Comment by vundercind
11 hours ago
On the board gaming website, Board Game Geek, It sits in the 47th overall rank by ratings (this is very high, even quite good games are often well south of 1,000 in the overall ranks) and fifth in the family games category.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/521/crokinole
I’d have had a board years ago if not for worrying it’d become another huge rarely-used thing to store or dispose of, after perhaps a year of good fun with it. Still haven’t played.
Eh, chess is ranked #453, go #219 and backgammon #1545. The highest ranking game is "Brass: Birmingham" which I have never heard of - so I don't know what to make of these rankings.
They're not ranking games on whether you've heard of them, but on how fun the BGG community finds them to play. Monopoly is rated #27,258.
BGG is heavily about[1] the board game night experience. Family, gamer group, newbies with a seasoned board gamer showing them some new games, that kind of thing.
Two-player games tend to suffer in the rankings to begin with, for that reason, though some do OK. Two player games with long or highly variable play times tend to suffer even more. Two player games that a brand new player is unlikely to enjoy playing against someone with even moderate skill is an even bigger handicap.
There’s also, undeniably, some novelty factor, especially near the top of the lists—which is part of why crokinole’s ranking is so remarkable.
Approximately nobody is breaking out chess or go at a board game night, even as a sidebar game for two players while they wait for others to finish a larger game. Maybe speed chess, I suppose. But in general those are less “we’re having a game night” and more “we’re having a chess/go/backgammon night” sort of games. Like, if someone’s not into chess and you suggest a chess match to kill some time waiting for the rest of the group to show up, they’re probably going to be less-happy than if you pulled out any of dozens of lightweight, quick 2-player games with fairly good BGG ratings. By that metric of game night suitability, chess and go et c. aren’t top-100 material. They’re less board-gamer games and more chess-person or go-person or whatever games.
[1] By this I mean the preferences and interests of the active parts of the community tend to run this way. You see lots of midweight attractive-looking newb-friendly (and also well-designed!) games good for multi-game gatherings, and big baroque “we’re getting together for six hours to play one single match of this game” games near the tops of lists, as a result, as those are the two kinds of game-playing gathering that are the ideal form of board gaming for the crowd there. It’s not a place with an unusual density of chess tournament fans, you know?
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I certainly understand that. But again I don't know what to make of the rankings. Yes, I know this is a niche community and yes I know there are more games than these classics...but comparison on Crokinole being #47 among thousands of games in the community is difficult to interpret for someone who hasn't played hundreds of different board games.
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Yeah because most people do not find chess, go or backgammon particularly fun. Sorry to burst your bubble if you thought they were somehow perfect games.
BGG rankings tend to be pretty good. I find they rate co-op games, sequels, kickstarted games and very heavy games a bit too highly. But apart from that they're good.
I don't know why you would expect Backgammon in particular to be highly ranked. It's got more strategy than most highly random games (e.g. cribbage) but it's not fun, at least not compared to the many many better board games that exist now.
As I mentioned in another comment, I expect most of these classic games would do even worse if they were released today. Struggling to find an audience, ranking down in the lower reaches on BGG. The communities around them and their cultural heritage are what they’re really about, and I doubt that you could bootstrap them back up to their current prominence if they showed up out of nowhere today, based solely on the strength of the games per se. Though, to be fair, the majority of top-100 BGG games will be all but forgotten in 100 years, too.
All the more reason Crokinole—a far less well-known classic game than backgammon or chess or go—ranking so highly is remarkable.