10 ms·

Diving into BoardGameGeek

155 points by fixie 5y ago

mlindner 5y ago
> Are heavy games really 'better' than 'light' games? To serious board game players, yes, more complex games are "better" because the simple games tend to have dozens of games with almost identical feel. If the game is complex there can be more variety. > But I don't have time to play games that are very complex and take many hours! And the authors personal biases heavily stilt things.
- iopq 5y ago
  Is that really true? Go is a game where the simplest rule sets only have 7 or so rules. Well, the complexity is 3.94 on that site: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/188/go https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/188/go But it's complex because of strategic considerations, not because it is difficult to learn the rules.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - slightwinder 5y ago
    Go has also a thousand years of history and is very popular. Even if the basic rules are simple and fast to learn, you still need a long time to learn the game's current meta and reach an acceptable level of ability by today's standards. This is very different from any new game with similar complexity, where you only play against people who invested a similar short amount of time.
    - iopq 5y ago
      Yes, but that's not an indicator of complexity. It's an indicator of the skill of other players. You can make an argument that the game tree complexity is immense, but that's because people prefer to play on 19x19 boards. 9x9 boards are similar to chess in game tree complexity, and had in fact strong computer engine play ten years before AlphaGo
      - slightwinder 5y ago
        No, I mean that it mainly is an indicator that complexity for the players does not only come from the rules, but also the explored game tree and the level you get from other players. There are many games similar to go, in terms of simple rules and hidden complexity, but none of them are as successful as go, because they simply lack the history and success of go. It's a strange feedback-loop that certain things become more successful because they are successful, which enable them to grow into their deepness and fully embrace it, reeling in more people who prefer this.
      - valyagolev 5y ago
        it's not about other players, it's about the ability to understand what's going on at all. go is not a "simple game with a lot of depth", even reading the board is a skill
      - NineStarPoint 5y ago
        I would definitely argue that complexity comes from the number of meaningful options available to the player, not strictly rule complexity. Simple rules can lead to complex situations. This has little to do with the skill of the players involved, even two amateurs playing Go are faced with constant decisions that will effect the course of the game. It is indeed the 19X19 board where placement is allowed anywhere therein that gives Go it’s complexity.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
    If you look at the break down of complexity votes, 22.5% rated Go 4. And 46.5% rated it 5. So almost 30% of BGG members consider Go a "light" game ... BGG is generally a good consensus of the weight of a game and how good it is. But take it with a grain of salt.
- anonymoushn 5y ago
  I've found bgg's weight to be pretty uncorrelated with whether the game actually survives when players make a sincere effort to win. An illustrative sample of games sorted by weight might be Splendor, Wingspan, Res Arcana, Roll for the Galaxy, Race for the Galaxy, Warhammer 40,000: Conquest, A Feast for Odin, and Through the Ages. Of these, the middle games Res Arcana and Roll for the Galaxy completely collapse under the slightest effort to take them seriously, and Wingspan does less than great (you can just tear your ravens in half though, if you want to make things a bit better). Race, Splendor, and Conquest hold up quite well. I don't know enough about the final 2 games to tell whether they'll still be recognizable after 1,000 plays, but it seems like even if a huge part of the options in those games turn out to be unplayably bad the remainder of the options might still contain some interesting choices.
  - StephanTLavavej 5y ago
    Can you expand on how Roll breaks down when the players are trying to win?
    - anonymoushn 5y ago
      Produce-consume ends up not working for almost all starting conditions. A lot of tiles seem tuned for a game where players leave their dice around, particularly as goods on planets, but it turns out you don't really need more than 9 dice. Players spend much of the game fishing for 6-devs, especially 6-devs that reward the player for playing a bunch of devs. If you don't get those, you can try to win with the 6-devs that reward you for playing a bunch of planets, but it's tough. Random access to starting conditions that do something, cheap planets that give red dice, and dev-oriented 6-devs ends up feeling bad, since these tiles are so much better than the other tiles. I didn't play with expansions because they aren't on the phone app. This might be unfair, because I'm comparing it to Race with expansions.
  - chongli 5y ago
    Yeah. Some of the heavier games are casual, cooperative, relaxing game night affairs, for example Pandemic Legacy (weight 3.24). Yet Santorini (weight 1.73), despite its cute art style, is an absolute monster of a game when played competitively against strong opponents. Many of the reviews reflect this, with a lot of people comparing it to chess and go. Honestly, I think you could approximate the weight rating of most games by setting the box on a scale. Other than telling you how many different components you’ll get, the weight rating is only a rough approximation of depth. Another pair of games to compare is Agricola and Caverna. These ones have very similar weights (a bit under 4) yet they play dramatically differently. Agricola is extremely tight and vicious with competitive play. Caverna, on the other hand, is a victory point bonanza. This has led to a sharp divide in the community, with Caverna having stolen a lot of the ‘thematic’ players from its older sibling. Edit: I need to add that I in no way intended to disparage thematic players. I love thematic games too. My preferences usually change based on my mood and energy levels. Thematic games are much better on a Friday night after work, with good friends, good food, and tasty beverages. Fierce, competitive games are much more of a Saturday afternoon rainy day type of situation.
- praash 5y ago
  > And the authors personal biases heavily stilt things. Yes, different games fit different needs and situations, but games designed to last six hours are also designed for a very niche audience. Public game/book/movie ratings average out to reflect how widely people find them likable. If a 15 minute game can make players feel nearly as invested and thrilled as a 3 hour campaign, that's an accomplishment in game design that deserves recognition.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  This is like saying bigger books are better because more pages = more complexity = more interesting plot. You must be a big fan of the dictionary. I've found the best board games are often the simplest ones. 2-player vanilla Splendor is one of my favourites and all it takes to play is a deck of cards and a stack of tokens. When both players have a good level, the depth of strategy of that game is crazy good. And unlike chess, it's very approachable for new players.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
    That's a bad take. Words in a dictionary have no interactions. It's a list of words in alphabetical order and their definitions. Well crafted board game rules are about systems that interact with each other. You don't have to be rules heavy to have an interesting game, but the interactions between systems needs to be there to be interesting beyond some number of consecutive plays. A lot of lighter games will quickly feel samey if your players are half way competent. You'll simply pickup the patterns, game state and work out the value of each move quite quickly.
    - scrollaway 5y ago
      Well, here's a more developed (and spicier) take then. Larger board games are very often mere laundry lists of systems that can be found in many other board games. The longer games tend to have systems that MAKE the game long, rather than cause people to develop a strategy. One example is some mechanics forcing synchronous turns, or even worse, preventing you from preparing your turn in advance. Which gets even worse as the players have to iterate over more and more items in the turn checklist every time. I have a strong but obviously opinionated dislike for these mechanics, so YMMV. Still, these longer games very often feel "same-y" to everything else because they don't truly bring original interactions between players. Playthroughs don't even always vary because as you re-play the game, a meta quickly develops and settles on a tiny portion of the offered gameplay. More systems is also more opportunities to get the balance wrong. To fuck up. Which, if you don't tweak the rules preemptively, means the meta settling on an ever smaller part of the game. Small, highly-focused games tend to develop much more interesting metas. Yes, they're not necessarily as varied in "number of things that can happen", but honestly, sometimes the gameplay elements I see in larger games are so incoherent you might as well play different games concurrently, and turn the whole thing into XKCD/2488. To be clear, my point is not that shorter/simpler games are always better. It's that "longer doesn't always mean better, and more often than not means worse". The same does apply to books. You can more reliably draw meaning from an extremely-well-crafted fable, than from a massive heptalogy. Your experience will be wildly different, and there are unique attributes for which you need length in order to achieve. But a rock solid series of books is a much rarer breed than an interesting fable. And a much larger waste of time if you don't end up drawing something from it. And indeed the same applies to everything else. Assembly-line AAA video games that stuff themselves in a checklist of content to justify their price are often far worse in depth than shorter, sweeter ones (Portal, Hades, whatever). More seasons of Dexter and Game of Thrones ruined extremely deep and interesting works, whereas Breaking Bad crafted a truly unique experience by finishing exactly where the author intended it to. And your next lunch won't be improved by emptying your spice rack on it and overwhelming your palate, but by finding the exact mixes of ingredients that will result in a great meal.
- slightwinder 5y ago
  This is not limited to board games. You have the same with tabletop, video games and basically everything. There is always that special crowd that enjoys long, complex stuff. How many people here are proud of their hundreds and thousands of hours game time in something like factorio, civilization, rimworld, in the year-long work they invested in some obscure software-project or something physical they had built? Some people like the kick of fast success, others like the long-running, slow burning joy. People are just different.
  - moate 5y ago
    If it were true that complex games were inherently, objectively better we would only see more and more complex games. We don't, and major hobby game producers are constantly putting out low complexity games because, spoilers, some people are playing games to goof around and have fun! It's just like any other form of entertainment. Think about genre movies. What makes more money, the latest giant Marvel/Disney zip bang popcorn flick, or the deep and complex Oscar Favorite? Why is the Marvel movie making all the money but not winning Best Picture? Why don't complex, difficult stories consistently pull in Marvel level money? Value is always in the eye of the end user/consumer.
    - slightwinder 5y ago
      > If it were true that complex games were inherently, objectively better What are you talking about? Complexity is more enjoyable for some, not all people. And the joy a game brings is subjective, not objective. You can't measure game-quality by saying this has x rules more than other games, so it's objectively better. > we would only see more and more complex games. We don't Not true. There is a rise of complex games in the last decades, especially in digital games. But it's still a relative small market, so the number of casual games are rising significant faster, distorting the impression on surface. And there are also several constraints which influence this rise. You can't measure this by simple binary logic. > What makes more money Money is an irrelevant metric for this. And we are long over the point were complexity in moving pictures was a thing of movies. It's now all in series, and the complex sh*t is on netflix, prime video, etc.
- drewcoo 5y ago
  Light games can often easily be "solved" and quickly lose replayability.
- moate 5y ago
  Just here to say, as someone who both worked for a gaming company, has designed games, and has a shelf FULL of things like Fury of Dracula, Root, and Mansions of Madness, I consider myself a serious board/table top gamer. Light games are great. Ever play "The Mind" or "Exploding Kittens" at a party? Super fun. Everything is personal biases. If you have the time to set up and play Gloomhaven, great! But many people don't, and that doesn't mean that they're wrong or you're right or that the value they place on the games they play is illogical. If your goal is "have fun with some kids for a half hour" then setting up a solo-play of Mage Knight is a worse choice than shuffling up the Uno deck. That said: Candyland is both the lightest "game" ever designed and is terrible. It's the gaming equivalent of waiting 10-20 minutes and then each player rolling a d100 to see who rolls highest and wins. /Candyrant
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    For a three-year-old, Candyland is fine. After all that's the target demographic, and for them, every turn is an adventure. Have you tried playing strategy games with small children? Even something like Connect-4 can be a disaster.
  - munificent 5y ago
    Candyland is a wonderful gaming experience for small children. You are taking for granted that understanding how to follow game mechanics and taking turns are both acquired skills. It's very rewarding for children to learn those skills and see themselves apply them. The fact that there aren't interesting decisions to make in playing the game is secondary. The kids are spending all of their mental energy making decisions to follow the game mechanics themselves instead of moving out of turn, jumping to the squares they want to land on, taking extra cards, etc. All that requires a lot more executive function and willpower than we realize because we're so practiced at it, but Candyland is a way for small kids to get that practice.
    - mbg721 5y ago
      I think, more specifically, Candyland is even tailored for kids who are old enough to match colors but can't count dice pips yet. For kids a little bit older, there's some game where you roll dice and move cherries into a basket. I wouldn't introduce Terra Mystica until kindergarten, first-grade at the earliest.
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
> I was a bit shaken by Eat Poop You Cat, but it seems a nice game you can play with pen and paper. This looks like a marvelous game that requires no purchase and no special equipment. Why would it shake anyone except for a ridiculous name?
- DicIfTEx 5y ago
  Interesting; I've never heard of Eat Poop You Cat (and I doubt I would've forgotten it if I had), but it's basically the same idea as Consequences[0] or Picture Consequences[1], only less structured. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_(game) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse#Picture_consequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse#Picture_conse...
  - SamBam 5y ago
    I had never heard of the name either, but then from the description I realized it was simply what we always called Words and Pictures. It's a fun game, and essentially a version of telephone. I grew up in a family of classicist academics, and had to endure the Latin game, which was exactly the same except instead of drawing pictures you translated the sentence into (usually poor) Latin, and then back again with every round.
    - irrational 5y ago
      > you translated the sentence into (usually poor) Latin, and then back again with every round. I’m honestly jealous you grew up in a family that could do this.
  - ChrisRR 5y ago
    Consequences is a classic game that you can play with pen and paper. It became a staple of our family christmases
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Yeah, I've played it at meetups with just a folded piece of paper and a pen. It's good fun. There's a better board game implementation of it (that's also on that same list) called Telestrations, with laminated flipbooks and dry erase markers and cards for starting ideas (which I mostly don't use when I play the game), that makes the experience a bit easier, but they're both the same game at heart.
vasco 5y ago
The fact that "pandemic" is at the top means that either we have a coincidence where the best game happens to be closely related to events of the past two years, or ratings merely reflect current fashion rather than game quality. This is further reinforced by the fact that pandemic didn't top best selling games lists until 2020-2021.
- opdahl 5y ago
  I seem to recall Pandemic being very highly rated and popular before the pandemic, but I bet it hasn't hurt it's popularity!
- lmm 5y ago
  > The fact that "pandemic" is at the top means that either we have a coincidence where the best game happens to be closely related to events of the past two years, or ratings merely reflect current fashion rather than game quality. It's a coincidence. Pandemic Legacy (not to be confused with regular Pandemic) went straight to the top of the ratings when it was released (knocking off Twilight Struggle which had been there for years).
- teruakohatu 5y ago
  I am pretty sure Pandemic Legacy, an RPGish version of Pandemic, was at the top of the list a few years ago.
  - morelikeborelax 5y ago
    It was very highly ranked, you are correct.
- JonathanFly 5y ago
  I'm sure it did receive a sales boost, but it was almost as highly ranked before the real pandemic. It really is mostly a coincidence.
- chongli 5y ago
  I was playing Pandemic (the original) 5 years ago and it was a very popular game even then. When Legacy came out (long before COVID) it rocketed to the top of the ratings in short order. Nothing whatsoever to do with real life. Legacy is popular because it’s a very good cooperative game that evolves over time, encouraging people to keep coming back to it every game night.
692 5y ago
I look at Boardgamegeek almost ever time I make a purchase of a game and to get ideas. To see what other peoples think, their reviews about the game and game play, strategy vs luck element, type of game etc It's similar to imdb for movies, its a place full of opinions. I take everything with pinch of salt, but it's the best review site around
- boringg 5y ago
  Exactly this - however I do find the commentary and community pretty honest in their opinions. It gives good guidance for my decision making.
- brightball 5y ago
  I do the same now. Never even heard of the site until I learned that one of my friends dad makes board games. Apparently has one high up in the top 100 list somewhere.
- Oddskar 5y ago
  The more amateur reviews I've read on BGG the less I pay attention to them, honestly. A big difference between movies and boardgames is that it's (for the most part) a group activity. And to make matters even more inconsistent, whether a group will take to a game or not will also depend a lot on who actually teaches them the game and how that person goes about it.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    > whether a group will take to a game or not will also depend a lot on who actually teaches them the game and how that person goes about it. Definitely agree on this. I was teaching a few different people at different times how to play Wiz-War over the holidays (I had recently made my own copy from a printables PDF I found on the BGG site since it's not really for sale), and I definitely took different strategies with my twelve year old son than I did with other people that I was teaching, because I knew more or less how much they might put up with in being screwed over by the game (because a lot of the fun of that game is screwing people over or getting out of being screwed over), and how much I dawdles after I did so to give them opportunities to find a way out of their situation. That seemed to work well, I think the people I taught the game to enjoyed it, and I could definitely see how someone more interested in winning could give someone a really shitty first experience in that game.
praash 5y ago
This analysis is clever! I'd love to see someone use these ideas in an interactive tool for board game discovery. Geeks appreciating complexity is obvious, but it's very interesting to see how much it actually matters in ratings. Some mechanic complexity is essential for replayability and depth, but maximizing the potential of individual components is a sign of great game design. Many successful games usually fit the saying "easy to learn, hard to master". Good games bring joy to pretty much anyone.
- sWW26 5y ago
  I built a recommendation engine[0] using the BoardGameGeek data with the methods described in Significance[1]. I've also extended it[2] relatively recently to have a tweakable ranking system which my father explains here[3] [0] https://trythesegames.com/ https://trythesegames.com/ [1] https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2019.01317.x https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.... [2] https://trythesegames.com/rankings https://trythesegames.com/rankings [3] https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2728398/flexible-boardgame-ranking-system https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2728398/flexible-boardgame-...
  - asgardian28 5y ago
    Really nice! As an extension to the article, I'm also making a recommender, but just colab filtering. But yours looks stellar! And the article is great, compliments! Need some time to let the like score calculation sink in :-) I'm going to experiment with the (rating * 2) / 100, seems like a great way to account for the nonlinearity. Btw don't you divide by 10 instead of 100? Another suggestion was to take transform the ratings of each user to percentiles, as a measure of how favorite the game is to the user, also seems interesting.
fridek 5y ago
Interesting analysis. It has some signs of the author introducing variables until the ranking looks "right" though. I also disagree with some of the conclusions, based on my moderate experience with the site and its users. A few suggestions to improve: * Consider that most users rank 1-10 to stack rank their own games. BGG explicilty encourages this, insisting it's YOUR rating and there is no wrong way of arriving at it. I'd try to normalize for this (i.e. convert user collections from ratings into stack rank percentiles, see where games end up on average). * Board games objectively got better over the years. There is more material on mechanics, it's easier to publish than ever, simulating and playtesting games is easier, etc. When I look at some (not all!) old games on top 100 I always think "come on, it's a good game but has no place here". It would be interesting to see rankings based on ratings assigned in a specific year. * Drop the notion of complexity as something to correct for. As others mentioned this is a very inconsistent data point. Personally I'd rather play two 8.5 games in an evening than one 9. Perhaps fun per hour would be better, but this is personal bias, no matter how you assign the weight you will get complaints :) * Kids and party non-gamer games are almost a distinct universe from gamers games. There is no way to fix or account for that. It has nothing to do with compexity or play time. I think this is more down to a combination of how well the game was playtested combined with the distribution channels available to the publisher. Gamers will happily play 15 minutes gimmick games, non-gamers will pull out Monopoly in a pub and go throught this monstrous waste of cardboard while downing pints.
- mercutio2 5y ago
  Funny! My gamer friends love monopoly as a light warm up! A game with adults who know how to play takes ~45 minutes. Auctions are taught affairs, which is really the only decision point, but that’s why it’s such a fast play-through.
  - Oddskar 5y ago
    And you probably play using your own house rules to make it palatable: the hallmark of an at best mediocre game.
    - 5y ago
ngcc_hk 5y ago
Board game need a lot of investment. Simple one like GO (which needs hours to play decades to perfect etc) is “easier” as at least you have clib, course, apps … etc. But complex rule one - who can play with you for hours. And what happen if you do not like it later. Or the game no more. Midway is a board game about the battle. Heard of it? How about Battiestar Galactic of just the reimagining fame. End up with catan and in fact still not open the seafarers. But at least when played you can. Wonder about the other 2 now. Pandemic seem catchy.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Just FYI, there's a now out of print Battlestar Galactica game which is very complex and very long but also excellent and very beloved by the hobbyist board game community. I used to meet up with friends once every other month for a six hour event to play it (the actual game took about 4 hours, but then set up, gathering, food, breaks took it to 6 hours). The publisher no longer has the BSG license so they rethemed the game to Cthulhu instead, and just a month ago re-released the game under the name "Unfathomable". It's no longer set in space but now in an ocean on a Titanic-like ship.
unnamed76ri 5y ago
BGG is a great resource for anything you'd want to know about any board game. Unfortunately, their forum moderation is very heavy handed at times if what someone posts is just a hair outside of the accepted world view of the forum admin. It used to be that you could see an almost comical amount of nuking of comments in threads but now they even hide that and it will look like the offending comments never existed.
hammock 5y ago
The ratings don't diverge around 2015 and it's not due to a hype split. They diverge around 2000 (slowly, with increasing divergence) and it's due to the fact that this is when BGG started collecting ratings. As author points out, newer games have higher ratings. If we hypothesize that brand new games get overrated when first released, we can posit that this "newness" effect would apply for games that are released during BGG lifetime, but not before. Using a Wilson score instead of the actual rating would control for this effect.
- The-Bus 5y ago
  This also occurred with IMDB. At one point the first Harry Potter film was rated #1 on the Top 250.
tylrprtr 5y ago
One other variable I'd like to see studied is the average cost of new releases over time. I have a hunch that this price has been steadily rising in the age of Kickstarter and deluxe editions. Higher price tag means a stronger urge to justify that purchase with a higher rating.
- treesrule 5y ago
  I don't know that I buy your narrative, but I'd sure like to see price vrs rating (while controlling for other thigns ofc)
- svachalek 5y ago
  I hear this often come up in this kind of discussion but personally I think I tend to the opposite, to have higher expectations of things I pay more for and judge them more critically. It might align with spender vs saver mentality (and granted the bulk of game buyers are spenders by simple statistics). Would be interesting to analyze but hard to separate from complexity. Although there is an inversion at the upper end, comparing $150 heavy euros to $400 thematic miniature extravaganzas (which tend to a middle weight).
ChrisRR 5y ago
It's interesting to see the lower review scores compared to video games, where every game is rated 75-100% Naturally over the years, video games have improved in visuals, design, cinematics, controls, etc. so they've ended up reviewing themselves into the corner. It's more interesting to see that games average at 6.4 which is much lower, partially because board games don't improve so drastically, and partially because I guess board games have only just started gaining massive popularity in recent years
- Oddskar 5y ago
  Speaking from experience the span of playable boardgames ratings is pretty much 65-100, I would be very sceptical of anything below that.
bussierem 5y ago
Seems odd to me that they would rate Monopoly as 1.3 complexity. This feels like "well it's an old game and so everyone probably knows it so it's not heavy". That feels wrong. Trying to explain Monopoly to someone who has never played could potentially be a very long discussion explaining how houses/hotels work, paying rent, etc.
- etataetaet 5y ago
  Really? I'm not saying Monopoly is dead simple and you would have to explain a few things but I think someone could understand it in about 5 minutes. Even if they didn't quite get the rules the game is really intuitive (And long xD) so they'd certainly fully understand half way through the first game. Most new games I've played you have to get in ~3 games before you start thinking more strategically.
- neurotrace 5y ago
  Children can learn Monopoly fairly quickly. To me, that sounds pretty simple. Buy property, get money when people land on it, get more money if you have more house/hotels. That's just about it
  - mbg721 5y ago
    Do you do the income tax space and the auction rule as written?
hibikir 5y ago
The problem of boardgame evaluation is that what we have multiple populations that have very different ideas of how good a game is, and are so aware of their preferences that they will not rate all that many games outside of their favored niches. Therefore, making head to head comparisons is not really about rating games, but the number of people in each group that decide to even rate the game. Any analysis that doesn't attempt to separate those populations will, with little doubt, be more about said confounding population effects than anything else. This is easy to tell by using the "Fans also Like" feature, which IIRC was built in consultation with someone working on recommendations at Netflix. Many top games have little correlation with each other: If you like Brass, you are likely to enjoy heavy eurogames like Terraforming Mars, but you might not like Pandemic Legacy, which happens to be a coop, Gloomhaven, which is more of an American-style game, or War of the Ring, which is mostly for 2 players, and a thematic wargame. The BGG adjusted ratings also have a significant damper on games that have few ratings, which is why more traditional wargames (like, say, A Victory Lost, or EastFront) are always going to be capped by the genre's lack of popularity among the site's visitors. Doing analysis like this is far more computationally heavy though, but it's far more relevant when it comes to telling people what they tend to want to know: Tell me of good games that I will probably enjoy, and aren't quite the same thing that I am playing right now.
- adamredwoods 5y ago
  This is why I generally do not use the BoardGameGeek rankings as an attribution to game quality. My gaming tastes are more nuanced than mathematical rankings.
- svachalek 5y ago
  I tend to think of most things on about 4 levels. I think it applies to types of board games but also movie and music genres, cuisines, etc: Flawed: you may not like this, even if you usually like things like this Good: perfectly serviceable example of this type of thing, if you are interested you will probably like it Exemplary: people who like this kind of thing tend to agree this is one of the best Outstanding: you may even like this thing even if you haven’t liked things like this in the past, and if this is your thing then don’t miss it I find that it’s fairly easy to sort things into the first three buckets by scanning through reviews and comments, but the fourth one is hard because by definition you need atypical reviews. Would be interesting to see an analysis that more or less predicted what reviewers would like and then plucked out positive outliers.
fixie 5y ago
Additional interesting discussion/context within the BGG community: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2797942/did-some-data-analysis-all-19m-reviews-bgg https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2797942/did-some-data-analy...

155 points by fixie 5y ago

> Are heavy games really 'better' than 'light' games? To serious board game players, yes, more complex games are "better" because the simple games tend to have dozens of games with almost identical feel. If the game is complex there can be more variety. > But I don't have time to play games that are very complex and take many hours! And the authors personal biases heavily stilt things.

iopq 5y ago
Is that really true? Go is a game where the simplest rule sets only have 7 or so rules. Well, the complexity is 3.94 on that site: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/188/go https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/188/go But it's complex because of strategic considerations, not because it is difficult to learn the rules.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- slightwinder 5y ago
  Go has also a thousand years of history and is very popular. Even if the basic rules are simple and fast to learn, you still need a long time to learn the game's current meta and reach an acceptable level of ability by today's standards. This is very different from any new game with similar complexity, where you only play against people who invested a similar short amount of time.
  - iopq 5y ago
    Yes, but that's not an indicator of complexity. It's an indicator of the skill of other players. You can make an argument that the game tree complexity is immense, but that's because people prefer to play on 19x19 boards. 9x9 boards are similar to chess in game tree complexity, and had in fact strong computer engine play ten years before AlphaGo
    - slightwinder 5y ago
      No, I mean that it mainly is an indicator that complexity for the players does not only come from the rules, but also the explored game tree and the level you get from other players. There are many games similar to go, in terms of simple rules and hidden complexity, but none of them are as successful as go, because they simply lack the history and success of go. It's a strange feedback-loop that certain things become more successful because they are successful, which enable them to grow into their deepness and fully embrace it, reeling in more people who prefer this.
    - valyagolev 5y ago
      it's not about other players, it's about the ability to understand what's going on at all. go is not a "simple game with a lot of depth", even reading the board is a skill
    - NineStarPoint 5y ago
      I would definitely argue that complexity comes from the number of meaningful options available to the player, not strictly rule complexity. Simple rules can lead to complex situations. This has little to do with the skill of the players involved, even two amateurs playing Go are faced with constant decisions that will effect the course of the game. It is indeed the 19X19 board where placement is allowed anywhere therein that gives Go it’s complexity.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  If you look at the break down of complexity votes, 22.5% rated Go 4. And 46.5% rated it 5. So almost 30% of BGG members consider Go a "light" game ... BGG is generally a good consensus of the weight of a game and how good it is. But take it with a grain of salt.
anonymoushn 5y ago
I've found bgg's weight to be pretty uncorrelated with whether the game actually survives when players make a sincere effort to win. An illustrative sample of games sorted by weight might be Splendor, Wingspan, Res Arcana, Roll for the Galaxy, Race for the Galaxy, Warhammer 40,000: Conquest, A Feast for Odin, and Through the Ages. Of these, the middle games Res Arcana and Roll for the Galaxy completely collapse under the slightest effort to take them seriously, and Wingspan does less than great (you can just tear your ravens in half though, if you want to make things a bit better). Race, Splendor, and Conquest hold up quite well. I don't know enough about the final 2 games to tell whether they'll still be recognizable after 1,000 plays, but it seems like even if a huge part of the options in those games turn out to be unplayably bad the remainder of the options might still contain some interesting choices.
- StephanTLavavej 5y ago
  Can you expand on how Roll breaks down when the players are trying to win?
  - anonymoushn 5y ago
    Produce-consume ends up not working for almost all starting conditions. A lot of tiles seem tuned for a game where players leave their dice around, particularly as goods on planets, but it turns out you don't really need more than 9 dice. Players spend much of the game fishing for 6-devs, especially 6-devs that reward the player for playing a bunch of devs. If you don't get those, you can try to win with the 6-devs that reward you for playing a bunch of planets, but it's tough. Random access to starting conditions that do something, cheap planets that give red dice, and dev-oriented 6-devs ends up feeling bad, since these tiles are so much better than the other tiles. I didn't play with expansions because they aren't on the phone app. This might be unfair, because I'm comparing it to Race with expansions.
- chongli 5y ago
  Yeah. Some of the heavier games are casual, cooperative, relaxing game night affairs, for example Pandemic Legacy (weight 3.24). Yet Santorini (weight 1.73), despite its cute art style, is an absolute monster of a game when played competitively against strong opponents. Many of the reviews reflect this, with a lot of people comparing it to chess and go. Honestly, I think you could approximate the weight rating of most games by setting the box on a scale. Other than telling you how many different components you’ll get, the weight rating is only a rough approximation of depth. Another pair of games to compare is Agricola and Caverna. These ones have very similar weights (a bit under 4) yet they play dramatically differently. Agricola is extremely tight and vicious with competitive play. Caverna, on the other hand, is a victory point bonanza. This has led to a sharp divide in the community, with Caverna having stolen a lot of the ‘thematic’ players from its older sibling. Edit: I need to add that I in no way intended to disparage thematic players. I love thematic games too. My preferences usually change based on my mood and energy levels. Thematic games are much better on a Friday night after work, with good friends, good food, and tasty beverages. Fierce, competitive games are much more of a Saturday afternoon rainy day type of situation.
praash 5y ago
> And the authors personal biases heavily stilt things. Yes, different games fit different needs and situations, but games designed to last six hours are also designed for a very niche audience. Public game/book/movie ratings average out to reflect how widely people find them likable. If a 15 minute game can make players feel nearly as invested and thrilled as a 3 hour campaign, that's an accomplishment in game design that deserves recognition.
scrollaway 5y ago
This is like saying bigger books are better because more pages = more complexity = more interesting plot. You must be a big fan of the dictionary. I've found the best board games are often the simplest ones. 2-player vanilla Splendor is one of my favourites and all it takes to play is a deck of cards and a stack of tokens. When both players have a good level, the depth of strategy of that game is crazy good. And unlike chess, it's very approachable for new players.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  That's a bad take. Words in a dictionary have no interactions. It's a list of words in alphabetical order and their definitions. Well crafted board game rules are about systems that interact with each other. You don't have to be rules heavy to have an interesting game, but the interactions between systems needs to be there to be interesting beyond some number of consecutive plays. A lot of lighter games will quickly feel samey if your players are half way competent. You'll simply pickup the patterns, game state and work out the value of each move quite quickly.
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    Well, here's a more developed (and spicier) take then. Larger board games are very often mere laundry lists of systems that can be found in many other board games. The longer games tend to have systems that MAKE the game long, rather than cause people to develop a strategy. One example is some mechanics forcing synchronous turns, or even worse, preventing you from preparing your turn in advance. Which gets even worse as the players have to iterate over more and more items in the turn checklist every time. I have a strong but obviously opinionated dislike for these mechanics, so YMMV. Still, these longer games very often feel "same-y" to everything else because they don't truly bring original interactions between players. Playthroughs don't even always vary because as you re-play the game, a meta quickly develops and settles on a tiny portion of the offered gameplay. More systems is also more opportunities to get the balance wrong. To fuck up. Which, if you don't tweak the rules preemptively, means the meta settling on an ever smaller part of the game. Small, highly-focused games tend to develop much more interesting metas. Yes, they're not necessarily as varied in "number of things that can happen", but honestly, sometimes the gameplay elements I see in larger games are so incoherent you might as well play different games concurrently, and turn the whole thing into XKCD/2488. To be clear, my point is not that shorter/simpler games are always better. It's that "longer doesn't always mean better, and more often than not means worse". The same does apply to books. You can more reliably draw meaning from an extremely-well-crafted fable, than from a massive heptalogy. Your experience will be wildly different, and there are unique attributes for which you need length in order to achieve. But a rock solid series of books is a much rarer breed than an interesting fable. And a much larger waste of time if you don't end up drawing something from it. And indeed the same applies to everything else. Assembly-line AAA video games that stuff themselves in a checklist of content to justify their price are often far worse in depth than shorter, sweeter ones (Portal, Hades, whatever). More seasons of Dexter and Game of Thrones ruined extremely deep and interesting works, whereas Breaking Bad crafted a truly unique experience by finishing exactly where the author intended it to. And your next lunch won't be improved by emptying your spice rack on it and overwhelming your palate, but by finding the exact mixes of ingredients that will result in a great meal.
slightwinder 5y ago
This is not limited to board games. You have the same with tabletop, video games and basically everything. There is always that special crowd that enjoys long, complex stuff. How many people here are proud of their hundreds and thousands of hours game time in something like factorio, civilization, rimworld, in the year-long work they invested in some obscure software-project or something physical they had built? Some people like the kick of fast success, others like the long-running, slow burning joy. People are just different.
- moate 5y ago
  If it were true that complex games were inherently, objectively better we would only see more and more complex games. We don't, and major hobby game producers are constantly putting out low complexity games because, spoilers, some people are playing games to goof around and have fun! It's just like any other form of entertainment. Think about genre movies. What makes more money, the latest giant Marvel/Disney zip bang popcorn flick, or the deep and complex Oscar Favorite? Why is the Marvel movie making all the money but not winning Best Picture? Why don't complex, difficult stories consistently pull in Marvel level money? Value is always in the eye of the end user/consumer.
  - slightwinder 5y ago
    > If it were true that complex games were inherently, objectively better What are you talking about? Complexity is more enjoyable for some, not all people. And the joy a game brings is subjective, not objective. You can't measure game-quality by saying this has x rules more than other games, so it's objectively better. > we would only see more and more complex games. We don't Not true. There is a rise of complex games in the last decades, especially in digital games. But it's still a relative small market, so the number of casual games are rising significant faster, distorting the impression on surface. And there are also several constraints which influence this rise. You can't measure this by simple binary logic. > What makes more money Money is an irrelevant metric for this. And we are long over the point were complexity in moving pictures was a thing of movies. It's now all in series, and the complex sh*t is on netflix, prime video, etc.
drewcoo 5y ago
Light games can often easily be "solved" and quickly lose replayability.
moate 5y ago
Just here to say, as someone who both worked for a gaming company, has designed games, and has a shelf FULL of things like Fury of Dracula, Root, and Mansions of Madness, I consider myself a serious board/table top gamer. Light games are great. Ever play "The Mind" or "Exploding Kittens" at a party? Super fun. Everything is personal biases. If you have the time to set up and play Gloomhaven, great! But many people don't, and that doesn't mean that they're wrong or you're right or that the value they place on the games they play is illogical. If your goal is "have fun with some kids for a half hour" then setting up a solo-play of Mage Knight is a worse choice than shuffling up the Uno deck. That said: Candyland is both the lightest "game" ever designed and is terrible. It's the gaming equivalent of waiting 10-20 minutes and then each player rolling a d100 to see who rolls highest and wins. /Candyrant
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  For a three-year-old, Candyland is fine. After all that's the target demographic, and for them, every turn is an adventure. Have you tried playing strategy games with small children? Even something like Connect-4 can be a disaster.
- munificent 5y ago
  Candyland is a wonderful gaming experience for small children. You are taking for granted that understanding how to follow game mechanics and taking turns are both acquired skills. It's very rewarding for children to learn those skills and see themselves apply them. The fact that there aren't interesting decisions to make in playing the game is secondary. The kids are spending all of their mental energy making decisions to follow the game mechanics themselves instead of moving out of turn, jumping to the squares they want to land on, taking extra cards, etc. All that requires a lot more executive function and willpower than we realize because we're so practiced at it, but Candyland is a way for small kids to get that practice.
  - mbg721 5y ago
    I think, more specifically, Candyland is even tailored for kids who are old enough to match colors but can't count dice pips yet. For kids a little bit older, there's some game where you roll dice and move cherries into a basket. I wouldn't introduce Terra Mystica until kindergarten, first-grade at the earliest.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago

> I was a bit shaken by Eat Poop You Cat, but it seems a nice game you can play with pen and paper. This looks like a marvelous game that requires no purchase and no special equipment. Why would it shake anyone except for a ridiculous name?

DicIfTEx 5y ago
Interesting; I've never heard of Eat Poop You Cat (and I doubt I would've forgotten it if I had), but it's basically the same idea as Consequences[0] or Picture Consequences[1], only less structured. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_(game) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse#Picture_consequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse#Picture_conse...
- SamBam 5y ago
  I had never heard of the name either, but then from the description I realized it was simply what we always called Words and Pictures. It's a fun game, and essentially a version of telephone. I grew up in a family of classicist academics, and had to endure the Latin game, which was exactly the same except instead of drawing pictures you translated the sentence into (usually poor) Latin, and then back again with every round.
  - irrational 5y ago
    > you translated the sentence into (usually poor) Latin, and then back again with every round. I’m honestly jealous you grew up in a family that could do this.
- ChrisRR 5y ago
  Consequences is a classic game that you can play with pen and paper. It became a staple of our family christmases
cableshaft 5y ago
Yeah, I've played it at meetups with just a folded piece of paper and a pen. It's good fun. There's a better board game implementation of it (that's also on that same list) called Telestrations, with laminated flipbooks and dry erase markers and cards for starting ideas (which I mostly don't use when I play the game), that makes the experience a bit easier, but they're both the same game at heart.

vasco 5y ago

The fact that "pandemic" is at the top means that either we have a coincidence where the best game happens to be closely related to events of the past two years, or ratings merely reflect current fashion rather than game quality. This is further reinforced by the fact that pandemic didn't top best selling games lists until 2020-2021.

opdahl 5y ago
I seem to recall Pandemic being very highly rated and popular before the pandemic, but I bet it hasn't hurt it's popularity!
lmm 5y ago
> The fact that "pandemic" is at the top means that either we have a coincidence where the best game happens to be closely related to events of the past two years, or ratings merely reflect current fashion rather than game quality. It's a coincidence. Pandemic Legacy (not to be confused with regular Pandemic) went straight to the top of the ratings when it was released (knocking off Twilight Struggle which had been there for years).
teruakohatu 5y ago
I am pretty sure Pandemic Legacy, an RPGish version of Pandemic, was at the top of the list a few years ago.
- morelikeborelax 5y ago
  It was very highly ranked, you are correct.
JonathanFly 5y ago
I'm sure it did receive a sales boost, but it was almost as highly ranked before the real pandemic. It really is mostly a coincidence.
chongli 5y ago
I was playing Pandemic (the original) 5 years ago and it was a very popular game even then. When Legacy came out (long before COVID) it rocketed to the top of the ratings in short order. Nothing whatsoever to do with real life. Legacy is popular because it’s a very good cooperative game that evolves over time, encouraging people to keep coming back to it every game night.

692 5y ago

I look at Boardgamegeek almost ever time I make a purchase of a game and to get ideas. To see what other peoples think, their reviews about the game and game play, strategy vs luck element, type of game etc It's similar to imdb for movies, its a place full of opinions. I take everything with pinch of salt, but it's the best review site around

boringg 5y ago
Exactly this - however I do find the commentary and community pretty honest in their opinions. It gives good guidance for my decision making.
brightball 5y ago
I do the same now. Never even heard of the site until I learned that one of my friends dad makes board games. Apparently has one high up in the top 100 list somewhere.
Oddskar 5y ago
The more amateur reviews I've read on BGG the less I pay attention to them, honestly. A big difference between movies and boardgames is that it's (for the most part) a group activity. And to make matters even more inconsistent, whether a group will take to a game or not will also depend a lot on who actually teaches them the game and how that person goes about it.
- kbenson 5y ago
  > whether a group will take to a game or not will also depend a lot on who actually teaches them the game and how that person goes about it. Definitely agree on this. I was teaching a few different people at different times how to play Wiz-War over the holidays (I had recently made my own copy from a printables PDF I found on the BGG site since it's not really for sale), and I definitely took different strategies with my twelve year old son than I did with other people that I was teaching, because I knew more or less how much they might put up with in being screwed over by the game (because a lot of the fun of that game is screwing people over or getting out of being screwed over), and how much I dawdles after I did so to give them opportunities to find a way out of their situation. That seemed to work well, I think the people I taught the game to enjoyed it, and I could definitely see how someone more interested in winning could give someone a really shitty first experience in that game.

praash 5y ago

This analysis is clever! I'd love to see someone use these ideas in an interactive tool for board game discovery. Geeks appreciating complexity is obvious, but it's very interesting to see how much it actually matters in ratings. Some mechanic complexity is essential for replayability and depth, but maximizing the potential of individual components is a sign of great game design. Many successful games usually fit the saying "easy to learn, hard to master". Good games bring joy to pretty much anyone.

sWW26 5y ago
I built a recommendation engine[0] using the BoardGameGeek data with the methods described in Significance[1]. I've also extended it[2] relatively recently to have a tweakable ranking system which my father explains here[3] [0] https://trythesegames.com/ https://trythesegames.com/ [1] https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2019.01317.x https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.... [2] https://trythesegames.com/rankings https://trythesegames.com/rankings [3] https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2728398/flexible-boardgame-ranking-system https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2728398/flexible-boardgame-...
- asgardian28 5y ago
  Really nice! As an extension to the article, I'm also making a recommender, but just colab filtering. But yours looks stellar! And the article is great, compliments! Need some time to let the like score calculation sink in :-) I'm going to experiment with the (rating * 2) / 100, seems like a great way to account for the nonlinearity. Btw don't you divide by 10 instead of 100? Another suggestion was to take transform the ratings of each user to percentiles, as a measure of how favorite the game is to the user, also seems interesting.

fridek 5y ago

Interesting analysis. It has some signs of the author introducing variables until the ranking looks "right" though. I also disagree with some of the conclusions, based on my moderate experience with the site and its users. A few suggestions to improve: * Consider that most users rank 1-10 to stack rank their own games. BGG explicilty encourages this, insisting it's YOUR rating and there is no wrong way of arriving at it. I'd try to normalize for this (i.e. convert user collections from ratings into stack rank percentiles, see where games end up on average). * Board games objectively got better over the years. There is more material on mechanics, it's easier to publish than ever, simulating and playtesting games is easier, etc. When I look at some (not all!) old games on top 100 I always think "come on, it's a good game but has no place here". It would be interesting to see rankings based on ratings assigned in a specific year. * Drop the notion of complexity as something to correct for. As others mentioned this is a very inconsistent data point. Personally I'd rather play two 8.5 games in an evening than one 9. Perhaps fun per hour would be better, but this is personal bias, no matter how you assign the weight you will get complaints :) * Kids and party non-gamer games are almost a distinct universe from gamers games. There is no way to fix or account for that. It has nothing to do with compexity or play time. I think this is more down to a combination of how well the game was playtested combined with the distribution channels available to the publisher. Gamers will happily play 15 minutes gimmick games, non-gamers will pull out Monopoly in a pub and go throught this monstrous waste of cardboard while downing pints.

mercutio2 5y ago
Funny! My gamer friends love monopoly as a light warm up! A game with adults who know how to play takes ~45 minutes. Auctions are taught affairs, which is really the only decision point, but that’s why it’s such a fast play-through.
- Oddskar 5y ago
  And you probably play using your own house rules to make it palatable: the hallmark of an at best mediocre game.
  - 5y ago

ngcc_hk 5y ago

Board game need a lot of investment. Simple one like GO (which needs hours to play decades to perfect etc) is “easier” as at least you have clib, course, apps … etc. But complex rule one - who can play with you for hours. And what happen if you do not like it later. Or the game no more. Midway is a board game about the battle. Heard of it? How about Battiestar Galactic of just the reimagining fame. End up with catan and in fact still not open the seafarers. But at least when played you can. Wonder about the other 2 now. Pandemic seem catchy.

cableshaft 5y ago
Just FYI, there's a now out of print Battlestar Galactica game which is very complex and very long but also excellent and very beloved by the hobbyist board game community. I used to meet up with friends once every other month for a six hour event to play it (the actual game took about 4 hours, but then set up, gathering, food, breaks took it to 6 hours). The publisher no longer has the BSG license so they rethemed the game to Cthulhu instead, and just a month ago re-released the game under the name "Unfathomable". It's no longer set in space but now in an ocean on a Titanic-like ship.

unnamed76ri 5y ago

BGG is a great resource for anything you'd want to know about any board game. Unfortunately, their forum moderation is very heavy handed at times if what someone posts is just a hair outside of the accepted world view of the forum admin. It used to be that you could see an almost comical amount of nuking of comments in threads but now they even hide that and it will look like the offending comments never existed.

hammock 5y ago

The ratings don't diverge around 2015 and it's not due to a hype split. They diverge around 2000 (slowly, with increasing divergence) and it's due to the fact that this is when BGG started collecting ratings. As author points out, newer games have higher ratings. If we hypothesize that brand new games get overrated when first released, we can posit that this "newness" effect would apply for games that are released during BGG lifetime, but not before. Using a Wilson score instead of the actual rating would control for this effect.

The-Bus 5y ago
This also occurred with IMDB. At one point the first Harry Potter film was rated #1 on the Top 250.

tylrprtr 5y ago

One other variable I'd like to see studied is the average cost of new releases over time. I have a hunch that this price has been steadily rising in the age of Kickstarter and deluxe editions. Higher price tag means a stronger urge to justify that purchase with a higher rating.

treesrule 5y ago
I don't know that I buy your narrative, but I'd sure like to see price vrs rating (while controlling for other thigns ofc)
svachalek 5y ago
I hear this often come up in this kind of discussion but personally I think I tend to the opposite, to have higher expectations of things I pay more for and judge them more critically. It might align with spender vs saver mentality (and granted the bulk of game buyers are spenders by simple statistics). Would be interesting to analyze but hard to separate from complexity. Although there is an inversion at the upper end, comparing $150 heavy euros to $400 thematic miniature extravaganzas (which tend to a middle weight).

ChrisRR 5y ago

It's interesting to see the lower review scores compared to video games, where every game is rated 75-100% Naturally over the years, video games have improved in visuals, design, cinematics, controls, etc. so they've ended up reviewing themselves into the corner. It's more interesting to see that games average at 6.4 which is much lower, partially because board games don't improve so drastically, and partially because I guess board games have only just started gaining massive popularity in recent years

Oddskar 5y ago
Speaking from experience the span of playable boardgames ratings is pretty much 65-100, I would be very sceptical of anything below that.

bussierem 5y ago

Seems odd to me that they would rate Monopoly as 1.3 complexity. This feels like "well it's an old game and so everyone probably knows it so it's not heavy". That feels wrong. Trying to explain Monopoly to someone who has never played could potentially be a very long discussion explaining how houses/hotels work, paying rent, etc.

etataetaet 5y ago
Really? I'm not saying Monopoly is dead simple and you would have to explain a few things but I think someone could understand it in about 5 minutes. Even if they didn't quite get the rules the game is really intuitive (And long xD) so they'd certainly fully understand half way through the first game. Most new games I've played you have to get in ~3 games before you start thinking more strategically.
neurotrace 5y ago
Children can learn Monopoly fairly quickly. To me, that sounds pretty simple. Buy property, get money when people land on it, get more money if you have more house/hotels. That's just about it
- mbg721 5y ago
  Do you do the income tax space and the auction rule as written?

hibikir 5y ago

The problem of boardgame evaluation is that what we have multiple populations that have very different ideas of how good a game is, and are so aware of their preferences that they will not rate all that many games outside of their favored niches. Therefore, making head to head comparisons is not really about rating games, but the number of people in each group that decide to even rate the game. Any analysis that doesn't attempt to separate those populations will, with little doubt, be more about said confounding population effects than anything else. This is easy to tell by using the "Fans also Like" feature, which IIRC was built in consultation with someone working on recommendations at Netflix. Many top games have little correlation with each other: If you like Brass, you are likely to enjoy heavy eurogames like Terraforming Mars, but you might not like Pandemic Legacy, which happens to be a coop, Gloomhaven, which is more of an American-style game, or War of the Ring, which is mostly for 2 players, and a thematic wargame. The BGG adjusted ratings also have a significant damper on games that have few ratings, which is why more traditional wargames (like, say, A Victory Lost, or EastFront) are always going to be capped by the genre's lack of popularity among the site's visitors. Doing analysis like this is far more computationally heavy though, but it's far more relevant when it comes to telling people what they tend to want to know: Tell me of good games that I will probably enjoy, and aren't quite the same thing that I am playing right now.

adamredwoods 5y ago
This is why I generally do not use the BoardGameGeek rankings as an attribution to game quality. My gaming tastes are more nuanced than mathematical rankings.
svachalek 5y ago
I tend to think of most things on about 4 levels. I think it applies to types of board games but also movie and music genres, cuisines, etc: Flawed: you may not like this, even if you usually like things like this Good: perfectly serviceable example of this type of thing, if you are interested you will probably like it Exemplary: people who like this kind of thing tend to agree this is one of the best Outstanding: you may even like this thing even if you haven’t liked things like this in the past, and if this is your thing then don’t miss it I find that it’s fairly easy to sort things into the first three buckets by scanning through reviews and comments, but the fourth one is hard because by definition you need atypical reviews. Would be interesting to see an analysis that more or less predicted what reviewers would like and then plucked out positive outliers.

fixie 5y ago

Additional interesting discussion/context within the BGG community: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2797942/did-some-data-analysis-all-19m-reviews-bgg https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2797942/did-some-data-analy...