Rose-Tinted Glasses

I recently played a couple of games we haven’t dug out for a couple of years at least – Roborally and Starfarers of Catan. Jax & I played Starfarers with my boys, they’ve played it before but not for a couple of years and the chrome is always appealing. We used to play this a fair bit when it came out in 1999, but it has definitely lost it’s shine. The gameplay was slow and quite frankly a bit boring. The boys enjoyed it, especially Tom who always enjoys trading and doing deals, but I don’t think we’ll be getting it out again in a hurry.
Iain and Tully came over last Tuesday and I introduced them to Roborally, which was decidedly flat. Iain was especially keen to try this and must have gone away wondering what all the fuss was about over this game. Ok, we didn’t play with any weapons or power-ups, and had a simple run across one board, but the game wasn’t anywhere near as much fun as I remembered it. My copy is the original from 1994, and looking at the expansions they seem to add more frustration and complexity without adding any more gameplay and strategy.
I’m decidedly cold on Settlers of Catan after playing it a few times over the last year, and maybe we are just used to much higher quality in modern games. The recent highest rating games on Boardgamegeek are all full of tactical options, themes and great components, and even a fair number of medium-rated games would have shone if they’d been released in the mid-nineties.
We’ve come a long way in game design