Board Game Arena

I am a little at a loss sometimes when a game is given a low complexity rating. Sometimes I don't know if it is for the rule set or if it is for the play of the game. I know that games differ a lot at what level you play at.

I was top 20 at one point on Lost Cities and at that level the game is very different because there are maybe 2 or 3 times in a game where you need to identify that you should make a read to not play standard based on what has been played and is still in the deck. There is a lot of luck involved with that game but to have a high rating, you have to figure out where to eek out a few extra percentage points to give yourself the best shot.

I think Azul is very much like this in that since there is a lot of luck involved, you are continuously trying to put yourself in the best position with slight improvements over many plays and it is very hard a lot of times to read the board as to what the best play is. I would go so far as to say that it is so hard that often the predictor used to determine the odds of someone winning based on the ratings is very wrong if the better player intentionally makes the board complicated by not making the game just a race to build columns and rows. If you leave the game to be a race, you are leaving the game to luck of the draw. If you complicate the board, I believe that the game actually is actually not very much luck based and most of the luck is due to who plays first and even that is grossly overstated. I think if I played a player 200 rating points below me, I would probably win like 15+ out of 20 games pretty easy, which the ratings wouldn't reflect in their calculation.

I think the game is treated as not complex because it is often very difficult to read a statistically better position when there is a fair amount of randomness. The abstractness of a statistically better position makes the game seem simpler than it is.

I'm under the impression that complexity just refers to how easy or hard the rules are to learn. As such, I do think Azul deserver the rating of one.

What I find odd is how it has the same rating of three for both Luck and Strategy which seems to imply it's a 50/50 split between the two. From my understanding (and rather limited experience) the Strategy is way more impactful than the Luck.

I believe there is very little luck. If there was a rule of either bidding for who goes first or redrawing tiles if any of the sets had four of the same color, I would say almost no luck. I would say most of my games were determined before going into the final round and the final round is just a play through of what was planned in the previous 4 rounds.

We talked about that in that subject: https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=30423

Short summary being that atm, there is no guideline about it, so each developper rate those ratings as they want.

To change it, either contact the dev of the game, OR wait for bga to work on that problem (which could never happen ), OR try to do something really nice to harmonise all ratings.

But people playing only simple games should not have the same rating than people playing only complicated games.

As others have said, easy to learn and understand. Maybe what you’re talking about would fit more in the strategy/luck category. Also the ratings don’t consider how many players are playing. 2p is much more strategy and less luck than 4p.