Amount of luck in different games

[Hubajube]

I've been half-mindlessly playing Captain Flip a lot. It's a luck management game, but I was wondering how much you can really mitigate. I'm thinking a good way to estimate that is by checking the win percentages of the top players. So I did a quick check of the 3 leaders in the current arena ranking for a handful of games, and I averaged their win percentages. I realize that there are a number of confounding factors that can influence these numbers, but this is just for fun.

As I expected, Captain Flip is down near the bottom with Can't Stop. Azul and A Feast for Odin surprised me the most. I would have guessed their spots would have been swapped.

86 Agricola
84 Azul
81 The Castles of Burgundy
80 Puerto Rico
80 Through the Ages: A new Story of Civilization
80 Splendor Duel
79 Ark Nova
77 Wingspan
76 Carcassonne
76 Forest Shuffle
76 A Feast for Odin
74 Akropolis
70 Space Base
67 Race for the Galaxy
65 No Thanks
63 Innovation
60 Captain Flip
60 Can't Stop
54 Yahtzee

[Meeplelowda]

I've been half-mindlessly playing Captain Flip a lot. It's a luck management game, but I was wondering how much you can really mitigate. I'm thinking a good way to estimate that is by checking the win percentages of the top players. So I did a quick check of the 3 leaders in the current arena ranking for a handful of games, and I averaged their win percentages. I realize that there are a number of confounding factors that can influence these numbers, but this is just for fun.

As I expected, Captain Flip is down near the bottom with Can't Stop. Azul and A Feast for Odin surprised me the most. I would have guessed their spots would have been swapped.

86 Agricola
84 Azul
81 The Castles of Burgundy
80 Puerto Rico
80 Through the Ages: A new Story of Civilization
80 Splendor Duel
79 Ark Nova
77 Wingspan
76 Carcassonne
76 Forest Shuffle
76 A Feast for Odin
74 Akropolis
70 Space Base
67 Race for the Galaxy
65 No Thanks
63 Innovation
60 Captain Flip
60 Can't Stop
54 Yahtzee

In principle this is a reasonable approach, but one thing that will pollute your data is the win % rates for games that tend to be (or can only be) played two-player vs games that are usually played multiplayer.

Another way to approach this is the look at the ELO of the highest rated players for a game. You'll note that peak ELOs for games near the bottom of your list are also relatively low. E.g., 573 for Yahtzee and 453 for Can't stop and 532 for Captain Flip. But for games at the top of your list, for Agricola it's 751 and for Azul it's 1087. The reasoning is basically the same: you can only climb so high when no matter how well you play it's still basically a flip of a coin slightly weighted in your favor.

[Strode]

Also note that this is more about the amount of skill in a game, not the amount of luck. They are not inverses.

Tic-Tac-Toe has no luck.

[JohnnyCyclops]

I tend to view the range of ELO to be a good proxy for skill / luck. As noted above, Azul has a wide ELO range (0-1000) whereas something like Can’t Stop is narrower (0-500). There’s also probably some skewing of the distribution curves for each game’s ELO and I’ve seen graphs produced by other site users so it’s possible to access/download such datasets for further analysis.

[Hubajube]

Good points, all.

[Exotic Dreams]

Me too. Except mostly for King Of Tokyo, which is a game I play a lot on here.
Good luck with those findings.