Built up and abandoned

After the last #BG2GETHER in December was all about bright eyes and childhood memories of Christmas, today we're turning our attention to a very serious topic in every game: match abandonment. The specific question for February is: *We all know board games that are doomed. You want to throw in the towel for all sorts of reasons. Does that happen to you? How do you deal with such requests? Is this a common practice or is it frowned upon? And under what circumstances can you imagine abandoning a match? What would have to happen for you not to agree to this?

Aborting a game is an issue that fortunately rarely or never occurs in most of my gaming sessions. It is also frowned upon by most of my fellow players. If things are going badly, it's better to finish the game than to abandon it. Specifically, I can only think of two exceptions that actually lead to a game being abandoned. However, this happens very rarely (max. once a year):

  1. The game is not going according to the rules
  2. It's late, everyone is tired and there's no concentration left

If a game doesn't go according to the rules, you usually notice it relatively quickly. For me at least, this is a reason to stop the game in the middle and restart the round by mutual agreement. Of course, there are also rules that are not logical, not clear or even incomprehensible, but then house rules tend to help before a game is abandoned. It is particularly annoying if you don't realize that you are playing according to the wrong rules. One example of this was two rounds of Abgrundtief that we played one evening in a row. The game was fun, but in hindsight it was too easy for everyone. The next day I looked at the rules again and found a serious mistake. The evil minions of Cthulhu are placed on the game board after each player's turn. In our rounds the previous evening, however, they were only put into play after each round (i.e. after all players had had a turn). Of course, the game was easy if 3/4 of the monsters remained in the box. That really annoyed me and would have been a good reason to abandon the game. After a few months, the game came back on the table and I was secretly quite glad that we hadn't gone up against the deep creatures.

The other reason why a game can fail and be abandoned is lack of concentration. It's usually a bad idea for a group to come up with the idea, more or less by mutual agreement at the end of a game night, of getting another board like Nemesis off the shelf, knowing that the setup won't be finished by midnight. In this case, it can also make sense to end the game early or to switch to a smaller game.

Incidentally, we had a completely different situation the other day, which also led to the game being called off due to a lack of concentration. There were two of us and we really wanted to get the Golem that had been on the shelf for a long time onto the table. So we got to work, unpacked everything, read the instructions and started assembling. The assembly then took 1.5 hours and after the first three pages of the rules we looked at each other with the same thought: No, not today! We then banished the Golem back into the box and played The Legends of Andor. Generally, more complex games are no problem for us, but sometimes it just depends on the form of the day :-).

What's it like for you? Do you ever skip a round? Let us know in the comments.

Christian from Spielstil.net drew my attention to the #BG2GETHER campaign some time ago in order to strengthen networking. So read/hear/see more interesting opinions on the topic directly, e.g. at:

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16.02.2024 - user://Stefan

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