I Like the Top Ten

Dominion has entered the BGG Top 10, pushing out Through The Ages. That to me, is an improvement. I can't even bring myself to try Through the Ages - there seems to be way too much theme and way too much time, and it just looks boring. This from someone who loves GIPF. I think my problem is that it looks like the game is doing all the playing for you.

That is not to say that I think the Top 10 are all excellent games... I'm no MWChapel. I don't like Power Grid, Twilight Struggle, El Grande or Caylus either, and Princes of Florence is not something I rush to play. I don't know why I don't like Princes so much... maybe because of the mish-mash of mechanics I can't figure out what it's trying to do. Oh hang on, it has a sucky auction...

There have been quite a few games in the Top 10 I wasn't interested in enough to even try, and they've all fallen out. Age of Steam, War of the Ring, Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage, Shogun, Paths of Glory and 1960 have all been studiously ignored. Mostly they're longer games, and I really fear being stuck for 3 hours in a bad game, as happened when I played Twilight Imperium (that was 10 hours!).

I don't like long movies either.

Do You Like Games You Don't Understand?

I played Caylus for the first time today, and I was kind of meh. It's an interesting game, but there are too many things to think about and I'm not sure I'd ever do a good job with it. I like the building track, and if Caylus was simply an economic game trying to build the right sets of buildings so that my economy functions more efficiently than yours, I think I'd like that. I find that adding the castle and the royal favours makes Caylus so complicated I'll probably never do a good job with it. I can't grok the long-term consequences of my actions.

I think Princes of Florence is somewhat similar - there are just too many things going on. I'm all at sea when I play that, and consequently I don't enoy it so much. I suspect Goa and Louis XIV are a bit like that as well. Maybe just a bit too complicated. I like games that I can get my head around, even if it's only just, such as Tikal, Tigris and Euphrates, and Elfenland. They're the limit of complexity that I'm comfortable with and consequently a challenge to play. Easier games like San Juan, GIPF and Hare and Tortoise that I understand really well become old favourites that I can play to relax.

What I want to know is, do people often like games which confuse them? Are all the people who rate Caylus highly super-mega-smart? I have a Ph.D. and a genius IQ, but it confuses me. Are Caylus fans the absolute intellectual elite of the planet? If not, what's so good about a game that's confusingly hard? Do people like playing a game where they feel lost? Is there some different sort of intelligence that they have and I don't? I need feedback here, because it just doesn't make sense to me.