Game Designer Hall of Fame

The best board game designers of all times – according to Spiel des Jahres

 Posted on May 17, 2024  |  11 minutes  |  2240 words  |  Markus Shepherd

Spiel des Jahres 2024 nominations are just around the corner (watch this space for our annual predictions), but I wanted to take this opportunity for a look back over the history of the award. Specifically, I wanted to see which designers have been most successful at the Spiel, Kennerspiel and Kinderspiel des Jahres awards. The first red meeple was given out in 1979. Since 1989, the jury also awarded the Kinderspiel des Jahres for children’s games, initially as an annual special award, and from 2001 as its own award with the blue meeple. [Read More]
Spiel des Jahres  Kennerspiel des Jahres  Kinderspiel des Jahres  Game of the Year  Hall of Fame  Designers  Records  Statistics  Wolfgang Kramer  Reiner Knizia 

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 

Measuring the Shut Up & Sit Down effect

Using synthetic control to make up our own counterfactual world

 Posted on March 17, 2024  |  12 minutes  |  2392 words  |  Markus Shepherd

Shut Up & Sit Down Shut Up & Sit Down (SU&SD) is arguably the largest (at over 400k subscribers) and most influential YouTube channel in board gaming. A video with a glowing recommendation by them can lead to a game sell out overnight. Or at least that’s how the anecdotes go. There’s been previous attempts at quantifying the effect, but over here at Recommend.Games is where board games and data science meet, so obviously, we have to dig a little deeper. [Read More]
Shut Up & Sit Down  SU&SD  Synthetic Control  John Company  Cole Wehrle 

How long is a game of High Society?

 Posted on February 27, 2024  |  10 minutes  |  2107 words  |  Markus Shepherd

High Society is a classic bidding game by classic designer Dr Reiner Knizia, most recently released by Osprey Games with a wonderfully classic look: The general concept is quite simple: the players are members of said “high society” and are trying to outdo each other in showing off their wealth. The game is played over a series of rounds, and in each round, a card is revealed from a deck of 16 cards. [Read More]
High Society  Reiner Knizia  Osprey Games  Game length  Negative hypergeometric distribution  Python  Simulation  numpy 

Child's play: How hard is Orchard?

 Posted on January 24, 2024  |  5 minutes  |  988 words  |  Markus Shepherd

Orchard is a beloved children’s game classic which is so old – it’s as old as myself. 👴 As one might expect from a children’s game, it’s really simple: roll a die, pick a fruit of the corresponding color, and put it in the basket. If you roll the raven, the raven moves one step closer to the orchard. If you manage to pick all the fruit before the raven reaches the orchard, you win together. [Read More]
Orchard  First Orchard  Haba  Child's play  Children's games  Win rates  Game length 

Recommend.Games is back!

Request to have your collection added to the database now

 Posted on September 23, 2023  |  3 minutes  |  492 words  |  Markus Shepherd

The hiatus is over! Already since April 2023 the recommendation engine at Recommend.Games has been back online, albeit with reduced functionality. In order to cut down serving costs, I made the recommendation model much more lightweight (this deserves its own article) and removed rarely used features as well as a bunch of bloat from the database. Most of the database was filled with users’ collection items, i.e., games they rated, owned, have played etc. [Read More]
Announcement  Hiatus  Recommend.Games  Internal  Collection  Donations 

Spiel des Jahres 2023 winners

 Posted on July 31, 2023  |  4 minutes  |  728 words  |  Markus Shepherd

The cat’s out of the bag and the winners have been announced! This year’s show was… long… On the one hand, it’s nice to have all three awards (including the Kinderspiel) back together in one announcement, but on the other hand, once you add special awards, the review of the 1983 awards, interviews etc, even die hard fans (and obviously I’m one of them) have a hard time keeping their attention up. [Read More]
SdJ  SdJ 2023  Spiel des Jahres  Spiel des Jahres 2023  KSdJ  Kennerspiel  Kennerspiel des Jahres  Kennerspiel des Jahres 2023  Winners  Game of the Year  Germany  Dorfromantik  Challengers!  Unlock! 

Spiel des Jahres 2023 predictions – Part 2!

 Posted on July 13, 2023  |  10 minutes  |  1973 words  |  Markus Shepherd

The waiting is finally coming to an end! On Sunday, July 16, the jury will announce the winners of Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2023. We’re blessed with another year of very strong games and I’m certainly very excited to learn what games will win the two awards. After two years of calling both winners correctly, I’ve missed the Spiel des Jahres 2022 winner Cascadia last year, so I hope I’ll do better this year. [Read More]
SdJ  SdJ 2023  Spiel des Jahres  Spiel des Jahres 2023  KSdJ  Kennerspiel  Kennerspiel des Jahres  Kennerspiel des Jahres 2023  Game of the Year  Germany  Predictions  Spiel des Jahres nominations  Spiel des Jahres 2023 nominations  SdJ nominations  Kennerspiel nominations  Kennerspiel des Jahres nominations  Kennerspiel des Jahres 2023 nominations  Dorfromantik  Fun Facts  Next Station: London  Challengers!  IKI  Planet Unknown