How Board Game Brother’s reviews work
As you might have noticed a large part of Board Game Brother is explanation of the rules for different board games. At the end of each of these “How To” articles there will be two reviews of the game from different angles.
The first angle will be the Brother Rating. This review will focus on how accessible this game is to new people and how easy it would be to introduce to someone who has never played before. The medium with which I use is how confident I would be in trying to teach it to my brothers and get them to play it. Both of my brothers are adverse to more complex or complicated games and any game that will regularly take longer than an hour to an hour and a half. On the flip side, they both enjoy board games and are comfortable with gateway games like Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride. So an easy benchmark would be that if I say I could get both brothers to play it’s very accessible, if I can only get one brother it’s a tough sell but not completely inaccessible, and if I could get neither brother than it is a very complicated game recommended only for the more hardcore audience or those who gravitate towards much more complicated or longer games.
The second angle is the much more traditional Fun Rating. This is simply a review of what I think of the game and whether I had a lot of fun playing it. It will be a traditional scale out of 10 and will look much more like other reviews you would have seen rating movies or videogames.
Why the different reviews? Why not just combine them into one review? Well, the biggest reason I wanted to separate out the Brother Rating review was because I found that how accessible a game was had a huge impact on whether I bought it, particularly when my main gaming companions were my brothers. A game can be incredibly fun while being very complicated. It can also be fun while being simple. In a combined review I don’t think the difference between those two is defined enough, so I have separated them out. This way, before you find out how enjoyable the game is, you know how accessible it is and whether it would be a good fit for you and your normal board gaming companions.
So enjoy the how-to articles and their attached reviews and let me know what you think of each one through comments at the bottom!
