So you’ve got this new board game, right? You’ve been reading about it for months online, you’ve downloaded and practically memorized the rules weeks before it hit retailer shelves, and you’ve been waiting days to get your friends together to give it that maiden play that so often makes or breaks a game. With chips and drinks abound and game night finally here, you set it up and explain the rules. Or, if you’re lucky, your friends have read the rules in advance.

The smell of the Made-in-China gameboard permeates the air with potentially toxic ink fumes, freshly punched counters are arrayed and ready for their first deployment. Card decks are shuffled out of alphabetical or numerical order and plastic bits are organized into color-coded military parades. Everything’s in place and there’s that “going skydiving” feeling of embarking on something new, fresh, and bold. The fate of the evening’s fun rests on you and if that pressure isn’t enough, you’re going to be spending the entire evening worried that your friends are getting Cheeto dust and pizza grease on your brand new game.

Three or four turns in, you look around and nobody is having any fun. Your game sucks, and you’re suddenly responsible for ruining the entire night not just for yourself but for your friends as well. And this isn’t like a video game- you can’t just hit the power button and be done with it. There’s a level of commitment involved- you may have spent thirty minutes setting up and that doesn’t include all the time you and the other players may have spent reading rules and getting ready to play.

Even breaking down the game and packing it unceremoniously away is going to take you fifteen minutes or so. You announce to your friends “Hey, if you guys just want to play something else it’s OK with me.” Maybe one guy likes it and wants to keep going. Maybe you like it and are disappointed that no one else does. But there’s an apparent consensus and all that build up, all that anticipation, gets shoved back into the box without even the dignity of being properly sorted, bagged, or rubber-banded.

When a board game tanks it’s a terrible thing for all involved but once the possibility of 86’ing the game circulates throughout the players a certain groupthink starts to take hold. And once that threshold is crossed, it’s hard to stop the momentum toward oblivion. The thing about it is, sometimes the quitters’ virus starts with just one person who winds up more interested in gazing with love at his Blackberry or complains constantly throughout the game because they don’t understand the rules (that they didn’t pay attention to in the first place) or that they don’t like that the game features fruit or has more than two rules.

Board games are very much a social, communal thing- the creation of a consensus alternate reality, to some degree- that’s pretty fragile. Once even one player isn’t having fun, the next thing you know nobody’s having fun. It’s so virulent you could practically get the CDC involved.

Of course, I’ve had more than my share of aborted, half-played, and ruthlessly lambasted games hit the table- most recently GMT’s pirate opus BLACKBEARD was almost unanimously voted into oblivion before we even reached the halfway point. The endless series of die rolls, which in the game serve more to determine paths along invisible flowcharts than to provide narrative or drama, were too much for my group to handle and the complexity to fun ratio was completely out of whack.

And we were prepared- everyone had read the rules in advance and there was some real enthusiasm for the game, at least for an hour into it. My pal Frank threw dice at the game, which is his signal that he’s ready to take the game out into the backyard and burn it in a fire. That was the spark then, that lead to BLACKBEARD being embarrassingly shuffled off the table in favor of the can’t-miss apocalyptic pleasures of NUCLEAR WAR.

Even though it was my copy of the game, I didn’t pick it for the night’s entertainment so at least some of the blame fell on our friend Billy. Nevertheless, certain members of the group hold me responsible simply for bringing it and my credibility as a game selector has suffered. It wasn’t nearly as damaging as the time I tried to get folks at Atlanta Game Factory to play the truly abominable, almost wholly worthless game WHEN DARKNESS COMES not once but twice, though. I think the second game of that lasted about fifteen minutes before the prospect of a YAHTZEE-based adventure game system chased away the other players and caused them to seriously question my reputation as gamer of taste, class, and dignity.

But then there’s also those times when it’s not your game and you didn’t pick it. You find yourself allied with others against the game and maybe you’re spending more time verbally trashing it than getting involved any deeper into its mechanics, theme, or narrative- if there is any. Sometimes you find yourself actually trying to sow discontent and you’re actually lobbying to get the game flushed down the toilet of never-to-be-finished games.