Sum of Its Parts
As a player, I have always been excited by the tangibility of board games; The satisfying snap of a mahjong tile hitting the table. Flipping disks in Reversi. Moving meeples in Agricola. Spinning the board in Tzolk'in. Trading sticks in Catan. Fitting pieces in Patchwork. The tactile sensation cannot be replicated digitally, and remains as the reason I still spare time to play on tabletop despite owning enough video games for a lifetime.
When crowdfunding came into the picture, it heralded a new era. You can support these small makers with dreams, and in turn receive cool stuff. Who wouldn't want clacking wooden meeples or gleaming metal ores with actual heft? A dragon figurine which doubles as a paperweight?
Fast forward a few years though, and for every interesting game coming out of the scene, we have this vast landscape of overengineered titles with heaps and heaps of components inside ever-growing boxes. To incentivize funding, every project comes with two dozens stretch goals that have to be fit into a game somehow. They are pretty, alright, sometimes even beautiful enough to entice people who don't usually play board game to try it out with you. You sit down to play, and you meet this sprawling mess of seven different mechanics half-baked together, justifying the existence of every colorful bits of components. They're monstrous, confusing, and unwieldy, and not quite belonging to any place other than the display case or the coffee table.
My go-to card games like Hanamikoji and Abandon All Artichokes may be packaged in oddly-designed boxes, but once repackaged they're just simple deck of cards you could easily fit into your jacket pocket and offers many hours of fun. I can teach them to anyone in ten minutes flat. Even if you would rightly point this out as an unfair comparison, one could still agree that board games used to come in more reasonable sizes. My favorite board games can fit into a messenger bag, and the biggest ones fit into a backpack.
I suppose Kickstarter culture really doesn't support elegant, concise designs, and we may be somewhat to blame.
(sigh)
They're really beautiful though.