Boardgaming in 2018!

Lost and loved my first game of Keyforge! Games I enjoy losing get slotted right into my play this again soon category!

I cannot compare it to MtG. I have a lifelong resentment of MtG thanks to it displacing Warhammer Fantasy Battles in my teenage gaming club. Years of enjoying marching miniatures across varied battlegrounds, rolling buckets of die for attacks, guessing ranges for war machine volleys, herding squigg hoppers & hoping that my Snotling Pump Cart would hurry up was replaced by all these flat & lifeless cards in the space of a few months after the initial release. Damn you MtG!

Anyhoo, for someone that loves card games but who dislikes and mostly lacks the time and inclination to design decks the ‘every pack is a unique deck’ feature is hugely welcome. Quick to learn, quick to play and feels like there is sufficient depth to the tactical choices available from turn to turn. Decks may well not be balanced but the mirror match format (play a game, swap decks, aggregate scores between the pair of games) is an effective solution.

This article is pretty fascinating. The author does a regression fix to correct the BGG top 100 for its complexity bias and produces a new top 100. The resulting list seems fairly reasonable to me. (Except that Gloomhaven is still near the top.)

It pushes Pandemic Legacy to #1 and Railways ofnthe World our of the top 100, so those are big negatives to me.

However it does a good job with lighter games that are quite enjoyable. I am 100% ok with Codenames at 2, King of Tokyo in the 30s, and Sushi Go and Love Letter in the top 20. Games I think defininitely fall afoul of the BGG hive mind.

That Uwe Rosenburg in particular gets downgraded from ‘best thing evar’ to ‘generally good’ is also nice.

Sheesh. Even when corrected for bias, Gloomhaven is massively overrated.

Nah, it’s perfect at #1.

Yeah, BGG should have a “fiddliness” rating, referring to setup, takedown, and rules explanation time, and how much manipulation of little cardboard and wooden pieces you have to do during play. On a scale of 1 to 10, Gloomhaven would be a 98.

It’s a nonsensical analysis that basically assumes its conclusion. You simply can’t apply this kind of “unbiasing” without knowing anything about what the actual populations are. Nor can you do it just along one dimension. For example it’s well known that BGG ratings vary widely by country. And for obvious reasons, American users have a disproportionate representation on the site. Should votes also be weighted by country?

On another note, that list is total garbage given the author’s with that it should be an approachable recommendation list for non-gamers. If you wanted a list like that, it’d be much more appropriate to just restrict BGG’s list to family games:

https://boardgamegeek.com/familygames/browse/boardgame

Huh, I didn’t even know that was part of the site. And it’s a pretty good list. Indeed, better than the article’s one for recommendations to non-gamers. I don’t know though, who decides what’s a family game?

Also, I’m no statistician, and you’re way more qualified to comment on this stuff than I am. I’ve spent many many hours playing Terra Mystica on your site, and your analysis there is pretty fascinating to read. But if I notice a correlation–say tall people tend to have longer feet–I can plot height vs. foot length on a graph, determine an average trend, then look for outliers against that trend. Someone could have long or short feet for their height. I think that’s all the article is saying: this is a list of the games that are highest games above the score vs. complexity trendline. Am I off base? I would actually like to see a chart that shows games that are disproportionately liked or disliked by non-Americans.

From Pax Unplugged, highly recommend Catch the moon

It’s part of the game’s metadata, which is user-editable but moderated. (See the “classification” box on the game page, and click on the little pen icon). All of the metadata tends to be pretty decent quality, since this is exactly the kind of taxonomical task that appeals to a certain subset of gamers. Except the 18xx family, that’s a total mess since publishers want to insist on putting their non-18xx games there :)

Oh, the correlation is definitely there. Though I think the confounding factor of very old games that are both light and universally agreed to be crap is affecting the curve fit, making it steeper than it should be. Given the author identified that problem, they probably should have adjusted for it e.g. by having a cutoff date.

But… The author didn’t stop at just observing a correlation. They decided that it expressed a bias, that the bias came from the BGG user population not matching the general population, and then tried to adjust for that bias to create a “true” list. That’s like saying that the 2018 US elections were biased in favor of the Democrats, making some sort of regression fit to unbias the data, and then declaring that actually the Republicans would have won if the voters weren’t biased. But expressing a preference is the whole point of voting, not a bias that should be corrected!

So let’s say that the actual goal is to use the BGG user population’s preferences to figure out what the general population’s preferences would be. And let’s accept the hypothesis that BGG users are biased toward heavy games and the general population toward light games. Well, the general population is 100x or 1000x larger! Then it makes no sense to try to make the effect of weight be neutral. You’d need actively penalize heavy games, since the opinion of a normal person should count for 100x that of a boardgame enthusiast.

Just controlling for the weight in isolation though? I have no idea of how to interpret that data in any useful way.

This is the one I was thinking of: top 50 games in top 13 countries with bonus (but see also the one with a fewer ggames but a table of correlations between countries: Top 15 games in top 13 countries)

Not aware of anything newer, though it seems like the kind of thing that somebody would have repeated.

Maaaaybe a 6, tops. You clearly haven’t played the really fiddly games.

I love Gloomhaven! Can’t wait to play again, where does that rate? Heh, no matter how you form a list someone isn’t going to like it. We should be getting a whole bunch of top 2018 insert anything lists about now too.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/262941/dominant-species-marine
How the h*ll did I not know that this was a thing?
Can’t wait to try it out.

Indeed! It’s on the GMT P500 list, so I am not sure if it will come out in 2019: https://www.gmtgames.com/p-738-dominant-species-marine.aspx

Since my wife and I didn’t lug 20 pounds of Gloomhaven with us to France, we took the much more travel friendly One Deck Dungeon. We just completed a campaign with 2 characters. I think we beat the 6 bosses in 8 games.

Once we got a couple of perks through the campaign experience the game got unexpectedly easy. We killed the minotaur in 2 turns. I think that was because our classes were kind of tailored for that boss. It almost makes me wonder if we inadvertently cheated, but I don’t think we did.

Does the expansion add any new mechanics to the game that make it a bit more interesting?

I’m looking forward to getting back to Gloomhaven in about a month.

Done goofed and played One Night Ultimate Werewolf.

Worst “game” ever. Definitely not my thing at all.

No345

I sometimes bristle when people call those things games. I really enjoy them, but that kind of social deduction stuff feels more like a party activity than a game, at least in the sense that most boardgamers use “game”.

-Tom

I played some games at the Toronto Area Boardgaming Society Convention yesterday.

1889: A print and play 18XX, set in Japan. Supposedly very close to 1830, but with a smaller bank and a more compact map with a lot of mountain spaces. I managed to stay just ahead of the curve on the train rush, and managed to eke out a win. I liked it, but I think I prefer the “nicer” 18XXes.

Minerva: Surprised to find that this hasn’t been mentioned here on Qt3. This is my type of game; you build an engine, then run it. You build your city by buying tiles, but in order to get the effects of most buildings you have to place one of your limited residential buildings that runs everything in a line from it until it hits another residential building. Each round you can also buy an assistant that will let you run a residential building a second time. Plus there’s a lot of tiles that do special stuff, and a supply of temples that adds point. Writing this out it sounds very dry, but I think this is the tableau/engine builder game I’ve enjoyed the most in quite a while. In some ways it reminds me of Uchronia and similar games, but I much prefer having a set number of rounds like in Minerva.

Tulipmania 1637: Speculation on bubbles is fun, and incredibly topical in these crypto-currency times. A really clean and quick market game. Also, the wooden tulips look like Pacman Ghosts when you turn them upside down.

Try Dont mess with Cthulhu instead. I really like the twists they put on social deduction.

I will admit that I just jumped to the list without reading, but man this list is even more terrible than the BGG list.