alternative rankings

Bias is a bit of an ugly word, isn’t it? It certainly has become one of those battle phrases in the culture war, where both sides of the argument accuse the other of forcing their biases onto society. Board game reviews frequently need to justify themselves for their biases affecting their views. Dan Thurot recently wrote a very eloquent piece on the matter, diving deeper into different kinds of biases. [Read More]

BoardGameGeek (BGG) users can select their country of residence in their profile. The main purpose is to find other users in your region to play face to face or maybe trade games, but but over here at Recommend.Games we obviously cannot help ourselves but to use this information for some interesting statistics. 🤓 Let’s start with the usual disclaimer: We will have to rely on whatever information BGG provides. In particular, users can freely choose their country. [Read More]

We have some pretty exciting news! 🤩 Since 2022-02-22, we’ve been using a new and improved ranking as the default sorting for our front page at Recommend.Games. … What do you mean, you haven’t noticed there’s a R.G ranking? You know, that thing that’s referenced in the statistics? … You haven’t ever opened that view?!? 😱 OK, let’s back up for a second. R.G’s primary purpose is a recommendation engine, that is, finding personalised game recommendations based on a user’s preferences (in this case as expressed through their BoardGameGeek ratings). [Read More]

TL;DR: BoardGameGeek calculates its ranking by adding around 1500-1600 dummy ratings of 5.5 to the regular users’ ratings. They called it their geek score, statisticians call it a Bayesian average. We use this knowledge to calculate some alternative rankings. I often describe BoardGameGeek (BGG) as “the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) for games”. Much like its cinematic counterpart, the biggest board game database not only collects all sorts of information obsessively, but also allows users to rate games on a scale from 1 (awful - defies game description) to 10 (outstanding - will always enjoy playing). [Read More]