I discovered the world of board games a few months ago. I fell down the rabbit hole fast and was so excited to have a new hobby to share my partner.
We started off with chess, and I enjoyed it a lot. I did win a few times, but I feel like he won more than me. No big deal. Most games were very close and super fun. We just grew tired of it.
Then we got Hive, and like chess, the winning to losing ratio was pretty even. We just got a bit tired of it after playing it a lot.
We then got into more specific games like Arboretum and Azul, and I feel like I've lost all my love for board games. We've played for a while and I always lose. Arboretum is super hardcore because it is mostly luck based, and the final scoring round is brutal. Your opponent can pick a specific card at the end (random) that will render your paths useless. Paths that you've been carefully building the whole game. Still, I always lost. Most games were always, again, within a few points, which feels even worse because it means I played good, just not good enough or weirdly unlucky.
Another thing with arboretum is that my partner will take forever to make a decision. Calculating and making sure he'll score the best. By the time he's done I'm bored waiting for him so I just casually make my move. Doesn't mean I don't think, but I'd try to play in under a minute or two.
We moved on to Azul, and I loved this game at first, but after losing like 5 times in a row, I feel pretty defeated. If I make a tiny mistake, I just know my whole game is over, and there's also a lot of math and thinking ahead, which I just don't want to bother with a lot of the time.
I feel like my partner is just extremely competitive and will take these games extremely seriously. There's nothing wrong with that, but I really wish we could play these games in a way that's fun. I'm not saying without thinking, but without acting like it's life or death where you make a move fairly fast in a strategic way.
I usually am really good at games like Dominos, or chess, and even Azul when we're playing with more people, but most of the time I play with my partner, and I'm just not really having fun anymore.
We've talked about adding a timer, but now if I start winning, I feel like it's just a little handicap for me to win. I know we haven't really explored board games, but every time I play anything I just feel so sad. Very often I'd make a mistake early on that will determine the outcome, which usually involves me losing by a handful of points. I don't really care when I lose by a lot because then that means I just sucked that round or wasn't lucky if it's a luck based game, but when I make a move and realize it wasn't the right move a split second later and now I KNOW my game is over, I feel like absolutely crap after, especially if I barely lose, which happens a lot. To me, that's the worse way to lose a game, by a few points and knowing exactly why.