I fear your expiration measurement is too subjective to be useful! I’ve already played Raiders of the North Sea more than twice and it hasn’t even nearly expired.
But I played Tigris and Euphrates a couple of times and have no desire at all to ever play it again - the thought of playing it 300 times seems a cruel and unusual punishment.
This is where instead of absolute numbers T Shirt sizes are helpful as ratings. Because while we can’t agree quite on the actual numbers it’s far easier to say that Raiders might be an S or M while T&E is most likely an XL. It remains subjective just like complexity ratings are. But I’m my plans I would use TShirt sizes a lot.
All fair.
I’d also like to make the distinction between not getting on with a game and playing it out. I didn’t find much to like in Tiletum and was done in 2, but that’s different from the expiration. Lost cities I really enjoyed but after 10 games or so found an inescapable rut - that’s the value I’d want to assess.
Yeah, I’m probably unusual for RotNS but I always cite it as I was blown away by my first play and devastated by my second - despite the random distribution of loot and a different crew, I felt I was playing the exact same thing.
But yes, ranges would be best to manage the diversity of opinions, a 23 session game and a 28 game session aren’t meaningfully distinct (even if theybwere precise). Also semi logarithmic, 1-5, 5-10, 10-20, … 50-100, 100+. Practically, few games will get more than 20 sessions.
Did euros always have tracks? I feel like tracks are important to some euros and not to others.
I also think there’s a difference between tracks that just make you better at something vs tracks which are basically an area majority competitive thing.
That could be a deep dive in itself. A score track can be a race game’s main board (Flamme Rouge, complete with “first player to get to this score stops others having it”), or effectively decorative as in Concordia where most of your points come in the end game and you might as well use a score pad. I’m playing Planet Unknown on BGA at the moment and those tracks are stuffed with benefits when you get to particular spots.
It’s the planet unknown type I’m mostly thinking about - this kind of RPG stats element where you buff abilities.
Only if you have no soul! And therefore don’t enjoy the thrill of watching a piece move round the track, and the uncertainty over whether it will catch up!
I haven’t seen it done in a game, but I could easily picture an inverted Y-shaped score track, where whoever gets to the junction first blocks that space for everyone else. (Then some mechanisms allow you to score two points at once so that you can overtake.)
I would probably make a BGG account for the collection. I am nitpicking about the BGG ontology. It is decent enough for a basic catalogue. Also there is a page somewhere where you can make nice catalogs from your games. It was mentioned on that geeklist with boardgame tools: Create your board game catalog automatically - myBoardGameCollection.com
Geekgroup.app has a far better filtering on an existing collection and the ability to tag games.
Unless of course there is a marjority of games that is not in the BGG database which I think is unlikely…
I saw someone use the word “care bear” and I almost vomited. But having said that that could be a class of games - ones where you don’t conflict directly and cause damage to other players prospects.
One could probably try to rank games on aggression/meanness and people who have low tolerance for that could use the metric to avoid games with a high score. Games with take that mechanics would rank higher. Lower interaction games would probably rank lower.
And at the lowest end you find both cooperative games and non-cooperative games that would qualify for the term. Also some party-games would probably qualify.
and this good for both ways:
This is play. It should be fine in theory.
But there are days … where I tend to opt for “low aggression” games which often means cooperative or solitaire-style games.
To me there’s a subtle difference in how aggression in games is structured.
If we’re playing a dudes-on-a-map game, for example, and I need to expand my territory, it’s inevitable that I’m going to bump up against someone else’s territory – we’ll probably have to exchange some pieces as the map develops. This is “aggression” but it’s perfectly fine.
There are other games (of all kinds) where on my turn, I can completely destroy the plans of another player with, in some cases, little-to-no benefit of my own. Some people delight in this sort of thing. I… do not (though it can be funny 
). e.g.
A: “I’m going to Build a Church next to the Orphanage and that’ll give me 8 points.”
B: “I’ll play ‘Catastrophic Fire’ as a reaction to that. A building being built catches fire during construction. Then each building next to it also burns to the ground. There are no survivors.”
This sounds like something that would happen Frostpunk.
It is kind of funny … in the way Frostpunk is … never funny.
Depends. If it’s an action limited game, then yes they screwed up themselves and B for little benefit, meaning C and D are in a better position.
But if A can steal an action that denies B a lot of pts AND can do their original plan that gives them the best pts, I don’t see how that is “unnecessary meanness”? They ruin B’s position without sacrificing their own.
I think I find (A) easier to navigate as most actions include this as opposed to some … but it is just as hard to bring to my table.
Yeah. I think that’s the beauty of classic “euro” games- stealing the worker placement spot that someone else needs gives a sense of competition and aggression, but it doesn’t come across as “cutthroat”. Sure, they aren’t going to get enough gold to bribe the priest on their next turn because you took that spot, but, honestly, bribing the priest is only going to net them 6 points anyway… and there are other places they can go that can score 5 instead.
My primary objection to this kind of thing is if the action economy is unbalanced. If, for example, it takes one person 3-4 turns to get all the resources necessary to build the building and the other player spends 1 turn drawing 5 cards then plays one of them as a reaction to destroy that building. That ability to spend one turn to ruin someone else’s plans, almost as an afterthought, when it took many turns (and maybe 15-30 minutes real time) to make those plans feels very unfair and can completely ruin a game.
100% agree and well said.
If a player can easily derail a plan that has taken extensive planning to execute over the course of a significant portion of the game, that’s an issue.
The interference between players should be like-for-like in effort, risk/reward, and pacing.
So well-balanced aggression I doubt I can even begin to start to express that in terms of an ontology. But I do like the idea of rating games on that scale or deriving it from some other statistics like included mechanisms…
In my mind… I associate certain attributes that have been mentioned here with the mechanisms with which games are already being described.
I wonder if I rated all mechanisms against these… if I could then deduce some attributes of boardgames that are really hard to grasp otherwise.
Yes, of course I am still trying to create a modell for boardgames and explain the world 
An aggression axis might run from “aggression is necessary to prosper” (chess, many wargames) to “aggression is impossible” (co-ops). But there some interesting special cases: the lineage of Shadows over Camelot and Dead of Winter where there is a cooperative task to be accomplished but one of you may be a traitor (I would put this a little down the scale from Battlestar Galactica where you’re guaranteed at least one traitor). Race games, broadly defined, where you are only working to improve your own score/position; but then also ones where if you get to a thing first you’ll have an advantage (Flamme Rouge). Games where resource denial is possible (hate drafting).