3 ms·
BGG rankings are essentially based on the idea of "how likely/eager would I be to agree to a game of X". By that measure tic tac toe deserves to be ranked very
by kriro 11y ago
BGG rankings are essentially based on the idea of "how likely/eager would I be to agree to a game of X". By that measure tic tac toe deserves to be ranked very lowly. Same goes for Monopoly for me it's mostly a boring long grind with very few interesting decisions. Once you've understood that some squares are reached more often than others it's also closed to solved imo...at least there's a very good standard strategy.
Granted that's not how most people would rank games especially if they get played only once a year or on the occasional family meeting. I would also rank "A few Acres of Snow" very lowly but it's still reasonably high on BGG despite being solved/broken.
There's also many people on BGG who have a "mission" of getting people to play less boring games. I'll gladly rank Monopoly lower than its true value because in relative terms I want it to lose as much ground as possible.
It's also noteworthy that they have different categories (overall ranking, strategy games, family games, war games etc.). The family games ranking is very useful when buying games for the occasional game night (Monopoly replacement).
There's also the (sometimes artificial) divide between thematic games (commonly referred to as Ameritrash) and strategy focused games (commonly referred to as Eurogames). Both archetypes are great fun for me but some people prefer a rich story and immersion (say Imperial Assault where you play a bunch of Rebels facing off against the Empire) and some want their games to be more pure optimization exercises. Like I said I love both types but this shows how hard it is to produce a unified ranking that makes everyone happy.
And of course their algorithm is far from great (imo). Some games stick around for sentimental reasons or because they are hard to get, it's odd that they don't unify versions of games etc.
Same guess for the UI which is quite horrible (once again imo).