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While my focus in most of my articles is on tabletop games, with the advent of summer comes the desire to play outside. There are many such games and activities, but the games of interest here are ones that involve rolling or tossing objects at another/other object(s). I think for most in the US, this is associated with Horseshoes or Bocce, but there are several variations on this theme–more than I realized–that are popular primarily based on the country or region of origin. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

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As mentioned in 2017 Preview – Gaming Goals, I have taken a very high level approach to goals related to how many games, what type of games, etc. that will hit my table this year. This is fortunate because I would have already headed down a path that probably is contrary to anything I would have imagined just 2 months ago.

About 18 months ago, I started looking hard at Dungeons and Dragons 5^th Edition (D&D 5E). An old friend who was the primary DM in my wife’s college D&D group was also looking at it, but we didn’t think we would be able to get any momentum toward playing. We are all just too busy and the old gang lives at different corners of the Denver area (Lori and I and another couple are actually “remote”), so getting together is always an ordeal. We also looked at Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds as possible tools to facilitate being able to play.

Can we pull it together to play D&D?

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The BGG games pages include tons of community contributed content. Obviously, I am an avid user of the site, but have traditionally participated to a limited degree and have been remiss in tangibly thanking others for their contributions. Let’s take a quick look at the various ways you can contribute to the site information and recognize the efforts of others, using Pandemic as our example..

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The BGG website (boardgamegeek.com) is the most comprehensive source of information and collection of commentary about board games anywhere ever… and it feels like it. Asking a simple question about a game on BGG is a bit like asking for the most common use of a word and having someone cart in the all of the unbound pages of the OED in a stack and saying, “Here, find it.” OK. So maybe not that bad, but it can be almost as intimidating to a new user.

Tabletop media has complained, criticized, and suggested improvements continuously for years now, so I don’t need to pile on any more than I already have. This article is not that. We will touch on the general sentiments and suggestions a bit for context, but this is not intended to be piling on.

Instead, let’s consider what a perfect BGG world might look like. Will there be a rush on rainbows and unicorns in that perfect world?

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If you are coming to this article first, you may want to start at Part 1 of this series to be sure you have the full context. In this final part of the article we will review some conclusions and briefly look forward to what may be the future of Legacy games.

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If you are coming to this article first, you may want to start at Part 1 of this series to be sure you have the full context.

A review of the data collected of those who rated Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 as a “1” provides some insight into some rating and tracking practices. This is a short article to review some of the methods that I saw in the data and some of the difficulty experienced in analyzing the data.

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If you are coming to this article first, you may want to start at Part 1 of this series to be sure you have the full context.

As we saw in Part 3 of this article, some of the “hate” in rating Pandemic Legacy was directed toward ‘legacy” or “disposable” games in general. In this part we will look at some of the justification for that hate and the tracking data provided by users that either supports or undermines that sentiment. Based on the comments provided by raters and the data available we have two basic foundations for argument:

• Legacy games have limited playability.
• Legacy games have compromised value.

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If you are coming to this article first, you may want to start at Part 1 of this series to be sure you have the full context.

As mentioned in Part 2 of this series, not all ratings of “1” for Pandemic Legacy are examples of “hate rating” and not all “hate rating” of Pandemic Legacy was related to preserving Twilight Struggle as #1 on the BGG rankings (or the positions of other top rated games). Another significant rationale as expressed in comments and implied by the data is a dislike of “Legacy” or “disposable” games – or, more precisely, how stupid and wasteful they are. Let’s take a look at a few more stats related to this form of “hate rating” and some other characteristics of those who rated this way.

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If you are coming to this article first, you may want to start at Part 1 of this series to be sure you have the full context.

The impetus for this article (which became this series) was the rise of “hate rating” (my term) reported to be occurring on BoardGameGeek as Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 rocketed up the rankings and in particular, as it approached the coveted #1 position long held by Twilight Struggle. As Pandemic Legacy approached the top spot on the BGG rankings, some users rated Pandemic Legacy a “1”, apparently attempting to keep it from rising higher in the ranking. Some raters flat out stated in their comments that this was their intent, so we know this was happening. Some stated other reasons (which we will discuss in Part 3) and some remained silent, so we don’t know their intent.

In this part of the article we discuss the practice of “hate rating,” review some of the stats on the ratings and discuss the information gleaned from those ratings and potential impact on the BGG rankings. Although this event was well-covered in the tabletop media, what remains lacking are specifics about the ratings – everything I heard or read was anecdotal.