I haven’t been part of the hobby side of boardgames for long enough to know if this is an extremely controversial topic. It could be for all I know about the internet. If I missed some big debates on this please let me know.
I tend to use categories and mechanics on BGG to get a first impression of what a game might be like (along with complexity, player counts, play time of course). But it turns out this is really difficult when there are games that list 5 categories and 15 mechanics, some of which aren’t really present at all.
I spent all of last evening categorising my boardgames on geekgroup.app because I am unhappy with the way BGG does this. But I am also running into troubles with geekgroup.app because the tags there are just a very simple implementation and I am really tempted to go about buiding my own thing for that.
BGG has a somewhat lacking ontology for games. In my opinion it is way too simple on the one hand lumping stuff together that is not the same thing at all and forgoing any kind of hierarchy to help structure the various elements. Here are the elements that currently exist:
Type
Categories
Mechanics
Families
Some of my gripes:
None of them have hierarchical groupings. I want auction games I have to specify which type of auction. There are about a dozen types: Dutch, English, Fixed Placement, Multiple Lot, Sealed Bid, Turn Order, Once Around… separated from betting and bluffing and bids as wagers and… meh. (Admittedly Auctions are the worst among the mechanic subgroups)
Type is extremely broad and useless. Families contain anything and everything that didn’t fit anywhere else: Digital Implementations by Platform is actually more useful than I thought and I didn’t know this was so thoroughly annotated. Types of components are classified as Families as well etc. etc.
It is impossible to tell by the mechanics and categories listed which of these are truly significantly represented and describe the game and which are only listed for the game to appear in more searches.
Then there is the issue of the Euro / Not-Euro / Ameritrash taxonomies… those are surely the most controversial thing about classifications but the way people talk about these I feel it should be represented.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg of my complaints or rather those I could come up with between 2 meetings
I found a few articles that seem to seriously try and create better taxonomies/ontologies for games
So I am reasonably sure with this community that the lot of you have spent > 0 time thinking about games and categorizations. What are your thoughts on this? Have you tried to get a better grasp on your collection by categorizing games? Do you even think in categories?
At some point, linking to BGG Mechanics [sic], Categories, Families and the like turned into a form of BGG-specific SEO[1] and was weaponized against the community for the purposes of hype and profit.
I used to try to analyze these aspects of my favorite games to develop heuristics to find other games I would enjoy; after countless hours wasted, I came to the realization that it’s all just marketing.
I haven’t yet formalized the theory, but it is similar to my theory of public BGG GeekLists. If you create a geeklist titled “Games that play best with 2”, for example, fairly soon that geeklist will contain games that fall into one or more of the following:
don’t even support 2-players
require a fan-made variant to play at 2 players
has a terrible 2-player mode, but the game is in the top 100
has a terrible 2-player mode, but was added 3 days before it was released
And over a long enough timeline, it would probably just contain every game in the database.
So, as we can see, it’s not just publishers’ hype-based marketing that is to blame… it’s pervasive across the hobby
It is funny that you started this topic and I just kinda ran into that problem at school.
I participated in a contest “Spielen macht Schule” by developing a concept for my school how to implement board games in all the different ways (I can talk a bit more about how I envision it if anyone is interested). It was a ton of work but I am very happy with the result.
And we also won and now got a ton of board games delivered from different companies for free as the prize (if you are interested you can check out what games they offer to choose from by sending a wishlist and hoping you’ll get what you want. Funnily enough I got a game called Hippo Flipp which is not on their list at all. I guess someone just put it in the box
Well to come back to why I even reply with that story in this post, I don’t know most of the board games I got and there are a lot of them, so I started an excel sheet to catalogue and categorize them (that’s pretty easy, at some point I have to learn and play all of them and consider how to use them). I don’t need to go too deeply in mechanics and categories but it still caused me some head scratching.
Thinking of the recent thread on luck, you could add axes for degree of competition vs cooperation (including those awkward ones where “we all want to beat the bad guy, but we each want to get most points doing it”), and perhaps for amount of hidden knowledge. Nothing to do with mechanics really, but it might give you some idea of the feel of a game.
I can’t really explain it but I really don’t like on BGG that deck and bag building are lumped together. I can understand why they are but somehow I also think a bag builder is completely different to a deck builder. They are both the same thing but also completely different.
Take Orléans for example. Even though you “build” a bag the nature of the tokens means they are individually useless (most of the time) and they each have different contextual meaning (eg if you want to interact with the map you need a red guy). In contrast I think most deck builders each card has its own utility. This is one gold, this is a draw 4, this is a curse…etc. the thing that binds the two - random drawing and modification of the draw pile- is less interesting to me than the things I do with the objects afterwards.
I think this exists more frequently in abstract games. So someone who likes Azul might like it not because it’s themeless but because it’s got a mean draft while someone likes chequers might not be fussed with drafting (ironically) and the mind set that puts you in. Although both might like the special planning aspects.
I wouldn’t say Dominion with cards and Dominion with (poker) chips are mechanically significantly different though. There are some things you can do with a deck that you can’t do with a bag - like specifically, inserting cards into position n, when n is not “before all the unsorted ones” or “after all the unsorted ones”. But I haven’t seen many deckbuilders really go deep into that. I think there was just one promo Dominion card, the last time I checked. There are deckbuilders where you don’t shuffle, I suppose, but they are their own thing.
(I do greatly prefer Dominion as a bag builder though!)
I think this a little bit of what I’m conflicted about. I think a bag builder is more than using a bag with chips. It’s got a part that is unsaid outside of the physical implementation. So when you start with the idea of using chips usually one is saying that the rest of the design grows from that - generally this means low information on the piece itself which means how wild you can go is lessened, there’s a lean into a luckiness perhaps and even the act of pulling a single piece is supposed to have drama.
Even if dominion can be put on chips I’m sure there’s a finite limit as to how wacky you can go compared to the use of cards and what that allows (eg just being able to hold them easily creates implications, such as secrecy, outside of the better available text space).
Thinking about it I wonder if Orléans chip use is partially about being able to easily read what a person is about to do.
I made Dominion and a whole bunch of expansions as chips, and I think there were only two cards (the promo I mentioned earlier and one other) that I skipped because they didn’t really work in a bag builder. I did have to edit text a bit, but mostly just “card” → “disc”, new icons, and cropping verbose clarifications.
There are commercial examples of bag builders that went with that format just because the components are nicer than way - see Puzzle Strike (where the designer ripped off the Dominion-on-chips design).
So even if there is some observable difference between commercially available deckbuilders and bag builders, I don’t think that’s a result of needing less text, more emphasis on single draws, or whatever. I think it’s mostly just that bag building means more expensive components, tooling, etc., making cards the default choice for any game with a lot of components.
Biggest difference I can think of in deck vs bag is deck traditionally you go through them all before starting over (guaranteed to see all) and in bag you traditionally throw everything back in every time. Doesn’t have to be that way for either and there are exceptions, but I do think bags tend to be much less likely to have an equivalent of a discard pile.
