New Boardgame
Explanation
This is a lengthy comic satirizing the experience of learning and playing a new, overly complicated board game -- a common frustration among tabletop gaming enthusiasts.
The comic opens with someone proposing to play a new board game, which has an absurdly complex setup involving multiple decks, tokens, meeples, and track systems. Another player asks about the rules, prompting a long, convoluted explanation. When asked for clarification, the response is even more confusing. Someone suggests just starting and learning as they go.
The game proceeds with escalating absurdity. Players encounter bizarre mechanics, someone accidentally triggers a rule that causes another player's pieces to be "executed," and the Grim Reaper appears (possibly as a game mechanic or metaphor for how long the game takes). There are walls of tiny text representing the endless rules explanations that board game enthusiasts subject their friends to.
The comic captures several familiar pain points of modern hobby board gaming: the overwhelming rulebook, the person who insists on explaining every edge case before starting, the game that takes far longer than expected, the mechanics that seem arbitrary and punishing, and the social obligation to pretend you're having fun. The final panel promotes a fake game called "Everyone Wins at Dinosaurs" -- a parody of simple, non-competitive games, presented as the antidote to the nightmare just depicted.
The humor comes from Weinersmith's exaggeration of real board gaming culture, where increasingly complex "designer games" can turn a casual social gathering into a multi-hour ordeal of rules-lawyering and confusion.