A Data Driven Review of Board Game Design and Interactions of Their Mechanics

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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353787592_A_Data_Driven_Review_of_Board_Game_Design_and_Interactions_of_Their_Mechanics

Este artículo de 2021 arroja distintos datos que pueden resultar de interés para analizar la situación y evolución de los juegos de mesa. Gran parte de ellos provienen de analizar los registros de la BGG.










The most frequently occurring mechanics such as hand management, variable player powers, set collection, hexagon grid, simulation, modular board, and tile placement

According
to the results, there are 25 mechanics with an average
complexity above 3 (out of 5). The mechanics: order counters
(where players can place order tokens in regions of the
board to indicate their actions in that particular region),
loans (where the players have the option to take a loan
from a bank to get more money) and ownership (where
players own entities or resources and collect merits based on
actions performed on these entities), have the highest average
complexities respectively.
However, according to Figure 9, there is not an observable
difference between the average rating of games using particular
mechanics. This implies that the types of mechanics
present do not impact how games are rated.

Several mechanics gaining popularity among board game
designers can be identied from the analysis. Hand man-
agement shows the most signicant positive shift in interest
from only 4.4% games using it in 1980 to 25.7% of games
utilising the mechanic by the year 2020. Further, variable
player powers, card drafting, area majority/inuence, action
points, worker placement, and deck bag and pool building
are steadily gaining popularity with 17.72%, 11.54%, 11.4%,
7.71%, 6.5%, and 5.47% of games respectively using them
by the year 2020








The analysis on trends in individual mechanics over
time also showed some insights into the types of mechanics
that are ourishing as well as those that are stagnating.

In fact, the correlations between complexity, rating, and the
number of mechanics are, at most, moderate which suggests
that the complexity, or the number of mechanics has little
contribution towards making a game more appealing. This
can be attributed to several factors: the interactions between
mechanics can drastically change the overall experience of
a game; and that a particular mechanic label is a coarse
categorisation that encompasses quite a range of settings that
can vary greatly across implementations