As the industry of tabletop gaming experiences an ongoing renaissance, the new opportunities and growing range of products has created a unique set of challenges. These challenges range for both publishers of games as well as local tabletop retailers across the country. On the publishing side, an oversaturated market threatens to drown out any new release with noise, not giving upstart game designers or independent studios a chance to build a customer base. For retailers, the challenge comes when accurately predicting which releases to keep in stock and what investments make sense when supporting particular products.

With a seemingly ever-increasing rate of new tabletop games published and released each year, uniqueness has become increasingly essential. Finding retailers and communities who will support the game in an ongoing fashion is a major challenge so standing out is more important than ever before. In 2019, 3,500 new tabletop products were launched, with as many as 100 new titles releasing in a given week, according to Steve Horvath, the North America President and Head of Publishing for Asmodee Games. Regarding retailers, it is estimated that between five and six thousand local tabletop retailers operate in the United States alone, creating an increasingly competitive market in an industry often reliant on the loyal support of a dedicated community of customers. 

So for both of these parties, our report aims to explore the question, “What insights can be gleaned from the types of games highly regarded by tabletop enthusiasts to inform publishers and retailers as to the products most worth releasing and supporting?” In our search, we’ll also look to answer the query, “Is there a particular attribute, such as the game’s complexity, that can meaningfully inform business decisions?”

Defining the Problem

The continuously growing interest in tabletop games brings many boons to those involved in the industry. These problems of unmanageable scale and limited resources create higher costs of opportunity for both publishers, who need to ensure the products they release will be sufficiently supported, and retailers, who must be selective when choosing their stock, in order to support marketing efforts or community events.

Clearly, an increased understanding of which types of games are expected to be more successful and which games are most worthwhile to be supported by retailers is beneficial information. Depending on their particular audience and focus, an increased sense of certainty across the industry would allow more accurate predictions. This would be a benefit for publishers who want to ensure their product reaches their customers, as well as, retailers who want to serve their community with an accurate stock.

So for both of these parties, our report aims to explore the question, “What insights can be gleaned from the types of games highly regarded by tabletop enthusiasts to inform publishers and retailers as to the products most worth releasing and supporting?” Specifically in this report, we will deploy Tableau’s data visualization capabilities to focus on these factors. Our focal point will be to hone in on how the complexity of a game can affect the popularity and how retailers and publishers alike may weigh their options when it comes to designing and offering products with varying degrees of complexity.

Dataset

By analyzing the data, created by the interactions of board game enthusiasts on the popular Board Game Geek website and forums, we hope to provide meaningful and interesting insights which could serve to reduce uncertainty and friction in the tabletop industry. Specifically, the dataset downloaded from Kaggle includes a mix of categorical and numerical attributes, including:

• Rank: The overall rank of the game, based on its ‘Geek Rating.’

• Name: The title of the published game.

• Min_players: The minimum number of players required for playing the game.

• Max_players: The maximum number of players allowed for playing the game.

• Avg_time: The average duration of the game, in minutes.

• Min_time: The published described minimum time which should be allotted for playing the game, in minutes.

• Max_time: The published described maximum time which should be allotted for playing the game, in minutes.

• Year: The year the game was published.

• Avg_rating: The average rating of the game as voted on by the users, on a scale of 1-10.

• Geek_rating: A Bayesian average on a scale of 1-10, normalizing for the amount of votes so a low frequency, high rated game does not distort the ranking of games.

• Num_votes: The number of votes cast for the board game’s rating.

• Age: The minimum age recommended for players of the game.

• Mechanic: The categorial identifiers for how the game functions, such as “Dice Rolling” or “Co-operative Play.”

• Owned: How many users marked the game as owned in their person collection.

• Category: The thematic or overarching elements of the game, such as “Adventure” or “Economic.”

• Designer: The name of the publisher or designer of the game.

• Weight: A metric on a scale of 1-5 which denotes the difficulty or complexity of the game.

We also performed a series of data transformations in Python to turn the combined string of Category and Mechanics into individual binary values, looking at the top 500 games ranked on the website.

Exploring the Data

Geek Rating vs. Average Rating

Geek Rating & Ownership 

Correlation Insights

Ratings Clustered by Weight

Categorization & Complexity Insights

With these insights in mind, we then turn to an examination of how board games are categorized. In total, the dataset includes over 150 specific categories of games, ranging from broad umbrella terms like “Card Game”, “World War I”, relating to a specific time period, or “Party Game”, relating to specific experience. Most titles are tagged with numerous categories, which highlight the ever growing diversity among the types of games being published. As displayed below, one can observe how the distribution of complexity ranges across different types of themes and types of table top products. Categories like “Adventure” see a wide cross section of complexity, while “Party Games” are by design and typically easy to teach and quick to learn. Contrastingly, titles which are categorized as “Economic” tend to be heavier, but not always. A title such as My Little Scythe, a family friendly version of the widely heralded Scythe, also published by Stonemaier Games, is a perfect example of an Economic game which is not as complex as others in the same category.

Among the other categories included in this graphic, we can see categories on the thematic side can often have a wide array of complexity, such as “Civilization”. Similarly, broad mechanical descriptions, such as “Co-operative” or “Dice Rolling” can have the same effect. Variety in depth also exists in the more interactive or social types of games including “Bluffing” and “Role Playing” which can range from incredibly lightweight and simple (such as Werewolf, a popular social deduction series of games) to deep and dense (i.e. Gloomhaven, a board game which weighs in at just over twenty-two pounds of components). From this graph we can also observe the noteworthy distribution of popularity (once again using Geek Rating from our dataset) across different categories and their weight. For instance, “Co-operative Play” features several more popular titles in its lower tiers of complexity than “Economic” games, while “Civilization” are most highly regarded titles more distributed towards the complex end of the spectrum. 

Comparing the Rating values to those of Ownership, we can also observe how a game’s popularity does not singularly determine the amount of customers who have purchased the game. Across several categories, games which are not the most highly rated within their category are the highest in terms of ownership. Furthermore, the distribution of the most owned games is often, but not always, emblematic of the category as a whole. 

In summary, even within individual categories or themes of tabletop products, a great deal of variety can exist in terms of the simplicity or complexity of the game’s core premise both in terms of popularity but also ownership, which are not always in lock step as one might assume. Thus, when considering the type of games for publishers to release and retailers to carry, one must consider a myriad of factors even when narrowing the scope to the theme and difficulty of a particular title.

Recommendations

With the above insights considered, our recommendation for both retailers and publishers, when considering a new tabletop product, can best be described by the adage by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who is attributed the statement, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Specifically, this concept applies aptly to the revelation of how the complexity of a board game affects its popularity and ownership. As the clustering of the game’s ratings and weight displayed, there are unpopular games across the spectrum of difficulty. Clearly complexity for complexity’s sake is insufficient, other factors must be viewed in comparison. Equally unsatisfying are certain products which are too simple to warrant serving as a recurring source of fun and engagement.

Based on the subsetting of difficulty by varying themes and categories, we believe we’ve found compelling evidence to suggest that complexity is not inherently good or bad, but that it is best considered in terms of its relationship to the nature of the game itself. Categories which offer the promise of deep, engaging, mentally demanding challenges benefit greatly from complexity and nuance and are rated and purchased as such. But large player count social games are inherently the antithesis of such experiences. The former benefits from density, where the other shines in its simplicity. Other categories straddle both of these concepts, offering satisfying mental puzzles without overburdening the experience with unnecessary bulk.

Thus, based on the insights detailed above, we conclude with our recommendation for publishers and retailers alike as they consider products to either create or champion: design and support the tabletop products which are precisely as complex as need be to bring their theme and experience to life to the fullest extent. These flagship board games, crafted thoughtfully to be rewarding and thematic experiences, are those which will create loyal communities around publishers and retailers alike and provide an incredible value to customers as a deep sense of entertainment.

In execution, this will be easier to directly apply for publishers since they serve as the creative force behind the products themselves and are able to test and find the most powerful combinations. For retailers, however, we would recommend one of two divergent strategies. First, one strategy would include following a model similar to Covenant Games in which they focus on only fifteen tabletop products, but create a wide range of content, community events, and offering free demos and learning opportunities both in person and online for each product they support. On the other end of the spectrum, retailers with larger resources should be considerate in providing a wide range of products in terms of weight and category so as to provide a series of divergent and engaging experiences for customers.

The combination of these two strategies working in tandem across the industry would allow for specialization, thereby decreasing competition and giving publishers more specialized avenues through which to bring their products to customers.

Debrief & Reflections

While our recommendations are perhaps a bit abstract in comparison to typical business analytics results, we are confident in the validity of our findings. We genuinely believe if more publishers and retailers carefully considered the balance of their unique audience and their product’s place within the larger board game ecosystem, not only would more titles be able to thrive, but each would do so to a greater extent. This idea of carefully balancing a game’s complexity with its theme and thus those it will appeal to would serve many eager publishers and discerning retailers. In terms of filling the market with thoughtfully created, balanced, and distinctively targeted products that meet the needs of the diverse and growing community of board game enthusiasts, this is the best option represented within our data set.

In future explorations of this dataset, one of the changes we would plan to make is to create custom aggregate categories and mechanics to create more reasonable distinctions which allow for more aggregated views and considerations. With more than 150 categories and 100 mechanics listed, it is simply unfeasible to meaningfully interpret their correlation with each other or different attributes and we have a suspicion that there are still kernels of insight to be gained from further mining. Alternatively, another expansion we’ve considered would be to find additional datasets which include wider sales and review metrics on sites which are not tailored to board game enthusiasts, but address the larger, but less engaged audience as well.

References

1. https://www.kaggle.com/mrpantherson/board-game-data#bgg_db_1806.csv

2. https://www.boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/BoardGameGeek_FAQ#toc13

3. https://stonemaiergames.com/when-does-it-make-sense-to-sell-directly-instead-of-through-distribution/