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KamSandwich (Web Video)
"Hooooooow's it going, doods!"

"Bringing you the absolute finest in the worst, weird, and downright confounding board game world."
KamSandwich's Channel Description

KamSandwich is a review channel on YouTube that started on May 8th, 2020. Though initially covering a wide variety of topics, ever since the success of his review of The Campaign For North Africa, he's dedicated itself to finding the worst, weirdest, and most downright nonsensical board games he can find. His videos either focus on one board game or several unified under a common theme. They are most well known for their Worst Board Game of All Time event, a bracket-style tournament for finding out the worst board game of all time.


KamSandwich provides examples of the following Wack Crap:

  • Accidental Incantation: While reviewing Empire of Satanis in his video about bad tabletop RPGs, he documents that the creator responded to criticism by attempting to cast a Curse on the game's reviewers. He attempts to defy this trope by paraphrasing the curse's contents.
  • Actually Pretty Funny: When reviewing the third edition of Oneupmanship, Kam admits that one of the new jokes in the instructions gave him a pretty good laugh.
    Instructions on the Vegas space: If you decide to not bet anything or anyone and pass your turn, please see the last line of the next paragraph.
    Last line of next paragraph: Don't.
  • Adaptational Villainy:
    • When reviewing a version of The Game of Life from The '70s, he paints a group of orphans as the game's antagonist due to a space forcing you to donate to an orphanage. Not helping is how this space has an integral role in a game-breaking loop that can be abused to devastate an opponent at the very end of the game.
    • Invoked in regards to the infamous Rap Rat, as Kam fully leans into the game's infamous invokedAccidental Nightmare Fuel. He calls the creepypasta an exposé, refers to the Rap Rat as "the demon" all throughout the second "Worst Board Game Of All Time" Tournament, has it invade his own home and when he got a group together to play it, he describes it as "sacrificing" them to the Rat.
    • Invoked in the The Worst And Weirdest of Candy Land video for the 1984 version of Lord Licorice. Kam attributes the disappearance of Gingerbread Man, a minor character in previous versions, to him being outright killed by the Lord and adding murder to a character whose original crimes were merely his involvement in King Kandy's disappearance, both his implied involvement in the actual act and his outright obstruction of the search.
    • Towards the end of The Anti-Monopoly Debacle, after the court casenote  reached the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and the judge ruled that Parker Brothers' trademark on "Monopoly" was no longer valid, handing the win to Ralph Anspach's team, Kam is so taken aback by how that decision was achieved that he winds up putting forward his theory that the appeals court had gotten so fed up with not only how long the case had taken, but also with how many mistakes the district court had took them to task over in the third case, that the final ruling was achieved out of spite:
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In "The WORST Board Game Ideas", Kam has a list of games he doesn't want to talk about consisting of such "classics" as Right or Racist, Racial Holy War, Intelligent Design vs. Evolution, Little Troubles... and Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine.
  • Attack of the Political Ad: His review of Road to the White House fittingly contains a parody of a typical mud-slinging political commercial, as the player is encouraged to spend on advertising their candidate in the game.
  • invokedAudience-Alienating Premise: Discussed. Kam has reviewed several games that have off-putting premises that range from leaning on stereotypes to heavy handed political statements and looks past such problematic theming to determine that the games are good on a mechanical level.
  • Author Appeal: Kam really likes sports, especially American football and basketball. His early videos before he began covering board games were all about sports, he has reviewed board games themed around sports, he often makes sports analogies when reviewing certain games, and every WBGOAT Tournament has been capped off by a "One Shining Moment" video that recaps the events of the tournament through basketball clips.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • Discussed in regard to the American Megafauna game, with the game essentially revolving around making your creature either this or Boring, but Practical. As Kam puts it, the traits you can give to your animals can either make them purely better at survival, such as being small, omnivorous and good at avoiding conflict, or make them more awesome, such as being massive, carnivorous and aggressive. Kam prefers the second option.
    • In his discussion of Cyborg Commando in "The WORST Tabletop RPGs", Kam notes that the titular cyborgs are built up as Earth's last line of defense... but the rules give them a maximum of thirty minutes of battery life in a combat situation, which is shortened even further if they use the built-in lasers that are their primary ranged weapon (especially since there are no rules for guns even though the cyborg on the cover is carrying one).
  • Bait-and-Switch:
    • Kam expects The OJ Simpson Board Game to be about determining whether O. J. Simpson was guilty or not, but Kam is dismayed that the game is just a redo of Monopoly with a lawyer theme and the goal of getting as much money as possible at the end of the game.
    • When talking about Failed Trading Card Games he touches on the America-centric G.I. Joe card game, and for a change of pace decides to appeal to his non-American viewers with the topic of football. Cut to shots of card games based off American football.
      Kam: (is wearing an American flag) Bamboozled, idiots! More America!
      (explosion followed by picture of Bill Clinton shooting an uzi in front of American flag and bald eagles)
    • During The WORST Board Game Ideas, Kam brings up the debate cards in Right or Racist, which can range from being silly little "debates", such as whether a hotdog is sandwich, or incredibly divisive political stances, such as one's opinion on the Black Lives Matter movement. After that, Kam starts a seemingly angry rant about how he can't ignore the racism of the game anymore, only to then start a tirade about how a hotdog is clearly not a sandwich, but a taco.
  • Berserk Button:
    • Kam really does not like games with controversial political themes, since they're practically guaranteed to cause arguments both at a play table or in his comment section. Part of the reason why he hates Right or Racist? so much is because it's a political game that outright encourages players to get into arguments.
    • He doesn't like it when versions of Monopoly change the train stations, since they're one of the few mechanics that most people enjoy in the base game. And he especially doesn't like the fact that nearly every single version either changes or outright removes them.
      Kam: Stop. Trying. To fix. The railroads! (Smacks box of Monopoly: Cheater's Edition)
    • He's not an especially big fan of games made by large corporations trying to push their brand. He outright considers Game of Life: Target Edition to be "worst board game of all time" material in large part due to the fact that, in his own words, it's a "corporate psyop".
  • Beyond the Impossible: A skit in "The Game Where You Run Your OWN Election!" features a news segment discussing how a hopeful presidential candidate had their favoribility polls somehow drop into the negatives after being publicly condemned by Taylor Swift after he had surpassed her in the amount of miles racked up in private jet flights.
  • Bigotry Before Reason: Discussed in "The Worst Tabletop RPG's". As Kam analyzes the incredibly infamous Racial Holy War TTRPG, he eventually comes to the conclusion that their creators were so focused on pushing their supremacist ideals that they ended up not only making their game unplayable, but actively undermined their own message. How badly did they mess up? Well, the players — who are supposed to be invincible "White Warriors" — not only have no special abilities (compared to the racial minorities who are equipped with literal stereotype powers that are extremely busted), but can't hit the broad side of a barn — there is no base accuracy statistic, thus at max level the hit chance maxes out at 25% while starting out at 5%. They're also far more likely to run away in fear than get into any actual combat due to how poorly the "intimidation" stat is implemented.note 
  • "Blind Idiot" Translation:
    • Several in "Board Game Bootlegs", the most recurring one being random board games being called "Chess" when they're clearly something else.note 
    • Discussed with Europa Universalisnote , which was originally released in French. Instead of translating the meaning of the phrases, the official translation instead went word for word, leaving the very complex and often unintuitive mechanics even more confusing than before.
  • Brand X: That One Guy/Thing, being a representation of any franchise that can be slapped on a game, Themed Stock Board Game or otherwise.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory:
    • As explained in "The Anti-Monopoly Debacle", this is how Parker Brothers eventually came out on top in their legal battles against Ralph Anspach. After losing the Monopoly trademark in court and the Supreme Court refusing to even appeal the case, they spent several months lobbying Congress until they eventually passed a bill that let them reclaim their trademark. They then settled out of court with Anspach to avoid any more exhaustive courtroom battles, eventually obtaining the Anti-Monopoly license altogether.
    • Features as a mechanic in certain board games Kam has covered. For example, Road to the White House allows players to spend money to perform "dirty tricks" such as preventing another player's movement or getting rid of one of the current issues in effect.
      Politician!Kam: People of these United States, poverty is a massive issue right now. We need to- (is given a stack of money from off-camera) New reports coming in, nobody cares anymore!
  • Brick Joke: invoked Following the section covering Reality in The Most Controversial Board Games, Kam admits to the audience that the next three games he had to cover put him at "a crossroads" due to not actually wanting to cover themnote . As such, upon finishing that portion of the video, Kam decides he never wants to acknowledge them again, before pulling out a neuralyzer and flashing the audience, making them think the video ended on Reality. Fast forward a couple months to his 2024 compilation video; once the Reality section wrapped there, we hard cut to the neuralyzer flash.
  • Butterfly of Doom: Right at the top of "The Game I [Allegedly] Caused", Kam goes into how the 3.0 revision of Oneupmanship might have been a result of his own actions. To whit: After briefly covering it on his channel in the past, Kam went out on a lark to actually acquire it for himself. In buying it, he learned the game got a revision in order to fix the old issues, and in turn he decided to make a video on it ("[Allegedly] The Worst Board Game Ever Made"). Towards the end of the video, Kam informs his audience that the 2.0 revision was still avaliable for purchase on the game's website... and no sooner did that video go public, the game sold out, causing the developer to in turn announce the future 3.0 revision.
    Kam: (sheepish) Yeah, so, uh... (plants the 3.0 edition onto his table) Shoot, my bad.
  • Caustic Critic: Zig-Zagged. While Kam is more than willing to absolutely tear into a game and expose every single bad mechanic it has, he also often talks about how some games are judged unfairly due to their reputation. For example, despite having put Oy Vey as one of the contenders in the first WBGOAT Tournament, once he actually got a copy and played it, he came to the conclusion that the game was actually pretty fun despite all of his expectations. It was part of the reason why the game didn't make it into the second WBGOAT Tournament.
  • Chekhov's Lecture: During the online playthrough of Rap Rat Kam did with his Patreons on Tabletop Simulator, it came to light that Tabletop Simulator would not work if a VPN was active, causing Kam to crack that this meant everyone had doxxed themselves to the Rat. This winds up biting him in the ass a couple episodes later, towards the end of "The Ice Man Rappeth", as that meant the Rat found him. Hard cut to him with an eye injury, having had to move for the third time.
  • Complaining about Games You Don't Play: Kam himself ends up doing this with Oy Vey during his video on The WORST Board Game Themes, even admitting that he knows basically nothing about the game other than the front of the box. He even went as far as to put it in the first WBGOAT Tournament, just working off the assumption that it was a bad game. But then, he actually got a copy of the game and reviewed it, finding that the game was actually quite fun and engaging, the components were well made, and the stereotype-based jokes were tasteful and appear to come from a place of respect.
  • Complexity Addiction:
  • Composite Character: Invoked for the Candy Land games, Kam describes the games as though they were entries in a single overarching series instead of each one being its own separate interpretation of the universe. As such, each character is merged into a single version combining all of their appearances.
  • Couch Gag: Many of his videos start with some variation of "So you're one of those[...]" as Kam described a hypothetical viewer, which can range from someone normal like a sports fan to someone weird like a person who has a moral code against buying games from their original publishers.
  • Courtroom Antics:
    • When discussing Ghettopoly in "The Worst Monopoly Ripoffs", Kam brings up the legal battle between Hasbro and the game's creator, where the latter floundered horribly and gave the former an easy win. However, he also brings up the theory that the defendant gave the wrong estimate of the profits made off his game, then intentionally sabotaged his own case in order to avoid paying out the actual full amount. In Kam's own words, "If that's what happened, what a play!"
    • While "Exploring the BreaKey Files", Kam discusses the three separate lawsuits that led to the game's sudden removal from the market, two of which were between Upper Deck and the game's creators. He's especially dumbfounded by the incompetence displayed by both sides in the final case, from withholding beneficial evidence during discovery to trying to wriggle out of a guaranteed payment.
    • Featured prominently in Squeeze the Juice, where the players assume the role of O.J. Simpson's legal team to try and make as much money off his trial as possible. At no point do they actually attempt to prove his guilt or innocence.
    • "The Anti-Monopoly Debacle" details the increasingly convoluted and messy legal battles between Parker Brothers and Ralph Anspach, who created the titular Anti-Monopoly game. Parker Brothers believed that Anti-Monopoly was against their trademark, while Anspach argued that "monopoly", when referring to board games, was actually a generic term for games with similar mechanics involving buying, trading and building properties. Both sides brought many arguments, many of which were simply bizarre. For a while Parker Brothers even lost the trademark, only to regain it through lobbying. All throughout the video, Kam is simply trying to understand what the court is even trying to say, since many of the judges seemed to have been actively trying to be as obtuse as possible.
      • "The Anti-Monopoly Betrayal" continues the story, focusing on Anspach's anti-trust lawsuit against Hasbro after the latter refused to help the former sell his sequel game Anti-Monopoly II. Unlike the convoluted mess of the previous lawsuits, however, this one is much shorter and more straightforward, with Hasbro easily winning at the start, the appeals court upholding the verdict, and Anspach throwing in the towel after that.
  • Covers Always Lie: Kam is dismayed to find that despite appearing on the cover for Chaos Risk, dinosaurs (and giant women, to a lesser extent) make no appearance in the game whatsoever.
  • Creator's Apathy: invoked During "Blasphemous Board Game Bootlegs", Kam showcases Board games - A liar's nose will grow longer, which is clearly meant to be a bootleg of Liar... which is made all the more obvious due to the fact that, during the video for the bootleg on its store page, they abandon all pretense and flat out show Liar's box.
    Kam: Ya gotta respect the ability to just give up sometimes, it's an admirable quality.
  • Credits Gag: Of the "fake credits before the end" variety. Halfway into "The Worst Monopoly Ripoffs", Kam explains how Ghettopoly caused absolutely no controversy and was a revolutionary title in the board gaming space before suddenly transitioning into the credits music and screen, albeit with the words "Screw you" instead of the list of backers.
  • Crippling Overspecialization: The main fault of the Euchre Decks, discussed in The Most POINTLESS Board Games, is that it's a pair of deliberately incomplete decks of playing cards, containing specifically the cards you use to play Euchre. Meanwhile, a full deck of cards can be used to play Euchre and lots more, and can be purchased at a lower price than the Euchre decks.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: Multiple times throughout the WBGOAT Tournament, as it's not uncommon for a merely bad game to be matched up against an abysmal, infamous title. Most notably, BreaKey would win 97 percent of the vote in its battle against Shark Attack, an outright record for the tournament.
  • Damned by Faint Praise:
    • During "The WORST Board Game Mechanics", Kam refers to Oneupmanship (or rather, its original version) as "a very... game".
    • During the second WBGOAT Tournament, when trying to describe any positive about Right or Racist, the only thing that the hosts can come up with is the fact that it functions right out of the box and doesn't need any changes to the rules. Which they outright admit isn't a real positive when compared to anything but the other games in the tournament.
    • When talking about Global Survival, the only nice way he can describe the game is that "it functions" and calls it "the closest a game has come to the line of being broken without outright crossing it".
  • invokedDancing Bear: Discussed in regards to Bumps and Grinds during the second WBGOAT Tournament. While the game, when played rules as written, does carry a legitimate fire risk due to the candle, that's all it really has. The rest of the rules are your standard adult game affair, so the candle is really the only thing that makes it "worst board game" worthy.
  • Deadly Game: Discussed where it is entirely possible that, though unintentional, there are some board games that can theoretically kill their players if the rules are followed to the book.
    • A few noteworthy examples are the "bitter pills" in Oneupmanship which were meant to be swallowed but had no nutritional or allergy information and the "meat feast" option for Mr. Bacon's Big Adventure which can cause one to overeat and die due to the increasing food portion sizes.
    • Most ridiculously would likely have to be the candlelight gimmick that the Diplomat Sales Co included in several games such as Office Party, Bumps and Grinds and Risqué, as an open candle sitting on a tiny dish and flammable board while being surrounded by people taking off their clothes in the dark poses a severe fire hazard. Risqué was particularly egregious, as the crinkled paper mat that you have to throw the dice onto make it incredibly easy to tip the candle over.
    • Some games mentioned such as Pass Out and Drink-Tac-Toe involve drinking a lot of alcohol, with the obvious hazard of people getting injured or killed from consuming too much.
  • Deadpan Snarker: All throughout his videos. The general rule is that the worse a board game is, the snarkier Kam becomes. For example, when talking about the official Gone with the Wind game, which was a game collection that came out 54 years after the movie:
    "I think we might have missed the audience buzz on that one by a bit of a half century."
    "The board game producers held for 54 years before striking the iron when it was basically frozen."
    "Because why do one game good when we could do ten games bad?"
  • Decided by One Vote: Came very, very close to happening in the second Worst Board Game tournament in the third-place match between 15 Love and Rap Rat. The polls said 50%-50%, but the visual bars showed that 15 Love was a single pixel farther ahead, with Kam invoking an Enhance Button as he zoomed in to show this. Analysis of the poll at the time via Inspect Element showed that 15 Love only won by four votes.
  • Demonic Possession: After reviewing the Rap Rat, Kam has brought up that he's been having to deal with the demon from said game messing with his schedule and general well being.
  • Department of Redundancy Department: When reviewing The Game of Life: Quarter-Life Crisis, Kam points out how unnecessary the outside ring used to track each player's total money is since you can simply lay all your money in front of you like in any other game, declaring it "redundant, much redundant."
  • Didn't Think This Through: Kam speculates this as the major reason why Gay Monopoly got sued into oblivion in "The Anti-Monoply Debacle". In his theory, the creators of the game saw Parker Brothers lose the Monopoly trademark and immediately capitalized on it by rushing out a board game using the Monopoly name along with a provocative theme to guarantee attention and sales. However, they didn't realize that Parker Brothers still owned the copyright to the Monopoly brand, which gave them the legal avenue to press charges. As Kam puts it, "All they had to do was walk in a straight line, and they managed to trip, fall, and die."
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: When reviewing a board game adaptation of Left Behind (2000), Kam is amazed that one of the win conditions is punching out Carpathia by landing on the same space as him, dubbing it "the Doom Slayer victory".
  • Dystopian Detroit: Kam cracks a few jokes at Detroit's expense, such as claiming the winners of the BreaKey Dutch and German TV shows would spend a weekend retreat at the city.
    Kam: I'd add another L to [Detroit's] pile, but (holds up white board full of tally marks) I think they've had enough.
  • Eagle Land: Kam sometimes slips into the character of the type 2 boorish American who thinks the USA is the only country on Earth that matters. This usually happens when American football is discussed.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: Kam featured rather rough drawings to demonstrate the games he reviewed before he stepped in front of a camera. He didn't even look at board games until he reviewed Campaign for North Africa.
  • Endless Game: Technically possible with the original version of Oneupmanship due to the Bitter Pill mechanic. If a player is about to win the game, any player can opt to take a Bitter Pill (though how wise that is considering this involves consuming a physical pill with zero nutritional or allergy information is... debatable) to negate the win and keep the game going. Since there's no stated limit to how many times one can do this, Kam points out the game can effectively go on forever, or at least until everyone on the table agrees on a final winner.
  • "Eureka!" Moment: invoked An unexpected side-effect of his deep dive into the Anti-Monopoly court case is that Kam winds up realizing exactly what transpired around the creation of Gay Monopoly: The creators heard about Parker Brothers losing the "Monopoly" trademark, mistakenly assumed it meant they also lost the copyright, and proceeded to rush the game out the door in order to take advantage of the situation. This also winds up being definite proof for Kam that all the makers needed to do to not get sued into oblivion was change the game's name.
  • Even the Guys Want Him: While reviewing the Emily Post Popularity Game, Kam would rank all of the potential friends that you can get during the game. With the top spot going to Fred, with Kam saying that both the girls and the guys want to hang out with him.
  • Everyone Has Standards: Covered on his controversial board games list is Juden Raus, a board game created in Nazi Germany that even the Nazis themselves refused to support, citing an article from the official SS newspaper denouncing the board game for "trivializing Nazi policy" and saying that "it has no place in the toy boxes of children."
  • Evil Debt Collector: While talking about Global Survival's debt mechanic, he notes that entering debt by buying the United States is a guaranteed loss, since there's no practical way to recuperate from it. So eventually, you'll lose when the time runs out and you get, in Kam's words, "atomized by a loan shark."
  • Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: While discussing Wraeththu in "The WORST Tabletop RPG's", he starts capping off the segment by discussing the titular species Exotic Equipment (specifically noting their similarity to a tall plant) and declares that the viewers should be wary of any flowers. A horrified tone creeps into Kam's voice as he slowly starts to look down at the game's cover by the end of that sentence, realizing the similarity to the flower-shaped knife shadow he had mentioned at the start of the segment and what that entails. For the rest of the segment, the shadow is censored whenever the cover is shown.
  • Eyes Out of Sight: Kam never takes off his shades when he's on camera. Even when performing a dramatic Glasses Pull upon learning about the sex manuals in Sexual Trivia, he has another pair of shades on underneath.
  • Fashionable Evil: Kam is enamored by how sharply-dressed Lord Licorice is in every edition of Candy Land... except for his 2014 incarnation, where he suddenly resembles Gargamel more than the stylish schemer he normally is. Kam is not pleased in the slightest with this design.
  • Foregone Conclusion: When finally given the opportunity to cover "15 Love" in The WORST Way To Play Tennis, Kam establishes the goal of the video is seeing if "15 Love" is as bad as he made it out to be prior... or if it's somehow worse.
    Kam: Because, I'll go ahead and let you know right now... this thing was never going to be "better".
  • Foreshadowing:
  • Freeze-Frame Bonus: Played With, as it's less of a bonus and more of a "Pause if you're morbidly curious".
    • In The WORST Board Game Mechanics, Kam has to resort to placing some of the most controversial aspects of F.A.T.A.L. in a one frame image that he begs his viewers not to pause on unless they want their days ruined. The same is done when he returns to talking about the game in "The WORST Tabletop RPG's."
    • In The Most Controversial Board Games, one of the games features some massive Values Dissonance that involves a shooting game featuring racist caricatures and in order to show the photo of the box, he does the same thing and resorts to a two frame image and visibly shows his disdain at the game's concept.
  • Freud Was Right: Kam has some choice words when discussing the unfortunate design of World in Flames's box cover:
    Kam: I really have nothing to say here. Completely in-phall-ible box design. Woodn't change a thing... Balls.
  • Funny Background Event: Kam likes to put a piece of paper with a relevant gag or pun on the wall behind him. This was originally done to hide the ethernet plug-in on the wall, but he's kept the gag even after moving to a new location. For instance, in the video on Global Survival, there are several that display extremely obvious facts about various countries, such as that if you move to South Africa, you will increase the population of South Africa.
  • The Gambling Addict: Whenever a game has any sort of gambling mechanics, expect Kam to enthusiastically say "Gambling?!" and be either disappointed when he can't bet everything on a game of chance, or enthusiastic when he can.
  • invokedGame-Breaker: In Monopoly For Sore Losers, players can use sore loser tokens to gain access to a token of Mr. Monopoly himself, who has several incredibly powerful abilities. One of which is that, when anyone rolls a double, the player controlling Mr. Monopoly can place down a house anywhere on the board. This wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't for the removal of the ability to sell houses back to the bank. So, as Kam said, you can just build up houses all over the board and completely collapse the market as there won't be any houses left to buy, slowing the game speed to a near-standstill.
  • Getting Crap Past the Radar: All throughout his "Naughty Board Games" video, as Kam can neither swear nor show inappropriate imagery due to Youtube guidelines. Which becomes immediately difficult as the first game he covers is called "Let's F*ck", which he has to call "Let's What".
  • Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Kam decidedly avoids swearing in his videos, instead relying on phrases like "Beans!", "Confound it!", "Jiminy frickin' frosties!", and even replacing "Bloody hell!" with "Bloody there!". Eventually lampshaded in "Naughty Board Games", claiming he has an "inability to swear".
  • Gratuitous French: After going through a thirty-second rapid-fire rundown of Oneupmanship's history, Kam then brings up a handy graph for the visual learners to glean from, except it's written entirely in gramatically-incorrect French because he felt it could use the extra "pizzazz".
  • Hurricane of Puns: When introducing The Vanilla Ice Electronic Rap Game in his review, Kam works in several of the man's song, album, and movie titles as part of the build-up, complete with relevant images of each.
    Kam: It's time to go To the Extreme as you get Hooked on this Mind Blowin title alongside an Icon that's Cool as Ice.
  • invokedImproved Second Attempt:
    • In his review of Oneupmanship, he found that a second edition of the game was created which, while keeping the interesting stock market mechanic, retooled many of the elements that made the original so bad, mainly the Bitter Pill. It was turned into simply a mechanic rather than a physical pill, it could only be used once by each player and it made the target player lose money rather than resetting their assets, which made it more strategic and meant that games could actually end. Kam would admit that the original version definitely deserves its reputation, but he would actually praise the changes made in the second edition.
    • Zig-zagged with the revised version of Bumps and Grinds. While it does make some welcome changes, most importantly removing the lit candle on the flammable game board, Kam feels that it lost its major claim to fame in the process. The end result is a game that's better and safer to play, but not as interesting to talk about.
  • Insistent Terminology: In "The Most POINTLESS Board Games", Kam is very insistent that the winner of a game of BreaKey is referred to as "the BreaKing". When he found out that the official name is "keymaster", he claimed that those are merely regional rulers compared to the BreaKing.
  • Insult to Rocks: Discussed in "The Most POINTLESS Board Games", where Kam says that one could consider a worthless game to be even worse than a pointless one.
  • Internet Counterattack: Kam discourages this when it comes to going after real-life people (such as one of the executives in charge of Breakey who is still in the industry). Besides, most games he reviews have been out of print for years or decades, so it would be unproductive.
  • It Only Works Once:
    • The BreaKey game in The Most POINTLESS Board Games features game pieces that require players to buy more pieces after using them as the loser of the in game battle has their game piece has said piece broken due to the mechanics of the game. Because of this, Kam not only considers it pointless, but outright worthless.
    • To a much lesser extent, he's also brought up legacy-style games such as Pandemic: Legacy and Risk: Shadow Forces, where the game encourages outright destroying and throwing away certain components after using them, thus permanently altering future playthroughs. These games don't earn nearly the same amount of ire from him as BreaKey due to them being much more substantial and not as blatantly greedy.
  • invokedIt's Easy, So It Sucks!: Kam will occasionally comment on how the lack of difficulty in a game can negatively affect the experience of playing it. Candy Land is the butt of many jokes on the channel precisely because of its incredibly simplistic gameplay loop, earning a spot IN both WBGOAT tournaments precisely because of this.
  • invokedIt's Hard, So It Sucks!: While Kam does enjoy difficult titles, it's not uncommon for him to come across games that are so difficult as to be simply unpleasant to play. The Campaign For North Africa is one of the biggest offenders in this, as the game is so rule dense that moving a single piece a single tile requires referencing several different charts and tables. It got to the point where it not only got into both WBGOAT tournaments, but DOMINATED, winning the 3rd place match against "What Do You Meme?" in the first one, and being the runner-up in the second.
  • Jewish Mother: Oy Vey is a board game in which players take the role of one and try to push their children to financial success. Kam was so baffled by the fact that the game even existed that he entered it in the first WBGOAT tournament based soley on the box, though upon actually tracking down a copy of the game to play it he found it not that bad.
  • Joke Item: As noted in The Worst and Weirdest of RISK, the One World Dominion fan expansion contains the United Nations card, which is filled with flavorful text of the UN condemning a military's actions but ultimately has no effect whatsoever. It can be played at anytime, at least...
  • Kick the Dog: Following Kam's first encounter with the Rap Rat in his video covering DVD and VHS board games, the fact the demonic entity kept inflicting hardships upon himnote  forced Kam to move. And then he was forced to move again several episodes later, when his decision to play the game online without a VPN caused the Rat to find him again.
  • Kill It with Fire: After visiting an adult toys site to get more info on the Hot Spots game, Kam says that he'll have to burn his laptop because of what he's seen on it.
  • Lame Pun Reaction: After reading the "sexetary" pun in Office Party, Kam just gives a slow clap while sarcastically calling it a "good one".
  • Loads and Loads of Rules:
    • Discussed all throughout both videos about "The World's Longest Board Games", as many of them achieve that length through the sheer volume of rules. The stand out, naturally, is "The Campaign For North Africa", which features over 300 pages of rules, including entire sections about fuel evaporation, rationing, Erwin Rommel by himself and also an optional set of rules for airplanes. And Kam managed to read through all of it, visibly regretting it by the end.
    • The final game discussed in The WORST Tabletop RPGs is HYBRID, an RPG with a strange variant. There are many, many rules included in each version of the game, with the 2007 version having the most at a total of 551 rules, which is a lot, but not even close to CNA. However, many are either extremely long on their own, are only applicable under hyper-specific circumstances, go off on unrelated tangents, or all three (the 551st "rule" isn't even a rule, but an extended rant on America's policies concerning the Middle East). Some of the things that HYBRID has rules for include using Maxwell's time travel equation to avoid copyright law, how to travel to Pluto and back (specifying that the trip is not state-sponsored, for some reason), equations for love, determining the outcome of a battle between two souls, multiple rules for determining one's salary, and rules that serve as disclaimers for other rules.
  • Luck-Based Mission: A lot of the games he covers have some element of randomness to them, be it dice-based movement, card drawing or coin flipping. While Kam usually enjoys this, there are certain cases where he believes it makes a game worse.
    • He dislikes it when games claim to be all strategy but still utilise luck-based mechanics. Joel Harden's Mogul is a particularly egregious case of this, as the game goes to great lengths to simulate real estate management, but due to the fact that it's built off of the framework of Monopoly, the winner will come down to the roll of the dice.
    • In BreaKey, every single "battle" comes down to this, since there is no indication of which key is stronger than the other. Unlike many other collectible based games, rarity does not play a factor in strength, meaning that whether you win or lose is essentially a coinflip.
  • Mathematician's Answer: During the second WBGOAT Tournament, the match between Ms. Monopoly and Monopoly: Cheater's Edition was judged to be so close, with both games having a plethora of negatives that might sway the voters, that all Kam can say for sure is that a "representative of the Hasbro Corporation will take home the win".
  • Medal of Dishonor:
    • The WBGOAT Tournament is essentially a fight for one, as the winner is the game that's considered to be the worst of them all by popular vote.
    • This is essentially what Kam considers the description of "pointless" to be for a board game, as it's so difficult for any game to be completely pointless that it's practically an achievement.
  • Metaphorgotten: At the end of his "Global Survival" review, Kam goes on a lengthy analogy likening it and other board games to race cars of varying quality until he gets off-track discussing engine belts, eventually forgetting what he was even talking about.
  • invokedMis-blamed: Discussed. During his coverage of Monopoly ripoffs, he brought up the intentionally offensive Ghettopoly and talked about how consumers were so furious about it that they sent complaints to Hasbro instead of its actual creator, assuming it was an official release because esoterically-themed unofficial Monopoly clones, though they became dime-a-dozen in later years, weren't at all common at the time.
  • The Moral Substitute: A few religious based board games are scattered throughout some of the videos, but they are really prominent in Bible-Based Trading Card Games. He does give them a fair chance, however, and praises Bibleopoly in his video on Monopoly knockoffs in particular for shaking up the Monopoly formula in a way that emphasizes the initial property scramblenote .
  • Mundane Made Awesome:
    • One of his earlier videos discusses how the card game Ace of Spades lives and dies on the dealer's ability to hype up players and onlookers. He makes a similar claim about the Deal or No Deal licensed board game, saying its biggest weakness is its inability to recreate the show's tense atmosphere, which makes its shallow mechanics feel worthwhile.
    • In "The Most POINTLESS Board Games", Kam attempts to give this treatment to BreaKey, imagining what it would be like if BreaKey had an anime adaptation like those commonly used to promote collectible card games and inventing a storyline where two hopefuls duel to be crowned as the next BreaKing. He still manages to make the game more exciting than the actual promotional TV segments.
    • The Worst Board Game of All Time Tournaments tend to get treated as seriously as the March Madness competition it's spoofing, with each of the games being given bits of personality and even motivations for wanting to win it all.
  • My Friends... and Zoidberg: In The Worst and Weirdest of Candy Land, Kam points out that the 1984 edition of the classic board game is the first appearance of "many fan-favorite characters and Jolly." He continues taking pot shots at Jolly throughout the rest of the video.
  • "No. Just… No" Reaction:
    • Towards the end of his Global Survival video, Kam had gotten so fed up, he outright refused to do the "Wack Crap" segment, going so far as to shut down Black Shirt Kam's attempt at cuing it up.
    • In "Blasphemous Board Game Bootlegs", he covers Italian Brainrot Guess Who I Am, a version of Guess Who? with completely ridiculous AI generated characters, with Kam stating that if anyone would like to check it out, he will not leave it in the video description, because he doesn't want to feel partially responsible for people buying it.
    • In the Honorable Mentions of "The WORST Tabletop RPG's", Kam goes over a few entries that aren't necessarily bad games, but have a really funny premise. After going through his selection, he asks if he missed anything... where upon an image flashes on screen: the cover of Let These Mermaids Touch Your Dick Maybe. Without missing a beat, Kam moves along like it wasn't there.
      • Later in the same video, Kam tries reading through the long list of magical misfires in F.A.T.A.L. in order, gets halfway through the first pointnote , and immediately decides to just hand-pick the most ridiculous misfires that won't get him in trouble with YouTube's rules, and cram the heinous ones in a Freeze-Frame Bonus for the morbidly curious.
  • Non-Gameplay Elimination: Kam disqualified the three board games at the end of the controversial board games video from the WBGOAT immediately after they were covered, because that tournament is supposed to be all in good fun; while many games in the WBGOAT are morally dubious, these three crossed the line with how willfully malicious and toxic they are. He then personified them as being caught trying to bribe the judges for a more favorable seed and disqualified for cheating.
  • Noodle Implements: In order to describe a rather racist shooting game that he can't say the title of, because it features the N-word, Kam carefully describes the elements one by one that present the full picture before briefly flashing the box artwork with a censored title to the viewer.
  • No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom: A major criticism of The Lord of the Rings board game: It's a beat-by-beat retelling of the film trilogy, with event spaces forcing you to play them out even as you pass over them, and each character has a pre-determined path they must follow that traces their journey in the story. This also means that completing the game involves experiencing every single event card in the same order, with the only variation being the rate at which you experience these events due to the Roll-and-Move mechanic. Kam reports this game has a replayability score of zero.
  • No Swastikas: When reviewing The Longest Day, a game about the Normandy invasion, a German Cross is used to represent the Germans. A small caption reads "The platform is not too fond of the correct German symbol I've heard". For the rest of the video, the German symbol is a demonetization symbol.
  • No True Scotsman: Discussed while covering Intelligent Design Vs. Evolution, as Kam directly mentions and explains this fallacy, bringing up the anecdote that coined the term, as he believes it absolutely fits when bringing up the infamous "There are no hypocrites in the church" trivia card.
  • Not Hyperbole: During his discussion of Joel Hardin's Mogul, Kam acts out a scene where a player considers purchasing a property, which requires absurdly specific details down to the nature of the tenant who will be living there. Kam later states that everything in his skit is from the game's actual mechanics.
  • Obfuscating Stupidity: Kam's plan to make another player rage quit the board game version of Monopoly GO hinges on the trolling player intentionally screwing over their target multiple times in one turn, only to reveal that they did so because they misunderstood the rules and "can't take it back now".
  • Old Shame: invoked The third entry in "The WORST Tabletop RPG's", Empire of Satanis, is a 2005 RPG published by a cult leader, who later did a retrospective on his creation in 2018 and acknowledged it as "an amateurish mess of cliches and something even worse" and "weird for weirdness' sake and tries too hard in the process."
  • One-Steve Limit: While discussing the many versions of Risk, he comes across one Richard Borg who designed the Risk Junior: Narnia Edition, and he points out how uncannily similar his name is to Richard Berg of The Campaign For North Africa fame.
  • Orwellian Retcon: invoked In The Worst and Weirdest of Monopoly, he rounds out his section covering Longest Game Ever by complaining about the ending condition where the game will stop when all properties are owned. It later came to light that he accidentally misread that condition, as it only goes into in effect when all properties are owned by the same player, facilitating the need to pin a comment explaining and apologizing for his mistake. As such, when it came time for the 2024 compilation video, and said video's section:
    Kam: With everything I've seen, it looks like LGE took their original goal, and managed to achieve it, keeping the original Monopoly spirit, while also making sure the game takes absolutely forever, making it probably the best revamped edition that we've seen thus far.
    (Smash Cut to—)
    And then the segment ends there and I say nothing else about Monopoly: Longest Game Ever
  • Overly Long Name: He inevitably runs into this trope when looking for obscure games or bootlegs through shopping sites, as the items posted up often cram in as many search terms as possible into the name to maximize traffic. Lampshaded with a skit in Naughty Board Games:
    Kam 1: Dude, I can't believe they stole your idea for Stacking Wooden Block Game for Grown Ups - Couple Dare Questions - All Genders & Relationships - Exciting, Pleasing, & Funny Challenges - Couples Date Night Gift - Make Date & Game Night Fun (54 CT).
    Kam 2: I knew I should've patented that!
  • Overly Narrow Superlative: While reviewing Bible-Based Trading Card Games, Kam would come across Faith Battle, which called itself the "first biblical collectible card game in Brazil". Kam snarks that by that logic, he's the "first blue hat wearing American youtuber to cover the first biblical collectible card game in Brazil".
  • invokedOvershadowed by Controversy: The Most Controversial Board Games is a video all about games that suffered this fate, ranging from games such as Bombshell, which was a relatively inoffensive title that simply ended up gaining the ire of the press, to something like Reality, which proudly declared itself "the most dangerous in Sweden" as it featured nearly everything that would upset Moral Guardians.
  • Paperworkaholic: In Part 2 of The World's Longest Board Games,Kam describes the incredibly meticulous managing required in Silent Warnote  as "exciting bookwork that every bureaucrat gets hyped for." This includes a shot of an office suit-wearing Kam slumped over a bunch of paperwork pumping his fists and shouting "Let's goooo!"
  • invokedPeriphery Hatedom: Discussed. When talking about the three The Twilight Saga trivia games, he's frustrated about people using reviews of the game to rant about their hatred of Twilight as a whole instead of discussing the games themselves, when the game was clearly meant for people who already liked the franchise. A similar pattern occurs with Trump: The Game, where reviews are more focused on expressing support for or hatred of the politician (and attacking members of the opposing camp) rather than talking about the game itself.
  • Piss-Take Rap: Zig-Zagged with The Vanilla Ice Electronic Rap Game. The design of the board and the lyric cards lead to Painful Rhyme and Word-Salad Humor, but in the play session in The Ice Man Rappeth demonstrates that you can make the results work.
  • invokedPoe's Law:
    • Invoked while discussing Joel Harden's Mogul, as Kam cannot help but compare the incredibly overcomplicated mechanics (including having to calculate mortgage payments, having to account for different types of tenants and a marriage and divorce mechanic) to Valefisk's Realistic Monopoly, which was designed to be as annoying and unfun as possible. With the main difference being that the latter was made as a joke while the former takes itself incredibly seriously.
    • Discussed in regards to UNO Non-Partisan, as seen in The WORST Board Game Ideas. Kam is unable to tell if the game was a genuine attempt to stop people from discussing politics while playing or if it was meant as a joke. On one hand, a large corporation such as Mattel is unlikely to release a product such as this as a joke, while on the other hand, the very idea is so ridiculous that it's hard to imagine anyone taking it seriously. As Kam out it, either the game is one of the worst ideas ever or a really funny joke, and it all depends on the intent.
    • Invoked while discussing the infamous Racial Holy War in The WORST Tabletop RPG's, as the game's own mechanics undermine the message that the creators were trying to sendnote . Instead of being underdogs who can eventually overcome the odds, the "White Warriors" come across as a bunch of incompetent idiots.
  • Potty Emergency: Discussed with the board game versions of The Eight/Twenty-Four Hours of Le Mans in The World's Longest Board Games. Both games are taken so seriously in competitions that a player leaving the "driver's seat" for any reason will immediately disqualify their team. Kam mentions how this could lead to months of planning going to waste because someone drank too much beforehand and had to suddenly jump out to "drain the faucet."
  • The Power of Friendship: During the final round of Kam and his friends' battle/playthrough of Rap Rat, the players Etiketi and Demi ended up tying for victory, and they chose to share the win and finally beat the demon, for now at least. Kam even name drops the name of the trope verbatim.
  • Press Start to Game Over: While covering deadEarth in "The WORST Tabletop RPG's" he notes that during character creation, every character starts with a random amount of radiation exposure due to the apocalyptic setting, and with enough radiation the character takes on one of many mutations, several of which are lethal (either instant or delayed). Each player only gets to create a maximum of three characters for the sessionnote , so it's entirely possible for an unlucky player to lose all their characters during the creation process and get locked out of even playing the game.
  • Press X to Die: Kam points out that buying the US in Global Survivial is an unintentional example, as it will saddle the player with so much debt that it effectively makes it impossible to win. This is because it's the only country that costs more than a player starts out with, meaning you have to go into debt to purchase it... except the game is so poorly designed it's effectively impossiblenote  to make that money back, leaving you with no money and thus out of the game completely.
  • The Problem with Licensed Games: Invoked. Several videos have been dedicated to bad games with licenses, with categories such as video games, game shows, and movies.
  • Recycled with a Gimmick: Has analyzed many games with this type of shtick such as: The Worst and Weirdest of Monopoly for actual licensed versions of the game, The Worst and Weirdest Monopoly Ripoffs for unlicensed games that are inspired by the Monopoly formula, The Weirdest and Wildest of Yahtzee which is a look at the popular dice game, among others.
  • invokedRecursive Adaptation: Discussed whenever Kam comes across a board game based on something that was already based on a board game. The two major examples he's covered thus far are Words With Friends: The Board Gamenote  and Monopoly GO: The Board Game.
    Kam 1: Okay, so we take our board game...
    Kam 2: Our very popular board game...
    Kam 1: And we turn it into an app...
    Kam 2: A very successful app...
    Kam 1: And then we take that app, based off the board game...
    Kam 2: Our very popular board game...
    Kam 1: And then we turn it...
    Kam 1 and 2: Into a board game! Yeah!
  • Ron the Death Eater: invoked A reoccuring trend in Kam's videos is his portrayal of the world of Candy Land as a Crapsaccharine World, complete with rampant political violence, death, and destruction. To name one such example, after the game's original mascot Gingerbrand Man was removed from the game in the 1984 revamp, Kam spun this as being the result of Lord Licorice killing him in order to relocate the gingerbread plum tree in order to construct his castle.
  • Running Gag:
    • invoked In situations where a video is covering a singular board game, just as Kam is seemingly about to start wrapping up, a Kam wearing a black shirt will pop into the room to remind him to cover the "wack crap". At one point, he steps out of a closet to remind him.
    • Anytime Kam's video is interrupted by a phone call, the ringtone is the theme song to F.A.T.A.L..
    • Whenever Kam opens a game box for the first time, he finds a copy of Connect Four.
  • invokedScrewed by the Lawyers:
    • Discussed occasionally, as certain rip-off titles end up attracting the attention of the original publishers. For example, Gay Monopoly ended up getting the attention of the Parker Brothers company, who then sued the makers of the game and had Gay Monopoly wiped off the face of the earth, until Kam himself brought it back via Tabletop Simulator. When discussing the game later, Kam would even mention that with how different the board, mechanics and components are, the game could have flown under the radar had it not specifically used the word "monopoly" in the title.
    • As discussed when exploring the BreaKey files, this is ultimately what led to the game's downfall. Instead of public backlash or poor sales, the game was dropped after both its creators (BreaKey International) and the company licensed to sell it (Upper Deck Entertainment) got into multiple legal battles against each other, destroying their working relationship and causing the game to be quickly abandoned. Kam considers this a stroke of good fortune, as his closing poem explains why the game could have ended up being a massive success despite its many flaws.
  • Sarcasm Failure: While reading through HYBRID, Kam fully admits to having almost quit at two separate points: discovering that among the examples for what you can create within the game is the Iraqi nuclear war program, and being exposed to, for literally no reason, the inclusion of a brownie cake recipie.
  • Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: One of the first things Kam brings up in Hasbro's Board Game Mobile Game Board Game is disclosing how the makers of Monopoly Go have tried twice to get him to accept a sponsorship deal, and has turned them down both times. In fact, as a segue into the video's actual sponsornote , Kam all but brags that Monopoly Go will never be a video sponsor.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here!: Reacts "Well, time to move" when Rap Rat invades his cabinet.
  • invokedSequelitis: Discussed during his video on the Diplomat/Topco/TLC brand. While Kam doesn't think that any of the Diplomat titles are actually good, he at least finds them interesting. But the games released under the Topco umbrella were all very safe and simple, to the point that Kam calls them "slop", while the TLC games were all too derivative of the original Diplomat titles.
  • Shoddy Knockoff Product: "Board Game BOOTLEGS" and "Blasphemous Board Game Bootlegs" features several knockoffs of popular board games, with each video having a segment dedicated to a specific game - Don't Break the Ice in the former, and Guess Who? in the latter.
  • Shout-Out:
  • invokedSo Bad, It's Good:
    • Discussed when comparing Game of Life Target Edition to Mouse Trap (1963) to show that a bad game can still be fun one. He criticizes Mouse Trap for its limited mechanics and flawed Rube Goldberg Device that doesn't work as intended most of the time, but he still could find fun in seeing how it fails. In contrast, Game of Life Target Edition is incredibly dull due to how mundane all its events are, which really hurts its quality as a game.
    • This is his opinion on the Vanilla Ice Electronic Rap Game, outright calling it The Best Worst Game Of All Time. The gameplay is so simple as to make Candyland look complex by comparison and the raps you can make are guaranteed to be bad. But if you can lean into how schlocky it is and ham it up while singing, you can have a good time.
  • Something about a Rose: The thumbnails for both his Naughty Board Games and his Diplomat Sales Co. videos feature Kam holding a rose, with the latter specifically having him holding it between his teeth.
  • invokedSo Okay, It's Average: His opinion on The Game of Life: Quarter Life Crisis is that it is "aggressively mediocre". It doesn't have any elements that make it awful like the orphan loop from the 1970 edition or the corporate psy-op from the Target edition, but there isn't anything especially good about it either. Kam acknowledges that he didn't have a bad time playing it, but he's also never been in the mood to play it again.
  • Straw Feminist: Invoked in regards to Miss Monopoly, as rather than just being a celebration of women's inventions, the game gives a massive advantage to female players. As Kam himself notes, this feels more like the game is talking down to women and acting like they need help to win at Monopoly, completely butchering its own theme.
  • Straw Nihilist: Invoked in regards to Global Survival, as he outright calls the game "a nihilist's dream", since most of the mechanics are practically pointless. Going into debt almost never happens since you start with too much money, global monopolies never happen since it's too dependent on luck with their doing virtually nothing even if one does happen, the situations almost never matter since they're too country-specific (with the one country that the most of them are only relevant to being the one country that's detrimental to purchase), and the game doesn't even have a definitive winning condition.
  • Stunned Silence:
    • On reviewing controversial board games, one of his entries superficially looks like a racist board game originating in the 1900's, but further analysis of the materials of physical copies suggests that the board game is a recent product, designed to resemble a piece of racist lost media to participate in antique auctions. This explanation is met with a still image conveying Kam's disbelief.
    • While reading the rules of Global Survival, Kam is left utterly stupefied when he reads the phrase "unlike numerous other board games, there is no definitive or established game end" at the end of the rulebook.
    • When looking at the fan-made Risk variant known as "3D-Risk", which combines the game with the 3D Chess game from Star Trek, he's left with his mouth agape as the Windows shut down sound plays over his shocked expression.
    • While reviewing Intelligent Design Versus Evolution, he shows off one of the trivia cards, which asks "Is the church filled with hypocrites?". The answer on the card was "No", but the logic that the game designers used to justify thisnote  leaves Kam so shocked that not only does he once again plays the Windows shut down sound over his stunned expression, but he claims that his brain had to turn off and back on again afterwards.
  • Suddenly Shouting: While going over the rules for TLC's Hot Spotsnote , Kam points out that the existence of the game means that someone probably painted another person's feet with blue raspberry flavored paint, and then shouts to the camera "Suffer with that image!"
  • Take a Third Option: A major issue Kam wound up having with Oneupmanship 3.0 was with the plastic slider on the stock chart, as it was too tight to properly move. He then went on to explain the process he took to try and remedy it: Just removing the slider from the chart left it too far away to use, using the 2.0 chart wasn't idealnote , and using the 3.0 slider on the 2.0 chart wouldn't work, as the old chart was too thick for it to go on... and in trying to force it, Kam accidentally snapped it in half... and immediately solved his problem in the process, as the ridge that was left behind on both halves of the slider meant it could grip onto the chart, and easily slide along it.
  • Take That, Audience!:
  • Tempting Fate:
    • Kam believes that a game as simple and quick as BreaKey would never make for good television, only to cut to footage of an European TV show featuring just that, much to his exasperation. He's just as baffled when it happens a second time.
    • While discussing the Diplomat brand at the end of his Naughty Board Games video, Kam laments the fact that they only managed to release 3 gamesnote , since he was interested in seeing what else they could come up with. Cue a phone call that informs him that people have found that there were actually 20 games released under the brand.
  • That Came Out Wrong: When discussing Non-Partisan UNO, Kam jokes about how this could be used for non-political fun with someone and their immigrant friends, declaring "Pull out those green cards" before immediately stopping himself and shouting "No!".
  • Themed Stock Board Game: Pops up a lot, but is especially prominent in the Worst and Weirdest of Monopoly. Here, Kam quickly runs through 46 of the over 1,500 official themed variants of the standard game, including themes like Heinz Ketchup, the U.S. Air Force, a Dutch shipping company, and Scott The Woz.
  • This Is Going to Be Huge: In analyzing the amount of resources going to support BreaKey in Exploring the BreaKey Files, it's clear that Upper Deck Entertainment had very high hopes for this game before it was killed in lawsuits and vanished into obscurity.
  • Title Drop: Kam has a decidedly over-the-top reaction to one of the possible situation categories in Global Survival being named... "Global Survival".
  • Tournament Arc: The Worst Board Game of All Time (WBGOAT) Tournament is an annual single-elimination tournament where viewers vote to determine the worst board game. It occurs every March, coinciding with March Madness.
  • Trademark Favorite Food: Kam appears to be quite the fan of Red Baron frozen pizzas as every time they're brought up in a video, it's always in a favorable light.
    Kam 1: (Upon learning the other Kam is $500,000 in debt) How did you get here!? What did you buy!?
    Kam 2: 95,602 Red Baron pizzas.
    Kam 1: (Smiles and gives thumbs-up) Oh nevermind, great buy!
  • invokedTrend Killer: Discussed in regards to DVD Board Games, as for how massively popular they were during the early 2000s, it more or less died as the DVD stopped being the primary way people consumed media. Kam even says that he had to get a DVD player at a garage sale.
  • invokedUncertain Audience: Discussed, as when a game makes you question "Who was this made for?", it's usually a sign that it's not a quality title.
    • Adultery in particular caught Kam's ire, declaring it a "game made for no one", as the game asks you to commit actual adultery as part of the game, which most people won't want to do due to the social taboo and, depending on where they live, potential legal trouble. This leaves the target demographic as swingers and people in polyamourous relationships, but those people will likely not enjoy being timed and told what to do by someone else, meaning that the game has no people who'd actually want to play it.
    • Discussed when talking about Game of Life Target Edition, where he can't fathom the possible target audience for the board game. He's even considered "fans of the original Game Of Life" but that fails too when the board game has enough unique mechanics to play very differently from the original. He boils it down to "Target fans" but also considers this concept incredibly ridiculous.
    • In The WORST Board Game Ideas, one of the games he brings up is the Beyblade Trading Card Game, which tried to appeal to the people who were into both the fast paced action of the spinning top game and into the slow and methodical strategy of a card game. As Kam put it, the overlap was miniscule, which wasn't helped by the fact that a large portion of Beyblade's audience were incredibly young children. Unsurprisingly, the game only managed to release one set before being discontinued.
    • Subverted when he talked about Sports Board Games, as while it might seem like the overlap between sports fans and board games fans would be small, not only are many of the games he talked about very successful, but Kam himself is part of that demographic overlap.
  • Ultimate Life Form: Variation: When dicussing the various updates to the game of Candy Land, Kam points out how Gloppy's design doesn't seem to ever change. And why is that?
    Kam: [M]uch like the humble Shy Guy, you can't improve an already perfect design.
  • invokedUnintentionally Unwinnable:
    • In the Movie Board Games video, a comment notes The Lord Of The Rings board game could be rendered as such. Essentially, if during the "Return of the King" portion of the game, the Frodo and Sam pieces are at the end of the board (meaning they cannot move anymore) and the Eye of Sauron is in the direction of the other pieces, locking them in place, then you cannot move anymore, as the Eye can only change its direction when a piece moves. Kam is utterly aghast at the fact that the game is so badly designed that it somehow has a softlock, something that he brings up in the second WBGOAT Tournament.
    • As Kam notes in his video covering Global Survivalnote , buying the USA and taking on its debt immediately costs you the game.
  • VHS Game: Featured in DVD Board Games, including the notorious Rap Rat.
  • Visual Pun: In "The Most POINTLESS Board Games", when talking about the dedicated Euchre deck, the piece of paper taped to the wall has a picture of a hand pointing at the camera next to a dog, making it "You cur".note 
  • War Gaming: The type of games that make up most of the longest board games of all time. These are games that make Risk look like a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. They are in these videos with Campaign for North Africa being the longest game by a long shot.
  • Wham Line:
  • invokedWhat Could Have Been: In Exploring the BreaKey Files, Kam finds out that one of the ideas proposed for the titular keys was to have the part that breaks off be made out of sugar, meaning that you could eat it. Kam says that this would have single-handedly made the game much better.
  • You Know the One: Many of Kam's community posts end up being this, particularly those made before the release of a video. They're usually collections of random, unconnected images that he put in the upcoming video, with the caption of "Y'allready know what time it is..." or some other cryptic phrase.

"Signing off for TV Tropes ruining your life, I am KamSandwich. Thank you for watching and have a fan-tastic day!"

 
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Twilight Board Games' Scores

When KamSandwich covers some of the lowest-rated movie tie-in board games, he has some suspicions that one of the contenders may not have actually earned its abysmal score, and he substantiates this with user reviews of the games that are clearly not from the game's target audience of existing Twilight series fans.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (15 votes)

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