's Galaxy Trucker and Dungeon Lords both have the same flavour of going through hell and sometimes seeing all your hard work smashed up beyond recognition--but the humour of the theme, design, rulebook and art mitigate the awfulness of losing because they make losing kind of hilarious. GT has the feel of a Douglas Adams novel and DL reminds me of Phil Foglio's old comics about D&D (or Robert Asprin's Myth series).