A while ago, a friend of mine had just released a game, and was doing what all board game designers (as far as I’m aware) do post game release: stare in frustration at the ratings on Board Game Geek.
The particular source of his frustration was a that the game had been rated with a 1 by someone who clearly didn’t own the game, and couldn’t have possibly played the game at the time. Shortly after he mentioned the whole thing to me.
We quickly discussed various reasons that players will do this, and there was a smattering of the usual ones. Review bombing a game for ideological reasons. Rating a game that is rated “too highly” to bring the score down. Fights or problems with a publisher.
It was at this point that I asked him if he’d just asked this person why they’d given him a 1. He had not.
So messaged them. I’ll be referring to the rater as “Tim.”
Reaching Out
After looking at the profile for a bit, I quickly noticed that it had a very odd distribution of ratings. Virtually all of them were 1’s, with a smattering of 7-10’s, but the 1’s MASSIVELY outweighed the 10’s.
So I messaged Tim, and asked them about their rating system for games. After a brief back and fourth, they responded, and I found their answer surprising.
The Big Surprise
The first thing was that Tim was not a single person, and instead was a group of players who used the account to collaboratively track plays and games for their gaming club.
The second was that when they “rated” a game, they were not rating it based on playing it. They were giving a rating based on how they felt as a group, and if they wanted to order it for the group. So a game that wasn’t bad might receive a 1 for the reason that nobody in the group was interested in trying it. This was especially common for games that the group considered too simple, or didn’t have the right player count.
There’s also one specific quote I want to pull out from their response, that I found quite telling.
Regarding the not yet released (games) – we consider ourselves enough experienced so we do not need to play the game to know that it is not for us – one text or video review is more than enough.
This is not an approach I would ever take, but I appreciated the clarity, and I think it gives insight on why this person had such a high number of low-rated games.
I thanked them for their response, and moved on.
The Takeaways
The general vibe I have gotten from designers when discussing what I’d generally consider to be unusually low ratings is a sense that they’re being targeted in some way or another.
There absolutely are folks in board game spaces who do what I’d call “hateful reviews.” The folks who hate others based on their sexual orientation, gender, race, etc. The whole nine yards. And because they exist in board game spaces, they also exist on Board Game Geek. And they will rate games badly as a way to harass and attack people.
There are also folks who are picky or petty. They’ll rate a game low because a component was damaged. Or because it was rated too highly. Or it was shipped to reviewers before Kickstarter backers. Or any number of a variety of other things that I’d personally consider mundane and irrelevant to the experience of the game.
But I think there is also a third category of folks who are just doing their own thing, and see nothing wrong with rating a game that they do not personally like much as a 1, and moving on.
Does this usually ruin that designer’s day? Yes! Do I have any idea how to fix this problem?
Not a clue.
I don’t think many board game players recognize the impact ratings have on a game, or the folks who make them. At the same time, I’m not sure publishers and designers are interested in asking the less vocal folks who rate games weirdly why they’re doing it, when all available evidence (to them!) labels those folks as hateful or petty.