The 10 Meanest Board Games Ever Created

 9. The Estates

Oh the number of times I’ve gotten awfully cross playing the Estates. In the game you’re playing as corrupt construction companies, raising buildings on these three lines of empty lots. On your turn, you select one of these pieces to be up for auction. Whoever wins it gets to put that cube on the board, where it becomes an unfinished building. You can also buy roofs, if a building has a roof it’s considered finished, and the game ends when two of these rows are filled with finished buildings, but here’s where the game bears it’s incredibly sharp teeth. Tall buildings score more points, that’s nice, but only for whomever’s the same colour as the topmost cube, that’s mean. The buildings in the two finished rows score points for whoever owns them, that’s nice, but all the buildings in the unfinished row have those points taken away from players who own them, that’s mean. You can bid for these pieces which can shorten a row, making that row quicker and easier to finish, that’s nice, other players can buy these pieces and use them to extend the row your buildings are on making it much less likely to be finished and now you’re going to lose all your points when the game ends, and that’s when fists hit the table and we share some carefully chosen words. There are so many ways to hurt people in the Estates, but it’s such a great and addictive little system of bidding and backstabbing.