F$@& BGG lists

Board Game Geeks top games.

Starting with the positive.  I love the resource of Board Game Geek and their ratings.   Designer board game products have just exploded the last 10 years and ANY filter or basis we can use to select them is just marvelous.  If something is ranked in the top 50, there must be a reason, similarly, if something is ranked 5000^th, there is a reason.

So the problems:

1)      It’s an unscientific poll.  The system requires activation by reviewers, who may or may not have some kind of agenda.  BGG does weight the responses, it takes a lot of responses for a game to climb the rankings, so this is probably mitigated.  And generally speaking, I trust the reviewers are giving honest assessments of the games, but even honest responses have a way of becoming biased.    Scale of the problem:  NABD.

2)      Reviewers tastes.  This ties into the unscientific-ness.  Reviewers tastes really effect the ratings.  Two games I no longer like, Fresco (ranked 123) and Thebes (ranked 165) are awfully high on the list.  Both of these have severe game play problems, but really work well with their themes.  I speculate that theme integration is a big deal for a lot of reviewers, much more important to them than it is to me.  I parallel this to movie reviews; you have to know the critic.  I never ask Juan for movie advice, because he loves every movie ever made.  Contrast to Richard Roeper, formerly of “At the Movies”.  Roeper hates nearly every movie ever made, so if he likes it, I probably will too.  Scale of the problem:  Kind of a deal, mitigated by the subcategories.  Fresco rates really high as a “Family” game which I suppose should give me a clue about themes vs. gameplay.

3)      Breaking the Game.  Stone Age is ranked 26^th and there is not a bigger travesty on that list.  Now the first half dozen or so times we played Stone Age I might have agreed.  Once we figured out the fatal flaw of going 2^nd, the game was broken.  Now Nerdy Friday has some pretty smart people participating, but there is no F$%^ing way that we are the only ones to ever notice this.  So how does that game remain top 50?  My (uninformed) conclusion is that early reviews push this game up the ladder, then once broken people can’t (or don’t) take back the rating.   Scale of the problem: A big deal.   It might be fun figuring out the game breaking move, but once you do the game is unplayable.

Quick summary.  The list is not perfect, but just browsing and going by my own untrustworthy memory…

I have played half the games in the top 10, and like them all.

I have played 9 of the top 25 games and like all but 1

I have played 16 of the top 50, and like 13 of the 16.

So it’s a good tool.  It soitenly increases the odds of buying a game I like.