Finding the Perfect Family Game

kowalski1971 writes "Some poor soul with far too much time on his hands has decided - in an attempt to increase sales at his toyshop - to calculate the formula for the perfect family game. Apparently it is, 0.22a + 0.17f + 0.153n + (0.12c - 0.1g) + 0.1s + 0.09e + 0.06d + 0.054l + 0.05m + 0.011c = pfg ...and which game came out top? Cards. So much for the increased sales then."

Aces!

This is interesting to me because there are a bazillion board games out there, and most of them are overpriced and have limited playability. Card games and their variants are countless.

Go cards!

Re:Aces!

I'm pretty sure it's Vice City and Carmegeddon. It's nice watching my 5 year old kill cops with his grandfather.

Re:Aces!

If you want a game where the variations are endless, try Nomic [google.com], where the aim of the game is to alter the rules. From one of the FAQ's:

Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed. (Peter Suber, The Paradox of Self-Amendment, Appendix 3, p. 362)

The game was developed from political science theory as an example - but it turned out to be a lot of fun!

Some poor soul with far too much time on his...

Some poor soul with far too much time on his hands has posted this article?

Simpler formula

I notice that most of those factors are vaguely defined at best... "Fun factor?" Get real! As long as we're pulling qualitative numbers out of the air, why not design a simpler system? Perfect Family Game = 1.0g, where "g" is the "goodness level." Practical, huh?

cards

"Cards" is not a game
a game is poker, bridge, blackjack etc.
which card game are they talking about?

Which game?

which card game are they talking about?

Clearly, strip poker.

Re:Which game?

No, the formula for Strip Poker is 0.50T, 0.50A.

Toy stores do not sell "games"

"Cards" is not a game

But it is game equipment. Toy stores do not deal in "games" as such but rather game equipment. A pair of decks of 52 cards can be used for 100 plus well-known games, which may figure into the decision that cards are nearly optimal game equipment.

BCS

Thankfully, his calculations are much LESS complicated than the formulae used to compute the bowl championship series rankings.

Oddly enough, they are also more accurate, and I would be willing to bet that his formula could easily be converted over verbatim, applied to college football, and STILL come out with a better ranking system for college teams than the BCS.

Re:BCS

PS. No one here knows what you are talking about. I do think that if they included a saving roll in the BCS formula, then the nerds here would help find the true NCAA champ.

Re:BCS

Meh, not totally true. The myth about geeks that don't know anything about sports has it's roots in fact but like many things is more that than anything else. Just a myth.

Allthough I do agree with you about one thing. A 1d20 roll could only help the BCS at this point.

Cards?

Given that his factors include:

N = number of people
S = stimulation
E = engagement
D = duration
L = longevity

I think we may at last have found the source of all those dastardly penis enlargement spams and viagra...

Best selling

So much for the increased sales then

Best selling game != best game. Admittedly, the point of this exercise was probably to increase sales, so on that front, it's failed... Also note that his formula reuses symbols ("C" is both competitive factor, and complexity), and he parenthesizes items for no apparently good reason when the operators are commutative. Is he just trying to come up with an impressive looking formula to get a newsworthy story and bring his store some publicity? On that front, he's succeeded...

Since 2 Simpsons games were mentioned...

Marge: Why don't you kids play one of your old board games? When was the last time you played "Citizenship"?
Bart: [looking through games] "Energy Shortage"?
Lisa: "Hippo in the House"?
Marge: Ooh, "The Game of Lent"!
Bart: Ohh, can't we just go to bed?
Marge: It's only five-thirty.
Lisa: Fine, we'll play "Hippo in the House".
Marge: Oh, the hippo's missing.

Ep: Wild Barts Can't Be Broken [snpp.com]

An old truth

Good for everybody and therefore probably good for nobody. And if anybody hopes complicated equations will help him pick the best Christmas gift for his nephew he's mistaken. It will be easier to ask.

Puff

0.22a + 0.17f + 0.153n + (0.12c - 0.1g) + 0.1s + 0.09e + 0.06d + 0.054l + 0.05m + 0.011c = Daikatana

Yes, I am stressed and I can't let it go.

Cards? Not at my house!!

While I was growing up, my parents thought playing cards were poisonous. We were forbidden to play (or even learn) any card games because they thought it was the first step towards becoming a gambling addict. This was extremely embarassing for me later on in school because in math class, concepts in probability and combinatorics were very often taught using ordinary playing cards. Of course, I had no idea what was going on at first, which bewildered my classmates who had gotten the idea that I was pretty sharp in math. Not a big deal, but it is a minor iritation I hold my parents responsible for.

Re:Cards? Not at my house!!

FWIW, my wife teaches college math and uses playing card explanations for a number of concepts. I was surprised and she was astonished (her family is obsessed with games) at how many students were unfamiliar with playing cards. It's a heavily international group of students, but still...

The Slashdot reaction

http://www.cartoonstock.com/lowres/sbo0313l.jpg [cartoonstock.com]

Sigh. When will we learn?

Human factors cannot be reduced to mathematical equations.

(Sit down Hari Seldon)

Attempting to do so only results in making you look stupid (like this guy)

Re: Sigh. When will we learn?

> Heh. I tried to read the Foundation series, but unfortunately I'd already read enough about Lorenz and Mandelbrot to know that little errors don't just go away if you pick a bigger sample, and subsequently couldn't ignore the major flaw that is "psychohistory" and enjoy the books*.

Heh, my calculations showed you were going to post that.

2 Cs

Silly bugger's gone and used 'C' twice - first for competitiveness, the second for complexity. And what's with the superfluous brackets anyway? Load of cobblers.

Re:2 Cs

You are correct. He also doesn't seem to have provided any kind of list as to how many different games they tested. Is the the top ten or did they test ten?

Also, this formula should really include variables for different people. I know monopoly with my grandfather is a blast, because he's old and cheap and sits on all his money and kicks butt at the end, but monopoly with my youngest cousins can be hellish, because they cry when anyone plays rough.

This should really be more of a function, where you supply 5 or 10 bits of information, and the top 10 list is customized to you.

If you do it just right...

a good game of "Twister" will enable you to start your *own* family!

Precautionary note on side of box says...

"For best results, do not begin game with original family"

**Posted as AC to cleanse myself of that 'icky' feeling**

Play cards, play sci-fi

Hi,

with all my respect to the grandpa picture on the right column of the article, what kind of crap is this ?

Two questions :

• No explanation of the mathematical formula : I assume that the 0.22 coefficient for the age accessibility comes from the fact that the average life expectancy multiplied by 0.22 results in a relevant Human Development Indicator, explained somewhere else on the net.
• I'd like the scientific staff out there to explain me how they link the Monopoly Simpson Edition to their *elusive* mathematical formula. Really I'd like to know, in other words than the political scheme "family like to have some fun", what ties Homer with decimal multiplicators.

Is this really 'News for nerds' ? I'm not a nerd, but this doesn't sound even like news....

Regards,
Jdif

Re:Play cards, play sci-fi

Actually it looks like the result of a pretty standard multiple linear regression (link [statsoftinc.com]). Somebody sat down and gave each game a 1-10 rating for "Fun", "Engagement", and similar nonsense and then fed the resulting "data" through a linear regression algorithm.

Algorithms always give an answer. That doesn't mean the answer makes any sense.

The only reason "Cards" won...

... is because they forgot the ever popular "Cardboard and plastic pieces" game.

Not surprising

My family always played a lot of games while we were growing up, and they were almost exclusively card games. The rules tend to be simple, which is a big plus if you're trying to hold the interest of people covering a big age range (60 year old granny along with 8 year old younger bro'). We burned a lot of hours with Uno, Spades, Pit!, and others.

Board games had a narrower appeal. If it was just "us kids" we'd play those, since it seemed the adults weren't interested in the same ones we were. Once we'd grown into teenagers we did find a few everyone enjoyed - Pictionary immediately comes to mind.

Ah, memories...

Simpler formula

Actually, the correct formula for the perfect game is:

1 Swedish Bikini Team, sans bikinis + Me = The Perfect Game.

Everquest

EQ is the obvious winner. With:
A = age range
F = fun factor
N = number of people
C = competitive factor
G - argumentative factor
S = stimulation
E = engagement
D = duration
L = longevity
M = mobility
C = complexity

While age range is fairly narrow and stimulation, engagement, and mobility are, well, zero, I think N and D make up for it.

N = several thousand
D = in hours? - sigh - several thousand

mathematicians! Bah!

Math is wonderful. You can basically create formulas that may or may not have any basis in reality. This is why in addition to mathematician we have experimental physicists who whack the mathematician on the snout, take their formulations, and subject the equations to a rigorous dose of reality. Clearly someone needs to whack this guy on the snout.

Cards and monopoly are great. The have no noise making annoyances, involve lots of manipulative that occupy the child, and rounds proceed quickly while occupying all players attention. More importantly, these games do minimum damage when the playing pieces enter the inevitable tantrum driven projectile phase.

But Bop It? It is noisy, and hurts like hell when used as a club. Jenga? The point is to frustrate your opponents. This game is great at developing necessary skills, but when the pieces fall, the loser has a great desire to test the aerodynamics of the blocks.

Re:mathematicians! Bah!

This is why in addition to mathematician we have experimental physicists who whack the mathematician on the snout, take their formulations, and subject the equations to a rigorous dose of reality.

Interestingly it goes the other way too sometimes. The physicists posit a nice theory, then some mathematician comes along and says "sorry, the math just doesn't work that way - it ought to really go like this...". The physicists say "but that's just bloody stupid, reality wouldn't work that way", then go away and test it and find that, oddly enough, it does.

Jedidiah

Re:mathematicians! Bah!

Math is wonderful. You can basically create formulas that may or may not have any basis in reality. This is why in addition to in addition to mathematician we have experimental physicists who whack the mathematician on the snout

Reminds me...

A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer were all taken to a farm and asked to build the best fence - the fence had to encompass the largest amount of area, with the smallest perimeter.

The engineer said - "That's easy - you make a circle!"

The physicist said - "No, you have the fence section encompass the diameter of the earth, that way you get more area because of the third dimension."

The mathematician ran over to a pile of fence sections, picked up three small ones and arranged them around himself to create a tiny enclosure - then said "I am on the outside!"

Clue

Clue has to be the best game, since it teaches you the best household objects you can use to kill people, as well as helping young children to realize that you should never ask the police for help when solving a murder.

Kill Doctor Lucky

it teaches you the best household objects you can use to kill people

My favorite along these lines is Kill Doctor Lucky from CheapAss Games [cheapass.com]. The goal is to, um, kill Doctor Lucky (and all the other players) on a clue-like board where there are various implements lying about.

a very good boardgame

I find to be 'Colonists of Catan' : It's easy to get into from all ages, and is heavily based on social skills amongst the other players.

No news here, move on please!

This is just a puff of smoke intended to stimulate Christmas toy sales. The formula is ridiculously over-complex and loaded with unexplained constants. How on earth did this make Slashdot when perfectly good stories (like the one about SCO violations being found on the Moon) get refused?

Cards are great!

Sure beats the old-time family classic... "come sit on grandpa's lap"!

Why linear?

It is funny how people always try to use a linear formula to objectively quantify the quality of things. In a way it is understandable: linear systems are very simple to understand and manipulate mathematically. Unfortunately, sometimes no amount of added terms or tweaking of the coefficients will make it work. Many things are essentially nonlinear and typically, quality is one of them. I remember that in the first engineering lecture I listened to, the professor said:

"Quality means user satisfaction, and in a multicomponent system it is not the average of the quality of the individual components. The overall quality is pretty much associated with the quality of the worst component."

Linear formulas tend not to capture that. A geometric mean could, and it is also simple.

Problem with the article

The writer gives a nifty little formula and all, with the constants included. But, what values did he plug in to said formula to get .98 for cards? What are the acceptable ranges of the coefficients? How do you decide which coeffients have more weight than others?

Does anybody remeber . . .

The card game Predator? Now this was fun, it had violence (the bear could eat the fish, or something like that), education (simple teaching about what animals eat), and entertainment (Nothing like slamming somebody's high level predator with good ol ' DEATH and DECAY).

Cards is a massive category

Even after ruling out collectible games (such as Magic), the number of card games out there using specialized or modified card decks is virtually endless. Reference: Board Game Geek [boardgamegeek.com].

Although I love Whist and Hearts, one of my favoriate card games is Mu [boardgamegeek.com], a trick-taking game (like Whist or Bridge) which uses a modified deck:

• 5 suites
• Numbered 0 - 9
• Cards are worth 0 - 2 points
• Two trumps per round, decided by bidding
• Variable (each round) teams
• Plays best with five

It looks like a kitchen sink game, but in reality every aspect of it is wonderfully balanced and there's room for devious bidding and strategy.

other games

Pictionary Taboo Scattergories

Drake Equation

That certainly doesn't look like the Drake Equation to me...

Just barely related...

I have to say that my favorite game is monopoly, and this is why (the following story is not for the faint of heart):

At summer camp when I was 12 we were playing monopoly in our cabin. This one kid, Jeff, was being a totally bad sport (accusing everybody of cheating, etc.) and just generally making the game less fun. About half-way through the game he says "I have to go to the bathroom" and gets up, grumbling about how people will probably steal his money or otherwise conspire against him. When he gets up everybody starts to smell what smells like the worst fart ever. Somebody makes a crack about this, "hawhaw, he probably said he has to go to the bathroom because he shit his pants". Then the kid lifts his leg to tie his shoe and out of the leg of his shorts, a mid-size turd plops on the ground. The rest of us all run out of the cabin yelling and screaming like 12 year olds do. After they cleaned it up there was a small circular space on the floor of the cabin that had been bleached so it was a little bit lighter than the rest of the floor.

So yeah, Monopoly's my favorite game because it reminds me funniness of the worst and most humiliating moment in somebody else's life.

What's next? "Measuring" poetry?

How about a game graph?

Place excitement on the horizontal axis and skill on the vertical.

S
k
i
l
l

-------------------
Excitement

Forget it, I got nothing.

This is bogus on so many levels!

Man - where do you start with such a bogus thing as this?

Take a large number of vaguely defined terms - with no units or ranges associated with them - and which are "measured" by the scientific method of asking some guy to rate them.

Then multiply each by a suspiciously exact number - accurate to one part in a hundred - and just add them up! What are the odds that none of these terms need to be squared or something?

Even if you ignore the actual equation - and take this as some kind of list of the things you should think about when buying a game - it doesn't make sense.

Just look at the first term:

"Age range"

The importance of the age range of the game depends crucially on the range of ages of the people playing. If everyone is aged 12 years - then a game that's rated "Ages 12 to 14" is likely to be more fun than something rated "Ages 2 to adult" because it's targetted at the precise ages of the people playing it. Then, if the people playing include a 2 year old and an adult - then a wide age range is indeed important. But if this equation is to be believed, then a game with a 12 to 14 year age range is doomed compared to a game that's simple enough for a 2 year old to play. That's ridiculous.

But in any case, this is a circular argument - age ranges are set such that the people within that range will have fun playing the game - so using that number to calculate how much fun the game is to play is just silly.

Argh!

This is the kind of thing that dramatically reduces the public's perception of the value of the scientific method.

Board Stiff

Personally, I think this "formula" is just silly. But interesting, I suppose.

As for me, I love board games. I love the different aspects of the games, the way they keep things interesting yet simple, how much damn fun they are. Board games get a lot more favor around the holidays in my family get-together's than cards do.

I found the Top 100 Board Games [kumquat.com] of the year. Awesome stuff here.

I'm The Boss! [kumquat.com] looks the most promising. Freeloader [kumquat.com] is cool, and Light Speed [kumquat.com] looks like something me and a friend might wittle away time with. However, I keep drifitn back to Mystery of the Abbey [kumquat.com], a "thinking man's Clue."

Re:Board Stiff

Freeloader is indeed exceptionally cool. I also recommend Huzzah! from the same company. Finally got round to playing Light Speed, and it's even more fun than it looks - very hectic. Helps if everyone playing the game has at least some idea what's going on, though - first time we played it one player ended up destroying half of his own fleet while failing to interact with the other players or the asteroid at all...

Other highlights in the same general vein:

Lord of the Fries Deluxe Edition - deceptively complex, and the different menus make for almost entirely different strategies. Put together meals at Frydays, the fast food restaurant of the damned.

The Big Idea - requires a bit of creativity, but it's outstanding fun if you've got the right group of people. Pitch bizarre products based on the cards in your hand, and try to invest heavily in the big successes. Anyone fancy investing in Unholy Cat?

Fluxx - about as simple as they come: you draw one card, you play one card, and there's no way to win the game - at first. But manipulating the rules can be great fun.

Aquarius - From the makers of Fluxx, a mind-numbingly simple looking card game that can end up being really rather deep as you try to mislead the other players and build towards a quick victory. Can get a little arbitrary and infuriating at times as players trade hands or goals, but that's part of the fun.

On a slightly larger/more expensive scale, Settlers of Catan is every bit as great as people have been saying, and the various expansion packs (Knights & Cities, Seafarers of Catan) add a lot of variety.

Crimson Skies is another big favourite - it's a truly outstanding game of aerial combat, with an inspired damage system that allows you to damage the individual components of the plane - a truly skilled gunner can eat away the armour and then send an incendiary round straight into the fuel tank. Can you say 'BOOM'? No longer being published, unfortunately - but if you see it, snap it up.

Warhammer Quest destroys lives. A dungeon-crawling boardgame which appeals to the munchkin in every gamer, this is as much about shopping and powering up to ridiculous levels as it is about exploring the dungeons. With the additional characters and dungeon expansion packs it becomes even more addictive.

Family Games

If you folks want a list of some good board games out there, I'd suggest funagain.com. Some of the ones I'd figure would warrant a look-see would include Carcassone, Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico, or Pitchcar. Go look them up!

PFG != f(game)

The provided formula purports to compute the quality of family games, but fails to include variables related to the specific family. Al the vairables are properties of the game. The perfect family game for a young family is different from the perfect game for a family with old children. Some very enjoyable games might be totally unsuitable if they require 4 players and the family has a single child.

PFG = f(Game, Family) so that different games would have different ranking for different families.

DDR Max

Dance Dance Revolution for PS2 is a great game. We take it over to my cousins for holidays all the time. Eveyone like to play, from my 7 yr old brother to my 60 yr old aunts. Not only is it fun, but when you are done and tired, there is more room for food - and you don't feel so bad cause you just burned off a weeks worth of Calories.

No interrelated factors

No attempts for age vs duration.
Number of players? shouldn't it just be the number of people available?

"german" board games are the way to go!

this guy has NO clue. if you are REALLY looking for great family games... check out a great community game review site [slashdot.org] and purchase some really great family games like Settlers of Catan [germangames.com] or Carcassonne [germangames.com] which are both "German" games [cifnet.com].

Right

Holy completely arbitrary Batman!

A bogus mathematical theorem that's helped me...

The Property of Ones:
The ONEitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the ONE.

Seems to make anything family more tolerable.

Would you...

... rate (A)D&D as a [posible] family game?

Depends on the context of 'family'

If you have a family already, then I'm sure that cards is great. If, on the other hand, you are looking for a game that will help you build a family of your own to later play cards with, I think that the game of choice would be 'Hide the Salami'

best family game

Apples to Apples.

unless there's small children present...then i'm not really sure...get them doing math or something while you play :P
but yes, apples to apples, hands down.

OH NOES! PARADOX ALERT!

Site says: FUN FACTORS: A = age range F = fun factor ... One of the fun factors is the fun factor itself? Isn't that a self-refferential variable, then? OMG ITS A PARADOX OF A MATHEMATICS PROBLEM!

Sounds to me like someone's on pot

... and to *determine* how high he is, we have a formula!

.403a + 20,000f + 1.0d - 93h = gal

A is Alf. Just Alf.
F is, of course, the fuzziness of the sound he heard while writing this equation.
D stand for the 'dankness quality' in the taste of his meal that day.
H is the hardness factor of yesterday.

This all computes to the GAL, or GET A LIFE factor.

Of course, this is not the perfect game.

It might be the perfect game if you have to pick ONE game to give to a million families. It is not the perfect game for a specific familiy, just the perfect game when the familiy is not known.

By the same logic, you can find out that the perfect food is a Big mac, since nobody really hates it (You can't hate something which tastes nothing).

Whenever you create something with the ultimate all-encompassing demographic, you end up with something which is infinitely bland and infinitely inoffensive.

In beauty contests, you typically have several rounds with different jurys, a mechanism which is sure to filter out someones ideals and move towards the average, which is why you'll find that Miss Universe can be less attractive than the girl next door.

Of course, there are objective parameters you can measure, but if you get all or most of them right, you just end up with something that doesn't totally suck. To create something brilliant you have to narrow your appeal, to match the individual preferences of a spesific group.

ORBZ

There is nothing remotely offensive in this game - it is easy to play and flat out fun. Most importantly, you support the indie game dev community when you buy it at Garage Games [garagegames.com] Nuff said!

Re:Fresh joke plz, thx

too much time on his hands

People always say this as though it's a BAD thing.