To War!!

I’ve been bit by the board game/war game bug as of late. I guess I realized that I own a bunch of board games and they are collecting dust. In my normal gaming group, there are actually plenty of girls…but the board games I’m talking about aren’t very ‘girl’ friendly.
The boargame I’ve been playing as of late is Starcraft. We joke that there is little reason to actually be playing the board game when we could just be playing the video game, but it’s a different sort of camaraderie when you have a room full of trash talking nerds.
Starcraft is definitely one of those ‘boy’ games. It’s complicated and focuses entirely on competition and war. The game plays…reasonably okay. It is too complex to be what I would call a beer and pretzels game. The game requires you to plan out what you’re going to do during the next turn AND in reverse order. The order that you give first will be your final action. The combat is the same, where you have cards that determine the strength of your unit but only if the card matches the figure. But if you don’t have the correct cards in your hand for a fight, you could have what appears to be a powerful unit who gets beaten by an inferior unit and there isn’t much you can do about it.
It’s…not entirely intuitive but after playing it a few times now, it makes sense.
The problem with Starcraft is that nothing ever feels intuitive. From placing orders to building to fighting, nothing ever feels confident, for lack of a better word. I really have no idea if my plans will work (my orders), or I build too much in one area forgetting about another crucial area or I lose fights which I figure I should win.
I guess Starcraft could technically be the most complex beer and pretzels game out there because I find that there isn’t really much I can do to ensure my victory. I didn’t feel that anybody else could either, other than very obvious, very simple tactics (like people who needed to win by holding X number of areas and nobody attacked them for the entire game).
Starcraft is also a game that punishes you for screwing up. One player amassed a huge army but forgot to buy a transport. His warmachine was immediately brought to a halt and it allowed the other player to survive. What was worse was that we thought that the game might come to an end that round, so he would never even bring his forces to bear, which would have sucked.
Ultimately, Starcraft is a fine way to pass an afternoon but I don’t’ find it a particular rewarding game. I tried very hard but in both my recent games the moment I overextended myself was the moment that somebody else stepped in and crushed me like a bug. It would have been better for me to consolidate power carefully and play a very defensive game instead, which is not the way that Starcraft (the video game at least) should be played.