Debiasing the BoardGameGeek ranking

 Posted on September 20, 2024  |  14 minutes  |  2786 words  |  Markus Shepherd

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  Debiasing  ranking  rating  alternative rankings 

What was the best year for board games?

The highest rated years on BoardGameGeek

 Posted on August 22, 2024  |  9 minutes  |  1833 words  |  Markus Shepherd

Corey Thompson (of Above Board TV and Dice Tower Dish fame) recently raised an interesting question on the Board Games Insider podcast: In what year do you think the best titles (highest rated titles) were released? He actually answered the question twice, first in episode #328 based on an analysis he ran a couple of years ago and then again in #330 with more up-to-date data. I’m not going to spoil his answer here – the podcast in general is worth a listen – so go and find those episodes on your favourite podcast platform. [Read More]
BoardGameGeek  Ratings  Highest rated games  Corey Thompson  Board Games Insider  Golden age  Cult of the new 

A brief introduction to Collaborative Filtering

Recommend.Games explained, part 1: how we recommend games to you

 Posted on May 9, 2024  |  6 minutes  |  1219 words  |  Markus Shepherd

What is a good recommendation? Collaborative filtering is the workhorse powering the recommendations by Recommend.Games. Over the years, I’ve been asked every now and then how it works. So, I thought it’s high time I outlined the basic ideas behind our recommendation engine. Let’s first take a step back and talk about recommendations in general. What is it we’re trying to achieve? The answer to this question is far from trivial, and it gets harder when you want to formalise its goals. [Read More]
Recommend.Games explained  Collaborative filtering  Recommendations  Recommendation engine  Machine learning  Matrix factorisation  Embeddings  Latent factors  Cosine similarity  Alternating least squares  Linear regression  BoardGameGeek 

The world of board games

Board game rankings by country

 Posted on April 25, 2024  |  7 minutes  |  1324 words  |  Markus Shepherd

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]
BoardGameGeek  BGG  ranking  rating  Bayesian  dummy ratings  highest rated games  alternative rankings 

Has board game rating inequality increased over the years?

Applying the Gini coefficient to BoardGameGeek ratings

 Posted on April 14, 2024  |  8 minutes  |  1662 words  |  Markus Shepherd

The number of ratings per game Perhaps one of the most controversial choices of the Shut Up & Sit Down Effect article was using the number of ratings1 on BoardGameGeek (BGG) as proxy for “attention” to a game. So let’s double down on that! 😈 If lots of ratings mean a lots of eyes on a game, we can ask questions like: What games get most of the attention? Do few games steal the spotlight? [Read More]
BoardGameGeek  Ratings  Gini coefficient  Inequality  Asmodee 

Reverse engineering the BoardGameGeek ranking – Part 2!

 Posted on January 26, 2021  |  3 minutes  |  533 words  |  Markus Shepherd

This is the second part of a series explaining and analysing the BoardGameGeek rankings. Read the first part here. Last time I left you with the nice result that BoardGameGeek (BGG) calculates its ranking by taking users’ ratings for a particular game and then add around 1500-1600 dummy ratings of 5.5. This so-called geek score is used to sort the games from best (Gloomhaven) to worst (Tic-Tac-Toe). One detail however we touched on in passing, but did not resolve, is how that number of dummy ratings develop over time. [Read More]
BoardGameGeek  BGG  ranking  rating  statistics  Bayesian  geek score  top 100  dummy ratings  highest rated games  circle of hype 

Reverse engineering the BoardGameGeek ranking

 Posted on October 3, 2020  |  13 minutes  |  2607 words  |  Markus Shepherd

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]
BoardGameGeek  BGG  ranking  rating  statistics  Bayesian  geek score  top 100  dummy ratings  highest rated games  alternative rankings