Conversations have always been an integral part of a fun board game night. There’s room for small talk, catching up with your friends and sometimes – when you’ve found a group that’s reasonably invested in board games as a whole – you can even find yourself talking about the broader and finer points of gaming itself. And as fun as all those conversations can be, sometimes they can get a bit dull.

Have no fear. Here are some hot takes – from luke-warm to sizzling – to liven up your game nights. (Results may vary. It’s assumed you can infer where I’ve placed my tongue during writing.)

1. If unbalanced strategies can be called a failure of design, then so can hard to learn rules.

It’s a common complaint made by people who lost their first play of a new game without fully grasping what they could have done differently: the game has unbalanced strategies, and should have been fixed during playtesting. One way or another, clearly the game’s at fault here, which is another way of saying that the game’s design is flawed. If not broken.

The argument is straight-forward. Because people did not feel they had any agency left, due to another player picking one specific strategy, the game has failed. It didn’t live up to its purpose of giving players agency to pursue the game’s goal.

If we look at a game’s rules, the same argument could be made. If the game promises to give players agency, but then withholds that agency behind hard-to-parse instructions, implications and unspoken assumptions; doesn’t it also fail to live up to its promise?

Now the counter-argument usually is, that it is down to the players themselves to learn and figure out how to play the game in such a way, that they feel they have agency. Which puts unbalanced strategies and hard-to-learn rules on the same level. If we can demand of players to put in more effort to learn the rules, we can demand of them to put in more effort to come up with new strategies. We can’t accept one and reject the other.

2. If you defend Monopoly as a misunderstood family game, I have to assume you don’t understand board games or their history.

People love a redemption arc. So much so, that they are willing to go to great lengths to construe one, even when there is no reason for it. And there is literally no reason to rehabilitate Monopoly among board gamers. It’s a bad game. Yes, even when played correctly. Even when properties are auctioned off right away. Even without the no-parking-rule. The closer you get to the actual printed rules of the game, the more apparent it becomes that Monopoly is a bad game.

Because it’s supposed to be a bad game. That’s its entire reason for existing in the first place. You are supposed to not enjoy yourself. You are supposed to get irate at this feeling of injustice and exploitation. Walking away from or even flipping the table is entirely within the realm of how the game is supposed to end. Even if you remove the explicit written commentary in Liz Magie’s original Landlords’ Game, you still end up with an experience that evokes these emotions in players.

Sure, schadenfreude is a thing. Monopoly routinely creates moments in which you can laugh at the misfortune of others, and even benefit from them gradually losing the ability to take part in the game. If this makes a game good or even great to you, you might want to ask yourself what it says about you, that you revel in the others being worse off than yourself.

3. The claim that board games tell stories only serves to prove the utter lack of media literacy among board gamers.

Stories are a very malleable concept. In fact, that elements that make up a story tend to change slightly according to the medium, you’re using to tell that story. Please note the use of the personal pronoun „you“ as in „a person“. Story-telling is a very human trait, a cultural practice if you like. We tell stories to each other for countless reasons. To teach. To entertain. To bond. To reflect. To emote. To empathise. Etc.

Stories are told by people, not objects. We may use objects to contain a story somebody is telling, but the objects themselves are not the storytellers. They are at best a device used, for people to tell each other stories. The objects are a medium, the storytellers are the people. It’s this very basic undestanding that makes it possible for us to read a book as something an author has written for people to read. Instead of randomly generated words on a page, that happen to have some sense of meaning; there is narrator speaking through the medium, i.e. telling their story.

There are some, who believe that board games as a medium work the same as books do. That the game is the medium through which the author/designer tells their story. These people mean well, but they’re wrong. Games are a paticipatory medium. So much so, that whatever meaning we attribute to the game, its events and components is player-driven, not designer-driven. Something that Huizinga observed and named the magic circle. And if you really want to go deep into the weeds here, the kernel of this idea already exists in literature, film, music, theatre, etc. Derrida’s deconstruction theory is just a needlessly provocative attempt to point out how no medium can fully retain its author’s intention. Every theatre troupe can imprint their own take on whatever play they’re performing. The many schools of film criticism only exist, because the audience can have differing views on what they’re seeing on screen.

Regardless of who you consider the driving force in the story we experience when we play games, if you understand how a medium works, there is no question that either the designer or the players are the ones telling stories.

Now that you’re equipped with these hot takes, you should have no trouble injecting some passionate arguing into your next game night. Bottoms up!