Disclaimer: a copy of Vantage was provided by Stonemaier Games for review
It’s kind of hard to know how to approach Vantage. The box is big, black, and heavy. Physically heavy, sure, but also weighed down by expectation. This is a project that Jamey Stegmaier spent nearly eight years bringing to life, a self-described labour of love built on over 800 unique location cards and 900 other cards besides. That kind of effort is something that makes you pause a little before diving in. You don’t just crack it open and give it a whirl, you need brace yourself for it.
In Vantage, every game begins with one to six players crash-landing on an alien planet after receiving a mysterious signal from a being known as The Traveller. Right from the start, Vantage does something interesting: It’s a cooperative game, but everyone has been separated. All those years of drilling “Don’t split the party” into role playing gamers heads, Vantage does it immediately from the outset. You’re all on the same planet, chasing the same broad mission, but your individual journeys begin in completely separate locations. It’s a cooperative game, so you can talk, share information, and offer advice, but for the most part you’re each having your own little adventure that might occasionally overlap with everyone else’s.
Each turn begins with your character standing on a single “vantage” card, which represents your current location. Every one of those cards (usually) offers six possible actions. These actions are tied to general traits like Move or Overpower, but the specific wording changes from card to card. One location might let you “climb,” while another might tell you to “leap,” another might ask you to “push” or “steal.” On your turn, you pick one of those options, and another player flips through the corresponding book to find your entry and read out what happens.
And this is where one of Vantage’s more interesting ideas shows up: you never really fail. The game leans heavily into a fail-forward system. You always succeed at what you attempt, it’s just a question of what that success costs you. Maybe you make the jump across the cliff, but you take two hits to your health while doing so. Maybe you manage to steal the item, but it took 3 time and 1 moral to make it happen.
Those costs are always resolved through challenge dice. When attempting an action, there will usually be a number cost, with the more valuable actions costing more. You pick up the number of challenge dice the action asks for, but before you roll them, you do have the chance to reduce the die pool by spending corresponding action tokens. And other players can even contribute their own tokens to help you out, which is a neat bit of cooperation. Thematically it’s like someone talking you through a tricky situation over a comms channel. Then, once you have your dice pool set, it’s time to roll them bones.
The dice themselves can hit your health, time, or morale. After rolling your dice you can slot them into any open slots in your personal tableau. Almost all the characters, gear, and items you encounter in Vantage will live in your tableau and offer slots for you to hold your dice, often giving you a reward cube for doing so. Many of them with certain restrictions. Some slots will only be available to certain die faces, while others will be restricted to being available when you’re using a certain type of action (i.e. you can’t slot a die into a spot with the Move tag when you’re doing an Overpower action). Some will be a bit nebulous and require that you are somewhere, like on water. There’s a good amount of flexibility in the system. Many of the book entries don’t explicitly say that you’re ‘on water’, so we made context appropriate calls as to when someone was on water or not.
And Vantage supports this, the rulebook specifically calls out for players to follow the golden rule of fun. If an interaction isn’t clear based on the context of verbiage on the card, just follow your gut and choose what makes the most sense, or what your group would find the most fun.
Back to those challenge dice. After you’ve slotted all the dice onto your cards and equipment as possible, any remaining die must be paid. That means losing stats, ticking your character one step closer to failure. Except even in failure, Vantage plays fast and lose. When any player stat drops to 0, you can choose to accept defeat, or, you can just keep going. There are options for both. If you’re not done with your adventure yet, Vantage is ready to support your whims, rules and consequences be damned. After all, it’s just a game. Who cares if you fudge the losing condition a little bit?
The challenge dice on your cards are generally locked to their slots until there aren’t enough dice for a player to take an action. Then a refresh happens where all the die come off and go back into the challenge pool. It’s a good system, but one that makes me frustrated when I’m playing solo. The number of dice in the challenge pool scales with player count. Eight by default, then plus two per player, which might sound reasonable at first. But in practice it means that larger groups will have a much easier time managing the challenges. In a solo game, you’re dealing with ten dice all on your own. In a three-player game, you’re dealing with fourteen dice total, but they’re spread across three people with three tableaus that naturally have more slots and more flexibility. The result is that solo play can feel punishingly tight, while multiplayer feels much more forgiving simply because the burden is shared.
And that flexibility matters. In one game, a character ended up stacked with boat-related abilities and could basically dominate anything involving water, and was able to take on dice from the other players rolls with ease. In another game, I couldn’t find anything useful and just quickly bled out after just a handful of turns, because I had no way to manage the dice being thrown at me. There’s a huge swing in how your game can unfold depending on what you happen to find.
But that variability is also part of the appeal. There’s a genuine sense of discovery here that’s incredibly charming. Every vantage card is a new location with 6 little stories to explore. Each time you move you get a whole new set of possibilities. In one game, I repaired a bridge and was rewarded with a bedroll that protected me from the cold. In another, we were trying to fish up a kraken, but I found myself wandering aimlessly across cliffs and plains, desperately searching for any body of water so I could start progressing our mission. The feeling of being lost is palpable, especially in your first few games. Even as you start to piece together a mental map of the world, everything still feels vast and unknowable. Like groping around an unfamiliar place in the dark.
My tableau is really good at handling green actions, and almost nothing else
That sense of discovery is easily Vantage’s biggest strength. I love exploring in games, and this one feeds that desire constantly. Every turn is a new choice, new threads to pull on, a new story beat to uncover. But that also comes with some trade-offs. You only get to take one action per location before you’re usually forced to move on, and sometimes that feels really disappointing. There were plenty of moments where I wanted to dig deeper, to try a second option on a card, to see what else was there, but the game ushers you forward instead. It creates this lingering feeling of “maybe next time,” which is exciting, but occasionally frustrating.
Initially, I assumed Vantage would be best as a solo experience. After all, you’re mostly off doing your own thing. But I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it with others. Taking turns reading for each other, reacting to each other’s discoveries, nudging someone toward a risky or ridiculous choice, it creates a shared storytelling experience that’s more engaging than I expected. Even if the mechanical interaction is light, the social interaction fills in those gaps.
That said, the variety doesn’t always hold up under scrutiny. There are moments where the game feels like it’s offering you meaningful choices. Like, do you duel this companion, or flirt with them? But the outcomes can feel a little samey, with only minor variations. It actually reminded me a bit of Charterstone, where the differences between resources or factions didn’t always translate into fundamentally different experiences. Sure there are 6 resources, but they all feel the same. Sometimes in Vantage I got the vibe that there was an illusion of choice happening under the hood. Where the journey felt dynamic, but no matter what choices I picked I would have been shepherded along the path the game wanted me to go.
And then there’s the question of what you’re actually working toward. At the start of the game, you’re given a mission, and you might uncover additional “destinies” along the way that can serve as alternate or additional win conditions. But the endgame is as loose as anything. You can complete your mission, chase a destiny, do both, or just stop when you feel like you’ve had enough. The game doesn’t push you toward a climactic finish so much as it invites you to decide when your story is done. And Vantage is not a legacy or campaign game, every time you sit down at the table, you should be crash landing back on the planet, starting from square one. The rules don’t encourage you to ‘save’ your game and pick up your threads when you come back. Instead you take nothing but knowledge into your next game.
For some players, that’s going to be a feature. I was the player who landed and immedately started chasing squirrels off into the sunset, my mission long forgotten. But then when I wanted to go back to it, I wasn’t really sure how I was going to get back on track. Vantage isn’t about winning or losing, but it’s about the stories you discover along the way. It’s challenging to wrap my euro-game brain around this idea, that the win and lose conditions aren’t really important, but when I do let go of my old preconceptions of what a game is, I find myself delighting in the shiny objects scattered around the world for me to pick up.
Sorting the cards back into the box at the end of a session is pretty tedious
And if you’re wondering, yes, it took me around 100 hours to finish the storyline in Breath of the Wild. I was that player that set a pin for an objective in the distance, and then spent 3 hours doing a dozen tasks completly unrelated to my pin, often sending me sprawling in an entirely different direction.
It would be a mistake to say Vantage isn’t a good game. It absolutely is. What it accomplishes from a design perspective, this sprawling, interconnected web of over a thousand cards is impressive. It may not have the mechanical heft of something like Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, but it doesn’t need to. It’s a fundamentally different experience.
And for me, more often than not, it works. There’s a sense of wonder here that’s hard to shake. Even when the systems creak a little, even when the choices feel thinner than they first appear, I keep coming back to that feeling of stepping into the unknown and seeing what’s over the next hill. And after just a few plays, I can say pretty confidently that I’d rather be wandering around Vantage than grinding my way through something heavier.
Disclaimer: This review is based on plays of the game on Board Game Arena.
I don’t usually like to review games solely based on a Board Game Arena play. I recognize that the platform has some sincere benefits, from the wide variety of games, the plentiful amount of people to play with, and the ability to play games asynchronously, letting me get my board game fix all week long. But even with all those benefits, it’s just not the same as playing a game face to face with your friends, handling and admiring the physical production, and heckling each other over each of our moves. But sometimes I get a sense of everything a game offers just from the BGA plays, and so here we are.
Seashells, by designer Bruno Faidutti and published by KTBG in 2026, is a grid movement set collection game for 2 to 5 players. In Seashells, you’ll randomly place all the seashell pieces onto a grid, with a red pail in the middle. On your turn, you can move that pail any number of spaces along the X or Y axis from where it currently sits. Then, you take the piece that’s on the spot you choose to stop the red bucket on and put it into your own supply, and the next player takes their turn. Turns progress until the bucket is put on a spot with no pieces in the X or Y axis, and the game comes to an end.
The score in Seashells is mostly achieved via set collection majorities. There are 7 types of seashells in 7 colours, and whoever has a majority in each of the 14 categories at the end of the game receives 3 points. Sand dollars are 1 point a piece, and each fossil pair you have (1 head and 1 tail) is worth 3 points as well. The player with the most points at the end of the game, wins!
I won’t beat around the bush. Seashells is fine, but it’s not very interesting. All of the scoring comes from getting and maintaining majorities, so you’re encouraged to gerrymander to the best of your ability, that is to say to only collect the items that you’ll be able to win the majority for and eschew everything else. Heaven help you if you get caught in a battle with another player for a colour.
The grid movement is slightly interesting in that the choice you make for your turn is what sets up your opponents options for their turn. But it’s frustrating in that it’s nearly impossible to control, if your opponents are happy to hate draft you, you’ll never have the opportunity to take the pieces you want. But with the nature of scoring only your majorities, choosing a piece you won’t win can almost be equated to a wasted turn.
Which leads me into the endgame for Seashells. As the grid gets picked clean, your options start to diminish. Your last few turns you’ll be forced to pick from one or two options at most, and often they’ll be effectively worthless to you, as they’ll be the first item or colour you’ve collected of that set. Wasted turns feel bad, and the endgame of Seashells is full of them.
The advance scoring variant helps with this problem slightly, in that if you miss majority but have the second most, you’ll earn a single point. Or if you tie for first, all tied players earn 2 points instead of the 3 given for a clear majority. At least then you’re slightly more encouraged to spread yourself out in hopes of scooping up half a dozen second place victories.
I think the nicest thing I can say about Seashells is that looking at pictures on BGG shows a very nice production. The pieces you’re collecting are made of very thick wood and look really attractive.
At the end of the day, Seashells feels like a game that belongs at a beach house. Something to mindlessly play after a long day of soaking up the sun. I appreciate that the gameplay is simple and approachable, that each turn doesn’t ask too much of the players at the table, but the frustration of being forced to take pieces that will never score had me thinking “What’s the point?” more than once during my plays.
Maybe the physical production does some of the heavy lifting that I’m missing when I play Seashells on Board Game Arena. I can imagine those chunky wooden shells, the bright colours, and the tactile act of holding the chunky pieces adding a layer of charm that smooths over some of the mechanical flatness. There’s definitely been games where the aesthetics and table presence elevate what is otherwise a fairly straightforward game.
But even giving Seashells that benefit of the doubt, I don’t think it offers enough interesting decisions to sustain repeated plays. The combination of rigid scoring incentives, limited control over your options, and an endgame that often devolves into low-impact turns leaves it feeling a bit too passive for my tastes. It’s pleasant enough, and certainly not broken, but it never quite gives me a reason to come back.
When is too much of a good thing… actually a bad thing?
It’s a question I’ve been turning over in my head a lot lately, and like most of my rambling blog posts, the question started with a board game.
On March 25th, Restoration Games announced the return of Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit with The Lord of the Rings: The Kings Gambit. I saw this announcement immediately after I was listening to the Board Games Insider podcast where host Stephen Buonocore announced his co-designed game with Geoff Engelstein, The Lord of the Rings: Circle of Conflict.
Now, my wife and I have always been fans of the Lord of the Rings series. The books and the original trilogy of movies, mind you. We didn’t care for the Hobbit movies (although I found this fan-edit to be significantly more palatable), and we only watched a single episode of The Rings of Power.
But ever since Embracer group acquired Middle Earth Enterprises, it feels like a deluge of Lord of the Rings games have hit the marketplace. In just the past few years there’s been The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Trick-Taking Game,The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth, There’s The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, You’ve got heavier titles like The Lord of the Rings: Foes of Middle-earth and The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth. And then there are others ,The Lord of the Rings: The Adventure Book Game, Exit: The Lord of the Rings, Spot It! The Lord of the Rings, and more! All these games circling the same source material, each trying to carve out its own little piece of Tolkien’s world.
At some point, I start to wonder: when does one of my favourite IPs being in a game stop being exciting and is actively hurting my intrest in it?
There was a time not so long ago when a new Lord of the Rings anything felt like an event. Maybe it was because releases were so spaced out. A movie trilogy in 2001, then a decade break before the Hobbit movies. I know that part of the reason was because so few people had access to the license, famously gate kept by Christopher Tolkien. But to go from a drip feed of Lord of the Rings content to the veritable deluge of releases that I’m seeing today, it causes a bit of an emotional whiplash.
I feel like that scarcity gave the games that did exist some weight. I have vivid memories of playing through the Lord of the Rings video games on the Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo Gamecube. Those games felt like they belonged. Like they had a reason to exist beyond simply wearing the skin of a beloved IP.
Nowadays, I can’t help but wonder if some of these games coming out NEED to be Lord of the Rings themed, or are they just slapping the name on because they know it’ll catch the attention of long-time fans? I received Lord of the Rings: Spot It for Christmas this year, and I’m sure that I never would have received that game if not for the LOTR name on the package.
I’m not trying to say that any of these games are bad, some of them are genuinely clever. But because LOTR games are no longer rare, they no longer feel special or unique. Which hurts my heart, just a little.
To be fair, there’s a very real upside to all of this. More games set in Middle-earth means more entry points into the hobby. A trick-taking game might appeal to one group. The narrative adventure that is Journeys in Middle-Earth will appeal to another. A quick, portable game like Spot It! might be the thing that gets a non-gamer to sit down at the table in the first place.
And there’s something comforting about a familiar setting. You don’t need to learn a new world, new characters, or new terminology. You already know who the factions are. You already understand the stakes. That familiarity lowers the barrier to entry in a way that original themes sometimes struggle to match, especially when it comes to High Fantasy, which has a tendency to copy Lord of the Rings anyway, in a way that makes them feel generic.
With that context, having a wide spread of games tied to the same IP is beneficial. It increases the chances that someone will find a version of that world that clicks with them mechanically. Not every game needs to be for everyone. But maybe there should be a version of Middle-earth for everyone.
But there’s a tipping point. And I don’t think it’s tied to a specific number of releases. It’s more of a feeling than a metric. A moment when I hear another game announcement and instead of thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting,” I thought “Of course there’s another one.”
And that’s when the cynic inside of me wakes up. These Lord of the Rings games are starting to feel less like a creative decision and more like a branding exercise. Because the real question isn’t whether a game is good. It’s whether the theme feels earned.
Does this game need to be set in Middle-earth? Does the design draw something meaningful from that world? Or could you strip away the names, swap in generic fantasy art, and end up with essentially the same experience? Is the only reason this is a Lord of the Rings game is so that long time fans like me will buy it?
And when those thoughts start popping into my head, I start to feel fatigue.
Even if each individual game is solid, even if each one targets a different audience, there’s still a cumulative effect. Seeing the same IP over and over again, across wildly different genres and weight classes, starts to wear down my sense of excitement. The same thing happened when Marvel really got their ball rolling. At first, a new Marvel movie was an event. It was an exciting thing to look forward to. First it was Iron Man in 2008, then Iron Man 2 in 2010, then Thor and Captain America in 2011, and Avengers in 2012. Now, there have been something like 17 movies and TV shows over the past 4 years. Absolutely exhausting, trying to keep up. I’ll be honest, after Infinity War and Endgame in 2019, I started ignoring everything Marvel.
And I’m worried I’m going to do the same with The Lord of the Rings.
I don’t think there’s a clean answer to when “too much” becomes too much. It’s not a total number of games. It’s not even a trend. It’s a feeling that creeps in when the connection between theme and design starts to feel thin, when the IP stops being a source of inspiration and starts being a marketing shortcut.
I don’t mind seeing more games set in Middle-earth. In fact, part of me enjoys it. It means the world I grew up loving continues to find new ways to exist. But I do find myself becoming more selective. Not because I’m tired of The Lord of the Rings, but because now I’m needing to mentally strip the LOTR theme off the game to decide if it’s an actually interesting game underneath the pretty wrapping paper. LOTR has stopped being a selling point for me, and is starting to be an active deterrent. This doesn’t mean I’m not going to buy any LOTR games in the future, but I’m certainly going to be more selective about them.
Last week I wrote about Turing Machine, a deduction puzzle that fascinated me with its cardboard computer but ultimately left me a little cold with the multiplayer experience. This week I’m talking about designers Fabien Gridel and Yoann Levet’s follow-up game, Kronologic: Paris 1920. It turns out the same designers have taken some of those clever ideas and turned them into something that feels much more like a game you’d actually want to sit down and play with other people.
Kronologic is still a logical deduction game, but the premise is wrapped in a small mystery scenario. In the puzzle I played, a detective has been poisoned, and the goal is to figure out exactly when, where, and by whom the crime occurred. The structure of the mystery revolves around an opera house made up of several rooms, a handful of characters constantly moving through those rooms, and a sequence of time steps representing the evening’s events. The key piece of logic driving the puzzle is that the detective was poisoned when he was alone in a room with someone else. Your job is to track where everyone was, when they were there, and eventually determine which character found themselves alone with the detective.
To uncover this information, the game uses another clever punch-board system reminiscent of Turing Machine, though thankfully, this system is much simpler to wrap your head around. When you want to investigate something, you pick a room, and then combine the room with either a character, and a time period, then place the corresponding punch cards together before flipping them over. The overlapping holes reveal information about that combination, giving you clues about where someone was or wasn’t during a specific moment. What’s particularly interesting is that when you ask a question in a multiplayer game, some of the information you uncover is private, while some of it must be shared openly with the table. Everyone gets a small piece of the puzzle, but you might receive a slightly more precise insight that helps you get ahead of the pack.
I really enjoyed playing Kronologic. The rules are straightforward, the setup is small, and the puzzles themselves manage to create that satisfying feeling of deduction throughout the entire experience. Because every character must move to a different room at each time step, the logic starts to unfold in interesting ways. Once you know where someone definitely was at one point, it constrains where they could possibly be later, and slowly the possibilities begin to collapse in on themselves. If you remove the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. There’s a good sense of progression as you start to piece together the timeline of the evening, marking down your deductions and watching the puzzle reveal itself in front of you.
The moment when you think you’ve cracked the case, when you’re ready to declare exactly when and where the poisoning occurred and who was responsible, is genuinely exciting. That feeling mostly comes from the fact that you arrived at your conclusion before everyone else did, and so you can rub it in their faces. Sometimes that happens because you simply asked the right question at the right time. Maybe you just happened to pick the one character who actually mattered and asked about them early, which then gave you just enough information to unravel the rest of the puzzle. Meanwhile, your opponents might have spent their early turns investigating characters who ultimately had nothing to do with the crime. In that sense there is definitely some luck involved, particularly in the opening turns when you’re still feeling around in the dark for a useful thread to follow.
That early randomness can make some of the choices feel somewhat arbitrary at first. You’re often picking a character simply because you don’t like their vibe, because they seem as good a place to start as any. But I suppose that’s also thematically appropriate. A good mystery always has its share of red herrings, and part of the detective’s job is to follow the logic rather than their instincts. Someone might give off suspicious vibes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they committed the crime.
What I appreciate most about Kronologic is how directly it addresses the issues I had with Turing Machine. The setup is dramatically faster; eighteen cards on the table and a sheet of paper to start scribbling your deductions on, then you’re ready to go. Kronologic also avoids that solitary puzzle feeling, because every question you ask leaks a little bit of information to your opponents. Even when someone else is taking their turn, you’re paying attention to what they’re investigating and what that reveals. That small layer of shared information creates just enough interaction to make the experience feel communal rather than parallel.
My biggest concern with Kronologic has to do with its long-term replayability. And maybe it’s a little rich for me to worry about long term replayability as I tend to play most games a mere half a dozen times before moving on to the next new shiny thing, but the difference between Kronologic and Turing Machine is stark. Turing Machine boasts over 7 millions puzzles, meaning you could do 5 puzzles a day for 3,835 tears before running out. Kronologic, on the other hand, comes with three main puzzles, and each puzzle has six variations, or difficulty levels. Once you’ve solved them, that’s kind of it. You know the answers. Unless you’re like me and manage to forget the details after a few months, those particular mysteries aren’t going to surprise you again.
That said, there are already two other Kronologic boxes available using the same system (Cuzco 1450 and Babylon 2500), which I’m glad to see. I also saw some PNP puzzles on Kronologic: Paris 1920‘s BGG page. I genuinely enjoy the physicality of the deduction here, and I’m curious to see how the other scenarios differ from the Paris 1920 setting I played.
In the end, while I still think Turing Machine is the more astonishing production, the cooler toy to hold in your hands, Kronologic is the better game. It captures that classic deductive thrill of piecing together a mystery while adding just enough shared information to keep everyone engaged in the same puzzle. If you have any fondness for old-school mystery games like Clue, Kronologic gives off very similar vibes, but in a way that feels fresher and more satisfying to unravel.
It’s a question I’ve been mulling over for years, and one that tends to pop into my head whenever I’m browsing an upcoming release and trying to get a sense of what people are thinking. I scroll past the preview images, maybe skim a few comments, and then my eyes drift over to the rating… only to see that bar graph with a giant foot, the 1 ratings outnumbering every other number by a large margin. Also, why the heck are there ratings on this game if it isn’t even out yet? These 1s aren’t low scores from disappointed players, they aren’t thoughtful critiques explaining why something didn’t land. These 1s feel more of a punishment than anything else. And I always find myself wondering: what is that number actually trying to say?
Because, at least in my mind, a rating is supposed to represent an experience. It’s meant to capture what it felt like to sit down, learn the rules, fumble through a first play, and how much joy someone had during their play. But when a number gets assigned before any of that has happened, it starts to mean something else entirely. It’s less about the game, and more about the drama surrounding the production, or perhaps one of the people involved.
Two recent examples of unreleased games with a large number of 1 ratings
The Things We’re Really Rating
In my experience, a lot of these early 1s don’t come out of nowhere. They’re reactions to decisions made long before a game ever reaches players. Recently, AI-generated art has been a flashpoint. People see something that feels off, or read a comment suggesting shortcuts were taken, and suddenly the rating becomes a place to push back. The most recent case of this was Concordia Special Edition by Awakened Realms. The cover looked a little Ai generated, people reacted, and Awakened Realms responded by saying “No AI art will be in the final game“
Sidebar: I’m surprised people continue to be surprised every time Awakened Realms uses AI images, considering Awakened Realms used AI art in their pre-production images many of their projects, including the special editions of Agricola, Puerto Rico, and more. They always publicly state that there will be “no AI art in the final products”, but it seems like every time they release a new product, there’s a new backlash over their continued use of AI promotional images.
No AI in my copy of Agricola
But honestly, I’m glad that people are willing to raise a stink over AI images. I don’t have the patience for it and I end up silently voting with my wallet instead of grandstanding on social media. But without vocal pushback, how is a company supposed to know what they’re doing is wrong? That said, I do dislike when those concerns get funnelled into a single number on Board Game Geek, especially in a context where a rating is for an entire game. It feels like it distorts the purpose of that number and platform.
What makes it even harder to untangle is when a game is getting slammed for multiple reasons. Some people give it a 1 for using AI art, others give it a 1 for being too expensive, packed with unnecessary deluxe components and premium materials. All of these concerns are valid, but is it worth dragging the entire production through the mud for it? Does Concordia designer Mac Gerdts get mud on his face by association because a publisher made the choice to use AI artwork for a promotional cover?
When Numbers Stop Meaning What We Think They Mean
The tricky part is that once ratings start being used this way, the meaning of the numbers begins to shift. A 1 no longer necessarily means “this game is terrible to play.” or “It’s utterly broken”, like in the recent case of RoboRover 2077. It now might just mean “I disagree with how this was made,” or “I don’t like what this represents,” or even “I’m frustrated with the publisher.”
And to be clear, those feelings aren’t inherently wrong. People engage with games for all kinds of reasons, and the hobby doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Themes matter. Production choices matter. The broader industry matters. But when all of those things get compressed into a single score, it becomes harder to extract useful information, especially for someone who just wants to know: is this a good game to play?
Sometimes just looking at a game cover or back of box picture won’t let you know if a game is for you or not
That’s ultimately why I look at ratings in the first place. Not as a verdict, but as a rough barometer. Sometimes I’ll be standing in my friendly local game store and I’ll pick up a box I hadn’t heard of. A quick search on BGG will sometimes tell me that a game might be a diamond in the rough, or, that a game isn’t really worth a second look. When that signal gets overwhelmed by reactions that aren’t rooted in gameplay, it becomes harder to trust what I’m seeing.
And people weaponizing their 1 ratings can go a step too far. The brigading between fans of Gloomhaven and Brass: Birmingham didn’t just stay in comment threads, it spilled directly into ratings, with people boosting one and tanking the other in a kind of ongoing tug-of-war. At that point, the numbers stop reflecting experience altogether and start reflecting the zealotry of the fanbase.
Can You Even Fix This?
Whenever I feel dissatisfaction with a system, my brain always shifts to trying to figure out a solution, even when I am powerless to make changes. I know BGG does take action against review bombing, and it can be challenging sifting out the actions of bad actors vs the legitimist grievances. But beyond that, I can’t help but wonder if ratings should be weighted differently? Should people who log plays have more influence than those who don’t? Could the system identify and limit users who consistently “review bomb” games before release? Should there be a separate rating for ‘verified’ reviewers, like Rotten Tomatoes has for movies?
But the moment you start going down that road, you run into a different kind of problem. Not a technical one, but a philosophical one. Who gets to have a voice?
Because there are infinite edge cases that don’t fit neatly into these solutions. What if you’ve played one edition of a game and want to rate another? What if you have strong objections to a game’s theme or message? Should those perspectives be excluded entirely just because they’re not tied to logged plays?
There’s also the simple reality that any system designed to police behaviour will eventually be gamed. If ratings required comments, people would leave empty ones. If they required play logs, people would log plays they didn’t have. At a certain point, you’re not solving the problem, you’re just moving it around.
Maybe the System Isn’t the Only Issue
Another idea that comes up fairly often is whether the rating system itself is part of the problem. A single number is a blunt tool. It tries to capture too many things at once: gameplay, components, art, rules clarity, personal taste, and compress everything into a single data point.
Would it be worth breaking the rating system apart? Would a system where you rate different aspects separately: gameplay, components, art, rules, overall experience. A composite score could still exist, but it would be built from multiple perspectives rather than a single gut reaction. Maybe that would make it harder to use the system as a blunt instrument.
Or maybe it would just give people more places to express the same frustrations.
A simpler, more immediate change might be to restrict ratings before release. Let previews be previews. Let early impressions live in comments and reviews. And let ratings reflect actual time spent with the game as it’s intended to be played. It wouldn’t solve everything, but it might curb the knee-jerk reactions to pre-production decisions.
Sometimes I wonder just how many people are turned away from Bullet because of the anime artwork.
Or Maybe This Is Just Who We Are
There’s a part of me that keeps coming back to a less satisfying answer: maybe this isn’t a systems problem. In my previous job as a Systems Administrator, I used to tell managers all the time “IT are really bad managers.” It’s not about building a system resilient to abuse, but it’s about how people choose to engage with the systems.
Some people will always use ratings as a way to express frustration, or to push back against trends they don’t like, or to support the things they care about. Others will treat them as carefully considered reflections of their experiences. Hell, I read one account of someone who used the rating system as a reminder of how many times he played each game in his collection (so a game he played twice got a 2, etc)
No system can really account for every use case that the public will invent.
Where I Personally Land
For my part, I don’t include ratings in my reviews. And even when I do rate games on BGG, I try to be mindful of what that number represents. Not just how I felt in the moment, but how the game held up over time, how it played across multiple sessions, how much joy it brought me each time it hit the table.
I also tend to avoid the extremes. A 1 or a 10 should mean something, at least to me. They’re not just expressions of dislike or hype, they’re markers of something truly exceptional, whether good or bad. Most games I play fall somewhere between a 6 and a 9, and I’m perfectly comfortable with that. Any game that would hit those lower scores get weeded out before they even hit my table, so they don’t even get a chance to get a score.
But more than anything, I find myself relying less on the number on the BGG page or it’s placement in the overall top games list, and more on the opinions of people I trust. The written reviews, the YouTube Videos, and posts people share after actually playing the game. That’s where I find the real value.
Because at the end of the day, I don’t think the BGG top games list is a objectively correct measure of the quality of a game, but it does serve as a barometer for me. And the more people use the ratings to talk about everything, the less value the BGG ratings has for me.
