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.
This correction is necessary. What appears to be a complexity bonus is really a selectivity effect. Everybody plays simple games, but only people who like complex games will play complex games.
Gloomhaven has long been the highest-rated game on BGG, but that doesn't mean it's the best game ever. That means the audience who chooses to rate it is selectively filtered. The only people who are playing and rating Gloomhaven are the people who are already eager to play a campaign-based dungeon-crawler.
The secret to a high average ranking isn't to get top ratings from your target audience; every game does that. The secret is to avoid exposure to a less-favorable audience that would drag down your average. Gloomhaven players will occasionally play Cards Against Humanity and rate it 1/10. CAH players won't ever play and rate Gloomhaven.
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.
Ratings per year is a possibility.
Complexity: Indeed I wanted to remove some of the more complex games because I don't have time for them. Although on reddit there was a nice discussion that the weight is composed of complexity & depth
The same 3 great games rated by someone with 5000 ratings will have much 'better' percentiles, just because all the crap games.
And all the shades in between.
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
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.
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.
Coup vs Resistance is, surprisingly, a very good barometer for the kind of group a group is.
Apparently has one high up in the top 100 list somewhere.
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.
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.
Top 3 for Eastfront: Advanced Squad Leader: Starter Kit #2, Unconditional Surrender! World War 2 in Europe and..... A Victory Lost: Crisis in Ukraine 1942-1943
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
This looks like a marvelous game that requires no purchase and no special equipment. Why would it shake anyone except for a ridiculous name?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_(game)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse#Picture_conse...
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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of rules-heavy games like Twilight Imperium, Arkham Horror or Dune use rules to simulate a setting as much as to create a strategic problem space. If you removed rules from these games, you can make them easier to play and possibly keep the same raw depth, but you would lose the setting they were trying to build. I remember explaining to someone recently that almost every rule in the Dune board game was a reference to something in the books.
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.
the complexity of a board game is in no way comparable to the length of linear media, aside from the amount of one's own lifetime one has the possibility of investing in the work before being satisfied with no longer engaging with.
Well, the complexity is 3.94 on that site:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/188/go
But it's complex because of strategic considerations, not because it is difficult to learn the rules.
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.
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
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.
Sure, it's not fun for the kindergarten-and-above crowd, that's kinda the point.
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.
I would put it first in my list of games that hold up when attempting to win.
Are you playing it with serious gamers? It has about the highest return to skill of any short game I know these days except Race.
A key test: do any of your games ever take more than 4 rounds to someone winning? If so, your group hasn’t gotten very deep in it yet.
Some people like the kick of fast success, others like the long-running, slow burning joy. People are just different.
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.
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.
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.
I've also extended it[2] relatively recently to have a tweakable ranking system which my father explains here[3]
[0] https://trythesegames.com/ [1] https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.... [2] https://trythesegames.com/rankings [3] https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2728398/flexible-boardgame-...
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.
Higher price tag means a stronger urge to justify that purchase with a higher rating.
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).
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.
This is further reinforced by the fact that pandemic didn't top best selling games lists until 2020-2021.
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).
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.
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.
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.
