Adjusted Board Game Geek ratings (2025 update)

Introduction

BoardGameGeek (BGG) serves as an important beacon for board game enthusiasts—much like IMDb for films—offering a comprehensive database of user-driven reviews and ratings on thousands of tabletop games. However, the very nature of community-driven ratings means that BGG's overall ratings and rankings tend to reflect the collective preferences of its active userbase rather than tabletop gamers as a whole. The platform's community disproportionately represents more invested and "hardcore" tabletop gamers, which can skew ratings toward heavier, more complex games that appeal to this core demographic.

Since individual preferences for board games can vary significantly from BGG community consensus, it can be useful to adjust for some of these community biases to obtain a more personalised view of the top games. This blog post presents interactive analysis and visualisations of the patterns that exist in the BGG dataset, with sliders to adjust your preferences for board game weight (complexity), publication year, and popularity to discover games that better match your personal taste.

Complexity-preference adjustment

BGG users tend to favour big heavy games, and we see a roughly linear correlation between game weight (complexity) and game rating. This can be corrected for with a simple linear regression of game rating on game "weight" rating. Move the slider or push the buttons below to see what the base BGG values look like, and how the adjustment factor affects the complexity-rating relationship. Set it to a value that matches your complexity preference. You can even apply a negative-correction or an over-correction if you have a particularly strong affinity or aversion to heavy games.