OK! This has been fun. One last bucket and then we’re going to tie it all together which I’m looking for. This last one is just “everything else” - what doesn’t fall into the prior buckets. Here is what we’ve covered:
Duel: Light
Duel: Crunchy
Duel: Epic
Social: Small group
Social: Large group
Filler
Quickteach
Skirmish
Epic
Scenario / Campaign / Co-op
What’s left is sort of the vague Euro? Economics, engines, upgrades, action selection…just gamey games? You may have other angles to define it. I divide this last bucket of less definable games into Light, Medium, and Heavy.
So I filtered out my Duels, Party-ish games, low-duration fillers, Fighting categorized games and games that tend to last longer than 2hours as well as cooperative games and campaigns. It was difficult to filter for quick-teach I went with complexity. Geekgroup app is awesomest:
I just sorted by rating and decided to cut off with Everdell. There are a bunch more games I rated 8… but somehow this seemed a good fit. Hispania includes Tetrarchia. Dune:Imp includes Uprising. This seems like a pretty good representation of the “leftovers” in my collection. (full list)
Mistborn would be up here if I had bothered to rate it yet. But that means writing up a review-ish comment for me on BGG so no rating yet. But it’s up there with Revive and Beyond the Sun. Lots and lots of deckbuildery games. I just like games with lots of different cards–I blame Richard Garfield.
PS: Terraforming Mars should probably be filed under epic but if not there it is definitely part of this crew. No idea what parameter kicked it out of this ranking
Your “everything else” seems to cover nearly all my games? Certainly wouldn’t call most of them Euros, as “Euro” pretty much defines games I’m not interested in, except specifically for old-school aggressive Euros. Economic games, sure, some of those. And everything else.
While that may well be filter friendly our play of that would easily file under skirmish for me. The fight for position in a rail road and how to mess up routes and cause merges was all about tearing down opponents.
Season though screams great shout. Such a good game and while there is some sort of attacking it’s maybe not central enough for it to dominate.
i want to add that @Acacia divided this into different weights. one could obviously include ranges. i went for the middle weight because as stated: below tends to be fillery and above epic. YMMV.
Oh, I didn’t see the personal rating in the filter list because I only inspected the filters while looking at yours and llv’s lists, not my own. My list is much larger when including unrated games in addition to 7+
The filters are fine and it was great we can use it as template. I mean, you have to set the line somewhere, but I checked what was removed from my Top 20.
I would add The Estates and Ride the Rails - which was excluded for “quickteach”. It is, but then so is DIC, Chex, GM&O, and PR, as they are light weight rules, but obviously weight is given for their depth. I feel The Estates is in the same basket here.
P.S. I re-read the Quickteach thread - looks like if games like Go are considered as Quickteach, then Cube Rails like I enumerated above will be considered borderline quickteach?
I would also add The Great Zimbabwe it was excluded due to its weight being higher than the range given. But it is far from “epic”. It’s Splotter you can play in 2 hours.
Pax Renaissance is arguable. The rules weight is crazy. But a 2 player game can last as fast as 40 mins.
Homeland: the Game, which I would count as “social [deduction], small group”. Same basic idea as Shadows over Camelot or Battlestar Galactica: you all ostensibly have a task to do, and some of you may be trying to sabotage that task.
Steampunk Rally, which I grant doesn’t fit into the previous categories; like long-term favourite Rallyman GT, it’s competitive while rarely being combative (you can directly malaffect another player, but that’s not a big part of the game). “Racing games” is a bit too theme-focused to work with the previous categories, but I think there’s a room for “we are all playing in a competitive way while mostly not directly attacking each other, and it’s neither filler nor epic”—I mean, that’s most of the games I have.
Evil High Priest, one I should play again some time. Quite like a racing game in feel, though you’re all competing to claim spots on the ritual tracker.
The Networks, well, again, there’s some room for hate-drafting but it’s much more “I try to out-compete you” than “I attack you”. Sort of vaguely Euro I guess, but nobody would call it a Euro game (nor any of these really).
I have very few personal rankings on BGG, so I just went with 7+ on BGG rankings. Here’s what I get with that criteria:
Bruxelles 1897
Castles of Mad King Ludwig
Concordia
Deus
El Grande Big Box
Everdell
Everdell: The Complete Collection
Five Tribes: The Djinns of Naqala
Gùgōng
Hansa Teutonica: Big Box
Istanbul
Letters from Whitechapel
Lost Ruins of Arnak
Lowlands
Maharaja: The Game of Palace Building in India
Orléans
The Princes of Florence
Race for the Galaxy
Raiders of Scythia
The Red Cathedral
Shogun
The Taverns of Tiefenthal
Tigris & Euphrates
Troyes
Vampire: The Masquerade – Vendetta
War of the Ring: The Card Game
The Wolves
Seven of these games I have not played in any way, shape, or form. Five have been played on BGA. The rest I have actually played my physical copy.
I was surprised that Heat and Flamme Rouge were missing, then realized they are considered rather light weight. Also noticed Stephenson’s Rocket was missing, which lalunaverde has on his list, but then saw it is only rated 6.9 on BGG.
This also reminds me I should probably sell, trade, or give away my original copy of Everdell. Though occasionally it’s been easier to just pull it out and play the base game rather than pull out the massive Complete Collection.
I find it quite interesting what the same filter parameters (or mostly the same) are telling us about each of our collections and how they compare.
In @RogerBW’s case I’d say, it would probably be more interesting to widen the complexity filter especially at the lower end. This filter currently selects for mid-weight. What happens when we move complexity up or down by one? Are we still getting euro-ish games? Or does it overlap with epic and quick-teach/filler games too much.
At midweight however… the result is decidedly euro-ish for a lot of our collections I would say. Which is interesting… I suppose @Acacia had a theory that something like this might emerge when we took out all the other categories of games. Did you have a filter like this in mind? Did I forget anything?
This is more about grouping games by audience or mood. If you want a well rounded collection, not everyone needs a tile laying game, a worker placement game, a trick taking game … those are mechanics. And if you want a museum or a gaming curriculum, you should experience each. But there’s nothing magic to individual mechanics.
If you do want a well rounded collection, though, I would say you need short games, long games, games for two, games for more, some for newcomers, some for veterans, some that make you laugh and some that make your brain burn.
So I think I initially thought in terms of Quickteach-light-medium-heavy-epic, with breakouts for two player since that is often walled off from 3+ (depending on the game, some privileged few do scale great). And then I saw some subsections that were worth labeling.
Also, I’ve admittedly had the benefit of foresight in all of this. If you call Libertalia and The Crew social games (because the primarily rely on interpersonal communication or interactive chaos and schadenfreude) and call El Grande and The Wolves skirmish games (because you’re fighting over territory and knocking each other’s pieces around) then you end up with a pretty homogenous group for this light-medium-heavy set. Hard to articulate, but easy to feel homogeneity.
If you’re stricter where social means Wavelength and skirmish means Risk, this last bucket can be a bit large and hodgepodgey.
