81–90 of 105 posts
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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.
And you probably play using your own house rules to make it palatable: the hallmark of an at best mediocre game.
It’s just a pleasantly light start to 12 hour board game sessions.
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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 interest…
> My favorite part of a game is discovering it. 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 t…
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.
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
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…
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.
> 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…
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 does…
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…
> * 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 selectivel…
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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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Coup vs Resistance is, surprisingly, a very good barometer for the kind of group a group is.