Filtering out 'Bad' or unknown games

[Soulis6116]

There are so many games on BGA now, but still almost no tools to gauge popularity, ranking or overall 'quality'.

Obviously a hard subjective thing to measure, and there's no true right answer, but surely there could be a way to filter for games which are pretty clearly lesser quality, not well liked, or just not played as much.

Maybe some way for users to rate a game, or search for popularity? Or even to just filter out by BGG ranking threshold (I.E only show me the top 2000 ranked games). BGG rank is not a good measure really, but could still be helpful here.

There's no way to sort or filter right now when you're looking through all the new games, between something like Hegemony (Ranked 41 on BGG, with almost 1500 ratings) and a game like Shokoba (Ranked 30,000 with 40 ratings). Right now they both appear in the 'new games' list and even many of the premium games are in this same boat.

Just would love some way to separate the actual well regarded and best selling games, from the board game equivalent of shovelware that seems to be the majority of new releases.

[Fuchur]

How would any such system work without knowing anything about your preferences, the games you like and those you don't ? A "great" game seems to be pretty personal -- something like Hegemony won't fit most players on this site.

[RazorOz]

Not sure of the metric used but https://boardgamearena.com/gamelist?isPopular= orders the games by popularity.

[lefalaf]

BGG ranking is trash, as you indicate. Text reviews frequently don't always jive with the number rating they picked. (e.g. Explaining why they didn't like the game. Here's a high rating. Loves this game, but rated it low.) Brigading happens for assorted reasons. Bias toward heavy games, high production values, well marketed games, or what some popular influencer said.

I suppose it could be an option, but you might overlook some gems. EDIT: Sorry, went on a bit of a rant there. The BGG rating/rank bothers me. Largely a flaw of human nature and large groups when something is no longer niche, so not sure how they could realistically police or fix it.

Separately, popularity is no indication of quality. Some of my favorite games aren't popular on here. And some are.

And there are plenty of simple, benign personal preference reasons to like or not like a game.

As others note, there doesn't seem to be a good way to automate this as it is too subjective and would require predicting your tastes, and we've seen how bad many social media algorithms are with this. The youtube music one seems to be quite good as an exception though, at least for me.

[tbhp]

The points made here literally all apply also to movies and any other artform. Yet most everyone agrees that it is good they have a critical scene.

Is this site the right place for it, I don't know. But this is a big community who cares about board games, so it would be nice to know what people think. Even the ability to add reviews (for a game in general, and for a particular instance of it) would go a long way to develop the culture on here.

[Soulis6116]

They do have popularity sorting on here, which is something I only just realized.

Really I'd just like SOME kind of way to tell broad quality at a glance.

It's true BGG game rankings are bad, but they're better than no rank or rating of any kind.
There's going to be endless discussion around what is in the top 200 of BGG rankings, but there's a lot less contention for the MANY titles, available on BGA that don't even make it into the top TEN THOUSAND of BGG.

Even BGA itself probably has some data that could be useful for this, like Popularity + How often people replay a game + user submitted ratings, weighted to account for new games with less data.

[Cile]

There could be value in a page that lists games by how active they are in BGA, either by how many tables were started in the last week/month/timeframe or average number of active tables at a time. If I'm looking to learn and try a new game it would be useful to know which ones I'm more likely to be able to find opponents for.

[Meeplelowda]

There could be value in a page that lists games by how active they are in BGA, either by how many tables were started in the last week/month/timeframe or average number of active tables at a time. If I'm looking to learn and try a new game it would be useful to know which ones I'm more likely to be able to find opponents for.

There is very much a value in this (to me at least), even if it's on a longer timeframe than hourly, or whatever it used to be. I'm not a DBA, but I can't see how it would be overbearing to run this query once per week during a low traffic time.

[Fuchur]

They do have popularity sorting on here, which is something I only just realized.

Really I'd just like SOME kind of way to tell broad quality at a glance.

It's true BGG game rankings are bad, but they're better than no rank or rating of any kind.
There's going to be endless discussion around what is in the top 200 of BGG rankings, but there's a lot less contention for the MANY titles, available on BGA that don't even make it into the top TEN THOUSAND of BGG.

Even BGA itself probably has some data that could be useful for this, like Popularity + How often people replay a game + user submitted ratings, weighted to account for new games with less data.

It might be interesting that BGA starts an algorithm similar to that an youtube : If you like games A, B and C and hate games X and Y and there are some other players on this site with the same pattern which also like games D and E, than BGA could propose you these games.

I don't believe that there is something like a general "quality" of a game (but of course, an implementation might be buggy).

[tbhp]

There could be value in a page that lists games by how active they are in BGA, either by how many tables were started in the last week/month/timeframe or average number of active tables at a time. If I'm looking to learn and try a new game it would be useful to know which ones I'm more likely to be able to find opponents for.

That would be a sheer popularity ranking though (popular as in many people play it), whereas the OP was talking about quality too.

People tend to be more prone to try out and get competitive at games many other people are already playing. On the flipside, games that are not played a lot may see their quality ratings inflated, since the people who play them are more likely to be fans of the game.

The heavy types of games mentioned above would be a good example of this. The people who play those games are likely to have a good opinion of them. You probably wouldn't get invested in such a demanding game if you didn't. But this could also lead the ratings to be misleading for the majority of players who prefer lighter games.