One thing that's come to...not annoy me, amuse me I guess? Is how board game people latch onto words and then overuse/misuse them constantly. "Fiddly", "euro", "theme", what have you. But the one that actually does annoy me a little bit is the frequent misuse of "genre" when they mean "mechanism".
For folks who don't know, let me make a comparison. Say you were playing a first person shooter where manual reloads are a constant factor. If this were a board game, a substantial number of contemporary board game neophytes would insist on calling it "a reloading game". Not "a shooter with reloading" or "a game where you have to load the bullets back in the gun", just "a reloading game", as if the game was entirely about competitive speedloading.
Ridiculous, right? But this is what mechanism-first descriptions do, drawing all attention to parts that barely matter. Who cares if the game has drafting or worker placement or deckbuilding - what are players actually doing?
