Crokinole

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.

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.

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?

The best boardgames, as scored by people who play boardgames.

No different than the top review aggregators for any medium. The top movies on Rotten Tomatoes are not ranked just by name recognition.

I mean, Brass Birmingham and many other high ranking games would be rather poor choices for pick-up and play game nights with most groups (number 7 is Twilight Imperium, which takes 6 hours on the short end!). Indeed, a lot of them can be played as deeply as Chess or Go.

There's been study over what "biases" the site has, which I personally think is rather uninteresting (what's the use of a global ranking without bias, after all?), but there's a lot more to it than what's easy to learn.

Yeah, the other category (I mentioned in my footnote-edit) is giant games that you dedicate a large part of a day to. Diplomacy, Twilight Imperium, that stuff. The two ideal gaming-situations for BGG-type gamers are multi-game game nights, and gatherings to play a single round of gigantic games that they can never get their more-normal casual game night enjoyer friends to play with them :-)

Further, you see a lot of "This game has seen tons of play at our table! Maybe 100 times!", not like chess where 100 matches is something someone who's barely even interested in chess may achieve by accident (I bet I've played 200+ matches in my life, and I'm not really that into chess, don't find it as fun as probably most other board games I've played, and remain entirely terrible at it—and I mean it, even chess programs set to stupid-mode so they only look one move ahead get me about half the time, because I reliably blunder badly at least once per match and they catch it every single time). It's just a very different crowd than the dive-very-deep-into-one-game sorts that might rate whichever game they've chosen to do that with as #1 and aren't even really looking around for other games.

There are exceptions in the rankings, that's not absolute, but mid-weight game night games that play something in the 4-8 range, good lighter filler games for game night, and enormous this-is-your-whole-day games, tend to be the ones that do well, assuming they're also, like, actually good for what they are. That's why super-famous games like chess aren't higher than they are (if chess were just invented today I bet it'd struggle to break the top 5,000—"Two stars, some of the variant rules are OK but ultimately if you want an abstract two-player game on a grid, you're better off with GIPF, and the knife-fight tension and wonderful portability of something like Hive just isn't present here, if you want a game with theme but don't really care about it connecting well with play—which this game clearly doesn't—just get Hive. Also they should print the piece layout and move sets on the board, it's hard to remember all that stuff and it's not like that space is used for attractive artwork or anything mechanically-relevant except the grid anyway.")

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.

BGG has a lot of problems with its ranking system, but one of those is that it favours complex games.

The reason being is that complex games are played by fewer people and those who do master it are more likely to give high ratings. Whereas, a less complex game gets played more and is subjected to harsher ratings.

Somebody made a great data analysis of reranking BGG ratings by complexity for the real top games list: https://dvatvani.com/blog/bgg-analysis-part-2

They also have a complexity score, so you can certainly search for 'find me the highest rated game as simple as monopoly'