Board games offer players several perks. For children, they can help teach valuable skills like patience, teamwork, or even basic math skills. As an adult, board games can provide a structured activity to break the ice with new friends. No matter the audience, board games deliver hours of fun, or at least that's the intention.

While board games are designed to be fun, they can also become incredibly frustrating. Some games have clunky rules, others take agency away from players, and some purposely give players feel a sense of frustration. Whatever the reason, these games tempt players to flip the table.

10 Deck-Building Games Give Players FOMO

DC Comics deck-building board game cover box art

Deck-building games can be a lot of fun. They offer a similar experience to playing a trading card game without the expensive cost of continuously buying new cards. They also feature a variety of themes. From DC Comics to My Little Pony, if there's a fandom, there's probably a deck-builder. However, these games can become frustrating after a few rounds.

Deck-building games often revolve around using in-game points to purchase more powerful cards to create a better deck. The cards needed are on display for all players to choose from. When a player needs a specific card on the board, they must wait for a trip around the table before they can acquire it. On each other player's turn, there remains a chance someone will snatch the needed card, making each turn anxiety-inducing.

9 Arkham Horror Is Frustrating By Design

The box for Arkham Horror game

Based on the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Arkham Horror invokes the same dread. Set in Lovecraft's fictional city of Arkham, MA, players must work together, seal portals to other worlds, and defeat monsters. While Arkham Horror sounds like a very fun cooperative experience, it's often a frustrating slog.

RELATED: The 10 Best Co-Op Board Games, Ranked

Arkham Horror is meant to be difficult, purposely stacking the odds against the players. In a sense, the designers want players to feel the same sense of meaninglessness and dread that many of Lovecraft's protagonists feel. However, just because it's intentional doesn't mean the game becomes easier to play.

8 Battleship's Game Pieces Are Tedious To Deal With

Box art for a newer edition of Battleship

Battleship is a somewhat strategic guessing game where players simulate naval combat between two fleets of warships. Neither player can see how the other player has laid out their ships and must guess where they think their opponent has hidden their ships. While the game itself can be fun, interacting with the game's pieces is anything but.

When players guess a square on the grid, they mark a hit or miss with a small red or white plug that's inserted into the game's laptop-shaped board. Not only does this lead to tedious gameplay, but it also requires each plug to be removed at the end of a round. Additionally, misplacing a plug on the grid can mess up a player's game, since it affects their subsequent guesses.

7 Settlers Of Catan Becomes Too Cutthroat

A set up board of Catan

Catan, originally The Settlers of Catan, is a strategy game where players settle on the fictional island of Catan. Players earn victory points for creating roads, building settlements, and more, attempting to reach 10 victory points first. The game starts out as a fun experience, with each player doing their best to build up their resources and settlements. However, the tail end of the game often proves frustrating.

As one player approaches 10 victory points, the other players often try to block their progress. They can do this by blocking that player's planned construction with their own or by using Catan's robber to shut down a valuable resource for the winning player. This creates a scenario where the leading player gets punished for doing well, and it significantly slows the game down.

6 The Resistance Is More Fun For Certain Players

The Resistance board game box and its components

The Resistance is a hidden identity game similar to Mafia or Werewolf. Most players take on the role of resistance, while the rest become spies. Resistance players must staff missions with trustworthy players, while spies try to blend in and sabotage said missions.

RELATED: 10 Board Games That Are More Fun When You Cheat

The Resistance is often more fun for the spies. The spies know who their partners are and work together to fool or frame the resistance players. These tactics can frustrate resistance members who find themselves thrown under the bus.

5 War Is Decided The Moment The Cards Are Dealt

A set of playing cards in a hand, ace through 5.

Participants play War by dealing out an entire deck of cards between two players. Each turn, players place a random card from the top of their deck in front of them; the player with the higher card takes both. This continues until one player acquires all the cards. There's no strategy involved.

While War can help young children understand the concept of higher and lower number values, it doesn't have much of an actual game to it. Worse still, there's no way for players to influence the outcome of events. This causes one player to watch themselves lose over the course of a very long game.

4 Risk Usually Ends With A Boring Fight

The box and content for the Game of Thrones Risk variant

In Risk, players are randomly assigned control over countries on a map, the goal being to take over every space. Risk's combat system adds tension to the gameplay. Random dice rolls determine each battle, and only a few soldiers can die in each encounter. While this random element can lead to exciting moments, like a single soldier holding off a much larger army, it also leads to boredom.

Players who lose battles that should've been in their favor can become frustrated as they lose the game to bad luck, despite making the right decisions. Risk often comes down to two players armed with hundreds of soldiers and a lot of dice rolling. For any players already eliminated, the resolution proves anticlimactic.

3 Yahtzee Gives Players Just Enough Choice To Have Regrets

Yahtzee being played on a table

In Yahtzee, players roll 6 dice each turn and use the results to fill out categories on a scoresheet. Players get three rolls and get to choose which dice to keep and which to re-roll in between. This provides some sense of agency to a game that would otherwise be pure luck. However, even players with the best strategy fall prey to bad rolls.

RELATED: The 10 Most Successful Board Game Kickstarters, Ranked

The choices Yahtzee provides actually add frustration while playing the game. A player may choose to keep the pair of fives they rolled over a pair of twos, only to roll four twos on the next turn. While the player can make strategic choices, they'll second-guess their decisions on most turns.

2 Chutes And Ladders Is Pure Luck

Box art from Chutes and Ladders

Like many games for young kids, Chutes and Ladders tries not to overwhelm players with choices. Players simply flick a spinner and move the number of spaces indicated by their spin. Games like this can be fun for small kids, since anyone can win. However, once players get a little older, they'll find the lack of agency frustrating.

Making things even more complicated is how quickly players backtrack through no fault of their own. Landing on a chute causes players to slide several spaces back, forcing them to retread ground they've already covered. This only gets more frustrating as they watch other players luck into climbing ladders, making the distance between them insurmountable.

1 Monopoly Makes Players Wait A Long Time To Lose

The box art for Monopoly: Longest Game Ever

Losing a game isn't inherently frustrating, as long as the game itself is fun. Unfortunately, winning or losing is all there is to Monopoly. Players lucky enough to land on high-rent spaces like Boardwalk early on have a clear advantage. Other players know it's only a matter of time until they land on those expensive spaces too many times and lose the game.

Monopoly always drags on, offering players occasional influxes of cash to keep them in the game, despite making it clear they've already lost. Constantly mortgaging their properties, players forced to travel around the board are more likely to quit instead of finish the game.

NEXT: The 10 Best D&D Board Games