The BGG Scoring System Explained

Board Game Geek and at the top is a BG top 100 games of all time but what does it even mean to be a groomhaven or a brass Birmingham wait I Feel Like Glue Maven has been at the top for a long time oh but then one of my favorite games has such a high average rating but a terrible overall rating well all the board game Geeks scoring Mumbo jumbos confused me for quite some time too so I rolled up my sleeves got good with the calculations and can finally explain it real quick rating games of organ geek is pretty simple you got a ratio from 1 to 10 to pick from it's actually quite similar to our Shelf size scoring system right here 10 is oh my God I love this one is uh well defies description of a game clearly broken and we'll get back to this but then these numbers aren't like your Amazon reviews and just simply averaging out the values from people because like one of my favorite two-player card games of all time is ranked 12 000 and that can't be right but then that also does make sense look at all the who the heck knows about these games that technically have the highest scores on the website rather we must use some mumbo jumbo formula calculations for something I did some research on called a geek score now this uses a formula called a Bayesian average yep I told you it was going to be geeky essentially this tries to average out the numbers in a supposedly more useful Way by adding fake boats or dummy votes to every single game what do the fake votes do they always vote the game average or 5.5 out of 10. if no human votes on the game the game is a 5.5 geek score rating but then as people slowly vote more and more on the game the result drifts away from my 5.5 to a new value so even if you hate the game so much when it just came out and rated A 1 out of 10 the game doesn't immediately drop to a 1 out of 10. rather that's just a very tiny blip that's averaged out with a bunch of 5.5 votes obviously when a bunch of people vote 1 out of 10 then the geek scores starts drifting that way formula for this geek score it is this bam look at all that math stuff we actually know everything here from either BGG itself or from the average of 5.5 we just don't know the number of dummies after doing some research and plugging in numbers myself this seems to be about 1450. the exact number seems to change a bit depending on the game whatever Beach G is doing in their back end but this is right enough for the purpose of this video sweet so now all we need is a game gloomhaven let's go add up everyone's score ratings that's a big number 465 932 then we got number of ratings wow that's actually a lot of gloomhaven campaigns at 53 504 so then we have two big numbers over each other do the math and 8.62 wow that's actually really close for not knowing the exact number of dummies let's try another example this random family game called Flame Rouge Flom Rouge hopefully I'm saying that right add up your total scores plug in the total votes send divide and yep 7.336 compared to the actual geek score pretty darn close try it out for yourself here's the formula again just kidding no pressure to do that it's actually a little bit annoying to do but really cool to know about so now that we know how the score Works let's play around with it a bit like say there's a super duper new hyped game that came out and there's 1450 votes of a 10 out of 10 without even playing the game for some reason so what happens to the geek score with this system well that lands us with a 7.75 geek score which lands Us in the BG top 50 between Maracaibo and on Mars and that was with only 1 450 votes of a 10 out of 10 to get so high on the BGG top 100 this leads us to our first concern with this geek score system AKA Bayesian averages which is it might not actually be giving enough dummy votes this current dummy value of about 1450 is supposed to be based on how big BG is that is how many accounts there are but then what happens when a super high my Kickstarter is going on and people are really really excited for it and start rating it a 9 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10 even before the game comes out look you can't rate it 10 out of 10. always will play because uh the game itself doesn't really exist only the campaign does you can't play it that's how you get tainted Grail the fall of Avalon a game firmly in the top 100 but when you keep playing the game past the first couple of chapters you realize that the actual palettes and implementation of surviving is kinda doggy doo-doo it's worrying that maybe someone is just so hyped for the game and then plays it once to confirm their fake type rating of a 10 out of 10 and so they don't change their score and then move on to other things their final score for tanza Grill the fall of Avalon is a 10 out of 10 which is incredibly misleading for someone looking for a Sally designed game maybe as crowdfunding through Kickstarter and gamefallon becomes more of a popular way to get games unpublished games could just not have geek scores or prevent voting altogether if you're spending 300 bucks on a game as opposed to normally like 60 bucks maybe you're more likely to feel polarized about it so a 10 out of 10 or a 1 out of 10 is your final vote maybe voting Tendencies can continue down this weird path because you have people also voting a game a one out of 10 even before they played it because they're trying to balance out the 10 out of 10. uh yeah I mean I get what you're trying to do but like do you think this game broken no you have this other weird agenda Here Also let's clarify that BGG rankings because these might be kind of confusing if you've come from any sort of school which says that uh six out of ten that's like 60 that's a D minus man that means garbage you're almost failing whereas actually a six out of 10 means okay game some fun or challenge at least will sporadically play it if in the right mood that also brings us to some pretty inconsistent times when people vote some people only play a game once like a learning game and then rate the game others insist on playing game multiple times who can tank the score because you're unhappy with how the game was delivered to you or how the company handles its Kickstarter campaign is everyone voting a game based off the actual Board Game Geek system or are they using their own made up criteria because I've seen plenty of glowing reviews that gave a 4 out of 10. are they saying they just didn't like it but think it's a good game or how about how BGG rankings or How likely you are to play the game again but if you beat a campaign game are you likely to play the game again are people voting whether or not they think it's a soundly well-designed game or whether or not they enjoy it maybe there should be two scores like a more objective one and a more subjective one like how shelf side does it you've probably heard about the movie website IMDb which also applies Momo jumbo to their movie review averages to get a final score movie scoring has its own weirdness but at the end of the day a movie is just something you watch whatever moving pixels and sounds you are encountering are exactly the same as everyone else going back to board game games board games are weird man like they're just pieces of cardboard moving around with certain rule sets and being games means that they can often be made to play in different player counts or don't even show their true colors at first but then you have people rating multiplayer Centric board games based off only solo plays or solo Centric board games rated only on multiplayer sessions or maybe you rate it after playing it once with the wrong rules because maybe the rulebook is too confusing but the game is actually sound let's think about the general board game experience too where you have to buy the game for a decent chunk of change and then bring it home open it up punch out all the pieces and then you have to read the rules and then set the game up and then find friends willing to play with you and teach it to them this is quite a bit of work so chances are if you don't think you'll like a game then you're probably not going to ever play it this is why some more expensive long games would never get raided by people who would never play a game like that because of someone who didn't like negotiation area control somehow got persuaded to spend six hours playing ti4 chances are they would rate it pretty low this makes so many big games from Star Wars rebellion Geyer project and Eclipse just tend to not have a lot of middling or low ratings whereas for a movie even if you think you won't like it there's a chance you could be persuaded into watching it since it doesn't take any effort to learn you can even hate watch movies you can't really hate watch board games at least the ones that are fillers because they take just so much more work to do as a thing like I am a board game reviewer in title that's played a ton of board games but I've played less than half of the BGG top 100 I just don't have that much time board games having this inherent barrier really uplifts ratings of second editions or re-implementations of games if you liked the game previously you'll probably play the new version and also rate it highly probably higher than before since it's an updated game if if you didn't like it before you're just probably not going to bother with it so you don't have an actual rating of the game this is the pandemic Legacy dominating this top 100 list Clank Legacy really high at only under 7 000 votes or even the Standalone expansion of dominion Dominion entry making the top 100 over base Dominion which is what people know Dominion before Oh and then Great Western Trail and Eclipse all show up twice on this list and this revised Agricola is on the list as well as the original why are these games allowed to take up so many spots and we know that BGG sometimes does disqualify games like Mage Knight having a super high geek score for its ultimate version that is listed as not applicable for the BGG top 100 rating so does this mean all ultimate editions of games are disqualified uh that doesn't seem to be the case who is making these decisions what is the consistency mods please then maybe votes on digital plays of games should be disqualified because uh blue behaven digital I know it's good but that's not really the Box board game experience or maybe just maybe at the end of the day some people just got tired of voting low on games so there's a sort of raiding inflation I can't really say for sure there's just so many weird things that can happen with voting to round it all out not every board gamer uses Board Game Geek I mean here at shelf side we own quite a bit of games okay but we don't really rate anything on Board Game Geek I have my high school scores on the website and Daniel doesn't use it at all for scoring maybe there could be a way for Board Game Geek to encourage people to vote on games they own that is games they own that are published so you don't get weird Kickstarter hype for all this criticism the BGG top 100 is still a pretty solid assessment on what games are popular sure we have concerns on certain voting habits or implementations of voting on unpublished games but there's still a certain quality in quantity of votes even if BGG is far from a reflection of all board gamers out there popularity still means the game got a ton of 9 out of 10 or 10 out of 10 votes to override the dummy votes and that activity is worth checking out the way this final geek score gets actualized though is funny C bloodrage at 41 000 votes versus the crews deep sea at 8500 voltage which are both games handily in the top 50. use that quantity as a huge point of interest if you're already looking at games at a glance if you're new to the Hobby it's good to be wary of groupthink but to also go in with an open mind to see what popular games may end up aligning with your tastes but the relevance of this BGG top 100 is here to stay after all the most popular board game website shows this list when you click all board games and you used to be able to clearly see the BGG top 10 when you went to the huge board game subreddit though when they took this list off I I have no idea when they did when basically what I'm trying to say is that it's cool to know how the BGG geek score system works and its limitations it's really up to you the board game connoisseur to read and watch reviews to figure out what really works for you that is keep watching shelf slide for more reviews on board games I see what I did there this whole video just kind of came full circle for shelf side yeah thanks for watching the video as always let me know what you think maybe you have more thoughts on BGG as a whole thanks to our patrons yeah over here thank you guys so much for making videos like this possible and then we got a little uh sneak peek for you guys that I am working on a really big Isis Vanguard review that is I am playing the game a lot to see how the campaign goes so yeah excited for that one and also thank you to our mad lots of cardboard right here over there yeah yeah remember to like com subscribe yeah any more ideas on how to improve BGG is always a good idea

Channel: Shelfside

Views: 52,574

Keywords: tabletop, shut up and sit down, dice tower, boardgamegeek, geek and sundry, no pun included, watch it played, prozd board game, dicebreaker, rahdo runs through, actualol, jongetsgames, 3 minute board games, tom vasel, before you play, susd, quackalope, boardgameco, our family plays games, rolling solo, gloomhaven, bgg top 100 solo games, bgg top 100 strategy games, boardgamegeek top 10, top 100 board games of all time, Brass Birmingham, boardgamegeek brass birmingham, bgg top 100, bgg

Id: UqFvEzhjSfI

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2022