538.com is long one of my favorite sites, as it was founded by Nate Silver, who is of course the statistics savant who made a name for himself pretty much nailing the last two presidential elections based on a lot of disparate polling data. Since that time, they’ve left their home on the New York Times and expanded their mandate to pretty much do statistical analysis of anything anywhere there happens to be a large amount of data to examine.
Recently, they gave this treatment to Board Games, utilizing the database housed on BoardGameGeek. Of particular note, they examined the best-ranked board game in the database (Twilight Struggle) and then delved into the list of the worst. The latter list tends to contain a lot of passive aggressive hate for classics like Candyland and.Monopoly, both because these ancient bits of family fare are poorly designed by modern hardcore standards, but also because board game geeks tend to have quite hipster attitudes towards any game you can pick up at Target. Both articles are great reads.
The article has some good ideas on what makes a good or not so good game. I won’t regurgitate these because I wanted to get down some of my own thoughts (which I’ve been mulling because I’ve been building one of my own).
1) Time length. The article talks a lot about the optimal length, but the data kind of shows that the primary fault are that games shouldn’t be too short. I tend to think that games do best when they are about 2 hours long without teaching, and 3 hours long (max) with it. Games that go longer than that tend to get bored and disenfranchised users.
2) Number of players. The data suggests that smaller games tend to be better. I think there’s a lot of factors going on with that assessment, and the data that should be examined are the ‘optimal sizes’ — for games that can take different player numbers, BGG will tell you what the sweet spot is for that particular game. As an example, Chaos in the Old World is a great game, but is much better with a full table than with 3 people.
3) Time between turns. A huge factor in games with more players in them is how long the player has to wait before making his own moves, choices and decisions. In Risk, each player moves one at a time – a ‘slow roller’ can gum up the works ridiculously, and the larger the game the longer your wait. By contrast, Seven Wonders allows all players to effectively make decisions simultaneously, which results in very snappy play at most play tables, even with a seven player group. Most games with more than 4 people nowadays, try to make it so that players are making one move when its their turn, so that things can move quickly.
4) Interaction. How much players can affect each other is a hugely contentious and tricky subject. Many games, particularly ‘building’ games of some sort, tend to have very little interaction – Seven Wonders, for example, has not many reasons for you to pay attention to what other players are doing, and so you tend to silo yourself and play them and hope you get a final score at the end. Other games demand more interaction, but here tactical transparency becomes a concern – players need to be able to read a board state and see how it factors into their decision making quickly.
5) Teachability. If you have to start a new game, how long does it take until people are rolling dice? There are several games on my shelves, including Kanban and Bora Bora, that I find personally engaging, but I dread having to explain the convoluted iconography YET AGAIN in a teaching seminar that lasts an hour. The worst part about these games is that the first game is almost always a learning experience, as people don’t fully ‘get it’ until halfway through, which means you’re really looking at game 2 with a new audience before they feel like its a fulfilling experience.
Games I’m playing a lot of lately:
1) Trajan. Worker placement game with the Mancala as the central game mechanic. Fast turns, relatively light but obvious levels of interaction. This game is harder than it looks to plan in advance in.
2) Tzolkin. The game with the crazy fucking wheel, a gimmick that makes it easy to convince people to play. The wheel also adds time delay to the basic concept of the worker placement game, which will break your brain in new and interesting ways.
3) Castles of Mad King Ludwig. A new game this year with a fun central premise – you’re designing, room by room, a castle for a crazy king, which is nice because everyone’s got a castle with a story to tell. The core mechanic is a pricing mechanic that adds an interesting competitive layer to the game. This game was made by the designers of Suburbia, a good building game that was too interactive – the game expected you to pay too much attention to what others were building, which was hard to mentally track. CMKL solves these issues.
4) Chaos in the Old World. This is a territorial control game, but embraces the philosophy of side asymmetry to the degree you haven’t really seen before. The expansion pack with the crazy Rat Lord is definitely recommended, as the Rats are awesome, but it also fixes some core problems with the game.
5) Fields of Arle. I’m actually not a huge Agricola fan – I always felt there was too much going on, especially if your play group gets all the expansions and jams them altogether. This, though, is a tightly-balanced 2-person Agricola-like by the same designer. Because it is small, tightly focused, and balanced around a set player size, it seems to fix several of my biggest complaints about the original.
I should play more. I have stacks of board games in my library, and there’s a small percentage of them that are still in shrinkwrap. Currently, I’m thinking I will go on a playing spree of my collection this year, and anything I don’t play in the next 12 months, I’ll give away this time next year. Of course, I say that now, and then come January, I’ll be back to making resolutions like this again.
When I play 7 Wonders I’m always keeping an eye on what other players are up to, because going where the other guys aren’t is almost always the best way to score. If three people have already plonked down grey resources or actual green cards in the first couple of hands of Age 1, then I’ll probably pass up the science card in my hand to go somewhere else. Having an idea of what resources other people are going to want to build their Wonder gives me an idea whether I need to build this useful-but-not-vital brown card now, or if I can take a chance sending it round the table to pick up when options are shorter late in the round. Stuff like that.
7 Wonders’ biggest flaw is how difficult it is to teach for such a simple game. The mass of icons and the fact that it takes several games before you can get a feel of what consists a “good” play means that I’ve had a bunch of people bounce off it for not really any fault of their own.
Good to see they identified three key points to a bad game:
1) Luck, high degree of randomness from dice rolls eclipsing player decisions and skill.
2) Player Elimination, unlucky players that fail to last the distance are unlikely to stick around and play again. I’ve seen many a game of Risk start off with a promising number of players and dwindle to a stalemate of two players, same with Monopoly.
3) Kingmaker, weak players bolstering the resources of mediocre players to bring down the skilful. These alliances can be seen as an emergent social aspect of games but can seriously damage the will of any one to return to the game table.
Hmmmm having thought about those three elements, why wasn’t Dungeons & Dragons in there 😉
What frustrates me about Silver’s analysis is that the boardgamegeek ratings seem to be captured by a very particular kind of player, so most of the “best” games aren’t at all what I’m looking for in my current situation.
(At my house we either play a complex game after the kids are in bed, in which case it needs to be short so we can get to sleep ourselves, or we play a simpler game with some of the kids, in which case it needs to be short to hold their attention span. 2+ hour games are a once- or twice-a-year treat.)
When BGG says “best” what they mean is “best according to the sort of people who visit BGG” not “best according to people who play board games.”
It’s an extremely self-selecting demographic.
My experience with the kind of games BGG likes and the kind of people there is that you play a game once or twice to learn the rules and then your enthusiast friend wants to move on to the hottest new game without you ever having played a single real match of the game you just learned. In many ways it’s less about the experience of playing the games and more being up-to-date on board game culture.
So I have played a very large amount of monopoly thanks to a summer at a campus helpdesk with ~2 calls per hour and 4 guys on staff. We sat around our computers and played LAN Monopoly, which has some surprisingly deep, rich complexity to it lying just below the surface. The key factor to understand is that there is a fixed housing market of 32 houses. When all 32 houses are on the board, no more can be purchased.
The game becomes about 20-25 minutes of dice rolling, property buying until enough of the board is bought to start building alliances. Then 10 minutes of wheeling and dealing to try to ensure your strongest position going into the late game, followed by about 10 minutes to watch the game wrap up. (Computer removing the issues of dice rolling, piece moving, money taking speeds things up considerably)
I will note that Free Parking is a terrible home rule. Without money leaving the economy, it’s very reasonable to run into a situation where the game cannot resolve, as two players run around trading money back and forth and slowly accumulating wealth.