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fun with BGG URLs, part II (AKA the games we actually play)

Posted by Dave Ross

04 Jun 2011

Dave Ross

(ddgdrs)

United States
Ames
Iowa

Note: this was also posted on my blog, playing and designing board games.

Okay, so I’ve been playing a bit more with the “plays” data on BGG. I went through and looked at the top 20 games from the years 2003 to 2010, sorted by the number of unique players. In other words, which games had the most unique players each year?

When I tried to track each game until it fell out of the top 100, all I got was this rather uninteresting and fairly linear mess:

I then decided to take a page out of László K‘s book and just include the top twenty games each year. The graph is both more interesting and more readable:

So what is this exactly? Take a look at 2003: there should be 20 games along that line. The ones that take up the most vertical space had the most unique players that year. Same for all the other years. If a game persists across the entire graph (quite an achievement), this means that the number of unique players for that game has been in the top 20 on BGG from 2003 to 2010.

Looking at the number of unique players of a game gives you an idea of its popularity; if a game remains popular for a long time, it’s probably a fairly good game.

So what games stand out? Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico, Power Grid, Lost Cities, Citadels, Carcassonne, and Bohnanza. But look also at the big impact Agricola, Dominion, Pandemic, and Race for the Galaxy have had.

Some years you get a bunch of new games cracking the top twenty; other years it all stays pretty much the same. 2004 saw the introduction of both TtR and Power Grid, while 2008 saw the introduction of both Stone Age and “the big four” above.

Edited: added link to my blog, added end parenthesis.

10 Comments

Sat Jun 4, 2011 5:04 pm

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R S

(Runcible Spoon)

United States

Wow. That is really a fascinating visualization.

Thanks for doing the work behind this and sharing the results.

I don't entirely agree with (and this might be nit-picky) this statement "if a game remains popular for a long time, it’s probably a fairly good game."

I am not sure that "popularity" = "Good" (although it could be one competing definition of a 'good game' but there are other potential definitions as well) but the rest of your post, especially your graphs, are very interesting indeed.

Thanks again for sharing, so have a thumbsup

and some

Posted Sat Jun 4, 2011 6:03 pm
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Giles Pritchard

(caradoc)

Australia
Shepparton
Victoria

I think the interesting thing is that it's based on unique plays recorded for the game. So I found it interesting to see the games that have been released, then played steadily since that point - I think they're, for the most part, pretty solid game designs. This would be fascinating to revisit in 10 years time!

Cheers,

Giles.

Edit: It's also interesting to see that, while there are certainly plenty of 'flash-in-the-pan' style games, that come, are played heavily, then fade. There are also plenty of games that have been played heavily and consistently for a good while.

Edited Sat Jun 4, 2011 6:11 pm
Posted Sat Jun 4, 2011 6:09 pm
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Dave Ross

(ddgdrs)

United States
Ames
Iowa

Runcible Spoon wrote:

I don't entirely agree with (and this might be nit-picky) this statement "if a game remains popular for a long time, it’s probably a fairly good game."

I am not sure that "popularity" = "Good" (although it could be one competing definition of a 'good game' but there are other potential definitions as well) but the rest of your post, especially your graphs, are very interesting indeed.

Yeah, that part of it is pretty iffy. I mean, if we were looking at a fifty- or hundred-year time frame, then I think it would be fair to say that a game remaining that popular for that long would have to have something going for it. But eight years isn't really long enough.

.... thinking ....

Then again, Monopoly has been popular for around 80 years, and I don't think many people in this community (myself included) would want to argue that it's a "good" game based on that. Best to say then that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and leave it at that. These games, though, have been quite popular.

Posted Sat Jun 4, 2011 9:27 pm
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R S

(Runcible Spoon)

United States

ddgdrs wrote:

Then again, Monopoly has been popular for around 80 years, and I don't think many people in this community (myself included) would want to argue that it's a "good" game based on that. Best to say then that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and leave it at that. These games, though, have been quite popular.

Yes, agreed, popular among BGG'ers for sure.

Thanks for the considerate response and thumbsup

so here is a thumbsup

back at you

Edited Sat Jun 4, 2011 9:56 pm
Posted Sat Jun 4, 2011 9:51 pm
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R S

(Runcible Spoon)

United States

This chart does remind me (a little bit) of this famous map of Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

http://cartographia.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/napoleons-invas...

Edited Sat Jun 4, 2011 9:56 pm
Posted Sat Jun 4, 2011 9:55 pm
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it's pronounced "em cee crispy"

(mccrispy)

United Kingdom
Basingstoke
Hampshire

Of course a game that is played by a lot of people over an extended period is a "good" game - it has achieved the aims of its designers, publishers and (arguably) purchasers. There's a tendency to snobbishness and elitism in the responses that imply that something that is popular is not "good" and that these two labels are mutually exclusive. I might be persuaded that we're arguing the toss about the difference between "successful (popular)" and "purist" (popular with "serious" gamers) in the same way that people argue about pop music and "serious" (artform) music. In my opinion these are pointless categories. I might choose to avoid pop music because it offends my sensibilities in a number of ways, but that would be true of some artform genres too (notably free jazz). Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder; as a previous poster pointed out.

If one wished to really assess longevity in a game, one could extend this awesome piece of work to include some measure of repeat playing. Assess not just unique plays per year, but also whether a unique player also played again the next year (my analysis skills can't hack how to represent this). I think this would smooth out some of the "commercially popular" bias (where a game sells a lot of units, but nobody plays for more than a year before moving on). That would be interesting, but still wouldn't really help define a "good" game, just whether a game "has legs" (a different form of "success") - if you believe those are different things.

Posted Sun Jun 5, 2011 1:44 pm
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Nick N

(nine9ths)

United States
San Leandro
California

Smashing data analysis. Would love to see similar charts for the various subdomains.

Posted Tue Jun 7, 2011 3:13 am
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Ken Bush

(klbush)

United States
West Linn
Oregon

I think another factor in the people playing is the length of the game. Shorter games will tend to hit the chart a little higher than longer games just due to the opertunity issue.

Posted Sat Jul 2, 2011 5:31 am
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Travis Worthington

(T Worthington)

United States

California

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