My buddy Mike said collector games are just inventory management with dice

I was at a game night last Saturday in my buddy's basement over in Arlington and we were playing some heavy euro game. Mike just looks up after like two hours of moving resource cubes and says this whole hobby is just pretending to run a warehouse. I laughed it off at first but honestly it hit different the next morning when I was thinking about it. He's got a point when you look at all these games where you're just moving stuff from one pile to another pile. Even my favorite worker placement games are basically just deciding which box gets the thing first. It made me wonder if I actually like the theme or if I just like organizing pretend stuff. Has anyone else had that moment where a friend's joke made you rethink your whole shelf?

2 comments

2 Comments

wendy_clark21d ago

Mike said that but he's dead wrong. Theme is the whole point. Without the setting, Magic Maze is just a timer and a bunch of arrows. Pandemic is just shuffling colored cubes around a map until you lose. The reason we play is because we're convincing each other we're scientists saving the world or dwarves digging for gold. The mechanics are just the scaffolding, the glue that holds the story together. If Mike wants to run a real warehouse he can get a job at Amazon.

cole_mitchell5721d ago

Ha! That reminds me of something that went down with my buddy Tom back in 2019. He was trying to get into board games with us and I had him try Terraforming Mars. About halfway through the game he just stops and says "Wait, I'm just buying cards to get more money to buy better cards so I can build a thing that says I win." He put his cards down and walked to the kitchen to make a sandwich. We didn't see him for like 45 minutes. The thing is, he wasn't wrong. That game is literally just a spreadsheet you play with other people. And I still love it, but his joke stuck with me harder than I'd like to admit.