BGG Ratings Are Broken | Let’s Fix Them 

Ratings are so dang hard. With it being all opinion, they will vary greatly. Like you said, I enjoy most of being part of a community with like minded people. Echo chambers can get very expensive as you are exposed to many more games than you normally would be lol. I have also really enjoyed joining groups that have a different perspective and it gets me to see value in what I didnt value before. Ratings will never be an amazing solution. Best bet is to surround yourself with people that you enjoy, and take part in conversations to learn more about games you dont know, as well as the ones you know you will love.

Excellent video - very thought provoking! I will definitely check out the book, it looks interesting. I think the BGG ratings (not rankings) can be useful if used as part of a larger decision-making process when deciding whether to purchase a a game. I think the thing to keep in mind is that the rating system is not intended to rate how objectively "good" a game is - it is intended to be a subjective rating related mostly to how much a person wants to play that game again. It benefits from the law of large numbers. That said, your idea of community ratings is an excellent one. While we can get close to that with the geek buddy system, it would be nice to have something more like what you described.

It’s really important to find reviewers that align with your taste. In my early days I would buy any game that Quintin smith from susd would recommend. Later to find out we have very different tastes. But also look into why some reviewers rate a game lower in their final scores. Dice tower for instance. Chris the other day rated a game lower because it was long (2-3 hours). The argument was that it might not hit the table as often. That for me is not a valid reason to rate a game lower. If the game is good and a good experience. Then it shouldn’t get a lower score just for playing time alone. Personal preference is valid as an argument for why it’s not for me. But as a reviewer you do have an obligation

On the note about trick-taking. Taylor's trick taking table is a great youtube channel for more info on a lot of games. I'll admit, I'm torn on putting a number to a review. On one hand, it communicates so much information so quickly. On the other, what information is being communicated isn't always clear. And when it becomes a way to rank games, it can get kind of funky (e.g., when people review bomb for one reason or another). It would be great to really find a community and build new friendships. And I'd love to find an environment for something like that too. But in the interim, while I definitely have found a few reviewers that seem to have similar tastes, I also have learned (a little more) where my tastes lie. So if a reviewer at least describes why they like a game, I can try to decipher what that would mean for me

Fascinating discussion. Definitely think that any person’s rating (or weighting) of a game is only relevant in relation to ALL of that persons ratings and preferences. Which is why RU-vid can be useful once you learn the creator’s preferences and such - like you said in a recent video 😊

Great video and discussion! I think the key to making the scoring work would be to allow each category to go into the negative. I agree that the theme can add around 5% to a score, but a poorly themed game (or one that is themed something you don't want to simulate) could be a strong negative- far more than losing the 5%. The question I'd ask is- At what point does this factor begin to ruin the enjoyment of the game? That's where it goes negative. Monopoly (especially a special edition) can easily top most of these categories, but the mechanics are so bad they don't leave the game at a 7.5 / 10, but much lower.

You're absolutely right that a single number rating is not going to capture the nuances involved in personal preference and enjoyment. For me, theme is a critical part of gaming, in that if the rules of the game and the actions you're taking don't make logical sense in regards to the theme of the game itself I will ABSOLUTELY struggle with learning and retaining the rules. I think that's why I don't like trick taking games since they frequently boil down in my brain to numbers and then it just doesn't care.... And I immediately lose. Great topic, and I very much enjoyed the video. I'm also nearby Portland so I guess I should leave the house to see what's out there. 🤔 Maybe.

I will pay you back in the form of playing trick takers with you online some time. It is tough seeing some really great games suffer in the BGG ratings, especially trick taking/climbing/shedding games, and BGG is horrible for party games.

Top 10? 1) The 10 games you WANT TO PLAY the most/again? 2) The 10 you would take with you with a group to an isolated island for 5 years? 3) The top games based on the actually most played games (min/average on all inhabitants) in the world? I guess these three lists will differ...

I might've missed the part where you clarified this, but what site/tool did you use to compile the gallery? Is it a personal project of yours that is not yet released or an existing one? I would be glad to use it as well. Great video and insights, btw.

Good video. Was disappointed by the theory of fun book and its... well... theory of fun. I haven't read it, so I'm just going off your description. There are so many other things that contribute to "fun" in playing games than components related to skill/ability/challenge, depending on who you are - and of course that's the point of your video. For me, fun in games doesn't come from elements of skill/ability/challenge at all, but rather the experience of the game through its mechanics and emergent properties. As an example, I can play War of the Ring (solo - haven't found someone to play with) ad nauseum purely for the joy/fun of seeing a different story unfold every time. I really don't care whether I win or not, or whether I'm getting better at the game. I just want to see the saga play out and I really enjoy the unique mechanics of the game. The same is true for most games I play. For me that's the big disconnect with how most others view and rate games - I just want to experience them, and so many of the things that turn others off (like randomness) aren't a problem for me. Good video and totally agree with your premise on individual weightings of categories and cohorts of like-minded individuals.

Great points. The rating system on bgg is a weird system. Also it’s weird when people rate a kickstarter game when it’s not even out yet. Or rating it low because the publishers were bad at communication or deleting very late during the campaign. The point about thematic as a rating. Is interesting. I usually didn’t care much for thematics. Beige euro was my thing 😅. But theme is actually quite important when explaining and playing it game. The theme could really help you understand the mechanics of they make sense towards the theme. An example could be barrage. A quite heavy game. But the contracts, the placement of dams and conduits and what ever. Makes a lot a sense. So you understand that idea/theme from real life. A great support to understand the rules/mechanics. 😊

Just have ChatGPT clean that shit up and offer an alternative score that ignores stupid and useless comments.

I tried to evaluate my games, the dififculty came when I guessed the thematic about each of them. I agree with you ; some games don't need a strong thematic. Nevertheless, others ARE thematic game, the narrative ones and ones that are card driven. I think about Arkham Horror (V3 and LCG), Fortune&Gloy or Fallen Land. I do like the quality component of the games, I pimp mines.

When a reviewer rates a game they likely can say with little bias if its a good game or not. That is not what we all do on bgg. We dont rate if a game is good, we rate how fun it is for us. I dont think Terraforming Mars is objectively a 4. But its a boring thing for me cause ixhate economic euros so thats what it Got from me. Period.

Chess actually doesn’t expand the board. Chess board is 8x8 and checkers board is 10x10 But ok. You get to play on all squares on a chess board and not only half of them.

First you need to get people to not use completely different rating criteria. The recommended from BGG scale is not about game quality. It's about "How likely am I to play this game again" ... and a lot of people take that very seriously and rate games low just because they are too heavy for them. Others rate by game design quality - some times trying to be objective, other times not. And some rate a game 1 because the kickstarter was delayed ... and some rate it 10 to offset the stupid 1s ... In conclusion... you won't fix this.

I really appreciated the topic of this video, but as a gamer who primarily plays games for story theme and player interaction and not achieving some sort of mastery Flow State, I kind of bounced off the core premise.

I disagree pretty strongly with what you are saying here. I think that the BGG rating system works pretty well. The biggest strength of the BGG system is that you get a lot of votes. Making it more complicated to rate a game is only going to drastically decrease the amount of information we get. I also don’t like the idea of people insisting on rating a game using certain categories with different percentages as you show here. I don’t want people flattening their scores up or down toward 6 in some misguided attempt at objectivity. I hate it when people say things like “ I didn’t enjoy the game at all but clearly it’s a great design so I’ll give it a 7”. I want to know if you liked it, that’s pretty much it. You said you liked Cascadia better than Harmonies but then rate Harmonies higher… I really don’t like that. The mistake is thinking that the top 100 games should somehow be an accurate representation for any individual gamer of games that they will like. It’s like assuming that the IMDb user top 100 will be my favorite 100 movies. It’s just an aggregated list of things that people like and I quite enjoy that it exists. It’s a good way of quickly identifying major hits that you might have missed. If all that you saw was algorithm directed pushing you further and further into whatever sub genre you are already in, how would you ever try new things? I think you would actually be less likely to find something like a newfound appreciation for trick-taking games if you were fed everything by an algorithm. The Crew shooting up the top 100 not long after it was released helped that game get exposure and introduced trick taking to a lot of people who may not have been identified by an algorithm as the “target audience”. The key is to look at various different sources of information. Even on BGG the geek rating of a game is just one piece of the puzzle. You can set certain users with similar taste to yours as “geek buddies” and then see only their ratings. There are countless lists and rabbit holes that will take you off the beaten path and point out hidden gems. The there are countless resources on RU-vid, Facebook, discord, etc. that can give you more targeted recommendations and information including playthroughs of the games. If you bought a game solely because of its ranking on BGG and then don’t like it, that’s not because the ranking system is broken, it’s because you’re too lazy to find out if it’s a game for you or not.

Well... the person reviewing that gave a 4 to Ark Nova and Brass because they were "too complicated" is clearly at the tic-tac-toe stage

i found this 10 seconds cutting video super annoying. Cant you talk for a minute straight without 10 cuts in your own subject?