I like spending time with people, and I like that time to be some sort of quality time. There is a sort of activity that gets proposed occasionally: board games. I don’t think those are quality time spent for the most part; and now I have arguments for this.

Board games proper are just a central example of activities of the sort I am arguing against: some arguments below apply to multiplayer video games, card games, and social deduction games.

Reasons why I would rather just talk to people

I have two important arguments: the time commitment, and “just talking to people” being more fun.

Board games are a time commitment, often for more than an hour, that you can’t escape from if you are feeling it’s not worth your time.

This is a very different experience from basically any other activity at social gatherings. If you are bored, you can just drop out of the conversation and go talk to someone else until you find a conversation you are getting value from.

Further, board games center the attention on something that is not related to the lives of people I am hanging out with. Honestly, I would almost always rather hear a story about something that happened, or something they are thinking about, rather than spend time on a board game.

The world is full of detail! Full of stories and troubles and hopes and interesting things someone learned! Why spend social time figuring out made-up complexity that has nothing to do with anything I care about?

At this point in the essay, a careful reader notices that the above problem is not unique to board games; it is also an argument against watching a movie or reading a book or many other activities.

With regards to movies, I must confess I never watch any sort of video on my own.

But I do like movies. Not in the sense of watching imaginary people living interesting lives instead of focusing on reality; but rather, I appreciate culture, and I appreciate a story well told. I especially appreciate this sort of joint experience watching a movie together creates.

Coming back to board games, they sort of... make for unremarkable memories?

I think most of my board game experiences were not really worth remembering, or did not produce the kind of bonding over an experience together that I valued in e.g. sports or watching movies. This of course is subjective.

Here are additional reasons that are somewhat specific to particular board games (specifically, somewhat complex Eurogames) I played that were not particularly fun:

1. Skill gaps. Games are competitive, and you always seem to play the game with someone who has already played it and finetuned their brain on the game, and then you make completely wrong initial moves and have no chance of winning. It’s like playing chess without knowing any opening lines; you are instantly in a worse position.

2. The overhead in learning the rules is high. One time I went to a game night and played a game called Wingspan where you have to deal with like a hundred bird cards and put them into habitats to score points and whatnot. I figured some reasonable strategy out, but I never played it again, and learning the strategy was not a good use of my time. This is too much to ask if you are not in the habit of learning new board games on the fly.

3. Some of these games are basically single-player. The aforementioned Wingspan can literally be played by a single person with not that much modification to the rules.

Steelman of the board game argument: equalize participation

Board games help shy people participate. For those readers who do not feel comfortable in settings but still want to hang out with people, board games are a very inclusive activity. In fact, a stronger claim is true: unstructured socializing is very unequal in the amount of participation given to each person (and this strongly correlates with social status, but also extraversion and other personality traits not commonly found in shy people); structure, such as board games, plausibly increases the median amount of social participation.

They also help people compete and eke out wins! In a given social context you need many social hierarchies for everyone to have something they are good at compared to others, otherwise they feel low status in everything and this can make them feel miserable.

Poker is the worst

I know poker is not what people think of with regard to board games, but it can arise in similar social contexts, and it is among the worst offenders in terms of taking up time for very little interesting activity. The correct way to play is so full of inaction. You should be folding most of the time; the fun part with the betting and revealing cards is just a tiny fraction of the time. The only thing you need to know about poker as a social activity is that people who played poker for a living used to play 12 tables simultaneously online.
This is reflective of how often there is an interesting decision to make.

You can of course play incorrectly and bet all the time; but if this happens, you are likely to lose fairly quickly.

Slightly less against particular board games

Here are some board games/word games I do not actively dislike: Coup, Grabble, Codenames, Contact.

The board games I did not actively dislike all share similar properties:

• I can explain the entirety of the rules in 2 minutes, or learn from observing for a similar amount of time

• The rounds are short, maybe 15 minutes

• Or, if the rounds are a bit longer, you can just drop in and out of the game at any time

• The gameplay is verbal and social, but not in the adversarial sense like in social deduction games

Contact is my favorite game. It is a word-guessing game for >= 3 players.

There are two roles: the chooser and the guessers. One person (the chooser) thinks of a word (say, “candle”) and says only its first letter (”c”). Everyone else tries to guess the word in a specific way: by giving clues whose answers start with the letters revealed so far. 1

Why do I like Contact more than most games?

1. It is a complex word game and requires understanding how other people think.

2. It is easy to play during travel, even while walking somewhere, in situations where the counterfactual use of time might be worse. And it’s easy to stop playing!

3. Reminds me of some AI research concepts such as steganography and generative adversarial networks.

Bonus: against social deduction games

Social deduction games avoid most of the objections in this post. Nevertheless, I do not feel comfortable playing them, mostly because I have to pretend being the bad guy and then they figure me out. Also, no one wants to introduce time limits on discussion and everything drags on. Aargh.

Social deduction games often arise on events where many people are spending long hours together. My experience of such social events got so much better the day I decided to opt out. You can just decide it’s not for you and go do something else.