Board Game Arena

There was a thread recently about quitting games prematurely (which, mercifully, I won't bump) that referred to the statistical tables that premium members can see. While I do think manually comparing your own data for a game directly to top players is useful (there are videos on Ark Nova that do a great job of this, for example), the aggregate data tables you can see for each game are largely jumbled nonsense. Reasons for that:

1. Solo play is included, and solo play often has a fixed number of turns and different incentive structure (see again: Ark Nova).
2. All player counts are included, and those can also be different in terms of turns and numbers of points.
3. Variants are all jumbled together and change game play and speed (see: Terraforming Mars - Prelude).
4. Finally, and this is the biggest one: players of all skill levels are in the same pool, a pool that is biased toward lower Elo ratings given the distribution of players.

Without filtering, you get something like this:



Clearly, I'm a way below "winning" at Forest Shuffle, almost 50 points lower...except I'm Expert-level.

All I'm saying is, the data in those tables is numerical sludge, and it would be nice to filter, though I say that without knowing the mechanics or complexity of it.

Alternately, adding a column of the top 50 or 100 player statistics would give players a clearer view of highest-Elo winning play...maybe that's the path?

Like so many other things, it's much less useful or meaningful than one would expect/wish:

- Elo is also aggregated for all variants, player counts, etc. So take it with a pinch of salt.
- Complexity/strategy/luck/interaction ratings are set arbitrarily by the developer, and there's no guideline on what they even mean.
- Other game tags (mechanism, theme, etc.) are also added haphazardly and sometimes wrongly. A game having a tag might mean that's relevant (but e.g. Aquatica has a "building" theme... really?). And a game *not* having a tag definitely does not mean the tag does not apply.
- Game lists can't be shared or done anything useful with... except seeing which games are in a list.
- The list of last games played for a given game does not show settings (beyond number of players) and cannot be searched/filtered.
- The list of games in the site itself cannot be searched either. I mean you get just a list of "logos", good luck finding if a given game is there.
- The filters in the game list cannot be negated (e.g. find all games that do *not* have dice, because they are rigged, of course)
- ...

Hello Jelby,

I agree with all you said

Jellby wrote: ↑06 March 2026, 19:36 - The list of games in the site itself cannot be searched either. I mean you get just a list of "logos", good luck finding if a given game is there.

As a workaround, you can either sort the list alphabetically or, even better, search for a game name in the search bar in the top left.

Jellby wrote: ↑06 March 2026, 19:36 - Game lists can't be shared or done anything useful with... except seeing which games are in a list.

I'd be curious about your ideas here...

I am amused by the absurd statistics in some games. In viticulture, for example, there are statistics showing the average number of the selected starting card. But these numbers are just something abstract for the operation of the game and have no real meaning. Why do i need to know tham my red starting card is 112.7 on average???

Is game data accessible somewhere via API so that it’s possible to build an external data dashboard for a game? Would be neat!