Diving into BoardGameGeek
jvanelteren.github.io
jvanelteren.github.io
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.
I also disagree that one cannot fix some of its many, many flaws with house rules. Remember that the spirit of the original rules was a game made as an anti-capitalist statement, not to be a fun experience.
It’s just a pleasantly light start to 12 hour board game sessions.
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.
Coup’s deception is confrontational. On every turn you facedown an opponent and challenge them to a guessing game directly. The game relies on you deceiving others to perform actions optimally. If no one lies or no one confronts anyone’s lies, the game ends very quickly.
Resistance’s is less confrontational. Your goal is to evade detection and deceive the group as a whole. In addition, not everyone needs to lie. If you aren’t assigned the role of a spy, you are spared the act of deceiving the group.
I have found that this results in two polar opposites of player groups. A group of players who aren’t confrontational in nature find Coup lackluster because everyone just settles into an optimal or suboptimal strategy and the game ends without much fanfare.
Resistance on the other hand, bores players who want to challenge each other. Be dealt the wrong role and they find themselves just sitting around for 15 minutes. Yes the accusation and voting rounds provide some entertainment, but it just isn’t the same.
This is all anecdata of course. I like both games, and admittedly I might be stuck in some kind of local maxima due to my own personality and personal history defining the kind of people I play games with.
As a final parting thought: Coup with a mix of highly confrontational and pacifist players also never goes well either.
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.
I’m honestly jealous you grew up in a family that could do this.
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.
Ahaha tell that to a writer! Perhaps others are more strategic with their use of words than you are :)
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.
My favorite part of a game is discovering it.
I'm in it for the easy "a-ha!" moments and as soon as it starts to look like a particular game is going to have to become a whole thing for me to keep getting those from it (by moving on to "competitive" levels of play, memorized strategies, et c.), I'm done with it.
Complex games often throw enough variables in the mix to keep things interesting—to me, anyway—longer than simpler games. A lot of times all that's just smoke and mirrors, but it's effective smoke and mirrors.
> Small, highly-focused games tend to develop much more interesting metas.
Right—which is precisely what I don't want. If I need to start deliberately practicing or reading books or something to get better at a game, that's a job, and I don't want it.
[EDIT] Just to be extra clear, I'm not saying this is "the right" reason to prefer a certain kind of game, and I'm very aware that lots of people want the exact opposite: a game they can play for life, taking it very seriously, and never stop improving because the depth of play is practically unlimited. That's just not why I play board/card games.
Interesting. I feel similarly, but I would place my joy in exploration rather than discovery. I'm not interested in discovery, where I take only the rules/components and try to discover the best plays and strategies. I don't have the time or the inclination to endure the dead ends and plays of failed strategies. (Some people love that, they want to find the best plays themselves; not me.) I want a map, a guide, then my joy is in taking that map, and applying it to the game state I'm in.
Thus, I love reading strategy guides, and following instructions. I build Lego sets frequently, but I never build My Own Creations. For me, the fun is in execution. Thus, complex games give me more paths to walk, more levers to pull. Simple games get boring, and often end up in the deeply iterative analysis that you see in Chess/Go: if I do this, then they'll do that, so then I need to do this, etc. etc. etc. Not fun at all for me, and why I largely avoid most abstracts too.
In a related note, this is also why I ended up in SysAdmin, not Dev; I want to implement the awesome programs that other people make; I have little interest in creating something new myself.
I play games to feel "clever", not to feel "smart" (for values of smart like "ah ha, I happen to have read and memorized a counter to this opening that you don't know, so now I will crush you"), and continuing to feel clever with a deep game requires more commitment than I care to give to them, personally.
... this is probably a holdover from painfully-typical bad attitudes developed during a "gifted" childhood. It took me a very long time to stop seeing—if only subconsciously—studying as something adjacent to cheating, like "yeah you got an A but you had to study, so, that hardly counts". Looks very dumb written down like that, but it was the rut my brain got stuck in for a long while without my even realizing it. However, in the specific case of games, I haven't bothered to try to work past it, because I'm still having a good time with my approach, and I really do not want to get serious enough about any game that studying & focused, non-play practice becomes necessary to keep getting "I did a clever thing" dopamine hits.
Weirdly, this "preparation is akin to cheating, and at the very least a sign that you have already failed" attitude didn't transfer over into sports, where I was totally fine with (and loved, actually) practice and drilling.
> Thus, I love reading strategy guides, and following instructions. I build Lego sets frequently, but I never build My Own Creations.
Oddly enough, though, that's me too. I had lots of Legos as a kid but rarely built my own thing, usually building from instructions, and then if I did anything else it was typically combining, re-theming, or adding on to, instruction-built sets.
I feel this really depends on who you are playing with. If everyone is new, I don't mind exploring the strategies. You can learn something and still get a good game. If one person knows the game fairly well, it's sometimes good to play half a game with open hands (if there is secret info) while the one person teaches and gives hints. It's definitely no fun if one person knows a lot of the game and trounces everyone.
Many moderately popular board games don’t have anything even approaching this level of analysis, some have quite broken combinations and strategies that have never been published anywhere, so even if you’re not the first to figure it out you can feel like you are. I really enjoy that feeling, that your discoveries have not been trampled over and graffitied long before you got there.
But if you're not a person who loves intricate, shallow pastiche, you're probably not a person who buys 1-3 retail games every month. Which means that the market shouldn't cater to us. I do wish that BGG still did sometimes, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that BGGs visitorship is shrinking.
I've almost dead-stopped visiting of late, but 1) picking the right selection of geekbuddies can narrow BGG into something that's still useful to find good games and some good conversation about games, and 2) the geekmarket can help you find those games when they've been out of print for a long time.
Here's a less commercial recommendation that gets you a warehouse full of games for almost nothing: New Tactical Games With Dice and Cards, and Dice Games Properly Explained by Reiner Knizia.
Includes dozens of games with variants that thoughtfully explore the spaces of those games, and encourages you to play around with them to discover new challenges. I wish Wolfgang Kramer would start giving away his secrets like Knizia always has.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
It feels like a lot of the variety in the game should come from the 8 cards in your deck, but it can't if you just discard them most of the time.
I agree that you're going to discard 3/4 of your artifacts, and ~50% of them are almost never worth playing. But I've been continuously surprised by people pulling out wins with PoP/artifact combinations I didn't expect to be viable.
If your definition of "completely collapses" is "some paths are much better than others in high level play", then I guess we just disagree on what makes a good heavy board game.
I do agree with you that Wingspan has a corvidae problem, though; I've never seen anyone but a beginner lose with an early raven.
This is all subjective, of course. The Splendor designers obviously intended for players who purchase a large number of small holdings to be able to win. Every variant in the expansion works to address this issue. Another player could reasonably say "Splendor has failed because everyone just rushes to buy about 2 big holdings." To me, "Splendor but everyone goes for big holdings right away" is still pretty good at being Splendor. "Res Arcana but you rush a PoP and get like 8 VPs from it and 2 from a monument" feels disappointing compared to the game I thought I would be playing. I'm glad you like it! A friend tells me the 2nd expansion makes a lot of things better, so I'm looking forward to trying it out.
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.
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.
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.