I frequently read that people at the time said the plastic minis in Nemesis can detract as much as they can add to the atmosphere, hiding important parts of the board space owing to their sheer size.
TI is often lambasted for taking an entire weekend.
Rosenberg’s euro games are the bane of many a player trying to keep all possible actions in their mind.
Modern kickstarters can arrive in shipping crates worth of stuff, making you rent a lorry just to get your 25 minute party game to a meet-up.
What’s your biggest regret purchase you can readily recall where a game was just “too much”. No matter what specifically it was too much of.
For me personally, my big one was Android: Netrunner. I was excited to jump back into 2-player competitive deckbuilding after I quit Magic The Gathering early in the fourth edition. And it seemed so perfect. No luck involved, known spaces of cards, multiple factions, asymmetry which I nearly always love, it’s all perfect!
On paper…
In reality I found out, yes, for me this is a strictly superior MtG. No downsides. Except that I’m no longer 16, and I no longer want to spend forever creating decks, collecting cards even if they’re not random, or engage with sifting through hundreds or thousands of cards when working on decks. The exact things that made me excited to play MtG-but-better and brought me to buy Netrunner were the very things turning me away from it now.
Still got to sell it, oddly attached to my first-run box + all expansions now that it’s no longer available. But played it like 6 times and that was it. 0 enjoyment. Gave actual MtG a try, even less enjoyment. Tried Keyforge, also even worse. I feel that the entire genre is just a goner for me, and I regret investing so much money into Netrunner. A lot.
Frosthaven ended up being really complex. My partner and I got through Gloomhaven just fine. Maybe I forgot how much of a struggle it is in the beginning or it was trying to keep track of everything after an exhausting scenario, but we petered out after a handful of scenarios. Using apps has helped, especially with tracking combat, but we ended up fudging a bunch of stuff so we didn’t have to re setup and replay whole scenarios that came down to a single card draw.
Plus organizing everything meant it doesn’t fit in just one box. It is a home-only game.
Man, I bounced off Gloomhaven hard, which was disappointing because the rest of my friend group really enjoys it. The whole mechanic around burning cards each time you shuffle / when you use powerful ones really turned me off. It’s set up like a tactical game, and that makes me want to take my time and approach it strategically, but the time pressure of running out of cards and losing made me feel like I had to rush all the time. After the second or so time we lost a lengthy run due to running out of cards, I was about done with it.