Designing the Best Board Game 155
An anonymous reader writes: Twilight Struggle tops BoardGameGeek's ranking of user-rated board games, handily beating classics like Puerto Rico, Settlers of the Catan, and Risk. FiveThirtyEight has an article about the game's design, and how certain design choices can affect enjoyment. Quoting: "Gupta has a few theories about why his game has done so well. For one, it's a two-player game — the Americans vs. the Soviets. Two-player games are attractive for a couple of reasons. First, by definition, half the players win. People like winning, and are likely to replay and rate highly a game they think they have a chance to win. ... The data offers some evidence for Gupta's hypothesis. Games that support three players rate highest, with an average of 6.58. But two-player games are a close second, with an average rating of 6.55. Next closest are five-player games, which average 6.39. ... The shortest games are the lowest rated, on average. But players don't favor length without bounds. Three hours seems to be right around the point of diminishing marginal returns. Another key to the game's success is its mix of luck and skill."
What design elements do you particularly enjoy or hate in board games?
Board Game design (Score:3)
I like my board games to be based purely on chance. #LifeforLife
Re:Board Game design (Score:5, Interesting)
I like my board games to be based purely on chance. #LifeforLife
I actually don't mind games that have a high degree of luck involved, though I prefer somewhere around "low" luck. What I do mind is if that luck knocks a player out of a game well before all of the other participants are out, so that there is extreme downtime for one or more players. Games like Ticket to Ride, Lords of Vegas, Power Grid, etc... deal with this by having all players play until the scoring phase at the end. I played Risk Legacy once, and lost before I even took a turn (!). Sure I got back into the game with reduced resources, but I had already really lost the game. Letting people play (mostly) until the end is probably the single biggest requirement aside from actual fun/interesting mechanics.
Re:Board Game design (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with not eliminating players in a free-for-all type of games (like Settlers of Catan) is that often worst players become kingmakers. It's been more than on a single occasion in Catan that if A and B are way ahead but of more or less equal strength, C who has no realistic chance to win the game can essentially decide if A or B does. And that is is arguably even worse than blind luck.
Re:Board Game design (Score:4, Insightful)
Playing Dummy in Bridge (Score:3)
Bridge has the "one player gets knocked out very early" aspect to it, but it's fine. Dummy's job is to go mix the next round of drinks for everybody.
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I don't mind chance in games, so long as it complements the skill/strategy aspect of the game. I like poker as an example, chance determines the hands in play but a skilled player can turn the weakest hand at the table into the winning hand, at the same time chance can override a seemingly impossible to beat hand.
And then there is Mario Party which destroys relationships.
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Then you'd like Candyland... http://existentialcomics.com/c... [existentialcomics.com]
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I approve.
Social dynamics of game groups matters (Score:2)
I disagree with much of the discussion and analysis in the article - optimal number of players and game length depends a lot on the group your playing with. How many people are at the event, is it a gaming event or is it a party where there are also games, how much do the people want to talk about the game vs. non-game socializing while playing.
Back when my wife was playing games a couple of nights a week and I was occasionally joining, the right choices seemed to be games that could handle 3-5 players bec
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I'm kind of surprised Scrabble hasn't really gotten any mentions here. While not perfect, it has an overall good design, balancing player skill against chance on each letter draw and allowing players to play both offensively and defensively.
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Scrabble has some flexibility in regards to skills, at least if you're looking to make it enjoyable. My wife is not a native English speaker, so if we play together, we throw out the standard scrabble dictionary and allow words from her native language as well as proper nouns. I'm not sure how highly competitive play goes, but I usually adopt the approach that I need to maximize my score, while minimizing tile usage. This makes the game just math, with valid plays restricted to the set of tile combinatio
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About the only thing we agree upon is that Third Reich is a great game and could take a day or longer to play. I don't consider the rules to be complicated/obtuse, and it is definitely not a simulation. It is a meat and potatoes grognard [wiktionary.org] style game.
I love the modern Euro-games but many times would rather play Third Reich, Empires in Arms or Advanced Squad Leader with some old friends whenever I get a chance. The former are easier to get new people into playing and don't take a lot of time, the latter req
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So you should be searching for what ever happened to M$ Surface in a large format, perhaps in cafe environment with the western equivalent of sushi, stepford mom snack food (perfect triangular sandwiches with the crust removed, mini lasagnes, pizza toast with prime ingredients, cheese steak sandwich etc.). Pay for the booth with thrown in snack meal budget and play board games on a large flat digitised surface while enjoying perfect snacks one after another as a full meal. The ideal place for new and exist
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My all-time favorite is still Supremacy. It's like Risk for grown-ups.
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Oh man... Supremacy! That game can be fun, but it always ends with nuclear winter when you play with my friends. lol
~Kat ^_^
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Any game where I can say "I've got wood for sheep" is tops in my book.
Stoned need wood.
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Everybody must get Stone.
Elegance and replayability (Score:2)
I play board games two or three times a week. I love games with elegant rules which still lead to a game that can be played over and over. I've been playing bridge for 30 years, and I still find something new every time I play. Dominion and Werewolf are really neat elegant systems, but nearly every game is a new experience.
I also need to be able to improve. I think Royal Turf is an elegant game, but I know the ideal strategy and don't enjoy playing anymore. Whereas I have a lot to learn to be a better
Advance to Go (Score:2)
You still can't beat Monopoly.
Re:Advance to Go (Score:5, Insightful)
Monopoly is actually probably the single worst board game I can think of. There's a dominant strategy, which means that the game (assuming everyone plays to the dominant strategy) just comes down to luck. It takes hours. After the first 2-3 rounds of the board there's effectively no strategy at all in the game.
Seriously, literally the worst board game I can think of.
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Yes, the best way to tell that someone is horrible at board games and rational thought in general is if they think they or someone they know is good at Monopoly. The only way to be good at Monopoly is to play with brain dead opponents (or very young ones), because the game is almost entirely luck. It is good at teaching 7 year olds math, and that is about it.
I also cannot think of a worse board game.
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And, of course, there's always the strategy of the a
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Yes, indeed. One time I owned the entire lowest-rent side, hotels on all. I down-built to houses when other players were getting ready to build. They looked at me like I was looney. Shortly thereafter, once they understood the rules, they paid me to build hotels again.
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One of the big problems I've seen with Monopoly is that a lot of people don't play the game by the rules. For example, the rule about having to build four houses before you can build a hotel is a rule that seems to get ignored a lot, in which case you can't employ strategies such as yours. The annoying part is that a lot of the "house rules" that people make up (like free money on free parking) tend to prolong the game even longer.
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I'm afraid you've just shown you don't know how to play Monopoly. Like any dice game it has a luck element, but there are strategies to employ that mean you can win around 50% of 4 person games. Doubling your chance of a win is not not "almost entirely luck".
For example it's not just children and brain dead people that are unaware of the widely varying probabilities of landing on the different squares. Which groups have worthwhile paybacks, and which do not. And what the optimum number of houses to build is
Re:Advance to Go (Score:5, Insightful)
But what I really object to is the claim that the game takes hours. Yes, for unskilled players it takes hours. However, top skilled players usually take about 15 minutes to 30 minutes to play a game (and many time even less than that). You buy stuff, you trade, and mortgage everything to build as much as you can, and then somebody is bankrupt in just a few round trips of a game after the house building phase starts. Skilled players roll, move, buy, pay rents, in less than five seconds usually -- so the game is very fast, until you get to the point where you have to think. You can play the game with a 10 minute clock for each player for the whole game without compromising much in the way of skill. Also, you usually agree to a draw if monopolies cannot be formed in a reasonable number of turns.
From what I have seen, the critical phase of the game occurs at the time trading occurs to form monopolies -- and this requires a great deal of skill, some of it involves being artfully persuasive. It is one of the reasons why monopoly is a cool game. Strategy and tactics sometimes are less important than being a great salesperson.
However, never bring such skilled people into a regular monopoly game. Their style of play can leave all the other players bankrupt in less than an hour and leave them wondering what just happened to their casual fun game.
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Much of that is down to snobbery. Risk isn't that much higher at 8751st.
After all, how can a gamer be smug about liking a game that "the masses" know how to play?
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Something like Snakes & Ladders (or Chutes & Ladders) is definitely worse than Monopoly. At least you have choices in Monopoly.
~Kat ^_^
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That's because you stuck to the rules. I once played it with a couple other, ahem, more creative players that turned it into an awesomely funny haggle game, by more or less inserting a "trading" round at the end of each turn in which they would offer money+estates for other player's assets that would offer them a strategic advantage. The face value of the offer would more often than not exceed the price of the haggled item. It was out-of-the-box, emotional and very entertaining.
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An ex-colleague of mine told me how he played Monopoly with his kids where he was the banker but not a player. He offered loans (with interest; obviously) and rent or jail insurance policies etc. Obviously he had more fun than they did but they learned some valuable lessons about money.
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The rank on boardgamegeek of Monopoly is 10464. According to quite a large community it is quite easy to beat Monopoly.
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Yeah, there's gamers and then there's gamers.
Amazon isn't ranking based on gamers - it's ranking based on people who buy the game. Everyone knows Monopoly. Most folks were brought up with it as the example of a "good" board game, with little understanding of the meaning of that term, and Hasbro markets the heck out of it (and its other games).
Not to belittle your point, though: Corps are going to focus on what they can sell. Monopoly is easy and caters to the masses. Most folks aren't going to get or necess
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Yeah, there's gamers and then there's gamers. ...easy and caters to the masses.
Careful, that's edging towards #gamergate.
A gamer isn't what a self selected bunch of white middle class young men decide a gamer is. A gamer is simply someone who likes to play games. Even if it's Farmville, Monopoly, or even Twister.
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A lot of people like monopoly, in spite of it being a terrible game. For those folk, the following video from this fellow Scott Nicholson could be mind opening
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
(skip the first two or so minutes of puppet show to get to the good parts)
Monopoly Free Parking Jackpot (Score:1)
The unofficial Free Parking jackpot in Monopoly was my favorite thing about any board game ever.
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The unofficial Free Parking jackpot in Monopoly was the worst thing about any board game ever. It meant a game that already dragged on too long never ended.
Casual games with strategic depth (Score:5, Interesting)
The best games for me have a good deal of strategic depth, but are comfortable for casual players. As an adult it is very hard for me to find a large group of hard core gamers, so casual gamers have to do. But I want to be entertained too.
The best trade-off I have found is a game with a little randomness but not too much, and one that helps players who are losing catch up. This allows the good players to be rewarded for their good play instead of just luck, but also keeps the game competitive until the end.
The best game I have found so far for this is Power Grid. It has simple rules, a good deal of strategy, and many game mechanics that give players a chance to catch up. It is often in a player's best interest to not get too far ahead because they will be too harshly punished by the "catch up" mechanics. And that ultimately just adds more strategic depth to the game.
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+1 on Power Grid. It really is an excellent game, and as you say, very cleverly designed, so that those that are doing well are reigned in a little, while those who are lagging are given a little hand.
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Amazon rates Power Grid very highly. One group, who did not care for the game, caused me to wonder what the optimum number of players is for this game. Any suggestion(s)?
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I'd suggest 3 or 4 is optimum.
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One group, who did not care for the game, caused me to wonder what the optimum number of players is for this game. Any suggestion(s)?
Two player games are not that fun, but fun two player games are so rare that I still sometimes play it two player.
Three and four player games are both fun and easy, because there is a low chance that anyone will get screwed by someone else's city placement.
Five and six player games are by far the most fun if you are good at the game (IMHO), but there is a high likely-hood that a new player will make a bad early decision and get completely surrounded by opponents. Even with the good "catch up" mechanics, tha
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I've enjoyed Power Grid with both 3 players and the maximum allowed by the game (6). I tend to believe that in between would probably be inferior. If you have 3 players, everyone can get in every city, at a cost. If you have 6, then half the people are locked out of every city. But if you have 4, then one person is locked out, which can lead to dogpiling, etc.
6 is fairly accommodating for differences in skill and experience, 3 less so.
There is a new 2 player version I am looking forward to trying.
The right amount of randomness (Score:3)
The best trade-off I have found is a game with a little randomness but not too much
I concur.
I have played some games with very little randomness, and for me at least they become "brain-burners" where I try to think three or four moves ahead. When I tried Caragena [boardgamegeek.com] I had this problem. If there is some randomness, I can relax until it's my turn.
Also, some games that seem to contain a whole lot of randomness can become statistically predictable. If a game has you rolling a set of dice a dozen times in your t
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The difference also lies in how the randomness affects you. Games where you make choices, then a random event occurs (like a die roll) to resolve everything can feel frustrating. On the other hand, games where something random happens, then you make (meaningful) choices based on it, feel more empowering to the player.
Talisman - Random event (die roll) followed by sometimes-meaningful choice (which direction to walk) followed by random event (card draw)
Alien Frontiers - Random event (dice roll) followed by
Length, skill and revenge (Score:1)
It must not last longer than 3h, must be 90%+ skill based and preferrably not be medieval themed. I loath chance-driven games. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, the game must not foster too much direct player-to-player offense as that incites vengeful behavior and bad atmosphere. German Eurogames usually hit all the sweet spots for me (except the theme one). Eclipse rocks in all aspects (and isn't German, I believe).
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I loath chance-driven games.
There needs to be enough chance so that you have to apply new strategies and skills to overcome the luck of the draw. Chance that simply promotes or demotes you without any recourse is pointless. Chance that puts you in situation A or situation B is slightly more interesting. Chance that puts you in situation(n!) is where you have to exercise your brain to map out a new strategy, and it's where games get fun.
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Well said. The antithesis of casual games, Star Fleet Battles, kept its appeal for years for me for precisely this. You could work out optimal "openings", but as soon as you exchanged heavy weapons fire the first time things could go many different ways. A good player would consistent recover from bad luck in the first volley, while a bad player would count on luck. It was neat that way because the set of situations you could find yourself in was large, and influence both by the basic strategy chosen by
The data offers some evidence for Gupta's hypothes (Score:1)
You mean, of course, evidence that his hypothesis is wrong...
Strategy over luck (Score:1)
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Why then are so many Settlers, Ticket-To-Ride, etc games boring once it becomes obvious someone has an edge and is likely going to win?
I prefer strategy + luck. Killer bunnies is a great game because people with better strategies generally have better odds of winning, but even a bad player can win and will remain invested till the end of the game. I like the idea of strategy giving better odds, but if it wins outright then bad strategists lose interest. You know what that leads to.....nerd sausage fests
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Settlers is incredibly random, but also is affected greatly by the pseudorandomness of other player's actions. After initial town placement, before the first turn begins, some players can be at such a disadvantage as to be unlikely to win.
Ticket to Ride doesn't suffer from this problem, because competitive players know the routes, predict the paths of those in the lead, and block them.
I agree that some randomness is necessary to level the playing field, as otherwise you have a game like chess and it's bori
Game of Thrones, (Score:2)
is pretty great. My group of friends have got deeply in to it recently, most of them being people who would never play board games and hadn't watched the show (or read the books). It's clear they took a lot of inspiration from Risk but has more than enough new elements to stop any sort of comparisons.
The design is well thought out, each house needs a completely different strategy and tactics which keeps it from going stale. Forming alliances (which to win you are going to have to betray at some point) alway
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Good point. I think the meta game is often important and allowing for it makes for a better game. Alliances, betrayal, ganging up one someone just because they're winning, all add so much more interest and intrigue.
Three-Cornered Pitney (Score:1)
MAD Magazine and Tom Koch nailed it with "Three-Cornered Pitney". Any good board game should involve uncooked popcorn kernels, conch hackers, rolling whirtlings, and pancakes.
Where the losers feel like they also won (Score:1)
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The problem with cooperative games is that many of them devolve into the most dominant personality running the show, i.e. if we want to win, everyone has to do what the smartest person says they should. Games of this sort that allow recovery from the bad decisions of one team mate are often trivially easy if all the players are equals and execute flawlessly.
Party games, like Cards Against Humanity, or Telestrations (where we too don't keep score) are just for fun, but also don't remotely tickle the itch of
cooperative game (Score:2)
I spend a lot of time with my wife playing Pandemic [boardgamegeek.com]. We love the fact that it is hard to win, but a cooperative rather than competitive play.
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I've played Hanabi with three players, and one of them had played it with two players.
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The issue is that the inexperienced players need to just do what the experienced ones tell them to, if the team wants to win. This leads to coops being dominated by the most vocal & experienced player. That player could just as easily play by himself, playing all the hands, as a solitary game.
That's why I don't care for most coops, at least.
Cooperative Game... With Possible Exceptions (Score:2)
That's one advantage of mostly cooperative board games where there might be a hidden "traitor" among the players who wins if the group loses (e.g. Shadows Over Camelot, Battlestar Galactica). With that possibility on the table, players can't just trust somebody else to make decisions and have to pay attention to what everyone else is doing (usually in these games, exposing the traitor has some reward, at least insofar as it curtails his ability to continue undermining the group).
Lord of the Rings cooperative game (Score:2)
A decade or so ago I played a LOTR game that was semi-cooperative. (There are presumably other LOTR games around.) You're playing one of the fellowship of the ring characters, and you're competing against each other, but Sauron's also moving, and if he gets to the ring before you get it to the volcano in Mordor, you all lose.
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What I like (Score:2)
Things I like in a board/card game:
1) Rules that are relatively easy to pick up in a short time even by casual players
2) A balanced game where proper play should provide a reasonable chance for all players to win
3) An element of randomness but one that demands calculation of odds ala poker (outcomes not pure chance)
4) Playable by groups of 2-4 people.
5) Easy to learn and play competently but hard to master completely
6) Can be played in a relatively short amount of time
7) Socially fun and with minimal frustr
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Sealed deck or not Magic is still a game of chance.
A friend wanted to play a couple weeks before Christmas so we bought a couple decks and played. He got two bad shuffles in row the first game he had two mana and nothing with a casting cost under three when he died on the 6th turn and the second game was pretty much the same even though the deck had a decent amount of mana and low casting cost creatures.
Nothing wrong with an element of chance (Score:2)
Sealed deck or not Magic is still a game of chance.
Nothing wrong with that. There is a high degree of skill in the game just like poker. Yes you can have a bad beat but on average the better player usually wins.
Re:What I like (Score:4, Interesting)
Land dependency is Magic's number one flaw. It always has been. If there had been a rule like "You can play any card from your hand face down as a land that you can tap for one colorless mana" the game would be very different, but less flawed.
Mana screws, though, occur more on the game level than turn level. If you aren't in a game where you are screwed, your turns are based on strategy after randomness, i.e. draw a card then plan what you want to do based on the known board and hand state, with the pseudorandomness of your opponent's choices to keep play somewhat uncertain.
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i just hear this as "i don't have the patience for chess, the brains for go, or the balls for poker."
It's not that I think chess or serious poker are bad games. Rather that they take a level of dedication to play at the highest level that takes all the fun out of it for me. Playing poker for serious money is more like a job than a game. A casual game of speed chess is fun. Poker on a friday night with your buddies is a great time. Trying to win the World Cup of Poker is no longer a game but an obsession. Misses the whole point for me.
Your mileage may vary of course...
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I would tend to agree with that for any game played professionally, maybe the competition itself may still be enjoyable, maybe even more than normal at that level, but the amount of work you would have to put into it to maintain your skills would seriously detract from the day to day enjoyment of it. I'd apply that to poker, chess, settlers of catan or counter-strike.
Why I don't play Go (Score:2)
It's a serious, interesting game, but you not only have to put a huge amount of work and study into it before you're any good, but also you need to have opponents around who are of a vaguely similar level. Yes, there's a handicap system, but playing a game with a 9-stone handicap is still mostly the smart guy teaching the newbie (and playing 13-stone is just silly.) And watching games between people who are far enough ahead of you doesn't teach you much.
I used to work in a building with about 4000 enginee
Easy to follow rules. (Score:4, Insightful)
A good game should have simple rules, but hard to master.
Chess has the maximum amount of rules for a game.
Most casual game players the rules need to be simple as they can start playing quickly. Without feeling like an idiot. However even though the rules may be simple, there is a lot of different strategies to try to win.
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Chess has the maximum amount of rules for a game.
As in... unique movement mechanics with few exceptions for 6 different types of pieces and no more than 16 different objects in play for each player at a time? Honestly I think chess is the best example of "simple rules, tough to master" but I must disagree that it has the "maximum amount of rules for a game".
There are games that are far more complicated than chess that are still great. I would submit "Magic: The Gathering" as an example. But really, if you take the time... there aren't too many popula
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In middle school, I loved chess. Not that I was great, but I enjoyed it and studied it and became middling. Later in life, once I had a job that required concentration for 8 hours a day, chess totally lost it's appeal. A moment's lapse on concentration costs you the game in chess. It just wasn't fun at the end of a work day. That is when backgammon became my game of choice. Strategy, similar to chess, but the dice make it pointless to plan more than a couple of moves out. Within a broad strategy, you
The Drinking (Score:2)
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Arimaa (Score:3)
I like abstract strategy games, but I don't like heavy memorization. Chess is popular so it's easy to find opponents, but memorizing the opening book is necessary if you want to get good. It's also very easy for weaker players to lose the game from a single blunder, which is unsatisfying for everybody. Arimaa was designed to be difficult for computers because of the very high branching factor, and that same property also makes it interesting for humans.
Arimaa can be played on a Chess board, and the rules are simple. Memorization is completely useless. You're forced to use intuition, in a way more like Go than Chess. There are no draws. Comebacks from inferior material are much more common than in Chess. It feels like Chess without the boring bits. It's still too new to tell if it's a truly great abstract strategy game, but people are already playing it at a very high level with no obvious flaw in the rules. I recommend trying it:
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/ [arimaa.com]
Knightmare Chess (Score:2)
I loved this game; it totally ate my brain when it came out. Basically an event deck for chess so you get cards like "Move your Bishop as if it were a Knight" style cards. You can play it better if you know a tiny bit of chess openings but good chess knowledge can also hinder you if, for example, a card is played which swaps the directions of move and capture for pawns - all your pawn structure knowledge goes out of the window.
I also played it with a stacked deck rather than a shuffled one to lessen the ran
Board games (Score:3)
I'm an avid board games collector, but I have specific interests.
I like "mathematically interesting" board games. A lot of the big-name games just don't do it for me. I also like board games with well-designed elements and pieces, no matter how bad the actual game. Yes, I'm odd.
I quite like the Pac-Man from the MB Game Pac-Man board game. It's a piece of design that I love. And I quite like the "inifinite board" concept of a Mad-Max like car board game I have called Thunderoad (also went by other names). But I really like things like Super Cluedo and even Cluedo: The Great Museum Caper (Cluedo = Clue in the US). However the original Cluedo is just boring. It's about how well it works as a game, not some hard-and-fast rule for what works.
It's the old story - you have to have something that nobody's seen before and telling you how to do that is impossible.
Strangely, I find RPGs and other tabletop games uninteresting for the most part.
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RPGs are heavily based on locking down the probability but obfuscating it to a high degree.
It's too high cost to lose, thus, they are always designed to be be won about 95% of the time.
if not more.
One of the especially rough things is that the players generally can't adapt that much, either they do have what is required of them or they must flee, if possible.
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My point is that RPGs with a focus on adventuring is not really lika a board game.
It's more of a way to try and play an epic fantasy book.
Games with Negotiation and Variety (Score:2)
Games where there is a lot of variety and games with negotiation are golden in my book. This is why I adore Cosmic Encounter and Dune. Both games are made by the same guys and they were far ahead of their time. You will never play two same games of Cosmic Encounter or Dune. Such great games. Cosmic Encounter is definitely far easier to get to the table because Dune basically is best with exactly six players... and Dune can be too long for some players. I should also add that Dune was reprinted as Rex
Downtime is a factor (Score:2)
Oh... I also left out that Cosmic Encounter is a game with basically zero downtime, since everyone is usually involved in everyone else's turn. That can be something that keeps people happy in games when they HATE waiting for their turn. I am far more patient than some players, since I can handle old-school wargames that take all day to play, but I am easily in the minority. ;-)
~Kat ^_^
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Absolutely, but the only downside to Cosmic Encounter is that you need more than a couple of players - the more the better the game is. As for design aspects, the powers make each game different so it keeps people's attentions in a way that playing for the hundredth time can't.
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I was lucky I read this topic early enough.
I actually got RC because I am related to Defoe.
I do like the game though.
There's a significant amount of random so it'sn't Euro
But much of that can be removed.
The Co-op part is good; as is the many scenarios.
Unfortunately not many people know about it.
A Tip for crowdfunding a Board Game (Score:2)
When you are close to the end of your own play testing phase you need to build multiple prototypes.
If you want to get the word out to people about your game, particularly sites that review games and recommend them to potential crowd funding audience is that you must have betas you can send to people.
And don't underestimate the time required to develop, build and create a beta for your game, in-house playtesting can take months of refinement. Review feedback is going to add a new cycle of changes / testing.
I
I'd rather be waterboarded than play Twilight Stru (Score:2)
Best? No way. (Score:2)
Calling Twilight Struggle the best boardgame on the basis of its BGG ranking is quite a stretch. BGG rankings are not to be taken as absolute statements of a game's quality or popularity. Just take into account that most people won't necessarily go back to rerate a game after a few years have passed. Also, a game which would never even be considered for play except by the enthusiasts (like Twilight Struggle...) will have its score inflated. A game like Dominion, which was much more popular and had a sig
There is an annual board game test event (Score:2)
It's called "Mind Games" - board game manufacturers use the Mensa organization to test new games over an intensive period of several days in a different city each year. Board game addicts within the organization converge on this event from a wide variety of places.