Board Game Rankings

As a kid, I played plenty of board games. Snakes and ladders, ludo, Chinese checkers, chess, Scotland Yard and Monopoly. In the age of the Internet, of course, there are sites to rank your favorite board games. Like BoardGameGeek.

Oliver Roeder wrote an article after checking out the site. The best game? It’s called Twilight Struggle. I’d never heard of it! Then again, I’ve not played board games for a long, long time.

Note that despite the name the site includes card games and pencil-and-paper games like Tic-Tac-Toe (also called Noughts and Crosses). Which, by the way, is the lowest ranked game on the site. At 10,505^th place (I’m betting you didn’t know that there are that many games to rank! Me neither). It’s easy to understand why Tic-Tac-Toe is bottom of the heap:

“It’s a solved game — if both players are above the age of roughly 5, the game ends in a draw.”

And yet everyone of us has played Tic-Tac-Toe. Why? Here’s Roeder’s answer:

“Tic-tac-toe represents a first foray into strategy and game theory — however simple — for many children. That’s not a bad thing.”

So what are the characteristics of the worst board games?

“The worst games, for the most part, have one thing in common: luck. They’re driven by it, often exclusively.”

The surprise to me was Monopoly: turns out it’s part of the “hall of shame” of board games! But Monopoly’s isn’t all luck; it involves choices and decisions (to buy or not to buy, that is the question), right? Hell, there are even Monopoly tournaments around the world. So how come it ranks so low?

“It suffers from problems that most game designers nowadays try to avoid. First, players can be eliminated. This is no fun — unless, of course, the eliminated player finds something better to do than play Monopoly — and games are meant to be fun. Second, there is often a runaway leader. Someone can snap up a juicy monopoly early on, and that quickly becomes that. The rest of the game is pro forma and boring. And games aren’t meant to be boring. Third, there is what’s known to game designers as a kingmaking problem. A losing player can often choose, typically via a lopsided trade of properties, who wins the game. This is also no fun and negates whatever skill was required to begin with.

Oh, and it also takes a really long time to play.”

Here’s Roeder’s take on why the low ranked games are also the ones almost everyone has played at some point or the other:

“These “bad” games are cultural touchstones. Through whatever quirks of history, culture and commerce, these are our first games.”

Amen to that.