"[S]aying that this game should be burned is an insult to fire."
—Jason Sartin, in his review of F.A.T.A.L.
You know those old board games, card games, and roleplaying games you keep in your closet or attic? Yeah... you might want to keep a few of those in your closet, lest somebody sees them and tries to use it against you in court... especially if it's one of these.
Important Notes:
- Merely being offensive in its subject matter is not sufficient. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of deviancy, no matter how small a niche it is. It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify as this.
- A game isn't horrible just because KamSandwich or any other Caustic Critic reviewed it. Nor is it horrible just because it has a low score on Board Game Geek. There needs to be independent evidence, such as reputable, professional reviews, to list it. Though once it is listed, the Caustic Critics can provide the detailed review(s).
- To ensure that the work is judged with a clear mind and the hatred isn't just a knee-jerk reaction, as well as to allow opinions to properly form, examples should not be added until at least one month after release. This includes "sneaking" the entries onto the pages ahead of time by adding them and then just commenting them out.
Examples (in more-or-less alphabetical order):
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Tabletop RPG
- RTG released a Dragon Ball Z RPG. The execution was just as ludicrous as it sounds - stat blocks for characters from the series had attacks that required rolling upwards of 30 dice... and that was just for the Saiyan Saga. The book itself was poorly written and poorly laid out, and it suffered from a lot of filler devoted to only marginally-relevant subjects, such as customizing action figures for use as game pieces. Three sourcebooks were released (with more cancelled), but the Fuzion system used for the game was horribly suited to DBZ - the creators took a system with expected stat values between 1-10 (involving rolls of only 3d6 to resolve checks) and fed stats in the hundreds into it. "Power levels" amounted to nothing more than MP, but were used as the basis for gaining XP from a fight.
- F.A.T.A.L. fails worse, and on more levels, than any other RPG conceived. Nearly every aspect of the game—including character design—is built around a broken rolling system that makes every action take hours. One of the most basic rolls is 4d100/2-1note , later "improved" to 10d100/5-1note , for everything requiring a bell curve, including each of your character's hundreds of stats and sub-stats. At first it was even possible for some stats (including "nipple length" and "anal circumference") to be in the negatives. Of the 16 races, everyone except ordinary humans (which the manual states are all white for "historical accuracy") is practically unusable; they're all bizarre ethnic stereotypes who hate each other too much to make for a good party, and nearly all of them eat people, die in sunlight, or bothnote . Every class earns experience in different ways, but some are incomplete, many are menial civilian jobs, and a character can die of old age before reaching Level 2 in some of them. Spells are either useless in normal play, pointlessly situational, time-consuming and impractical, needlessly risky, or any combination thereof. But by far, the game's defining flaw is a juvenalia which often tips into outright vulgarity and bigotry. Magical items tend to consist of sophomoric, racist jokes, and the miscast table, otherwise just about the same, contains a spell named for the game that kills everything in the world. The system favors murder-hoboing to its worst extremes—misrolling an attack can cause a player to rape an opponent to death. Rolling a female character carries several inherent penalties, from arbitrary stat debuffs to susceptibility to mind-control. Of the female-only roles, the most fleshed-out is prostitution (which at one point includes quadratic equations), and others include housewives, rape victims, or sexualized ritual sacrifices. The worst part is, this was a sincere concerted effort from the authors, who excuse all of this as an attempt at "realism". It's so notorious in the realm of tabletop RPG that there's even an article
about it on The Other Wiki. RPG.net tackles it here, excruciatingly graphic detail, and Zigmenthotep managed a four-part video series on the character creation system alone. At the very least, F.A.T.A.L.'s official theme song is pure comedy gold. - The Masters of the Universe RPG was released by FASA in 1985 to cash in on the fad at the time. It was intended to introduce 8- to 10-year-olds to RPGs, but even for adults it was close to being completely unplayable. Its combat system is its undoing, as it's needlessly complicated and missing some important rulesexample or even directly contradicts itselfexample. Spells are particularly ill-defined, with later releases including a card that rather than explaining the rules, said they would be included in a future edition (which never came out). Players have to consult a complex table to see how an enemy reacts to being hit before they can even do damage. And the game also gave the impression that the writers had never watched the source material - Teela, for example, is a magic user in the game but a Badass Normal in the original, and Orko of all people gets offensive spells.
- N2: The Forest Oracle is a Dungeons & Dragons module from a short-lived series aimed at novice players—presumably with the intention of driving them out of the hobby altogether. Its premise of finding a group of druids to lift a curse laid on the land seems like it could be a good exploration-focused adventure, but it's waylaid by abysmal writing and design. The story, even aside from the poorly-aged Magical Romani elements, is laden with childish or bizarre turns of phrase and gaping plotholes (the most infamous being a nymph who needs you to free her lover from his magical sleep, which can be broken by shaking him awake). The editing is very poor, with regular typos and inconsistencies and frequent references to characters using abilities and weapons they don't have. Even aside from the fluff, the adventure when run as written is both incredibly difficult and incredibly dull due to an excess of random encounters, pointless diversions, and mechanics designed to ensure the party spends as much time as possible getting nowhere. It's held a reputation as the worst officially-published module ever made, with Grognardia, ZachTheBold, and Just Roll With It finding that it lives up to it.
- Racial Holy War was made by a white supremacist group called The Creativity Movement, and it's pretty clear that pushing their ideology was more important to them than making a good RPG. The plot is right there in the title: set in the future, the Jews have taken over the world, and you play as the plucky white La Résistance who will overthrow them. It reads like an over-the-top parody of neo-Nazism, or like someone read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion but didn't feel quite up to tackling Mein Kampf. The game's most ridiculous feature is that every enemy race has a Special Attack based on racial stereotypes, which ends up making the whites look far less badass than what the writers intended; Jews can bribe them not to attack, and Black people can debilitate them with their body odor. Even if you're not offended by its hateful premise, there's no fun to be had with this game, as the rules are horrible, broken, and unfinished—notably, the initial release lacked any weapon stats or rules on how to resolve attacks, making combat impossible until a revision was published. Even after this, there are still plenty of broken mechanics: for example, Intimidation works by adding up the score of every combatant on each side and instantly ending the fight if one side's score is five times greater, meaning a handful of heavily-armed White Warriors could be scared shitless by a few dozen Jewish babies. The rules are so lazily-written that when they mention that shotguns should be stronger at short ranges, they can't be bothered to define what this means, instead telling the Game Master to finish this rule on their own, while the assault rifles are mentioned to have no range penalties whatsoever, and such a vague description makes them break the already broken game even further. And the game's cover is outright stolen from The Hills Have Eyes (1977) with almost no changes. It's so bad, 1d6chan considers the game worse than F.A.T.A.L. - the material lacks shock value, doesn't cross the line twice, and is too reprehensible and pitiful to be enjoyed ironically, a sentiment shared by KamSandwich when he discusses the game in a video covering the worst tabletop RPGs ever made. More info here.
- Spawn of Fashan is a classic example from 1981 that has become the standard by which bad tabletop RPGs are measured. For starters, the rulebook is a poorly-organized mess with rules that constantly reference other rules (and those other rules often reference other rules), forcing you to jump around all 96 pages without any index to help direct you. Things aren't much better if you can actually start playing, as the game is quite literally unfinished. There are many cases where the rules are too vague or outright missing, and only about a third of all enemies have a stat block. Combat is tedious, requiring an excessive number of charts and math equations to determine the outcome of every action. Not to mention, it features one of the most ridiculous instances of Game-Favored Gender ever: female characters have all stats but Charisma halved, which is so bad the rulebook has a disclaimer from the creator saying that he's not sexist. It especially stands out since, unlike F.A.T.A.L., Spawn of Fashan doesn't have any other shocking or offensive content. The game reportedly only sold a dozen or so copies on release, and would've faded into obscurity had it not ended up in an April Fools' Day review from Dragon.
- Wraeththu: From Enchantment to Fulfilment is an "adaptation" of Storm Constantine's fantasy series which began life as a fanfiction guide before blooming into an RPG homebrew that was sold for $40 USD. The series is already a hard sell for a casual audience, but the game paints it in the absolute worst light possible; it casts the player characters as pretentious and glamorous sociopaths, takes place in a dull and hopeless world, and, despite touting itself as LGBTQ+ friendly, skews heavily to the interests of a Yaoi Fangirl (despite being written by a man) in that it unintentionally presents queer men as a fantasy race unto themselves, complete with weird ideas about their sexuality and gender identities. Additionally, female characters and any potential for queer female sexuality are an afterthought at best; they can either join the one elusive tribe that allows them to become Wraeththu, or resign themselves to be human cannon fodder/breeding stock. As a game, the instructions go out of their way to be as unhelpful to a novice Game Master as possible, leaving terms undefined (especially those from the books) and example quests cut off before they can begin. The game also suffers from poorly thought-out, gut-wrenching mechanics: among other transgressions, chain mail armor transfers a statistical immunity to flamethrowers. A detailed review can be read here.
Board Games
- The 24 DVD Board Game seemingly has a lot going for it at the start, with a cool premise of players working together to thwart terrorist attacks and Kiefer Sutherland reprising his role as Jack Bauer. However, it all falls apart instantly upon getting into the actual game. The board itself being functionally useless outside of the extra game mode is the least of its problems. The main gameplay consists of picking locations and playing minigames on the DVD, many of which are painful due to the awful DVD remote controls and Trial-and-Error Gameplay that gets pushed to frustrating extremes.note The clue cards meant to guide the players are drawn randomly, which can lead to players wasting time by searching locations before the game wants them to or obtaining clues for puzzles they've already solved. There's a mechanic where one player can become The Mole and sabotage the others to win for themselves, but the chances of it occurring are so low that it will likely never cause any interesting infighting between players. The game holds a 2.3 out of 10 on BoardGameGeek, the lowest of any DVD board game on the site. KamSandwich looks at the game here, complete with footage of him becoming increasingly fed up with it during his first playthrough.
- Adultery is a game in which players move pieces around a board and collect time tokens. Sounds simple at first, but then two players of the opposite gender are chosen to head to another part of the house to have sex for the amount of time they received, with the game ending after each player has spent time with other players and has committed "Adultery". Besides the fact that it requires a group who are all okay having casual sex with each other (and are all straight), it doesn't even appeal to swingers since the gameplay portion is incredibly basic and the players will spend the majority of their time waiting around doing nothing while the other two are doing the act. Board Game Geek gave it a 3.9 out of 10, whilst in KamSandwich's first "Worst Board Game of All Time" tournament, this game won in a landslide. If you're curious, he also took a closer look into it and similar games the same company produced here and here.
- Dungeons of Demus is one of several imitators of HeroQuest, and likely the worst. The box art alone is a jumble of figures with no regards to composition or perspective, and the playing pieces are all cheap cardboard with little effort for any consistent look (while Hero Quest had plastic figurines playing on a board with walled rooms). The biggest failure is in the rules, which are badly laid out and full of mistakes. Much of the playing time is spent simply moving through the long hallways between rooms, and combat is unbalanced (the wizard is simply better than the warrior and thief because their special abilities are not worth using, most enemies are unable to damage the players, and many items make the boss monsters weaker than the regular Mook). Board Game Geek gave it a 3.5 out of 10. YouTube user "Always Board Never Boring" has no kind words for it in their review.
- Global Survival is one of many board games that tried to copy the property-buying aspects of Monopoly and put its own spin on it; namely, there are 191 country spaces. Players start with $2.5 trillion global dollars, which is not only a mess to sort through when purchasing and making change, but nearly all of the countries barely make a dent in the player's funds due to wildly different prices. Despite that, making "rent" from opponents barely makes a hundredth (or even a thousandth) of the nation's initial purchase. The game tries to shake things up with an event system, but since there's hundreds of individual events for only specific countries, they seldom affect players. There is also a debt system where players can use credit to buy countries, but since money rarely comes in, the interest rate will quickly outpace profits and end in bankruptcy which consequently makes buying the United States - the only space that you can't buy with your starting cash amount - completely impossible without getting into inescapable amounts of debt. It all results in a painfully slow and tedious game where only purchasing countries for their net worth matters and most of the game's features are pointless. KamSandwich has played a seven-hour game and not only found it mind-meltingly boring, but only managed to make 0.2% more money than he started — and he was the winner! Board Game Geek scores it at a dismal 2.0 out of 10, nearing the very bottom of their list of games sorted by rating.
- Intelligent Design vs. Evolution utterly fails to be a fun game, regardless of one's religious views. Designed by evangelist Ray Comfort and Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron, it's a simple board game where two players or teams must move their pieces to the end of the board while gaining "brain cards" and answering questions. There are only 250 question cards (by comparison, Trivial Pursuit has 1,000 with six questions each), and many of them don't have questions at all; they're just potshots at evolution, Ad Hominem attacks, attempts at proselytization, or random Bible quotes. A few use Insane Troll Logic, like one using the No True Scotsman fallacy to prove there are no hypocrites in "the Church". Information on the cards is not only wrong or misquoted, it's also often not proofread; one memorable card hits all these points by citing as its source "Wickipedia". The blog Freaking Awesome takes a look at it here. KamSandwich also dives into this game as part of a video on the worst board game ideas here.
- Jurassic Park III: Island Survival Game is an overly simplistic "roll and move" game whose primary failure is the utter lack of strategy designed into it. Two players control either the humans or the dinosaurs; the humans must escape the island, while the dinosaurs try to kill the humans. The dinos are at an intrinsic disadvantage, in part because the human player can always roll to escape during a dino attack and move forward several spaces. The game board◊ is split into five sections, but the game is so linear that there's no real incentive to choose any one over the other. You can draw cards, but a strict reading of the rules suggests they must be used immediately rather than saved for later. The humans' win condition amounts to landing on the final space and hoping you draw the win card. All this amounts to a Luck-Based Mission. Even the craftsmanship is terrible; while the modeled plastic dinosaur pieces are okay, the cards, life chips, and human character pieces are all made of cheap cardboard, and the game board's illustration of the island is sparse and ugly. Critical Hits gave the game a 2/10, noting that the only potential fun to be had would be from ignoring the given rules and simply role-playing your own scenario with the pieces.
- Monopoly Global Village: Pokémon GO is a knockoff version of Monopoly made to cash in on Pokémon GO. The game was just regular Monopoly, just with the spaces changed to real-life cities and costs having an extra zero (you will run out of currency really fast if you played the game, unlike the original Monopoly), the game has nothing to do with Pokémon except for the box and the center of the board being changed, the game board was noted to be so flimsy that there was no way to get it to lay down flat, the player tokens and dice were extremely tiny (for the player pieces, they could have at least used some of those knockoff Pokémon miniatures you can find online), the money was printed using cheap paper and would tear easily, the box and game board were made out of poor-quality plastic, and the building pieces were extremely poorly molded. Not to mention that half the renders on the packaging and on the game board have nothing to do with Pokémon Go (such as fanart of the Kanto starters playing Game Boy; Charizard, Ivysaur and Jigglypuff from the Super Smash Bros. series; Dawn, Red, and Ethan from the main series games; Detective Pikachu; and the Eeveelutions from Pokémon Stadium). Also, Seoul and Tokyo cost the least, possibly due to China's relations with Japan and Korea. Phelan Porteous was so unimpressed by it that he gave it a rating of 2 out of 10.
- Mr. Bacon's Big Adventure may not be the most highbrow of board games, being a parody of Candy Land sold by a company specializing in gag gifts, but there’s a limit to how much that excuse forgives. To start with, it has every flaw present in the original Candy Land, which is itself already somewhat maligned for its tedious, linear, and purely luck-based gameplay. Then there’s the spinner, which can either have you move forward to the next square of the meat type the spinner lands on, meaning you won't advance more than five squares, or you will be prompted to draw a card, which can send you almost across the entire board in a single turn (though it won't send you far enough that you won't have to risk drawing another card and negating your lucky draw before winning). The game's poor balancing can cause games to last for over an hour, which is terrible for a game as repetitive as this one. There's also an optional rule where the players have to eat a bit of the meat represented by every space they land on, which combined with the length of the game could potentially kill the players if they don't give up. And just to add insult to injury, there is a surprising lack of variety in the kinds of meat represented. Most of the meats represented are either pork, sausages, or pork sausages, with beef jerky, mustard, and meatballs being the only exceptions outside of the board's vegan segment.
- The original 1.0 release of Oneupmanship: Mine's Bigger, a 2013 roll-and-move game. The goal is to be the first player to get $100,000 by investing in real estate, playing the stock market, gambling, and acquiring valuable items. That doesn't sound too bad, but there's a good reason Tom Vasel of The Dice Tower subtitled his review "How NOT to design a game". It plays like a demented, low-rate Monopoly clone; one space forces you to pay 20% of everything you have (this is a pain to calculate, which may be why Monopoly uses fixed amounts), and the "Free Parking Jackpot" House Rule is codified in the game (when in Monopoly it's not a rule because it causes severe Ending Fatigue). The random mechanics can be cruel, with the worst being the "Do or Die" space in which forces a player into betting all their properties on a single roll. If one player declares bankruptcy, every other player must do so as well, and the game ends in a draw. The components are lazily designed and cheap, especially the paper money, which looks like it was just printed out on computer paper. And to top it all off, there's a Taking You with Me mechanic that can negate any victory: if any player wins, any other player can take a "bitter pill" - with the game coming with bitterly-flavored breath mints to act as said pills, with no ingredients list - to bring both themselves and the would-be victor back down to zero, with the only real limit to how many times this can be repeated being the players' patience. It was apparently designed to be a parody of the nonsensical lifestyles of the rich, but its execution was just lacking. Thankfully, as noted by KamSandwich in his review of the game, a later revision of the game, Oneupmanship: Machiavellian, seems to have fixed both the bankruptcy and "bitter pill" rules; the former does not cause all players to go bankrupt, and the latter no longer has physical pills, limits each player to one per game, and only reduces the would-be winner's assets by the same amount that the pill user had. These have earned Machiavellian a genuine fanbase to the point of selling out shortly after the release of KamSandwich's review, but the original has still left a bitter legacy, with an abysmal 1.2/10 rating on Board Game Geek at time of publishing.
- Power Lunch is a variant of Rummy in which players meld together cards of celebrities sitting at a restaurant table. If your cards don't match any sets, you explain why they'd be sitting together, and the opponents vote on it - and there's nothing stopping them from rejecting them every time. It also became outdated quickly, as it was made in 1994 and the celebrities were very much popular only around that time, making it impossible to play in later decades just because no one knows who they are. This isn't helped by the fact that the artstyle used for the game is quite unappealing, looking like a bad political newspaper comic. Only one version was made of this game, and Board Game Geek gave it a rating of 2.80 out of 10.
- Rap Rat is a board game for kids made in 1992 which used a VHS tape as part of the game. You would put in the tape, roll a color-coded die, and move around the board. Every time you land on a space in your color, you would get a MacGuffin piece; get ten, and you win. Except the board is an infinite loop, making it pretty much uselessnote . Instead, the TV was used for Rap Rat, an insufferable and frankly creepy cartoon rat with oversized ears and fish-like eyes, to interrupt the players to tell them to do things and/or rap (actually, talk while skipping over the same word several times) while eating a block of cheese for 10 minutes note - with all players losing if he finishes before a player wins, which is extremely difficult to do because the whole game is a Luck-Based Mission. The rules themselves are also quite broken - at one point Rap Rat tells a player to skip a turn based on their age, meaning that any adult player might be unintentionally eliminated from the game, and the final penalty he inflicts (with thirty seconds remaining) is to return all your puzzle pieces to the center, meaning one player will always be rendered completely unable to win if the game runs long. Needless to say, you're much better off playing without the VHS tape at all. It says something when Rap Rat has a creepypasta, which is pretty much the only reason why anyone nowadays has heard of him. Most damningly, its publisher was already known for the much better horror-themed VHS board game Atmosfear, suggesting it was a matter of just trying to market to kids and failing miserably. Matt Sall of the website Bell of Lost Souls reviews it here, as does KamSandwich here; the latter played a digitally simulated version of the game here, which went as well as one would expect.
- The Rock Paper Scissors Game is a 2005 physical version of Rock, Paper, Scissors. That's it. It includes a 3D console with a reveal shield and score counter, presumably to stop cheaters and keep score. However, it fails miserably due to the fact that you can simply play the game with your hands without needing to pay for the game and if you want to prevent cheating and keep score, you can put your hands behind your back and use paper for scorekeeping. It isn't even needed as a disability aid, because even without fingers it's still possible to play the game normally so long as you can somehow clearly indicate three different signals (and people who can't do even that wouldn't be able to operate the console anyway), rendering this game completely pointless. The game has a 1.3 on Board Game Geek and finished second in KamSandwich's "Worst Board Game of All Time" tournament, losing out only to the aforementioned Adultery.
Card Games
- Havic: the Bothering is a "parody" of Magic: The Gathering which actually predates the first official Magic Self-Parody set Unglued. The game itself plays like a worse version of Magic, so much so that "THIS IS A PARODY" was printed on the starter deck boxes and the rules card explicitly tells players not to build their own decks, all in an attempt to avoid legal issues from Wizards of the Coast. (Didn't work, and the game's creators were banned from GenCon thanks to legal maneuvering by WotC.) But beyond that, the game itself is bad, with most cards being borderline or outright unplayable, a shallow card pool (96 cards!), terrible "artwork", and humor which nobody would find amusing. The rules were all printed on a single card included in each starter deck, which fails to explain certain mechanics, comes up short in explaining others, reads like a run-on sentence, and abounds with misspellings. Certain cards also have typos. You can check out the game and its history here.
- Redakai was an attempt by SpinMaster to capitalize on the popularity of Bakugan, and wound up being a prime example of every design flaw a Collectible Card Game can have. Cards were made of clear plastic with lithographic designs that would "animate" when moved, allowing the cards to layer their effects by being stacked on each other. This was a Dancing Bear at best, but in execution was a massive detriment because it was impossible to make a unified card back, and the specialized black container (sold separately of course) didn't even work - in other words, you could recognize cards from the back. The extra material costs made the starter decks and boosters far more expensive than its competitors. Both of the game's expansions reprinted cards from the first set as Rares, meaning many boosters contained nothing of value. Marketing failures aside, game balance was atrocious and clearly untested; there were many examples of Power Creep, several cards gave you an Extra Turn at no cost, and some one-sided floodgates would lock the opponent out of the game. There was even an infinite loop one-turn-kill that could be executed as early as the third turn, all the pieces of which could be found in one starter deck. Throw in low-quality action figures, oodles of overpriced peripherals, and a So Okay, It's Average tie-in cartoon, and you have an utter flop. Despite the huge marketing push, Redakai floundered around for only six months before being cancelled entirely. Kohdok discusses it here.
- Spellfire is a CCG based on Dungeons & Dragons released only eight months after the first Magic: The Gathering set. The game was a last-ditch attempt by TSR to reclaim some of the market that Wizards of the Coast had taken from them, but was doomed by the insane crunch time and bizarre edicts imposed by the company. The designers only had around a week to develop its rules and cards, resulting in mechanics that mostly copied MTG with no changes, with the few differences between the games being undercooked. The game balance was also very poor, as TSR forbid public playtesting of the game before launch; this was common practice for late-stage TSR, as Lorraine Williams apparently considered playtesting the company's products "playing games on company time", but not even letting the public test it was a step beyond the pale. They also had no time or budget to commission artwork, meaning they had to reuse art from existing Dungeons & Dragons products, and when even that ran out they resorted to taking photos of household objects and employees in costumes to use as art. To make it even worse, the cards were printed on flimsy photo paper to further cut down on costs. While TSR's bankruptcy wasn't caused by Spellfire, the game did nothing for them other than make them into even more of a laughingstock in their final years.
- The original version of the Top Trumps: Space Phenomena set is embarrassingly bad. The parent game is well-respected and has had a ton of expansions, mostly from its simplicity: you compare statistics on each card, whoever had the better one wins the round, and you learn about various things in the process. Space Phenomena, however, is filled with cards that have statistics that are uselessly low or have almost every category listed as "N/A", use incompatible units like displaying the speed of some objects in kilometers per hour but others relative to the speed of Earth's orbit in Earth years, have many identical statistics due to using multiple objects located on Earth, use misleading statistics such as suggesting that Venus wasn't discovered until 1990 or the Moon wasn't discovered until 1651note , or are just plain incorrect like Halley's Comet being -6,000,000 Earth masses as if it somehow weighed a negative amount. All of this combined to make a game that was dubiously educational and no fun to actually play. A year after its release, Top Trumps apologized and reprinted the set with better objects and more consistent stats. You can watch Ashens rip the original version apart here.
Other
- BreaKey was a collectible trading game whose main gimmick was literally breaking your opponent's game piece when they lost. The point was to clip two pieces together and twist them until one snapped, and go until only one key was left standing. BreaKey pieces apparently came in either starter packs of 20 for $20, which could be wasted in less than a minute in a game, or booster packs of 4 (when the rules of the game require at least 5). Because the weaker pieces would always be the first ones to break, the law of collectible games — the rarer the game piece, the stronger it is — doesn't apply here, as the stronger keys would inevitably be all anyone had left. Furthermore, the broken plastic pieces were fairly sharp and could cause messes and small injuries. And the icing on the cake: you could just feel, with your fingers, how strong each key was before using it. Watch CR review it here. KamSandwich covers it here, where he declared it "worse than pointless", as you ended up with nothing but garbage after playing, and the game went on to win his second "Worst Board Game of All Time" tournament handily; a follow up video discusses the numerous legal problems that sank the franchise.
