Mechanics to avoid

Roll and move

Deck construction before game (or simply a ton of choices before game)

Roll and move is profitable though, or has the potential to be.

I hate games that are Fluxx.

I also hate games for adults that require players to do silly crap, like make a noise or wave their hands. I'm a grown man. I maintain my Victorian sense decorum even on a rollercoaster. Running around and screaming is what my neighbors do when the police show up to bust their meth lab. People even ruin wargames this way. When Games Day started, all of the nerds shouted "WAAAAAGH!" and it was so loud and depressing that I regained my virginity and had to go back to the bathroom to pour extra vodka into my soda bottle.

I hate Bunco. I can't even remember what the mechanics are, but they are hellish. It's a game that grandparents pretend to enjoy to make their grandchildren hate life. Why am I so mean? Bunco. It's like Shut the Box. That's not even game. It's what sailors used to play because they were too drunk, stupid, and sick with scurvy to break out Heroquest from the cargo hold. Both games are literally just rolling dice until someone's dice roll more of particular numbers than the other person's dice. Then you shut the box, and the loud bang of it simulates the sound of the gunshot that would have ended your misery.

I hate losing my turn, but I think hating that is the whole point. I hate waiting an hour for my turn and then having so little to do during my turn that it ends after a single die roll.

I hate when the rulebook is thicker than an RPG module and I need eighty plastic baggies to separate the playing tokens. I'm looking at you Android.

I hate when I can't point to a rule that requires someone at a convention to wear deodorant.

I hate the mechanic that forces my character to slide down a chute and get sick just because he ate an apple. It's an apple! They're supposed to be healthy for you.

I hate that the core mechanic of Operation has not been applied to more games. Seriously, it would be an awesome side task for picking locks or defusing bombs.

Yes.

Yes.

I'll also add dexterity games. The first time I played Bananagrams was also the last.

The following is war base oriented.

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I hate the fact that in Risk, 1 army can go round the world tireless changing the colour blue into red. Then the next turn, it goes the way around again.
Players who play Risk like that should get a slapping. All you do is gambling, not strategy.

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When Health is not the real deal. And weapons are random, NOT! Aka, the useless dice rolls and retarded health tracking.

A game where units only do 3 or 4 damage. All health is 9. Common guys! Think before you decide on the damage value's.

29, 30 or 31 damage, yet the target health is 345. Even worse!!! Why would you put in such numbers?

Target health 400, damage is 2 to 4. Yaaaarrggghh!!!

I really wonder, how they make those mistakes.

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When players are dead after a few rounds. While the game has yet to go on for hours.

Same goes for long down time. Give other players something to do !@#it!

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Having a bad start, that would lead to a long game of, KNOWING that you will loose.

[Monopolies money is a good way to lighten a BBQ]

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Only luck games.
Only puzzle games.
Only knowledge games.
No skill games.

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It often leads me to go like this:
http://www.scaryforkids.com/pics/screaming-face.jpg

Oh, see, everyone I play against figured a way around this. They all just team up against me from the very beginning -- and I still wipe the floor with them! Hahahahaha! I miss the old days though, back when practiced innocence and overt manipulation won the day.

A similar mechanic WH40k 6th edition introduced which basically made an assault more of a risk factor than a straight up roflstomp. One of the few things GW actually did something that wasn't blatantly retarded.

Other than that I approve such a mechanic in a game if it were used practically.

Can't agree more.

I also am not a fan of roll and move. The exception to that is the board game Titan.

When people say they hate a mechanic, what they really mean is they hate the iterations of that mechanic that they are familiar with or that have really rubbed the the wrong way.

I think the reason a lot of people like games that involve extrinsic knowledge is because they feel like they are not starting from zero and learning a whole new thing. When I play a new strategy game, I usually am not starting from zero either, as I have played many of them and a lot of the things I've learned in other games will help me in the new one.

I think it's worth pointing out roll and move as a mechanic that probably has the highest quantity of wholly uninteresting games. It is easy to point to as something many players do not like. You may even divide the world into people who stopped playing board games because they did not know there was more than roll and move, and those who still play and are as done with the mechanic as they are done with tic tac toe.

HOWEVER - there may be mechanics still in use in more strategic games that are of a similar kind, but have been tweaked and maybe aren't bad when combined with other mechanics.

I hesitate to consider "being silly" a mechanic, and also am not sure that I consider games which are predominantly about "being silly" (and I include cards against humanity here) as games. The occupy a similar social function as games, but the competitive aspect is a distant footnote. I see them as more of an activity.

Hmm, mechanics I dislike. It's not really a single mechanic, but I dislike it when games require you to remember a lot about the game state in order to play correctly. A lot of card games where you have many cards on the table that affect the rules in subtle ways can be like this. You can understand the rulebook very well, play the game many times, and STILL wind up in situations where you played wrong and only realize it a few turns later and it's hard to undo the mistake.

Roll-and-move ought to be loved by the euro-theoretical-input-randomness kind of designers because it really is the purest form of input randomness (not that I find it meaningful to discuss in that way) like drawing tiles at the beginning of your turn. Everyone's concern about roll-and-move really is because of the lack of decisions in most such games. As soon as there are enough decisions, like in Sagaland (Spiel des Jahres 1982, called Enchanted Forest or something like that in English iirc), it works quite well.

Silly no-decisions roll-and-move seems to have been popular about 100 years ago, for children and drunk adults, and then a few of those games plus any number of silly commercial advertising-games have kept doing that since (little games included in magazines or given away for free to market some company), and in Monopoly, but I do not think adult people being serious about playing games have ever thought highly about them.

I do not think it comes down to a specific mechanic being broken as a game being because mechanics were combined the wrong way. Also a sure way to make a very boring game is to think too hard about game design theories and try to apply every thing ever said in a textbook as if it was the law. If you make of list of mechanics that you hate and will never ever use that sounds like a sure way to make suboptimal games. Maybe introducing player elimination to your long game is just the right way to make it fantastic instead of just good? You will never know if you already made up your mind that avoiding player elimination is the most important thing to do and refuse to compromise.

There is no bad mechanics, there is simply bad mechanic usage.

For example, I hate auctions, but used at the right place in the right dose, it can be an awesome mechanic.

Same thing for roll and move.

I LOVE "Deck-Construction"!

To be able to think (maybe obsess) over a game BEFORE even playing it; well that to me is pure GENIUS! How well it turns out, is questionable. Often players are too inexperienced in knowing how to best prepare their decks...

And I must admit that with "Tradewars - Homeworld", I injected COMBOS and TAKE-THAT mechanics inspiring myself on CCGs/TCGs like Magic, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! Those cards really add "flair" to the game... It makes for memorable moments around the table especially since these cards affect the outcome of combat.

Imagine combat - with the option to screw over your opponent! LOVE COMBOS too!! They make for powerful moves and can sometimes be conquered by using other TAKE-THAT cards too... So it sort of goes both ways!

I can't say that I am OPPOSED to any mechanics... Like for "Roll & Move", it may be OLD - but that doesn't mean you can't refresh the mechanic with say "custom" dice and variability (from say Action Points - APs). So a player can have three (3) APs per turn; one of which can be to "ROLL" a "custom" die that will given them options to "MOVE"! It's possible to make that OLD mechanic FRESH and NEW. You just need to think about...

And to be REAL HONEST: is that not more flexible (APs + Roll & Move + Custom dice) - could it not make for a FUN and INNOVATIVE game???

Just some ideas I've had when people dumped on "Roll & Move" games.

Cheers.

Update: Maybe instead of using three (3) APs for "rolling" - what if you were allowed to only ROLL ONCE. But you could use APs to PAY for improving your odds:

• 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3: Normal die costs 1 AP.
• 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3: Enhanced die costs 2 APs.
• 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3: Balanced die costs 3 APs.

This could make for SMALLER "MOVES" especially when dealing with TILES. Just an example how "Roll & Move" can be made FUN and INTERESTING again!

For me an elimination mechanic tends to be pretty terrible in games, that only works for short games.
Otherwise players might be out of the game an hour or longer before it ends, and that just kills the fun for me. It's about spending time together playing a game after all.

While I tend to like some bit of luck to be involved in a game because its adds a random factor that cannot be planned for and thus only encourages more creative thinking, it should not be too high on luck either to the point that there is no strategy at all. Roughly I'd say that a game can't be more than 50% luck.

Also not a fan of early leads pretty much deciding the game. There need to be ways to catch up. Otherwise you might spend hours on a game of which the winner is already known long before the end. Typically a means to hinder other opponents their progress tends to be a good way to regulate this.

Which brings me to another point: Being unable to affect the progress of rival players. This is needed to have some interaction with each other and to prevent that runaway leader thing. Otherwise you are all just playing a singleplayer game together pretty much.

Hence I hate Monopoly since it pretty much has all these mechanics. It's pretty much the only game I will always refuse to play.

I definitely agree with the bulk sentiment so far, but to add to this discussion some things not mentioned:

People talk about player elimination, but what I hate even more are longer strategy games like axis-n-allies, where a player KNOWS they are effectively eliminated long before it happens. Then they just give up and quit the game, and you don't have the satisfaction of seeing your strategy through. AA tried to resolve this with victory conditions and victory cities, but it's still too transparent. One solution is to include hidden information in the victory conditions. Another, perhaps better solution, is to ensure the mechanics of the game are just variable enough that having a much larger army isn't enough to ensure victory on its own. Difficult to implement and balance, but im not convinced it cant be done.

I also strongly dislike games where the information is poorly and/or inefficiently tracked. By poorly I mean there are too many inherent opportunities for a player to miss a point, especially if the scoring system is clunky, and doing so has a very strong impact on the game. By inefficiently I mean forcing the player to do tedious counting or even math each and every turn, which also increases the likelihood of mistakes. Eclipse was brilliant at removing many of these sorts of problems.

On a more personal note, I don't like games that are pure randomness. I can see the point that you open the game up if you remove the intellectual barrier, but dammit Scotty, I need my strategic choices to have IMPACT!

But also solutions that might be used in other games.

Reading the last few posts. Raises a question. How do you feel about "the game ends when one of the players gives up, now count the score of remaining forces, XP and stocked money"?

No need for the players to watch television when they are "defeated" or "doomed to loose". The game ends for everyone. Period. And giving up equals 0 VP.

This would lead/force other players, who don't come first. To make a deal with the last player, not to leave the game. Players are free to give money and other things to each other. You can also team up.

A multiplayer requires at least 3 players for this.
2 Player games are often co-op. Where XP is worth, much more VP in the end. So stocking up XP is the best way to win.

That's an interesting idea, but it raises a few problems almost immediately:

1) The cut-off point is arbitrary, so you change the fundamental goal of the game from "who has the best long term, winning strategy" to "who can stay in first place the longest". This is pretty huge. Look at mario-kart, for example, where the winning strategy is to stay in second place until the last possible moment.

2) The cut-off point can be non-arbitrary, in that the player can game the system purposely. Let's say John doesn't like you. Or he doesn't like the game that you like and wants to play something else. He quits purposely, well before he needs to, and to spite you he times it so as to hand the victory to Mary who happened to have the lead at that point. Game over. Rinse and repeat until people don't want to play that game anymore.

Obviously you can alleviate this somewhat if all the players are interested in winning the game, but it still brings up the question: When John, who wants to win, realizes he cannot, when does he quit? He gets to decide who wins at this point. Even with hidden information, he can likely deduce who is more likely to win.

John has WAY too much influence. The mechanism is broken without serious considerations being taken to balance it.

EDIT: Actually, the best strategy would be to both reach first place AND ensure another player quits in the shortest amount of time. You have incentivized not only removing a player, which was the big problem in the first place, but ending the game prematurely. Ouch.