Want to hear my voice read this post? Catch it on Episode 5 of the Talkin’ Tabletop Podcast

I think I’ve mentioned it before, but we recently welcomed a new child into our household. He’s our second kid, and what’s different this time around is my partner is now self-employed, and is not eligible for parental leave, meaning I get to be the recipient of 35 weeks of parental leave. To celebrate, I’ve refreshed my top 100 games of all time, but the in the process of doing so, I was left pondering how I rank games, and how to generate this top 100 list.

I know a lot of people swear by the Pub Meeple ranking engine method. For those who don’t know, Pub Meeple is a website that lets you import your BGG plays and helps you rank them. It shows you two games at a time, and you simply select which of those two you like more. It’s a great system, but I’ve run into a couple of flaws that made me not want to use it this time around. First, I’ve played too many games. To generate a list via Pub Meeple, it would take around 2,500 comparisons. It took me, like, 4 days last time, and what’s weird, is that my feelings about certain match-ups would change from day to day depending on my mood! It’s a great system, just, not for me anymore. Side story, I recently had my mom use it to find her top 50 games (we’ve only played 50 games together) and it took her, like, 20 minutes. Eventually I’ll share that list, but not today.

What I did instead was to revisit all the games I’ve played and give them a 1 to 10 ranking. I more or less follow the BGG standard for user ratings. A 10/10 game is ‘outstanding, always want to play and expect this will never change.’, a 7/10 is a ‘Good game, usually willing to play.’ and a 3/10 is ‘Likely won’t play this again, although I could be convinced. Bad.’ You get the idea. Some other reviewers have their own ratings scale, like Blue Peg Pink Peg have a 0 to 6 rating for all their games, where a 0 is a terrible game and a 6 is a collection essential. I’ve seen everything from a binary thumbs up and thumbs down, to 5 stars, to a 100 point rubric system where each part of a game gets a score and the final rating the sum of those scores.

If you’ve read any of my reviews before, you may have noticed that my rating for a game is absent from the review. And this is because I feel like putting a number rating on a review doesn’t tell the whole story. A game for me might be a 10/10, but it’s a real-time game, which automatically makes it a thumbs down for someone else. I try to make my game reviews a more nuanced discussion where I talk about what I like and dislike in a game, and hopefully give you enough of my opinions to make an informed decision whether it’s a game you might like to play as well. But I’ve gotten off-topic.

I went through all the games I played and refreshed their ratings. I then sorted the games by their ratings, with 10 being the highest and 1 being the lowest. Then, within each ranking, sorted each set of game based on which ones I like the best. Not all 10s are created equal, you know! The end result was a list of over 100 games, roughly in the order that I prefer them. I’ll start posting my top 100 in early March, so look forward to it then.

One thing that quite surprised me about my top 100 games, was that there were a significant number of games that I ranked an 8/10 that didn’t even make it into my top 100! We live in an age where a game can be a Very good game that I like to play. I’d probably suggest it and would never turn down a game, and still not be in my top 100. Too many great games is a good problem to have.