xkcd #3235: Types of Board Game
Title text:
I can't believe Candles of Vienna caved to commercial pressure and added the Goku expansion.
Transcript:
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Source: https://xkcd.com/3235/
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
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Overcomplicated is when you have a thick book for rules and spend an hour just to sort and setup all the different tokens, figures, cards, dice, etc.
I remember one time being over a friend's house, he had some board game they just dug out of the back of a closet somewhere and we were thinking about playing it. Can't remember which game it was, I want to say it may have been Diplomacy, but I'm not 100% on that.
We open it up, looked like all the pieces were there, and we started reading through what we thought was the rulebook, it was a fairly beefy book.
Then we realized that what we had wasn't in fact the rulebook, but some sort of secondary book that referenced the full rulebook, which it called "intimidating"
On reading that, we decided that this game was just too much trouble for how much effort we were willing to put in that day.
Due to ill-advised tie-ins, in MTG you can now pit Dwight Schrute against Bebop & Rocksteady with help from Ian Malcolm and SpongeBob, who has the One Ring. Don’t worry, here comes Godzilla and Hatsune Miku to save the day, just tap your Bob Ross lands to play.
the worst thing is i can't tell if this is a joke or not
It isn't a joke. They didn't even bring up real life people that are in cards, or SpongeBob, mylitttle pony, Fortnite, or furby.
i haven't played MtG in 30 years. we had zombies. i wasn't expecting the mattel and mars bar chocobot hour.
Hasbro relies on MTG to make them profitable, so there's been a lot of selling out.
Even if you ignore the Universes beyond, the price of packs is way too high now, and they've made some blatant cash grabs.
"30th anniversary" was a special set with a different back, making them basically the same as the old gold-boarded decks, not tournament legal. This results in them being considered proxies, but made by WoTC.... For $1000 for 4 boosters.