The second half of the computer/board game articles is temporarily postponed. That article is about the bad part of computer/board game crossovers, so this miniseries should be a relevant interlude anyway. (It wasn’t going to be a miniseries at first, but it ended up spilling way over a reasonable length for a single article, so I’m splitting it up.)

Just as games have payoffs, the moments that you enjoy and come back for, they also can have turnoffs, moments (or stretches) that you dislike, that would make you not want to play that game again. Like payoffs, what constitutes a turnoff—or how severe it is—is different for different people. I’ll plow through some that come to mind, to get us all thinking about the subject; when I talk about individual games later, then, I can talk about their turnoffs, comparing and contrasting them to others.

Please note that I enjoy many of the games I’m about to mention—either I don’t care about the turnoffs, they don’t apply to me, or they don’t outweigh the payoffs. Everybody has a few games they dislike, though; I’m trying to grasp the reasons why my family and friends dislike the games they do.

Not Enough Involvement: The feeling that I’m just watching a game instead of playing it. Monopoly is pretty bad in this regard. For all the rolling I do, I get to make precious few decisions. If I just wanted to watch, I’d watch the TV. This is also what turns me off of Rummy-type card games like Gin or 500 Rum; you just sit around throwing off useless cards until sets land on top of you, then you score some points.

Takes Too Long: This problem is worse if the game tends to have too few opportunities to make decisions, or tends to be a foregone conclusion partway into the game; but a game that takes longer than my attention span lasts can be a drag, even if it might otherwise be interesting all the way through. People have tried to get me to play Axis and Allies, but the game doesn’t seem to have enough juicy bits to make it worth the four-hour investment. Large multiplayer games suffer the worst from this turnoff. Diplomacy, Civilization, and the non-computerized Titan are some of the games I won’t play in part because they just take too long. By contrast, Iron Dragon, Chess, and Bridge can also all take a while, but are interesting enough the whole way through to be worth it. Chess is especially good because if the game stops being interesting because one player has clearly won, the other usually resigns.

Have To Think Too Much: This is somewhat the opposite of the “Not Enough Involvement” turnoff. Chess and Go take quite a while to play, and thinking a whole game through can leave you exhausted at the end. Furthermore, the more you think and plan during the game, the more of a personal failure it can seem like if you lose. Like rejection in a relationship, it’s easy to see how fear of this failure can turn you off of a game.