"old man" complaint about board games
I'm sad about the direction popular board games have gone. Until 2008-ish, there was a lot of (euro/ameritrash) board game innovation that increased the number of meaningful decisions you have per unit time and increased the impact of a skill differences.
On average, since then, games have been increasing complexity and randomness and decreasing the impact of skill differences. You can see this in e.g., bgg top games over time, games like Puerto Rico and
"old man" complaint about board games
Caylus have been replaced by more complex games that take longer to play and are also more random.
People often complain that games aren't complex enough and that a more complex game that has more randomness per unit time is more fun or that the game wasn't fun because the game was decided before the last turn, but of course there's no way to have a non-random game with meaningful decisions if anyone can win on the last turn.
"old man" complaint about board games
If the set of possible moves is hard to enumerate (either large or the game does not have perfect information), I can imagine a game where no player can tell who can win even just before the last turn, even when the whole game state and enough computational resources would allow one to determine that.
Do you know of any games that go in the direction of making it as hard to tell whether you're winning as it's to be winning?
