#3 – Sorry
Mechanics: Sorry is one of the most straightforward board games in that it does not have many mechanisms or rules outside of what is explicitly stated on the cards that will be used during gameplay. The objective is also very simple, and ostensibly easy to achieve, because you are trying to get all four of your pieces from start to home. What can be unexpected about this game, is how incredibly rage-inducing it can be, which I find is the case because of its simplicity and highly individualistic objective. There exists a directness in the ways in which seeing one player progress is directly problematic for your progress, being that once a player gets their piece home or even in the “safe zone” – the zone wherein other players cannot touch the piece – you are more or less powerless to stop the player from having a leg up. Because of this, and likely due to the group of people I played with, everyone’s playstyle was very offensive. The three rules/mechanisms that encouraged this playstyle were the swap card, and the ability to bump a player’s pawn back to start if you land on the same space. There is almost an incentive to be on the offensive because of the structure of the board. Everything is extremely location focused in the sense that anything happening has a direct impact on where any player is/was, and the added layer that these swapping and sending back to start mechanisms allow you to manufacture the worst case scenario for another player occurs. For example, there is the 7 card, which enables players to either move forward 7 spaces or split this movement between two pawns; oftentimes the result of this would be that a player would use whatever amount got them on the same space as another player and then split the remaining amount. It was a kind of offensive tactic enabled by the game, but not necessarily a built-in task. That is, many of the character interactions among myself and the other players were unexpectedly reliant on our own prerogative; I happened to play this game with people I was quite familiar with, and so the offensive play style was even more encouraged. Usually games where there is more story end up creating a larger personality led play. Though it seems that the stripped down game style does also in turn give us the opportunity to share personality and/or relationships through play style.
