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Welcome to the Crucible

This blog is usually all about board games, but let’s stretch the definition just a little: snooker is, after all, one of the most widely followed tabletop games in the world. And with the World Championship kicking off at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, I couldn’t resist the excuse to dive into something a bit different.

In the last article, we looked at how Elo ratings can be used to measure player strength over time. This time, we’ll take it a step further: using historical match data, a bit of Python, and a lot of simulated tournaments, we’ll try to predict who’s most likely to lift the trophy this year. We’ll also compare our predictions to what the betting markets say – and see whether the wisdom of the crowd agrees with the cold logic of the model.

Chance in games is like seasoning in food — it’s all about the right amount. Just imagine a life without chance, where everything could be planned out strategically. That would get boring over time. In a game, I want to have experiences — I want adventure. A good game is like a miniature life, one where I can make mistakes, enjoy a streak of bad or good luck, and still recover. But you shouldn’t be at the mercy of randomness. There should be ways to compensate — like a friend of mine in CATAN, who always complains about his bad luck, prompting others to treat him more kindly and rarely target him with the robber. In the end, he often wins — to everyone’s surprise.
— Klaus Teuber on the importance of randomness in games in CATAN-News 1/2000 🗄️

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This subject has nothing to do with games nor data science, but chances are that amongst the readers of this blogs are many who appreciate mathematics – and its beauty. Long before Recommend.Games, I’ve had a blog on the Riemann Hypothesis – the famous conjecture which is usually formulated in terms of the zeros of the complex Riemann \(\zeta\)-function, but is really about the distribution of prime numbers. If you’re curious to learn more, check out the blog. 🤓

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.

But bias also has a well defined meaning in statistics. Moving from emotions to cold hard numbers, the word bias loses its antagonistic nature and simply becomes a measurement one might want to minimise or remove entirely. Hence, debiasing the BoardGameGeek (BGG) ranking is about asking the question what it would look like if we removed the influence of a particular parameter. One such parameter is a game’s age: we’ve seen in the previous article that ratings have gone up over time, so removing the age bias from the BGG ranking means correcting for this trend.

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. But of course I couldn’t help but answer the question myself, in the most needlessly thorough way possible. 🤓

The cat’s out of the bag and the winners have been announced 🗄️!

This year’s show was… even longer… 😅 After last year I’ve hoped for a snappier show – instead it was further extended. As much as I appreciate the jury’s work (which I’ve expressed at length), the stage isn’t where they shine, so I don’t understand why we need two awkward hours of their presence. It’s understandable they want to highlight various aspects of board gaming and their activities, since those are the only two hours of attention they get all year, but just as an endless recommendation list would water down the award, the rule in showbiz is to make every minute count.

The waiting is finally coming to an end! On Sunday, July 21, the jury will announce the winners of Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024. 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.

Some of you might have notices that I’m a bit of a Spiel des Jahres fanboy. 🙃 Every year when the award season rolls around, the discussion about the purpose and the influence of Spiel des Jahres comes up again. So I thought it’s a good idea to collect my thoughts on the subject in one handy place I can easily reference in the future. 🤓

Nominations are out 🗄️! The jury selected a total of sixteen games for their longlist, nine for Spiel des Jahres and seven for Kennerspiel des Jahres. Out of these games, three games each are nominated for the two awards and can hope to get the coveted meeple added to their covers on July 21.

Spiel des Jahres 2024 is around the corner! As in the previous four years, I’ll try to predict what games have the best shot at ending up on the longlist (aka recommendations) and the shortlist (aka nominations) when the jury announces their picks on June 11th.

As every year, I’ll let the algorithms speak, but I’ve added something new this year: I tried to track the jury members’ reviews of all eligible¹ games, in particular when they publish scores (such as in the magazine Spielbox), and fed those into the predictions. The other major contributor are the “recommendendations to the jury”. Our very own Kennerspiel score is then used to sort those into their respective list of the top 10 contenders for either award. You can find the detailed analysis here and complete results here.