Analysis Paralysis

When this blog published its first post in May 2020, it was called Data & Games, and its subtitle billed it as “the Recommend.Games blog on board game analyses”.1 It has been Analysis Paralysis since that November.

🇪🇸 Spain won. 🏆 I called it in part 2c, back in June, at 35.3% — the model’s boldest, most market-contrarian pick of this whole series.

The cat’s out of the bag and the winners have been announced 🗄️!

The waiting is finally coming to an end!

The group stage is over, the Round of 32 is set — and the model has changed its mind. ⚽️ When I ran the numbers before kickoff the model had a bold, market-contrarian opinion: 🇪🇸 Spain to win it at 35.3%, 🇦🇷 Argentina second at 23.0% and both dramatically…

FIFA is a mafia.

Nominations are out 🗄️!

Spiel des Jahres 2026 is around the corner!

A year in the making The 2026 World Snooker Championship is under way at the Crucible in Sheffield — a natural point to rerun the forecast from last April, when we put Elo on five decades of results and ran ten million tournament simulations.

W.

At some point this year, I let my laptop run flat-out for almost two weeks just to answer one question: how much of a four-player board game is “skill” and how much is “luck”?

Whether a game counts as “skill” or “chance” isn’t just a pub argument — in many countries it’s a legal distinction.

The cat’s out of the bag and the winners have been announced 🗄️!

The waiting is finally coming to an end!

Nominations are out 🗄️!

Spiel des Jahres 2025 is around the corner!

Welcome to the Crucible This blog is usually all about board games, but let’s stretch the definition just a little: snooker is, after all, one of the most widely followed tabletop games in the world.

Chance in games is like seasoning in food — it’s all about the right amount.

This subject has nothing to do with games nor data science, but chances are that amongst the readers of this blogs are many who appreciate mathematics – and its beauty.

Bias is a bit of an ugly word, isn’t it?

Corey Thompson (of Above Board TV and Dice Tower Dish fame) recently raised an interesting question on the Board Games Insider podcast: In what year do you think the best titles (highest rated titles) were released?

The cat’s out of the bag and the winners have been announced 🗄️!

The waiting is finally coming to an end!

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.

Nominations are out 🗄️!

Spiel des Jahres 2024 is around the corner!

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.

What is a good recommendation?

BoardGameGeek (BGG) users can select their country of residence in their profile.

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.

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.

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

Orchard is a beloved children’s game classic which is so old – it’s as old as myself. 👴 As one might expect from a children’s game, it’s really simple: roll a die, pick a fruit of the corresponding color, and put it in the basket.

The hiatus is over!

The cat’s out of the bag and the winners have been announced 🗄️!

The waiting is finally coming to an end!

Nominations are out 🗄️!

Spiel des Jahres 2023 is around the corner!

Update: The hiatus is over!

The cat’s out of the bag and the winners have been announced 🗄️!

The waiting is finally coming to an end!

Nominations are out 🗄️!

Spiel des Jahres 2022 is around the corner!

We have some pretty exciting news!

The cat’s out of the bag and the winners have been announced 🗄️!

It’s time!

Nominations are out 🗄️!

It’s our favourite time of the year again: time for Spiel des Jahres nominations!

Spiel des Jahres 2021 nominations might still be a couple of months away, but I thought now is still a good time to return to one of the harder questions in my predictions post from last year: What exactly makes a game a Kennerspiel?

This is the second part of a series explaining and analysing the BoardGameGeek rankings.