Top Five of: Board Games That Take Longer To Set Up Than Play

In the world of the board game, there can be no denying that many an hour can be spent socialising within the family environment, inciting some gentle arguments and some thinly-veiled tensions to be brought to light.

But some games do not follow this trend. Instead of being a game you can play with your friends and family for several hours, there are some games that take up your time with the mere SET-UP TIME. Then, you'll find once the game commences, it's over in a flash!

Picture it: It's Christmas morning, and little Sally-Alan has just received a fun game that Mummy-Santa purchased for her. However, it is now Daddy-Santa's job to sit for half an hour setting it up, only for Sally-Alan to play and end the game within ten minutes, and request it be set up all over again. This is likely why Daddy-Santa and Mummy-Santa no longer play any bedroom reindeer games.


So here we go: Turbo Toto's Top Five of: Board Games That Take Longer To Set Up Than To Play!


BOARD GAME THAT TAKES LONGER TO SET UP THAN TO PLAY NUMBER FIVE: OPERATION



Ah, the family game featuring a nude man dismembered in various capacities. Wholesome.

God knows what illness or ailment caused his current condition because needless to say, this dude is in a bad way to require a surgeon remove roughly 30 percent of his innards.

Musings aside, Operation is by no means the worst offender in my list, merely requiring you to fussily find and place all the relevant body parts and place them in their respective cavities on the soon-to-be-cadaver. But with a steady hand, games of Operation can be over fairly quickly.

Extra set-up time should be set aside for the inevitability that the super-awkward-square-battery-the-corner-shop-doesn't-sell in the main unit has been totally expended, sitting idle in the cupboard for the past six years untouched and leaking all over the gaff.


BOARD GAME THAT TAKES LONGER TO SET UP THAN TO PLAY NUMBER FOUR: MOUSETRAP



Let's face it... nobody really played Mousetrap for the game itself. The novelty lay in setting up the domino-like chain of events which ultimately lead to the titular mouse-trappage. But this is a fussy and intricate affair requiring things to be placed just so.

So once things are all set up, and you're ready to go, do you go and assemble a group of buddies to play?

Well, no.

You give in to temptation and start the sequence off manually, watch the mouse get trapped, and realise that's pretty much the only excitement this board game is actually going to give you. From there, it's just a short walk to hall-cupboardsville.


GAME THAT TAKES LONGER TO SET UP THAN TO PLAY NUMBER THREE: KERPLUNK



Kerplunk is a weird one. For starters, it's not really all that fun. It's a game about pulling straws out of a tube.

All there is to it is... take turns to remove straws from the tube which are consequently holding up various marbles. If you drop the marbles, instead of the collectibles being points, they are little glass pearls of shame and woe. The more you accrue, the worse you do.

Only, set up requires you to individually thread each straw through a random initial hole, then through to another random adjacent hole. As positioning needs to take into account every straw, it is inevitable that set up can literally never take less time than playing time.

Also there'll always be some stupid dick that knocks it, jostling the tube and marbles and ultimately rendering all previous turns pointless.

Another in this "Pulling shit out of other shit" subgenre includes "Jenga" which is incidentally less colourful but marginally more fun. Proving that beige can in fact, be cool.


BOARD GAMES THAT TAKE LONGER TO SET UP THAN TO PLAY NUMBER TWO: BUCKAROO



Buckaroo is a total dick.

Let me explain. Whilst Buckaroo may well be a quick set-up the first few times you play it, after a few "bucks", the elastic-powered lock mechanism in the temperamental little ass start to get a bit... lax-a-daisy. Flimsy.

So every consecutive game of Buckaroo becomes exponentially longer to set up, because you have to find that "sweet spot" where pressing his kicking back legs down sets him in place so you can begin the game of placing various crap all over him.

This ultimately makes the playtime of the game lessen too, as it gets easier and easier to trigger his "buck" motion.

I reckon this is a metaphor of how the creature slowly but surely gets less and less tolerant in real life until eventually he just becomes a defiant bastard in a perpetual kick-fury.


BOARD GAME THAT TAKES LONGER TO SET UP THAN TO PLAY NUMBER ONE: PERFECTION




Perfection is one of those weird games that someone out there is playing alone and getting *really* good at it. *scary* good.

The setup trauma in this case comes from the fact you're likely going to forget what this game does and try to play it in the car or some shit. You turn the timer, start the countdown and then furiously try to get the pieces into their respective slots before the game THRUSTS them into your face in a massive "FUCK YOU, FAILURE!"

But in doing this, it also thrusts those little yellow pieces all over the place, into nooks and crannies you didn't know existed in the vicinity, leaving you looking at the box and trying to marry up the picture of every... single... piece with their real life counterparts to ensure you have everything you need for the next go.

"...fifteen... sixteen... right, we've only got sixteen here. Which one are we missing? The wee rainbow-looking one? No, we've got that one. Which one is it? Okay, we've got the "S" shape, we've got the cross..."

And this is how the next ten to fifteen minutes plays out.

The game takes less than one minute to play. GREAT.


Do you have different Board Game Setup experiences? Does it take you forever to set up a game of Hungry Hippos or Screwball Scramble? Comments below!