Crumbling Monument

A few years ago, a new board game was released with an intriguing premise. Stonehenge was a game designed in a deliberately open-ended way -- several interesting but generic pieces, lot of elements on the board such as different positions and colors, a deck of cards with several different traits on them. The idea: this was to be an "anthology" board game. Several different game designers would each take these pieces and make their own game from them.

In the original release, the five designers who contributed their version of Stonehenge were Bruno Faidutti, James Ernest, Mike Selinker, Richard Borg, and Richard Garfield. A mixed group, but with enough highlights in there that you might expect something special.

Well, a game loving friend of mine (FKL, in point of fact) warned me that he'd played Stonehenge in all its incarnations himself, and judged it to be "five games, none of which were good enough to have been sold on their own." The warning came a bit too late; I'd already bought my copy. But now, years later, I've finally gotten around to playing them all myself, and I can confirm his opinion.

None of the games in Stonehenge are "bad," necessarily. But they're all various degrees of unsatisfying, in a number of different ways. One is laughably short, with a set-up time as long (or maybe even longer than) the game itself. Another has a pretty major "the rich get richer" problem, where the leading player pulls out far ahead of the rest of the pack. Several have an intriguing premise that's ultimately undermined by a high factor of luck infringing on the strategy.

I understand you can go to a web site where lots of designers (professional and amateur) have contributed hordes of potential Stonehenge rules sets, giving you a vast number of possible games. But I can't say I'm encouraged to go looking. It's weird, but the very notion that this game is really a sort of "tool box" just as much as it is a game gets me to looking at it almost more as an "investment" than a source of entertainment. On that level, I just don't feel I got my money's worth, and I just want it out of my "portfolio."

I expect I'll be off-loading my copy of Stonehenge at some point. Let somebody else figure out what to do with it. Literally.