Analyzing Popular Table-Top Games
Sean B. Coates
Introduction
My wife and I share a causal interest in board games (the Ticket to Ride series likely being our favorite). After looking through some datasets on gaming in general, I thought it might be a fun idea to take a look at the table-top game industry.
With table-top games being a fully offline method of engaging with others, it's not as easy to just download statistical data. Industry professionals and enthusiasts have to be willing to spend the time to put the necessary information online publicly, and players have to be interested enough to engage with it. However, there is a great community of players out there wanting to discuss and support their favorite games.
Motivation
I thought I should ask some questions to see what comes back. What games are the most popular among players? What makes a game popular? Does being a popular table-top game correspond to being highly rated? Well, let's take a look at the data and see what it tells us.
For this project I am looking at just table-top games, meaning board games and card games are included in the data.
Data
I used data from the website Board Game Geek, the largest online community of table-top game enthusiasts. It has a lot of statistical data from users, such as ratings and rankings, both overall and within specified categories. It also contains detailed descriptions of the games, year it was published, their expansions (if any), mechanics, and more. The statistical data for the titles is always changing. This dataset I downloaded on January 15, 2024, so it's up-to-date for this project. I only worked with games that have at least 1,729 user ratings, as this is one standard deviation of all user ratings for every game on the website. This number was chosen because the median user ratings was 4, and a reasonably higher number is needed in order to prevent niche games from skewing the results, as well as to limit the influence of the website's own Bayesian average. The final dataset for this project contains 2,667 game titles (click here for full data cleaning). For the visualizations I used Tableau Public, which you can view and interact with here.
I organized my data down into a single table titled board_games. It has basic data on each game such as the name of the game, year it was first published, the publisher's suggested minimum and maximum play time, etc. Most games have game categories, and mechanics listed, but not all of them. Some games have expansions and their game families listed if they exist. The statistical data of the games shows an overall rank on the website, which is based on their rating: 0.1 to 10. This number is averaged from user ratings, and the number of ratings given is also recorded. Each game contains at least one rank position within a category of games, e.g. family games, war games, strategy games.
What are the Most Popular Table-Top Games?
If we take a look at the top 15 games with the most user ratings, we see a lot of familiar titles.
It's not surprising to me that every one of those games I recognize. They're likely all sitting on your local toy store shelf at this very moment, or you'll hear one of those names the next time someone recommends a board game. Though I'm curious to know if their popularity corresponds to their rating. Do those that rate the games tend to recommend them?
It seems like being popular doesn't necessarily mean being well liked. If we take a look at every single rating given to our data set, we find that 7 is the most common score given to games.
With this in mind, all of the most rated games do fair above average, but some of them only slightly (top rated CATAN barely hangs over the average at 7.1).
But what are the top rated games? The games that, according to enthusiasts (read: board game geeks), are the best ones.
This gives us 17 games instead of 15, because some are tied for the same rating. Interestingly, none of the most rated games appear in the list of top-rated games (The two Terraforming Mars titles are standalone games within the same series). Remember, this is only games with a minimum of 1,729 ratings. Maybe these games just have more niche and devoted followings, so their results are skewed by those that really know and play them. How many users are rating the most popular titles?
It seems my prediction was partly right. All but one of them have less than 10,000 ratings in total. Compare this to the most rated games, in which the minimum was 71,800 ratings. However, there are some recognizable names here: a Terraforming Mars series game, even Star Wars and Dune titles, all of which are large and recognizable IPs. There also doesn't seem to be any rule, with a varying number of thousands of vote differences spread across the games with no pattern. And how can we interpret a difference of a thousand ratings? Players need to have played a game, then go online and create an account at BoardGameGeek, and then leave a rating for the games they like and don't like. It's a completely voluntary community. So, does 1,000 votes on the website represent 5,000 individual players? 10,000 players? We really can't know, but we can assume that however many votes the game has is only a minimum possible number of players that have ever played that game.
What is the Most Popular Year for Table-Top Games?
Does the year a game is released have anything to do with its popularity? Looking at every release year of my dataset is pretty unhelpful for this part. Games like Chess and Tic-Tac-Toe were invented centuries ago. So, let's start with the 20th century, when the idea of the modern table-top games as we know them started to be published (Sorry!, Battleship, and Monopoly were published 1929, 1931, and 1935, respectively). Let's also narrow it down even more, only including years where there were at least 2 games published.
The first year where 2 or more games were published is 1949, but we can see that as we get closer to the 21st century, the number per year rises steadily, and then sky-rockets after 2000. It seems to peak in 2017, but this could merely just be due to time. These aren't video games on the Steam Store where players can login and immediately be shown the most recent titles and have a catalogue of every release. Someone needs to log the game in the website (usually the publisher), it needs to gain a following, and then users need to start giving it ratings. If we come back to this data in 5 years, we are likely to find different results.
Now let's look at the average number of user ratings given, as well as the average rating per year published.
A really curious result. There looks to be a very subtle increase in the rating as time goes on, but there is no correlation to the number of ratings given, i.e., popularity. There is a drop off in the number of ratings from the most recent years, but that can be easily explained by time as stated before. Those games just haven't had enough time to gain notoriety as their older counterparts.
What Goes Into a Popular Table-Top Game?
So what goes into a popular game? What makes a game well liked? How can I ensure that my board game gets up to the most rated games with Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne? For one it seems like a short, easy to remember title can't hurt, but a more descriptive title is likely to get you a higher rating.
Let's take a look at the data of the 15 most rated games, and see what we find.
The first thing that sticks out is that the top 2 most popular games are the oldest. That isn't surprising, but it is surprising that the other 13 games were all released after the year 2000. This could suggest that as interest in the medium, as well as table-top game publishing along with it, grows it's the newer games that are garnering the majority of that interest. It's not like a digital copy of a game where new keys can be created for each sale, the publishers have to invest in copies and then hope those copies sell. If they decide a game is aged out, then they'll stop printing and focus on the newer titles. That leaves older titles that didn't gain much popularity in their day to slowly fade until they become a collectible for niche fans.
Another important figure here is the weight of each game. The weight is an average, same as user ratings, of a community poll for the difficulty of the game. A weight closer to 0.01 is easier, and 5 is the most difficult. Another unsurprising find is that only 3 of these titles have a weight over 2.5, with the average of the 15 being 2.324. Clearly a game which is considered less than average difficulty is likely to garner more popularity, as it becomes more accessible to people.
The majority of these games only require a minimum of 2 players, and some a minimum of 1; however, only one of these games is a strictly 2 person game: 7 Wonders Duel. This is actually a standalone title from the 7 Wonders series, and the original game from the series is also on this list.
Most of the games also estimate less than an hour needed to play. Only Terraforming Mars found its way into the most popular titles with its 2 hour play time.
It doesn't surprise me that all of our most popular games have expansions and game families. This is expected, as the publisher wants to keep interest going. This isn't a cause of popularity, but instead a result of it.
The game mechanics are quite varied and we don't need to go into detail in this analysis; although, I would like to explore the categories, which give us a better idea of the theme or genre of the games.
Pandemic and the two Ticket to Ride titles sit in their own categories, so let's take a look at the other 12 and how often the category names are repeated. Here is a breakdown:
Abstract Strategy 1 Industry/Manufacturing 1 Ancient 2 Medical 1 Animals 2 Medieval 2 Card Game 6 Negotiation 1 City Building 3 Party Game 1 Civilization 2 Puzzle 1 Deduction 1 Renaissance 2 Economic 6 Science Fiction 2 Educational 1 Spies/Secret Agents 1 Environmental 1 Territory Building 3 Farming 1 Trains 2 Fighting 1 Word Game 1
There is quite the variety of games here; 24 different categories. Only 2 categories, Card Game and Economic, appear 6 times, the rest appear 3 or less, most of them once. Our most popular games are pretty varied in genre.
But what about the type of games? For example, are they strategy, war, or party games? Let's see if we can find a pattern here. The rank position isn't important for this analysis, we just want to look at what classification each game falls in, and a single title can fall into multiple board game types.
The first thing to notice are the null values. Not a single one of our top 15 are customizable, child, thematic, or war games. Only 2 games are classified as abstract or party games. So, in order to ensure your game reaches great popularity it should be either a strategy or family game, and even better if it’s both.
Conclusion
Being popular doesn't necessarily correlate to high ratings, but it's likely to lead to higher sales. Are players more welcoming to simpler, quicker games that don't fully engage? It seems like it. Table-Top game enthusiasts might want the deep, long form games that require a lot of information and multiple playthroughs to fully learn, but that's not most people. We like our family or not-to-complicated strategy games. Something I can show to guests for the first time and not have to spend half the night explaining the rules to, and doesn't then take the rest of the night to finish.
If you want to make a really popular table-top game, ensure that it's not too difficult, it has a minimum of 1 or 2 players, but not a maximum of 2, takes an hour or less to play, is an economic card game (maybe with one more theme as well), and is a strategy game for the whole family. Of course that's just one side of it. Great artwork, lots of marketing, and a big publisher doesn't hurt either.
The Terraforming Mars series looks to have found its own niche in the market. There is a sizable amount of table-top fans looking for longer-form, slightly more difficult than average strategy games, which can still be played by 1 or more people.
It's possible that the real answer here is that a game needs to be social. We play table-top games to connect with others. Dungeons and Dragons has had a massive following since the 1970s, and those games can last half a day. Maybe table-top enthusiasts aren't looking for simplicity or themes, just something everyone can enjoy together.