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.
> * Drop the notion of complexity as something to correct for.
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.
The rank percentile is a great suggestion and after that take the average rank I guess?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Actually I'm making a small application that shows similarly rated games. For fun tried out Brass: Lancastershire and got as most similar games: Brass: Birmingham, Age of Steam, Food Chain Magnate, Dominant Species
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
One of my kids dug a copy of Pandemic out of the games closet recently and we played a couple of games. I remember wondering why we didn't play it more often when we were done. It's just a really well built game. It's a shame the publisher has started delisting the app version (https://www.pcgamer.com/digital-board-game-pandemic-has-been...).
It’s a coincidence. It was already near the top pre-pandemic. I actually expected it to drop when a real pandemic started. We haven’t played it since the pandemic started ;-)
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.
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.
[+] [-] fridek|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vikingerik|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mercutio2|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] asgardian28|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] 692|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Oddskar|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] brightball|4 years ago|reply
Apparently has one high up in the top 100 list somewhere.
[+] [-] hibikir|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] svachalek|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] asgardian28|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] adamredwoods|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisRR|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TedDoesntTalk|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_(game)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse#Picture_conse...
[+] [-] cableshaft|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dr_orpheus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asgardian28|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hammock|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlindner|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scrollaway|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] iopq|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] moate|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] anonymoushn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slightwinder|4 years ago|reply
Some people like the kick of fast success, others like the long-running, slow burning joy. People are just different.
[+] [-] praash|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] drewcoo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bussierem|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neurotrace|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etataetaet|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praash|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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-...
[+] [-] tylrprtr|4 years ago|reply
Higher price tag means a stronger urge to justify that purchase with a higher rating.
[+] [-] svachalek|4 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] treesrule|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unnamed76ri|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vasco|4 years ago|reply
This is further reinforced by the fact that pandemic didn't top best selling games lists until 2020-2021.
[+] [-] lmm|4 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] chongli|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] opdahl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmcdermott|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teruakohatu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JonathanFly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irrational|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fixie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ngcc_hk|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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.