The Board Game Industry is Booming
The board game industry is now worth a staggering $11 billion and growing at a rate of 7-8%↗ annually – just slightly behind other multi-billion dollar industries. For reference, board games are now on the map contending with other billion dollar media industries.
More Board Games are Published Annually than Ever Before
Today, board game designers collectively publish thousands of new games each year. After some Python scraping of BoardGameGeek.com↗–the leading English site for board game cataloging, I discovered several interesting trends in recent data. Even an exhaustive list of the top 25,000 games contains primarily games published in the last decade.
It may seem obvious that recently published games are popular recently, but before the year 2000, only a few hundred games were released annually. It wasn’t until the 21st century that each year saw 1000+ new releases annually.
If you were born before the 2000’s, your childhood board game memories might be filled with cheating the same games (playing the banker in Monopoly, in my case) over and over again.
Board Games are more Category-Forward than Before
Photo by Shreya Jaiswal, Parks Board Game
Chess and Checkers, games that are primarily focused on mechanics, are still likely to be the top selling board games in the world, but popularity within the board game niche differs from overall sales data. Newly released games today vary drastically in their themes and evocation of a story. Overall, richer themes and diversity of themes are more characteristic of games today; you can terraform mars, create suitable environments for bird species, or survive prehistoric times playing as our cave ancestors.
Of course, there may be outliers who find that oldschool games like Chess do feel immersive and thematically rich. If Chess elicits the feeling of battling kingdoms, it’s because it was derived from Chaturanga—an ancient Indian game made to consider real military tactics. The tradition of using board games to discuss military tactics lasted way past ancient India, but the category of “wargames” has decreased in popularity while fantasy has risen significantly within the niche.
Popularity is not Mechanic-Dependent
Mechanic (how a game functions) trends paint a clearer picture of board game diversity because users don’t show a preference for any one in particular. This isn’t to say that mechanics aren’t important, but it shows that categories may trend over time because either 1. Players are open to a variety of mechanics in their game or 2. Types of players vary wildly in which mechanics they care about.
The Board Game Community Loves Complexity
After learning that category trends were important and mechanics were not, I wanted to see if category could predict a game's popularity—but the results surprised me.
I trained a Random Forest predictive model on the top 25,000 board games (2000–2022) and found that only 'complexity' effectively predicts board game ratings. It has a high feature importance (0.92) and a strong Pearson correlation (0.97) with average rating.
Categories rise and fall whereas complexity always correlates with popularity. Take a look at the rating for the most complicated games in 2022, including Twilight Imperium; a game that’s predicted to take a whopping 12 hours, and in practice can take even longer. The board game universe is vast and varied, but there’s one thing the community agrees on: complexity is good.