People often ask if I ever get tired of board games. Ninety-nine percent of the time, my response is no, because board games are a bottomless wellspring of joy and creativity.

Then something like Worms: The Board Game comes along to make me reevaluate that answer.

Worms. Yes, those worms.

Worms, the video game series, is silly. It’s about worms with sketchy accents shooting at otherly-accented worms, only to accidentally deposit themselves into an early watery grave. There isn’t much more to say about it. I couldn’t tell you the difference between any of them, apart from the slight detail that the Dreamcast port of Worms Armageddon omitted the fire effects of the PC version. Once, my parents left me at the innovation center in Epcot so they could visit a few extra countries in the World Showcase. I played a bunch of Worms. That’s about it for fond memories.

The board game adaptation embraces the video game’s chaos. That’s about all one can say for it. Turns are a mess of phases: picking up crates for additional weaponry, inching or jumping, inching or jumping, playing a card that lets you fire a weapon and then perhaps inch or jump yet again, resolving an event card. To affirm your question, yes: rather than saying “You can make two moves,” the rulebook devises two separate “inch or jump” phases one after the other, the first of many signs that this thing was crafted with no interest in streamlining its experience.

How does it work? As though somebody had played Worms badly, decided its systems were wholly stochastic, and blasted out a few board game systems before lunch. When you have a worm jump, for instance, you roll a die to determine whether the worm sticks the landing (rare) or tumbles into an adjacent space (common). Often that space is water, which means your worm is dead. Or else that space contains a landmine and an oil barrel, which means flipping a disc like a coin to determine whether the mine explodes or happens to be a dud. These are both poor outcomes. The explosion causes damage and possibly hurls you into the water, but a dud means you’re at least one more turn away from ending the suffering.

Yep, those were in the video games.

Firing a weapon is much the same. You place a target, roll to see whether the wind will blow that target off-course, and then hit whatever’s in the resulting space. The landscape is densely enough packed that you’re almost certain to hit something. This often prompts a series of rulebook checks. What’s the difference between stepping on a mine or merely detonating it? How about an oil barrel? What are the exact results of a “blast” again? For a game this light and airy, the density of the rules, including a sprawling appendix, sure seems like a misstep.

Meanwhile, there’s a bugbear tickling at the back of my mind, because Worms wasn’t only chaotic — it was, at times, deterministic. Rockets could be fired so that the wind bent them around obstacles, shotguns could be turned into sniper rifles, carpet bombs could dislodge bunkered worms. Worms was a game one could play skillfully, which only made its mishaps all the more endearing. The same is true here, but only sporadically. Some weapons are sure things. A minigun shreds everything in its path, but a short-range grenade bounces back in your face. Wind can indeed be used to alter the probability of your shots, albeit not with any degree of consistency. Played seriously, which obviously is not how this game should be played, the weapons that deal guaranteed damage are streets ahead of those that blow off course.

And, look, that’s all fine. I love chaotic dice games as much as I love deterministic games about careful positioning and maneuvering. But Worms: The Board Game doesn’t operate in either mode. It’s too long and packed with particulars for the former. Referencing an appendix is the wrong fit for a game about chucking banana bombs at each other. As for the latter… well, it doesn’t even glance in that direction.

Even the models, which might otherwise be a delight, are chintzy. Some are too small to snap into their colored bases, resulting in awkward moments when you pick them up to move into an adjacent space or tip them over to indicate damage, only for the ring to roll away. The whole production comes across as cheap like that, which wouldn’t normally bother me — I’m happy to play home-printed board games — but doesn’t do much to dispel the idea that this entire enterprise is a cynical ploy to pick a few pockets.

Wind direction matters.

Ultimately, that’s where Worms: The Board Game lands its shot. As board game adaptations go, it’s jaded in the worst possible way. This is product, not something that was made with love and care. May the wind ever hurl its bazooka rockets back in its face.

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A complimentary copy was provided.