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Diving into BoardGameGeek

jvanelteren.github.io

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Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#51

Post by NineStarPoint »

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

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.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#52

Post by mmcdermott »

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.

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...).

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#53

Post by mmcdermott »

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…

A board game can choose to engage in a multitude of different ways. A well-crafted simple game can offer as deep a problem space as a more complex one, but strategy is only one form of engagement.

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.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#54

Post by bussierem »

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.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#55

Post by brimble »

scrollaway wrote: post #31
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

In defense of complex games:

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.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#56

Post by hibikir »

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.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#57

Post by etataetaet »

bussierem wrote: post #54

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.

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.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#58

Post by mercutio2 »

fridek wrote: post #19

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…

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.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#59

Post by mercutio2 »

anonymoushn wrote: post #8
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.

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…

I could not disagree more about Res Arcana.

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.

Re: Diving into BoardGameGeek

#60

Post by sWW26 »

praash wrote: post #11

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…

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/ [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-...

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