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A couple of friends and I played 7th Continent and felt similar. It was such a grind and all the admin (both physical and also game-based) just sapped any enjoyment from the experience. We touched it out for something like 18 hours of gameplay in total and it’s now our yardstick for tedium :-)
Shame as there were so many clever ideas that could have been enjoyable.
AlexD-
A couple of friends and I played 7th Continent and felt similar. It was such a grind and all the admin (both physical and also game-based) just sapped any enjoyment from the experience. We touched it out for something like 18 hours of gameplay in total and it’s now our yardstick for tedium :-)
Shame as there were so many clever ideas that could have been enjoyable.
I sold my copy just before christmas. I played 4 curses over multiple days each time and never came close to solving one of them, I liked the idea it just lacked that thread to pull it all together properly and the hunting/discard management was tedious and counter to the actual gameplay.
That said Tainted grail is very similar in its exploration and resource management, except it uses resource cubes not a discard pile and has a very thematic cyoa storybook taking you through a pretty compelling storyline as you explore. the grind is still there to stop you just jumping around and just unlock everything at once but it's less of a chore imo and was my top game of 2019.
I played through the first campaign (30-40hrs) twice now with a different char each time and still not managed to uncover everything and had a completely different experience both times through. it's next up on my playlist again as the second wave of the kickstarter arrived in jan and I've got another 70-80 hours of campaign content to play through now.
alot of youtube board game reviewers slated it but I've found their arguments against it (and etherfields from same producer) to be somewhat disingenuous at best. it's just not their cup of tea but they level criticisms at it that they don't for games with themes they like when they do the same kind of thing, which is excellent clickbait for them too coincidentally.
HatBeard
I've been playing the solo campaign for Hero Realms lately to get it off my shelf of shame and it's great fun but these kind of deck-builders where you accumulate all kinds of points from all over the place on each turn work so much better when the app does the counting for you. The bookkeeping just makes it less of a game to pick up whenever you fancy a quick game and more one you only look at when you're still feeling a bit mentally alert. the star realms app I can sit and play mindlessly any time, the solo challenges were my go-to for the london-brighton train journey back in the before times.
Some games just work better with something tracking things for you, slay the spire video game is just a card game but all the little accounting it does when you play cards tracking health points, status, energy etc would be mind numbingly tedious playing in real life. It's why even though it looks gorgeous I swerved the recent darkest dungeon kickstarter, there's no cards in that one but so many moving parts I can't see how it doesn't crawl when played in a physical medium.