Stats: Time and Categories in the past decades

I’ll continue a little on the data I collected from BGG. I just listened the latest On Board Games podcast titled The Evolution of Games, while I have different opinions on some things they said on the podcast it left me thinking about how games have changed.

There are two things that I want to shortly touch on this post. First is how the popularity of ranked games in BGG has changed over the years. I made the cutoff in the past 30 years as beyond that the ranked games total gets really small and fluctuations on the variability is huge from year to year beyond 1986. The only interesting thing beyond that year is a bump in the Science Fiction category that takes place between 1977 and 1983. Conincidentally, those are the years when Star Wars Episode IV: New Hope and Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi came out.

Anyhow, the list of the 10 most popular categories using the BGG data in the past 10 years (2014 – 2005) looks like this:

1. Card Game
2. Dice
3. Science Fiction
4. Fantasy
5. City Building
6. Zombies
7. Deduction
8. Fighting
9. Real-time
10. Civilization

The same list from years 1994 – 1985 look like this

1. Card Game
2. Collectible Components
3. Miniatures
4. Ancient
5. American Civil War
6. Action / Dexterity
7. Bluffing
8. Medieval
9. City Building
10. Word Game

Just looking at those list you can see that what we play today is very different from 30 years ago. Card game category is very stable across the years and should be. That category covers a lot of ground from single card deck games to Magic the Gathering and everything between and beyond using decks of cards.

Another thing that was talked about in the podcast was the length of games. Are we playing shorter and shorter game each year in average? The answer is yes. The average game time has been dropping steadily. I took the playing time of each ranked game and look them year by year.

The above graph shows the average playing time of a game from 1976 to 2015. A very noticeable decrease in playing time all through the years. Another persistant change I saw in the data is the what kind of games are ranked.

The blue line in the above graph is the percentage of games with playing time of 60 minutes or under, while the red line is the percentage of games with playing time over 60 minutes. It’s hard to represent this data beautifully but still detailed without proper education. However the following graph shows a little closer look through the years.

Blue bars are games with lenght under 20 minutes or fillers. Red bar is the light euro graph with playing time of 20 to 60 minutes. Green bar is the standard euro lenght of 60-120 minutes and the purple is games over 120 minutes. The most common set playing time in BGG is 45 min.

The boardgaming hobby is definately evolving and I’m happy to enjoy the ride. Each year brings a ton of new games to test. The downside of this is that games that would have been great a years ago are just good nowadays. I know I’m more picky now compared to when I started playing.

Stats: Mechanism pairs in ranked games in 2016

This theme is something I have done for the past five years. Why? That is a good question, and the answer is that because. I like stats, I like to see where our hobby is going. Is there some underlying trends that could be used in my designs. The last point was the starting point five years ago, but today I think that ideas for games must come naturally to you. If you force something you know that it will require a lot more work that a natural thing that you want to do and think about. The geeklists I made can be found here:

• Statistical study of game mechanisms (1990 – 2011). Trends in gaming (2011),
• The Lives of the Mechanic Pairs: Statistics about the mechanics in games (2012),
• Trends in gaming. Study of game mechanisms pairs (2013),
• Mechanism pairs and mechanism popularity through the years (2014).

I gathered the data using BGG1Tool (Check Nandeck out). All ranked games (no expansions) 1-10964 in the BGG database. This was done on the 2nd of July 2015 after the daily update. I’m making an assumption that if the game is not ranked it is not published. It can be a pnp game or a coming release. I know that there are ton of games that are not in the BGG database and there are games that while are published games will have a hard time gathering the 30 votes necessary to get ranked. There is also game with no mechanisms listed but even with these problems I find the following interesting and it is the best data freely available, thus I’m using it. Let’s start with going through total number of games. In the following graph years are in X-axis and ranked games per year on the Y-axis.Green line is 2015 data, red from 2014 and blue from 2013. This graph first shows that the rate of new ranked games to show up has stabilized. From 2013 to 2014 there were 475 new ranked games and from 2014 to 2013 it was 396. Another tidbit is that it takes 5 years to get most of the games ranked per year. I could argue that games that are going to be ranked from 2009 are now mostly there. A closer look into those games and their mechanisms reveal the most popular mechanism pairings from the 51 mechanisms and 1275 possible pairings BGG offers. The first number is the total games with that pairing, second is the increase from last year and the third is the position change compared to last year.

1. Dice Rolling & Hex-and-Counter (466) (+69) (-)
2. Dice Rolling & Variable Player Powers (414) (+73) (-)
3. Hand Management & Set Collection (352) (+59) (+1)
4. Hex-and-Counter & Simulation (336) (+6) (-1)
5. Card Drafting & Hand Management (319) (+61) (+1)
6. Hand Management & Variable Player Powers (302) (+57) (+2)
7. Dice Rolling & Hand Management (289) (+53) (+2)
8. Dice Rolling & Modular Board (288) (+33) (-1)
9. Dice Rolling & Simulation (269) (+6) (-4)
10. Area Movement & Dice Rolling (258) (+35) (-)
11. Dice Rolling & Roll / Spin and Move (210) (+22) (-)
12. Action Point Allowance System & Dice Rolling (207) (+28) (-)
13. Auction/Bidding & Set Collection (199) (+25) (-)
14. Modular Board & Variable Player Powers (196) (+27) (-)
15. Area Control / Area Influence & Hand Management (190) (+41) (-)
16. Card Drafting & Set Collection (171) (+33) (+4)
17. Dice Rolling & Set Collection (167) (+27) (+1)
18. Area Control / Area Influence & Dice Rolling (160) (+26) (+3)
19. Set Collection & Trading (159) (+10) (-3)
20. Roll / Spin and Move & Set Collection (156) (+13) (-3)
21. Modular Board & Tile Placement (153) (+13) (-2)
22. Dice Rolling & Point to Point Movement (147) (+26) (+2)
23. Hand Management & Modular Board (146) (+19) (-1)
24. Hand Management & Simultaneous Action Selection (143) (+25) (+2)
25. Area Control / Area Influence & Area Movement (140) (+22) (-)

Biggest rise is with the Area Control / Area Influence & Hand Management pairing. Games such as Rococo, La Granja or Nothing Personal belong in this category. The next two high risers are Card Drafting & Hand Management and Card Drafting & Set Collection. Slowest growth is with the Hex-and-Counter & Simulation pairing, only 6 new games ranked with this particular mechanism pair. The below graph shows the same data as above, the blue bar is all games from 2013, red bar adds games from 2014 and green from 2015. This graph is heavily influenced by the past when Wargames where more dominant. For comparison the first pair on the list (Dice Rolling + Hex-and-Counter) has only 82 ranked games in 2009-2014 and the rest 384 games before that. Euro games are rising steadily with Hand Management leading the pack. Interestingly, the older wargames are getting ranked in high numbers as the difference between this and last year ranked Dice Rolling + Hex-and-Counter games is +69. What about single mechanisms? Last year I calculated the possible uplift of a game mechanism by calculating the slope for it. So a single mechanism games divided with all ranked games per year. If the number is higher than previous years it is more popular. Slope is dependant on the range and I’m drawing a line to use only the last five years from this data. This means years 2009-2014. The five mechanisms that have most highest frequency to get ranked in the last five years are:

1. Hand Management
2. Variable Player Powers
3. Deck / Pool Building
4. Take That
5. Press Your Luck

The first two are obviously very popular mechanisms in todays games as they are also the two most common mechanisms last year. Hand Management has 187 games listed, while Variable Player Powers has 104 listed games. Deck / Pool Building has been on steady rise from 2008 (the year Dominion came out) but Take That and Press Your Luck are odd ones, for me at least. Take That for five last years has 4, 2, 8, 25 and 35 listed games which clearly is big rise. Lords of Waterdeep and Coup came out in 2012. Are those games influencing the “surge”? Press Your Luck has 6, 15, 32, 37, 27 ranked games from 2009 to 2014. The Adventurers and many dice games came out in 2009 and can be the reasons for this mechanism growth. Myself relate Press Your Luck with dice games and there are a lot of small dice games published in the last five years.

I will delve further into these mechanisms during this fall. I have planned a series of blog post focusing on a single mechanism. I’m going to call it “How to Begin Designing a (insert mechanism here) Game?”. The previous list can be the order I’m going through the mechanisms. I’ll try to write 1 or 2 post per month in this series. More about the series when the first, How to Begin Designing a Hand Management Game, comes out.

Look past the Past, what is Now is important!

I’m back again. My last post was two weeks ago and it is time to get back in the saddle. The last two weeks however have been really interesting as I have got the chance to meet and know my second son. Gaming wise, I have not played less boardgames in a month for over 6 years than in the just ended December. Only 12 rounds played, last time I played around 12 games per month was when I was on our honeymoon in 2011.

Anyhow, this post will be about the past. It is mostly for myself to get this data somewhere but it also introduces my gaming habits to you. I have recorded games about 6½ years now so I’m lookin back and see how my gaming life has changed. Everything is based on the following chart.

In the chart above the Blue line is the unique games I played per yer. The Red line is the total amount of games I played during that particular year and the Green line is the ratio of unique/total. Just looking at the chart I can say that year 2014 had characteristics from previous years. I played 285 unique games, figure similar to 2013 but played 384 times similarly than in year 2012. The worst thing is that while I play a lot of games I have less and less repeat plays, if you take my most played game “Unpublished Prototype” the numbers are lower than those. For year 2014 w/o prototype plays it was 1,14.

The reason is simple for this. My son was born in September 2013 and after that I haven’t had the time to play as much as I wanted. The months prior this were few of my best months in gaming. All because we had time to play with my wife. However, I’m not complaining, I still get to play board games, and I now have to handsome sons.

I want to play, I want to play new games and that really shows. For a game to hit the table it really needs to be good, well there are some games with my wife that she likes more than me. In year 2014 the only games I played five or more times were Tichu and Glass Road. Tichu I really love and there are several gaming groups that I can play that with and Glass Road was a wife game.

My goal for this year is to play games more casually. Don’t worry about the numbers and try to get back enjoying games, play great games more and try to get another publishing deal. Attend Ropecon and Essen, visit my friends in Kuopio and play games with them. Keep blogging. Start introducing game-like activities to my first son and enjoy the time I get to spend with the family.

Stats: Game Mechanism Through the Years

Finally I dragged myself to back to the excel-file and got something interesting out of it. In a previous blog post I browsed through the most common mechanisms pairs and found out that the top three pairs are pretty much linked to War games.

1. Dice Rolling & Hex-and-Counter
2. Hex-and-Counter & Simulation
3. Dice Rolling & Variable Player Powers

War games have a 20 year headstart over Eurogames so the results are reasonable. Of course all games with those mechanisms are not war games but in broadly speaking it just might be true. However, when you start looking at individual mechanisms there is some observations about the state of play seen. While the most common single mechanism of ranked games is Dice Rolling the second common is Hand Management. I’m no expert on war games but I usually tend to group Hand Management with Euros. Additionally the third common mechanisms is Hex-and-Counter but an early bloomer in Euros can be found at number four, Set Collection.

Blue is all games with a particular mechanisms. Red is the increase from 2013 geeklist per particular mechanism. The top 10 risers percentage wise are: (difference between years 2014&2013 / year 2013 results)

1. Player Elimination (151%)
2. Take That (97%)
3. Time Track (78%)
4. Deck / Pool Building (75%)
5. Grid Movement (65%)
6. Press Your Luck (39%)
7. Worker Placement (31%)
8. Action / Movement Programming (30%)
9. Storytelling (27%)
10. Card Drafting (22%)

To find out what mechanism is really rising in popularity we need another viewpoint. Here is how I have done it. Divide the sum of a particular mechanism with the Sum all mechanisms per year. This gives you a point how popular each mechanism has been in a particular year. Then calculate the Slope for each mechanism to see if it has gained or losed interest in the gamers eyes.

Above chart is just an example what kind of data I’m handling. It is interesting to see that from 1999 to 2002 many mechanisms were equal in the respect of getting ranked but then the lines differentiate quite a lot. Is that because we as gamers found out popular themes and publishers started to print them out by the thousands.

I made four different Slope calculations, first from the past 20 years, 2nd for 15 years, then 10 and finally last 5 years. The mechanisms with biggest Slope values are:

20 Years

1. Hand Management
2. Card Drafting
3. Area Control / Area Influence
4. Worker Placement
5. Dice Rolling

15 Years

1. Hand Management
2. Dice Rolling
3. Card Drafting
4. Worker Placement
5. Deck / Pool Building

10 Years

1. Worker Placement
2. Deck / Pool Building
3. Area Control / Area Influence
4. Card Drafting
5. Hand Management

5 Years

1. Deck / Pool Building
2. Variable Player Powers
3. Worker Placement
4. Press Your Luck
5. Co-operative Play

Finally I got something tangible out of the data. Looking at those lists I concur that those are popular mechanisms in todays games. Do you agree with me?

Stats: Mechanism pairs in ranked games

This is my fourth year with the mechanism pairs of games. I have previously made three geeklist about this on BGG;

• Statistical study of game mechanisms (1990 – 2011). Trends in gaming (2011),
• The Lives of the Mechanic Pairs: Statistics about the mechanics in games (2012),
• Trends in gaming. Study of game mechanisms pairs (2013).

So what is this all about? I’m interested what kind of games are popular or gaining popularity among the players. I like to look for trends on what types of games are coming or going. This also fuels my designs as I look at the mechanism pairs and try to come up with something new.

I gathered the date using BGG1Tool (Nandeck is really nice tool for this and prototyping also) to gather all the ranked games 1-9865 in the BGG database. This was done on the 1st of July 2014 after update.

From these using excel I combined the all the possible mechanism pairs to give different types of games and then checked on last years list to see which types are getting ranked.

Getting ranked is a metaphorical implementation of a published game. I know it isn’t so and BGG favors designers games but that data is available so that is what I’ll use. Also I know that there are many many games with no listed mechanisms or just one (Caylus) and therefore there is little ambiguity how useful this data is but in my mind two mechanisms represent games better as whole than just one.

There are 51 mechanisms (or mechanics as BGG puts it) listed. Pairing them up gives us the following results. I’ll show just the first 25 matched pairs as the whole list of 1275 pairs is little overwhelming.

1. Dice Rolling & Hex-and-Counter (397 total games) (+54 games from 2013)
2. Dice Rolling & Variable Player Powers (342) (+67)
3. Hex-and-Counter & Simulation (330) (+22)
4. Hand Management & Set Collection (293) (+47)
5. Dice Rolling & Simulation (263) (+44)
6. Card Drafting & Hand Management (258) (+51)
7. Dice Rolling & Modular Board (255) (+37)
8. Hand Management & Variable Player Powers (246) (+59)
9. Dice Rolling & Hand Management (236) (+52)
10. Area Movement & Dice Rolling (223) (+27)
11. Dice Rolling & Roll / Spin and Move (188) (+20)
12. Action Point Allowance System & Dice Rolling (179) (+33)
13. Auction/Bidding & Set Collection (174) (+13)
14. Modular Board & Variable Player Powers (169) (+31)
15. Area Control / Area Influence & Hand Management (149) (+41)
16. Set Collection & Trading (149) (+17)
17. Roll / Spin and Move & Set Collection (143) (+14)
18. Dice Rolling & Set Collection (140) (+18)
19. Modular Board & Tile Placement (140) (+26)
20. Card Drafting & Set Collection (138) (+29)
21. Area Control / Area Influence & Dice Rolling (134) (+21)
22. Hand Management & Modular Board (128) (+24)
23. Hand Management & Tile Placement (126) (+20)
24. Dice Rolling & Point to Point Movement (121) (+14)
25. Area Control / Area Influence & Area Movement (118) (+17)

I’ll keep this weeks post short. So here is one graph for this week and the rest of “analysis” will follow next week when I have more time.

Graph 1. Years in X-axis and ranked games per year on the Y-axis.

The year is the publish year of particular game according to BGG. The graph nicely demonstrates the growth of the interest in board games. We might be at a saturation now. Meaning that unless more people come to the hobby we don’t have the time to play more games (get them ranked).