The Secrets of Catan

Looking for what makes a modern hit board game

A Very Brief History…

If I say “board games”, what do you think of? If you answered Monopoly then you have been missing out on almost two and a half decades of analog entertainment.

…modern board games found success in being everything Monopoly was not.

The Settlers of Catan was released in ’95 and kick started modern board gaming. Catan showed that a game with interesting mechanics, little downtime, and no player elimination would keep players coming to the table. In short, modern board games found success in being everything Monopoly was not. Catan showed what games could be at the table and what they could be to bottom lines — the base game has grossed over a billion dollars in sales, and resulted in countless spinoffs and add-ons.

Ever since Catan found massive success, thousands of games have followed suit and an elite subset have even found comparable financial success.

So what makes a blockbuster game?

Drawing a hand of data

To figure out what makes a best seller I need information on thousands of games. Conveniently, the fans of the hobby have been kind enough to aggregate all of the information I need on one site — BoardGameGeek.com. If you want the details of how I collected my data, you can visit my github, but the short version is this:

• Use BeautifulSoup to scrape the ID’s for all board games that have at least 30 votes.
• Take the ID’s, BeautifulSoup, and BoardGameGeek’s API’s to pull down details on more than 17,000 games
• Divide that data into a main data set and 6 supporting sets of features like publishers, designers, and mechanics.
• Reduce the set to “modern” games (after 1990)and we are good to go

With our data collected, we can finally move on to analysis.

Critical Success Does Not Mean Financial Success

My initial route of exploration for this project was to look at features of the top rated games. I did a lot of exploration to eventually realize that just because a game is a critical darling and loved by the community, does not mean it will sell.

Let’s take a brief look at this.

We immediately see there is a lot of overlap. Being a game that’s well rated definitely increases sales, but what’s with everything to the left of 7.5? And why do so many highly rated games languish below 20,000 owned copies?

…aim to be more like Star Wars than Seven Samurai.

There are two main factors that generally keep a great game down. Weight and play time. Weight is a community voted measure, from 1 to 5, of how heavy and complex the rules and mechanics are. For the blockbusters the average weight is 2.35 and with a play time just over an hour. Compare that to the heavier, longer games of the top rated and you start to see why they aren’t sitting on everyone’s shelf.

All of these overlaps and differences makes perfect sense when we look at blockbuster movies. Just like with film, what the critics enjoy is not necessarily what sells. What you need is broad base appeal more than approval from the diehards of the medium. If you want to be a blockbuster, aim to be more like Star Wars than Seven Samurai.

Blockbusters versus the Masses

So, if simply being highly rated isn’t what sells, what factors do make a difference? Let’s start by comparing top selling games to the general pool of games on the same factors we looked at above.

All Games Average Weight: 2.03, Modern Hits Average Weight: 2.35

A clearer picture of what’s going on with the rating starts to emerge when we can see all games. A good rating has a slightly positive relationship with owned. Just like with movies, good word of mouth matters. We also learn there is a rough lower bound to weight above the average of 2.03. People don’t want to play kids games, you need to have more depth than a roll and move game. Consumers aren’t looking for a masterpiece or something to break their brain either, they want something they can enjoy while still sparing brain power for the other people at the table.

All Games Average = 2.7 players, Modern Hits Average = 3.8 players

I think this graph has one of the key takeaways — board games are the most successful when they are meant for small groups of family or friends. Tabletop games are a social affair and a group size around four means you have people to talk to with little downtime between turns.

All Games Average = 90 minutes, Modern Hits Average = 75 minutes. No significant difference.

While people want to spend time together, they are busy and prefer a game right around an hour. Don’t waste their time and let the game drag on, but don’t make something that takes longer to setup than to play.

Average number of mechanics per game surprised me. I expected fewer mechanics in a best seller, assuming this was key to a cleaner more streamlined game. At 4.33 mechanics per game for the hits versus 2.4 for all games, I was wrong. We can look a bit deeper and see how often mechanics show up in the hits. What we find are a lot of simple and core mechanics showing up a lot. This may be how best sellers are adding complexity without alienating players — build off of what they already know.

With designers per game, there is agreement — games are not designed by committee, unless it’s Cards Against Humanity. What you should do different is to pick a designer with a good batting average.

I also found the batting averages for publishers. I can’t speak to what the decision making process is of the top publishers, but find out and copy it.

Hasbro and Parker Brothers bat at .5%. They are not aiming at the fans of the hobby.

Last Round

So how do you get a hit game? Aim for mass appeal.

To give you the best chance of success you need a game for four with a bit of complexity but not brain melting because you only have an hour. To deliver on this balancing act you may want to blend together a handful of familiar mechanics. Finally, make sure it’s good because if the fans trash it, you aren’t likely to sell much. Easy, right?

Oh, and one last step — pray, because even the top designer only has a 25% success rate.

Play Again

This is a large and rich data set that I hope to explore further and build on. Some potential future posts include:

• A prequel post on scraping, cleaning, and thought process of what data to gather and look at
• Sister post on making a critical darling
• Identifying the key mechanics of hit games through text analysis of comments and descriptions
• Pulling user data and making a recommender engine
• Using NLP to comb through descriptions and comments for further hints at what makes a hit
• Image analysis on box art — What do successful games have in common.
• Combine it all together and try to predict hits