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Diving into BoardGameGeek

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Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#21

Post by slightwinder »

mlindner wrote: post #2

> 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 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.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#22

Post by iopq »

slightwinder wrote: post #20
iopq wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 But it's complex because of strategic considerations, not because it is difficult to learn the rules.

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.

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

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#23

Post by morelikeborelax »

teruakohatu wrote: post #10
vasco wrote: post #5

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.

I am pretty sure Pandemic Legacy, an RPGish version of Pandemic, was at the top of the list a few years ago.

It was very highly ranked, you are correct.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#24

Post by ngcc_hk »

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.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#25

Post by chongli »

vasco wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#26

Post by unnamed76ri »

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.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#27

Post by anonymoushn »

StephanTLavavej wrote: post #13
anonymoushn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you expand on how Roll breaks down when the players are trying to win?

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.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#28

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

scrollaway wrote: post #15
mlindner wrote: post #2

> 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 unli…

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.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#29

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

iopq wrote: post #4
mlindner wrote: post #2

> 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.

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 But it's complex because of strategic considerations, not because it is difficult to learn the rules.

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.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#30

Post by slightwinder »

iopq wrote: post #22
slightwinder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

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