Analysis Paralysis

Spiel des Jahres 2024 predictions – Part 2!

Posted on July 8, 2024 | 9 minutes | 1739 words | Markus Shepherd

The waiting is finally coming to an end! On Sunday, July 21, the jury will announce the winners of Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024. We’re blessed with another year of very strong games and I’m certainly very excited to learn what games will win the two awards. I’ve been doing this for four years now and I’ve called seven out of the eight winners correctly. No reason to rest on any laurels – there’s another batch of awards coming up, and this year might be the closest race yet! [Read More]

Thoughts on Spiel des Jahres

What it is and what it isn't

Posted on June 26, 2024 | 15 minutes | 3141 words | Markus Shepherd

Some of you might have notices that I’m a bit of a Spiel des Jahres fanboy. 🙃 Every year when the award season rolls around, the discussion about the purpose and the influence of Spiel des Jahres comes up again. So I thought it’s a good idea to collect my thoughts on the subject in one handy place I can easily reference in the future. 🤓 What’s the purpose of Spiel des Jahres? [Read More]

Spiel des Jahres

Spiel des Jahres 2024 nominations

Posted on June 11, 2024 | 3 minutes | 593 words | Markus Shepherd

Nominations are out! The jury selected a total of sixteen games for their longlist, nine for Spiel des Jahres and seven for Kennerspiel des Jahres. Out of these games, three games each are nominated for the two awards and can hope to get the coveted meeple added to their covers on July 21. Let’s dive straight into the nominations and recommendations, before we discuss how good (or bad) my predictions were and if the agreed with our Kennerspiel score. [Read More]

SdJ SdJ 2024 Spiel des Jahres Spiel des Jahres 2024 KSdJ Kennerspiel Kennerspiel des Jahres Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024 Game of the Year Germany Predictions Spiel des Jahres nominations Spiel des Jahres 2024 nominations SdJ nominations Kennerspiel nominations Kennerspiel des Jahres nominations Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024 nominations Captain Flip In the Footsteps of Darwin Sky Team Daybreak The Guild of Merchant Explorers Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West

Spiel des Jahres 2024 predictions

Posted on May 31, 2024 | 8 minutes | 1509 words | Markus Shepherd

Spiel des Jahres 2024 is around the corner! As in the previous four years, I’ll try to predict what games have the best shot at ending up on the longlist (aka recommendations) and the shortlist (aka nominations) when the jury announces their picks on June 11th. As every year, I’ll let the algorithms speak, but I’ve added something new this year: I tried to track the jury members’ reviews of all eligible1 games, in particular when they publish scores (such as in the magazine Spielbox), and fed those into the predictions. [Read More]

SdJ SdJ 2024 Spiel des Jahres Spiel des Jahres 2024 KSdJ Kennerspiel Kennerspiel des Jahres Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024 Game of the Year Germany Predictions Spiel des Jahres predictions Spiel des Jahres 2024 predictions SdJ predictions Kennerspiel predictions Kennerspiel des Jahres predictions Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024 predictions

Game Designer Hall of Fame

The best board game designers of all times – according to Spiel des Jahres

Posted on May 17, 2024 | 11 minutes | 2240 words | Markus Shepherd

Spiel des Jahres 2024 nominations are just around the corner (watch this space for our annual predictions), but I wanted to take this opportunity for a look back over the history of the award. Specifically, I wanted to see which designers have been most successful at the Spiel, Kennerspiel and Kinderspiel des Jahres awards. The first red meeple was given out in 1979. Since 1989, the jury also awarded the Kinderspiel des Jahres for children’s games, initially as an annual special award, and from 2001 as its own award with the blue meeple. [Read More]

Spiel des Jahres Kennerspiel des Jahres Kinderspiel des Jahres Game of the Year Hall of Fame Designers Records Statistics Wolfgang Kramer Reiner Knizia

A brief introduction to Collaborative Filtering

Recommend.Games explained, part 1: how we recommend games to you

Posted on May 9, 2024 | 6 minutes | 1219 words | Markus Shepherd

What is a good recommendation? Collaborative filtering is the workhorse powering the recommendations by Recommend.Games. Over the years, I’ve been asked every now and then how it works. So, I thought it’s high time I outlined the basic ideas behind our recommendation engine. Let’s first take a step back and talk about recommendations in general. What is it we’re trying to achieve? The answer to this question is far from trivial, and it gets harder when you want to formalise its goals. [Read More]

Recommend.Games explained Collaborative filtering Recommendations Recommendation engine Machine learning Matrix factorisation Embeddings Latent factors Cosine similarity Alternating least squares Linear regression BoardGameGeek

The world of board games

Board game rankings by country

Posted on April 25, 2024 | 7 minutes | 1324 words | Markus Shepherd

BoardGameGeek (BGG) users can select their country of residence in their profile. The main purpose is to find other users in your region to play face to face or maybe trade games, but but over here at Recommend.Games we obviously cannot help ourselves but to use this information for some interesting statistics. 🤓 Let’s start with the usual disclaimer: We will have to rely on whatever information BGG provides. In particular, users can freely choose their country. [Read More]

BoardGameGeek BGG ranking rating Bayesian dummy ratings highest rated games alternative rankings

Has board game rating inequality increased over the years?

Applying the Gini coefficient to BoardGameGeek ratings

Posted on April 14, 2024 | 8 minutes | 1662 words | Markus Shepherd

The number of ratings per game Perhaps one of the most controversial choices of the Shut Up & Sit Down Effect article was using the number of ratings1 on BoardGameGeek (BGG) as proxy for “attention” to a game. So let’s double down on that! 😈 If lots of ratings mean a lots of eyes on a game, we can ask questions like: What games get most of the attention? Do few games steal the spotlight? [Read More]

BoardGameGeek Ratings Gini coefficient Inequality Asmodee

Measuring the Shut Up & Sit Down effect

Using synthetic control to make up our own counterfactual world

Posted on March 17, 2024 | 12 minutes | 2392 words | Markus Shepherd

Shut Up & Sit Down Shut Up & Sit Down (SU&SD) is arguably the largest (at over 400k subscribers) and most influential YouTube channel in board gaming. A video with a glowing recommendation by them can lead to a game sell out overnight. Or at least that’s how the anecdotes go. There’s been previous attempts at quantifying the effect, but over here at Recommend.Games is where board games and data science meet, so obviously, we have to dig a little deeper. [Read More]

Shut Up & Sit Down SU&SD Synthetic Control John Company Cole Wehrle

How long is a game of High Society?

Posted on February 27, 2024 | 10 minutes | 2107 words | Markus Shepherd

High Society is a classic bidding game by classic designer Dr Reiner Knizia, most recently released by Osprey Games with a wonderfully classic look: The general concept is quite simple: the players are members of said “high society” and are trying to outdo each other in showing off their wealth. The game is played over a series of rounds, and in each round, a card is revealed from a deck of 16 cards. [Read More]

High Society Reiner Knizia Osprey Games Game length Negative hypergeometric distribution Python Simulation numpy