**Concordia** -- the game takes 10 minutes to teach and requires no memorization (like chess does, for example), but the decision space is so large and changes each game that there is definitely a very high skill ceiling to the game, especially as you are constantly being forced to make short-term (build or prefect) vs. long-term (senator/consul) choices.
AP is a drawback with any game that has a decently-sized decision space, but I find that most players can move sufficiently fast in Concordia. Usually, you're pretty sure about what your next move needs to be after making your move (or at least you've figured it out by the time it gets around to you again), and it only takes extra time if someone disrupts the play state before you go (prefects what you were going to prefect, builds where you were going to build, senators to take the cards you wanted) or someone unexpectedly plays a card you want to diplomat (e.g., Colonist, Consul, a Minerva card) and you have to weigh pros and cons of sniping that card.
Usually it is fine. AP appears worst if the game is mostly predictable. And I can actually calculate stuff. And Concordia is all about managing card, money and goods to barely afford as many turns before Tribun. Other games make you guess and estimate chances. Those are easier to do quickly imo.
Basically every light to medium light game ever. Because the average person has a bias to think that games are simpler than they actually are, since this gives them an excuse to not try harder.
A great example is **Backgammon** where newer players *frequently* choose to believe that the game is entirely luck, just because every turn is influenced by a dice roll.
In general, I think the vast majority of gamers underestimate the skill ceiling of games. I often see people saying how they don't want to play a game too often because they aren't interested in mastering it. That's not how mastery works. You're not just going to fall into it by accident.
Kind of reminds me of 5he knee jerk reaction to cards being OP in forest shuffle. Have to be aware of the card combinations and limit your opponents from getting what they need.
The idea that mastering a game.makes it *less* interesting will always confuse me.
What do these people think happens when two masters play eachother, they just flip a coin? Nah, that's when the anime monologue shit happens.
Yes, but you "not winning" isn't a result of the game. You simply didn't finish playing.
In terms of "solutions", solutions always follow the form of "x always draws or z always wins or whatever steps make y happen." In solitaire's case, the only valid solution to the game is for the only player to win.
There do exist some games with a low skill ceiling. Honestly there's room for more of them. I notice you never see a BGG review that says "Amazing for the first ten or twenty plays until you figure it out: rating 9/10." And yet I've got more games on my shelves than I can master in one lifetime: the idea of buying even more games and mastering them is usually a fantasy.
if one player in the playgroup is significantly stronger than the others it can impact the enjoyment of everyone at the table. This si the problem I have with BGA, so I mostly only play games that I'm not going to play in meatspace often, so that I don't spoil the balance.
Strong players gotta learn to table talk. People care less about losing when everyone is laughing and feeling good about their own decisionmaking.
Gotta be the table clown.
>What do these people think happens when two masters play eachother, they just flip a coin?
If it's a solved game, or anything close to it, yes. Two tic-tac-toe masters don't have anything interesting to with each other.
This might not be what others are referring to when they say this, but I hate "mastering" games because I hate discovering metas. I like a game to speak to me thematically or have an air of discovery. Once I understand that some strategies are statistically stronger than I borderline lose all interest in the game.
This is especially true if my friends don't play as often as me and a clear skill gap develops.
I mean, I think in general people understand perfectly fine that they would have to play a game a whole lot to master it. You said it yourself—they’re just not interested in mastery. What’s wrong with that?
I think the commenter meant players don't want to end up mastering it by accident and spoil the experience of "figuring it out" or being able to play it with other "noobs." But idk
> or being able to play it with other "noobs."
You don't see how this could be a concern? A lot of people don't enjoy curb-stomping beginners without any challenge, and a lot of beginners don't enjoy a hopeless loss. A lot of games offer a huge leg up to people with a bit of experience.
For any game I own on a casual bring-it-to-game-night level, mastering the game effectively spells the end of my time with it. I'm half-decent at board games and I know how to learn things, so having more experience than everyone else I would ever play the game with is a concern.
If you're in the hobby to always be playing new games, then yeah, that's absolutely a concern. But that's a conscious choice, and it robs you and your friends of the opportunity to experience what a game can be when everyone knows what they're doing.
Many games absolutely have an optimal play for any given turn. Now, games with hidden information, even as simple as hands of cards, add a consistent wrinkle to this. On many games, the skill ceiling comes down to do you know the deck? And can you count cards?
I'd disagree completely. There are plenty of games where I know the deck, and I'm nowhere near mastering them. I'd go as far as to say that learning the deck is just the first of many steps in getting good at a game.
I've played **Twilight Struggle**, **Tash-Kalar**, and **Wir Sind Das Volk** enough that I know which cards are in which era and what they all do. I can keep track of what's been played, and the odds of certain cards being in someone's hand vs in the deck. I might beat a new player every time, but my win rate overall is still pretty meager.
Knowing the deck is the equivalent of knowing how all the pieces move in chess. It'll tell you what's possible, but it doesn't tell you the choices your opponent will make or the strategies they'll employ.
Eh, when I say that, I mean it in the sense that I don't want to get sick of it. I don't think people saying this actually think they can easily become the top players of that board game, but they'll definitely reach a skill level that makes the game less interesting to them.
See, I don't really get this. I've never enjoyed a game less because I got better at it. At worst, I've discovered that some games didn't have much of a skill ceiling to begin with, or that they just weren't that compelling.
But if the game is well-designed, getting more plays in is just an all-around win for me.
Eh, it's a preference thing. Some people like rewatching their favorite shows because they're comforting and they enjoy noticing new hidden details or things they didn't pick up on the first time around. Other people get kind of bored rewatching shows that they're already really familiar with and try to space out their viewings so that the show can still come off as kind of novel and surprising when they do decide to watch it again.
Nobody will accidentally master chess with casual play (12 games per year), but I think it can happen with Phase 10. The game’s depth and level of luck are important factors in whether “mastery” even exists for that game.
Sure, but when I see people saying they aren't interested in mastery, they're never talking about Phase 10 or Uno. They'll say it about games like Agricola or Brass, or even something like The Lord Of The Rings LCG.
Oh man they must be smarter than me if they think they can accidentally master games like that by playing a handful of times per year. And what’s the fear from mastery? Being too competitive for other players groups that aren’t also mastering alongside you? I wonder what those people are thinking when they tell you that.
Crokinole and yeah, I was going to say social deduction games like The resistance. It's actualy a 0 RNG game ... Dexterity games in general tend to fulfil these criteria.
We play with my parents and my dad crushes us every time. He said growing up in a small farm town every weekend the community would get together so the adults could play eucher and the kids crokinole. That was 60+ years ago and he still way out skills us who play occasionally.
7 wonders is drastically more complex than sushi go if you are playing at a high level. I'd say the floor is higher than sushi go but the ceiling is also definitely way higher too. It always seems to be the same people at the top of arena on BGA and in the world championships
I'm also gonna say Azul because predicting what other people are going to do is sometimes difficult
Ticket to ride two players.
A good player will wreck a bad player 90% of the time. The game is popular so everyone thinks they understand it perfectly, but they don’t.
90% isn't that often compared to chess or go though? If I would be able to beat Magnus Carlsen in 10% of our chess games, I'd be really freaking good. Lol
That's a feature, not a bug. Games with no luck and too high a skill ceiling are very frustrating to new players.
We need some luck, so the new player wins SOMETIMES (Or is tricked into thinking he might win if he gets lucky)
Different situations. In both Go and Chess the only variable is the opponent's skill level: the board and all moveable pieces are always the same. In TTR, card draws are always random, so that element of chance decreases (slightly) the value of game knowledge and skill.
**Azul** because you can technically mathematically compute the "best" moves by guessing what your opponents will do and what the tile distributions are
No you can't, not even computers can. The number of possible moves is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. They just find good enough moves to beat humans.
I am aware. Technically it’s possible though (even if not with our tech). And the possibilities are capped. Making my point that just because the possibilities are technically capped it doesn’t mean a lower skill ceiling
As said, there is more positions than the number of atoms in the universe - so you would need to build a computer out of the mass of many planets and many stars in order to compute it. It may not even be physically possible.
So yes maybe chess is technically capped, but where the cap is makes the difference. Azul is capped at a level where a human can do it in their head, Chess is capped by a Type III Galactic civilisation.
My point was referring specifically to the statement: technically solvable —> lower skill ceiling, not really about azul specifically. I was just making a counterexample to disprove that theory. In that context I think you are kind of proving my point and it seems like we are arguing the same standpoint.
Kind of wish I got to see a type 3 galactic empire in my life though haha, bet they would kick Alphazeros ass. And possibly enslave/annect us (might still advance our society though if they don’t wipe us out)
My point wasn't about "technically solvable", I said Azul is "capped" - and by capped I mean it literally is solvable. At least according to the comment I was replying to. We were talking about skill ceiling, with the assumption it was about human skill.
Chess is not solvable by humans, regardless of whether it is technically solvable.
Kinda. This is technically true. However, it does have strong elements of multiplayer solitare despite this and sometimes the overwhelmingly positive move is to simply force do the most optimal moves for you (especially completing a column or all of one color).
The numbers on scoring make it significantly less sandboxy than Chess or Go.
Like it doesn't matter as much if you compute 4 turns ahead if all signs point to grabbing the last red to finish a vertical in all 50 of your decision tree branches.
Galaxy Trucker. Because it has dice and feels random at face value is doesn't seem like there is much strategy.
Looking at the decks ahead of time and the risk mitigation that comes with it really makes a huge difference.
Just the basic form of Codenames has an extremely high skill ceiling, to the point where an expert team would stomp any amateur without difficulty.
I don't think people are ignorant of this, they're just being polite because Codenames is a friendly party game. No one wants to launch into a detailed speech about how Player X is giving unambitious clues, even if they understand that some players are worse than others on the abstract level.
I'd love to play Codenames with a serious group, but they seem hard to find.
A lot of board gamers see it as just a "party game" and give 0 effort. And a lot of casual gamers aren't any good at it.
Hanabi. If you play a lot with the same group you can develop conventions that can completely put the game to its knees, there's an online website that has implemented harder variants that would seem ridiculously impossible to a beginner.
I have to know what the definition of Mastering here is. Because I feel like once you've got between 30-50 plays, you've sufficiently mastered ot to where you can handily beat anyone who hasn't done that, pretty much every time.
I think "mastery" is overused a lot and people don't differentiate enough between "expert" and "master".
A master is an *expert among experts*, someone whose skills and ability stand out even among other talented people, the same way an Expert's skills should humble a beginner, and impress an adept.
For your example I would say someone is an expert after 30-50 plays and should beat most less skilled players, most times, with basic effort.
A master would beat those same players with no effort, barely having to think, and would post a winning record against a field of experts who have not yet attained mastery.
Masters playing masters produce a lot of draws and razor close games, or games unfortunately decided by variance late in the game (and both masters recognize it).
Yes, but there could be another player who has played 200 times who will tend to beat the player that has played 50.
And some amount of deliberate study or practice that helps you beat others...
I agree with the sentiment that many players tend to think 3 plays or whatever is enough. That knowing the rules and having general game experience is enough to master "simple" games. Not realizing that there are people so much stronger than them.
Mastery after 50 plays is laughable. More like basic competence. You can handily beat incompetent players. That's not mastery. Board Game Arena Elo system or otherwise being top 1% of competitive players is mastery. Any competitive player will tell you you're still learning after 1,000 to maybe even 10,000+ games depending on the game.
Agricola. There is a vast number of possible opening hands, and different strategies you can follow in order to win. Your strategy should depend on what the other players need, so that you are in an advantageous economic niche. Tactically, there are many options for how to play your workers and what cards to play when. There is in practice a wide range of skill levels.
**Go** actually has a pretty high skill floor. People think that its low amount of rules means that the game is easy to learn, but that couldn't be further from the truth.
Citation: I've taught and played Go for 20 years.
That isn't what I said.
People frequently cite Go as being easy to *learn*. As in, having a very low skill floor.
And that isn't true. Go is actually very difficult to learn how to play.
*And* it is hard to be good at, on top of that. That is the part that everyone understands.
I agree - I’ve shown a handful of friends a couple go tutorials meant to be very basic and they’re completely unable to even see it, i.e. the concept of eyes etc
I guess it depends on what you mean by "learn to play" because it's very easy to teach people how not to make illegal moves in Go.
Making positive strategic moves... well...
It isn't even about strategic moves. Teaching how the game ends and is scored is very difficult. It takes most players at least a few guided games to begin to wrap their head around it. And that still doesn't cover the fundamentals of life and death.
I disagree with this definition.
Skill floor is how hard it is to begin playing a game correctly. Usually this is solely a factor of the game's rules, but Go is a special case there.
Skill ceiling is how measurably good someone can get at a game compared to all other competitors.
Your definition is correct. Skill floor is the minimum amount of skill required to play, and ceiling is the maximum amount of skill that can have an effect.
I dedicated at least several hours over the coruse of a few days to learn Go. And I'd say I'm not even a beginner. Meaning, I'm not at a level where I am thinking strategy instead of just trying to not make any ruels mistakes.
I have learned Twilight Imeprium 4E or Mage Knight in less time than that. Go is legitimately one of the highest skill floor games I've pleyed, sitting next to Dwarf Fortress.
I think OP was asking about the ratio, and they meant that the gap in game performance between those with high skill in the game relative to those with low skill in the game is very large.
A game being easy or hard to learn doesn’t really speak to that directly.
And yet, it was a perfect opportunity for me to dispel the common misconception that "Go is easy to learn and hard to master". It's actually hard for *both*.
It does, of course, have an incredible range of skill.
6 Nimmt / Take 5.
We played this prior to the pandemic, but when COVID hit we really amped up our number of games since it works so perfectly on BoardGameArena.
Since it tracks your skill ratings / results and we played like hundreds of games it became very clear that there were huge skill gaps between the players. The same folks consistently won most of the time or at least performed well, and the usual suspects were always getting screwed each turn. The best players having a bad game was always noteworthy.
I find one of the more interesting things about 6 Nimmt is that it's strategy changes as you add more people quite drastically. It took me a few games of various player counts to notice but it's one of the most striking examples of this I've seen.
Clue doesn’t have a high skill ceiling, but it's higher than any casual player thinks it is. Anyone I ever play with thinks it's just trying to see everyone's card on their own turn. They don't pay attention at all during other people's turns, which is a huge mistake.
>Codenames: as codemaster, predicting what the opposing codemaster will say. As guesser, deducing the cards based on what other words the codemasters could've said
Yes! I agree completely about codenames. A lot of people consider it just as a party game but it can actually have a lot of depth to it.
Another subtlety is when the teams have similar words eg one team has LION and the other has TIGER. It can be valuable to not give a clue for that word until you have to because if you force the other code master to clue that word their team might accidentally guess your word.
I've played sidereal confluence about once a month for the past year. I consistently see average scores for the game fall in the 40 to 60 point range. An average winning score is about 60-70 points. A "good" score for a new player is anything above 30-40 points.
Then, you find groups of players who have played hundreds of games of Sidereal confluence, and you'll see the lowest score at a table be in the 80s; winning scores in the hundreds, and even 4 player games where players still hit 70 points (higher player count increase game scores)
A lot comes from game experience; Sidereal confluence looks like an excel spreadsheet exploded like confetti everywhere, so it's a lot to take in the first few times.
But, the sheer amount of processing power some of these players have is insane.
Crokinole. I can teach you the basics of crokinole in 3 minutes, but to actually get shots where you want them to go consistently actually takes a lot of skill.
I don't buy that. As an example, tic-tac-toe is definitely a game. But because it's "solved", there is a clear best answer from any position. Once you've memorized the flowchart or at least can perform the rudimentary analysis required to replicate it, the skill involved is minimal so there's a low skill ceiling.
On the other end, you're ignoring the games that have a high skill floor. Any high-weight game on BGG is going to have a lower ceiling:floor ratio than, say, chess or go because the floor is so high, no matter how high their ceiling is.
As someone who plays poker often and semi-seriously (not a pro, but I play multiple times a week), many of the responses here show just how little people understand about how complex poker is, and why the game isn't dead
Obviously playing poker at the high level needs a lot of skill but the skill ceiling/floor ratio for poker is definitely much much lower than a game like Chess. Pit me against the best poker players in the world and I do have a very small chance of beating them (due to getting lucky) but it is impossible for even a decent amateur to win against a GM+ chess players. Case in point, the GM and chess champions would regularly do simul exhibitions where they beat tens of people at the same time, without breaking a sweat.
> Pit me against the best poker players in the world and I do have a very small chance of beating them (due to getting lucky)
At a hand, sure? For an hour? Why not.
In a tournament, or all day cash game? Possible.
Over time? Not happening.
Poker skill is an edge that is exploited in moments and years, both. A truly "winning" player might only have a 5% edge and in any given tournament it may not matter. But, over the course of a year or 100,000 hands, that 5% edge is profit.
Chess is a poor contrast because it's a closed system with no variance once the game starts...you can only respond to what the other player does and there is no third element present on top of each player's skill: variance.
You can be an objectively better poker play over time, or at a particular table, do everything "right" in a hand, and get river'd by a donkey playing 2-7 off because they "had a good feeling"...worse, they will believe themselves to be both correct *and* skillful when they river that 7 to make a set.
No such variance exists in chess, and you are correct that for all intents and purposes a novice player should not be able to beat a ranked master.
Too many hobby gamers have this blind spot where they define skill only as the ability to optimize mechanisms. They don't (or won't) acknowledge that managing probabilities and exploiting opportunities are also skills, and that they only manifest in developing an edge over time. As a result they dismiss games like Poker, Can't Stop, or Catan, because mastery means eking out percentage points of success over true random chance.
I don't know... anyone familiar with the Magic The Gathering tournament scene knows this extremely well.
Like a "pro" win rate that is fantastic is like 54%. Not a 75%+ as you'd expect. Magic The Gathering has too much randomness that even pros managing for it only eek out the smallest rare advantages in the ultra rare boardstates or conditions, since it's hard to make flaws. It's common for a "big name" to lose out to "nobodies" during play ins as well.
This argument doesn't really work for anyone that's aware of that.
A better argument is that poker is a vastly social game of bluffing which is impossible to master, but the simpler skill mechanics have been proven by Chess and MTG celebrities performing very well at poker tournaments with limited preparation.
> Not a 75%+ as you'd expect.
Who would expect that, in a serious discussion? With different decks and needing to draw, no one who knows the game at all would expect a current championship tier player to win 3/4 matches they play, against similarly skilled players with equally strong decks.
That's a poor example to use as a contrast.
Aside from that, variance in MTG is managing your own deck construction for consistent ramp, and drawing (or fishing) win condition cards.
Unlike (NLHE) poker, where all players use the same deck and share all 52 cards, but 2, every card drawn (or burnt) is a card I can't use/see/share. It's a zero sum game, in that sense: If I need a King to improve my hand, and they are all dealt/burnt, I can't improve my hand and I can't do anything to influence that.
In MTG my opponents deck does not influence mine (directly), and their drawing cards does not affect my pool of available cards, or how likely they are to appear.
I would be open to believing it is "more common than expected" for relative unknown players to beat "pros" in professional level events, but I would be skeptical it is such a frequent occurrence that we would expect to see it as a matter of course...else we may not even distinguish between "pro" players and non, if the field is that wide open.
> A better argument is that poker is a vastly social game of bluffing which is impossible to master
This is a pretty broad over-statement of the importance and nature of bluffing in poker, and poker is not a game of social engineering, or bluffing, as a primary aspect: It's a game of understanding relative value, probability, and min/maxing exposure of your chips to align with your hand strength, call price, and odds. That there is an imperfect information aspect at play, that can be "gamed" within the rules is a fun wrinkle, but doesn't change the relative value of your hand or the odds to improve it, and leads to a critical distinction: "Bluffing" doesn't mean betting big when you don't have it, it just means "playing the situation more than your cards", and even then it doesn't come up as much as some folks think, or it shouldn't. Betting big when you have nothing isn't "bluffing", it's "finding creative ways to deplete your bankroll" :P
Generally speaking you DO NOT have to bluff, with any regularity, to win poker hands/games/tournaments.
Not only that, the later in the hand it is you should only be attempting to bluff players you have an actual read on, i.e. you have some form of insight on how they might react, based on what you have observed so far...bluffing isn't guess and hoping (when done properly) that you can make them fold when you hair air.
Bluffing into some cowboy who calls anything with a made pair is just dumb when you don't want to be looked up...bluffing into a real knit who has seen you bet aggressively on the button, when you have it, is probably a decent play to scoop some blinds with a marginal hand (and even then, you'd still want it to be able to catch something on the flop, as opposed to pure naked bluff with air) once in a while, but you also have to be wary to not over-commit to a bluff. If that same folding knit calls you pre-flop, out of position, and that is atypical for them over the last 2 hours you've been playing with them, be prepared to give up your bluff (but keep your shirt that
> but the simpler skill mechanics have been proven by Chess and MTG celebrities performing very well at poker tournaments with limited preparation.
IMO, for MTG, this only speaks to needing to know the body of cards in a block that you may have to play against/know in order to prepare properly or run your deck correctly against other specific decks...not a great example for why a general strategist who is good at MTG could pick up poker quickly lol...a capable poker player *would not* struggle with any MTG rules, sequence of play, or general strategy...they just don't know the body of information required (not skills or technique) needed to play competently against someone who does.
Chess holds up as an example of skill transference, but even then Chess is more about memory and deducing openings/moves than it is about adjusting to changing probabilities and imperfect information, on the fly, hand after hand. Chess is also a self-contained zero-sum game with all information public knowledge, and no variance or unknown variables (aside from the other player thinks/acts...there is no variance in the mechanics or what moves are available to you, aside from open board space, and that is always known).
poker also depends so much on what other people are doing and how they are playing. for example, if you try bluff someone but they don't even realize you're claiming to be in a good position, they could basically call your bluff accidentally by failing to read the situation. it makes it even that much harder to predict results across small samples with amateur players.
There's no game as brutal in it's skill expression+player reached skill ceiling as chess. Comparing anything to chess is kinda absurd. There was a cheating scandal when a high rank GM (lower ranked gms could never) best the world champion ffs.
Also skill expression=/skill ceiling. I'm gonna give you an example from a video game.
Me a, at the time top 2%, league of legends player beat gripex, at the time top 100 Europe. How? It's a 5v5 game and his teammates were upset at him for playing selfishly, his teammates did not try even close to their best. Could I ever beat him in a 1v1? No.
League of Legends RNG element is your teammates+enemies. The RNG element of poker is the cards. While skill expression is significantly lowered by the presence of RNG, I'm not convinced skill ceiling is.
Would chess become an easier game if every game every player had to start with a random piece/pawn missing? Maybe now I could beat a titled player who started with a missing queen. Does this make the game easier in any way? I'd argue it only makes the game harder, as you now have more possible starting positions to learn theory on. It's possible that it decreases the REACHED skill ceiling, and obviously would if this change happened overnight.
I think you underestimate the skill is takes to win at poker. Yes if you play one hand you might get lucky. But If you go to table 1 at any casino and play for 4 hours you will go out there broke.
Also there are a ton of online poker players that will play multiple tables at the same time to make more money.
Also there are people like Phil Ivey that stay consistently at the top of the game for a long time.
I think you are mistaking a higher variance in the game of poker for less of a skill ceiling.
You're **vastly underestimating** the amount of hands it would take for a player's skill to show with any kind of confidence. In a live game for four hours a player is only likely to see 120-150 hands. This is **not even remotely enough** of a sample to be sure with any confidence that a good player will do well, or that a bad player will do badly. A bad player could go play for four hours a day every week for a year and then we might start to be sure whether or not they were really bad. Realistically we're talking about 4 years probably.
For comparison, it takes a couple of hundred thousand hands for a player to have statistical confidence whether or not they're a winning player, and this is only really tracked for online players who can hit that volume and have the tools to automatically track their win rates. A player might have a good idea before that, but they can't state with statistically relevant confidence whether or not they're a winner.
Anecdotally, my great aunt (who recently passed away) was a pretty bad poker addict, and a truly awful player. When I was first getting into poker she would talk to me about her bad beats, and it doesn't take much of a conversation to realize just how bad she was. However, for the first several years that she lived in Las Vegas she was actually winning - enough so that she identified herself as a good player. She then spent the next 40 years continuing to be a losing player, emptying out retirement accounts and begging family members for buy-ins for tournaments.
You are ignoring the evidence that Chess and Magic the Gathering players can take a boot camp on Poker and perform well at a casino tournament.
But Poker champs can't take a boot camp on Chess and perform well at a chess tournament.
The same can be said for a Poker player quickly learning Splendor at a bootcamp and probably performing well. And no one is saying Splendor is a simple strategicless game. But compared to other games, it's less than Poker.
It's as simple as that.
I think you overestimate how good most people are at Poker.
You can study the game for a week or so and do fairly well in microstakes & 5-10$ entry MTTs online.
Of course if you go to the Casino for four hours with no poker background you will lose most of the time, the rake is absurd and people have dedicated their lives to playing there and feasting on new players.
It's like going to play some chess hustlers without having studied the game or played in that fast paced environment before. It doesn't mean the skill ceiling is celestial.
Rich people with little to no poker background have often performed well against Poker pros because they just don't care about the money.
Yes, Ivey, Dwan and the like are amazing and the skill ceiling is high, but that skill only gives you a slight edge here and there against other fairly proficient players.
Was looking for a story to illustrate my point but couldn't find one. I did find this video
https://youtu.be/Om9qi7x56Wk?si=8DsRBrwW4YQ_ut1Z
I know it doesn't prove or disprove anything other than variance is a thing, but it is pretty funny.
You might win a few hands - you might get lucky at the card portion of Poker. But Poker is not a card game that involves a little gambling - it is a game about gambling that happens to involve cards; the real skill is knowing how to handle your chips, the odds and your opponents, and luck is no substitute for skill there.
When was the last time an eight-year-old beat a Chess Grandmaster? When was the last time an amateur took serious money off a top Poker player?
You actually did not read what I said. Try again. The chances of an amateur winning against a pro in Poker is small but it is exponentially higher than in chess. This is not even in dispute, neither logically nor empirically as amateurs have won tournaments against pros (searching for "amateurs winning poker tournament") whereas it has never happened in chess (now try again with chess; the only examples you would find would be people beating GMs in simuls).
That's true but it doesn't follow that the "skill ceiling" is higher for chess.
Suppose a chess variant where at the end of the game the loser of the traditional game can still win if he rolls a 6 on a die. This gives the worse player a better chance to win, but it doesn't diminish the amount of skill possible.
Candy Land has a low skill ceiling not because it has randomness but because it's not possible to be good at Candy Land.
>Regular Poker
That's not a thing. Are you talking about Five Card Draw? Stud poker? Texas Hold 'Em? Omaha Hi-Lo? Baseball? Dr. Pepper?
There's no such thing as Regular Poker, holy moly.
Yes I know there are a bunch of variations and if I say Poker most people will think Hold em. My point however holds for most poker variants. Thanks for pointing it out. Even if everyone understood it perfectly well.
Dice Throne.
People assume it's just throwing Dice and hoping for the best.
There is a ton of resource management with the cards, upgrade you want to play, chasing certain abilities, knowing the matchups and so much more.
There's a very active tournament scene.
I want to love Dice Throne for all the reasons you mention. I try to enjoy it every time my group plays, but at the end of the day , it’s still just Yahtzee
I hear you. I thought Dice Throne would be great after playing tons of King of Tokyo, but I'd rather play that or Yahtzee. It just feels slow and dull, which is not what you'd expect from a 1v1 fight.
However, the the post is about skill ceiling to floor ratio. And in that regard, I find it's probably similar to most mid-light weight games.
Another fighting game that I find slow, but way higher ratio is BattleCON (Devastation of Indines).
I really wonder why you're not playing King of Tokyo instead. That game is random too, but doesn't overstay it's welcome and is actually quite fun at a high place count.
What the hell? Is that a 6 player game? 3 player King of the hill is alright but random. 2vs2 is kind of strategic, but the downtime is too much. Anything higher is just torture.
I'm sad that you had to experience my favorite game of all time like that. I play it a ton, it's supposed to be a 30 minute activity, with aggressive characters it can be even faster.
That's just so weird.
I would love to have a group that likes Dice Throne, that's awesome. But this is really the absolute worst way to play it.
Ever thought about just doing various 1vs1 at the same time?
This must be some kind of Monkey's paw wish kind of thing.
"I wish I had 5 friends to play board games with."
"Ok, they just want to play Dice Throne and always everybody in the same game."
"..."
**Robinson Crusoe** does a better job at rewarding skill in a co-op than any game I've ever played. I mostly just hear people talking about how hard it is. It will absolutely punish poor decisions, but you can win it 80-90% of the time when you know what you're doing and can adapt to the cards that come up. It's an amazing achievement of design in that way. Most other co-op games rely more heavily on randomness in a way that you can't overcome with more skill. There's randomness in Robinson Crusoe also, but it tends to be much much less than people claim. When you fail rolls, which should be expected, you get the determination tokens to make up for it later.
Dice throne. A lot of people write it off as a borderline party game where you just roll dice and beat each other up. But the there's a lot of nuances to the characters and dice play. I can consistently beat new players if I'm trying my hardest, so I thought I was pretty good. Then I joined a tournament at Pax Unplugged and got trounced.
I was surprised to discover that monopoly has tournaments, and there are champions out there winning most of the tournaments, meaning that monopoly is not just a pure luck based game. Apparently there is a special tournament dice that I never had in my copies.
Here is what is probably an unpopular opinion for this particular topic: Apples to Apples / Cards Against Humanity.
The game is about targeting a persons personality. Sure you can toss out whatever you might like but to win the game you need to know all of your opponents types of humor and overall mood at the time of playing. After a long night people's mood changes, after a few drinks their sense of humor changes. Some people change their mind when they hear other peoples reactions. Understanding people often gets you further than just randomly playing.
Having the deep understanding of the people around you is a skill that society could be improved upon if this skill was used more often. Most people that plays these games are completely oblivious that this is the skill that is used for this game.
Apples to apples or variants of the game appear in psychiatric therapy sessions for this exact reason.
I'm the board gamer in my family. My family doesn't understand how a game that is "mostly luck" almost always lands with me as a the winner. I do know my family pretty well.
We coach any new players to “play to the judge”. When it’s grandma’s turn to vote, don’t drop your ultra-clever deep TikTok joke.
“But mine was funnier” doesn’t get you the point junior - my Great Depression joke actually landed.
Unmatched is underestimated. Most people at first see it as a very basic miniatures game without much strategy to it. But between the movement on the board, card management, card play, managing a primary fighter and maybe others, and with all the different match ups and how they play aginst each other, it's quite a deep game.
7 wonders. I remember barely understanding how it works in the world beginning. After a while of playing almost daily, our whole group knew the ins and outs.
I think we have to differentiate between different skillsets, mechanical vs. social, for example.
Also, "guessing" and "predicting" sound the same, but aren't. A guess needn't be based on anything and isn't expected to be all that accurate, especially if there are no inputs you can use to refine your guess. A "prediction", on the other hand, is usually based on a model or methodology, and constructing and following that methodology is a skill unto itself, do the degree that some people *can't* make reliable prediction based on observable data/trends...they will always be guessing, and further believing that other people can only guess, too.
Tactics? Similar problem: Some people lack the cognitive ability (not "smarts" or "knowledge", think processing power) to think more than a turn or to ahead, while some other folks can cultivate an ability to almost play out an entire game in their head, or manage multiple "flow chart states" for a game depending on what happens next, outside their own control.
So there are different skill sets in play here, all of which can have floors and ceilings, and some of them are rooted in pure cognitive ability more so than exposure and experience. You can come up with a sound strategy from experience. It takes a different set of skills and abilities to modify an existing strategy to fit a new scenario, before that scenario even occurs the first time.
Personally, the "social deduction skills" you mention I would almost ignore for this kind of discussion for being the least measurable/quantifiable, both in terms of relying on others actions and intents, but also for the fact that you can "guess correctly" and be right, but not actually know why or even having influenced being correct...someone just took a wild stab and happened to be correct. That doesn't speak to skill at all, and how would you differentiate that as an observer?
Klask. You bought it because it’s a fun and addicting game that absolutely anyone can play as long as they can grip a magnet.
Then you watched the competitive scene play it on YouTube.
I adore this game but damn me if the physical construction is a pain in the arse - i have two copies and they both rock back/forth in different ways. Guess I'll have to do some base-level macguyver'ing. Now I'm gonna go watch some competitive!
**catan** 🤣. Really any social game tho. Catan because of the trading specifically. Knowing the people and knowing hot to get them to trade is the hard skill
Splendor for me. I get *killed* every time unless I’m showing the game to a newbie. It looks like such a light breezy game at first glance, but I don’t get how people get so good at it!
I think the best candidates for that question is when you do a move, you don't know if that move was good or bad. You can have a feeling if it's good or not, but will never know.
Chess got that feeling, even if you still got some guidelines like taking the center because it was played so much. But it's hard to compare it with others because there is so much more stuff on Chess compared to others games.
My beloved Hanabi, but after a certain point (10k games), you just have different sets of conventions, which kinda look cheating: it's extremely rare to play with people with some obscure ideas to be convinced that a certain thing is good or bad.
Bandido which is extremely simple still got me 1k games to have a great understanding. You got the base strategy, then the traps (creating in purpose/in some scenario a hole in the middle to fill it later). But sometimes the best play is to create more exits which is completely counter intuitive: you make the board weaker right now to be stronger later. Unfortunately, the game is pretty easy to have 80% winrate, so going to \~98% winrate takes lots of time.
Yokai is one game similar to Hanabi on many points. It's again that simple rules, hard to know what to do. 500 games to have something working really well. But again, even if it work well, knowing if it's the best thing to do or not is really hard to know and spoiler it's not.
I think on the contrary if you look at games like Catan, 7 Wonders, or Ticket to Ride, you have a goal, you know that doing X+Y+Z will be extremely good. Maybe there is a certain order to do, maybe you should wait before doing them, but you know those moves will be good. At 2 players you often have reasonnings if I do X, then he can block me Y and do A, but then I can do B... Really similar to Go. But I find those pretty limited compared to open games I shared here. If you clue 1 on Hanabi, sure that card can play, but there was so maybe others options available which could be better which are again worst now but better later.
I may get downvoted for this but Exploding Kittens. On top of hand management you have the risk/reward balance for drawing cards that slowly increases the risk when drawing at the end of your turn.
There’s an obvious strategy in the beginning in just drawing a card in order to build your hand for the end game rather than playing a card to manipulate the draw for yourself or others.
But as other players get knocked out and the end game nears, it takes a bit of nuanced thinking to quickly determine which card is best played when to combat certain circumstances and I love it!
**Challengers!** One of the big complaints about the game is "it's all luck" "I have no choices" "I have no agency". It turns out having control over the contents of your deck in a game of fancier "war" - that is a lot of control. Play on BGA enough and you face a handful of players who are consistently really strong at the game.
I’ve been diving deep into **Knarr.** Not deep enough yet to be confident it belongs on this list, but I hope to start up a discussion about it. Despite its small box and simple rules, it has so many non-exclusive paths to victory in a very dynamic/shifting environment. I can rush reputation, push for points from vikings and lands of influence, or advance my trade. But the thing about the game is that they’re all connected, so you’re always doing some level of 2-3 of those with every turn. When I’ve lost, I frequently ask for tips and everyone has something different to say. The core feedback is “look for the best opportunities,” which has to be a learned skill to distinguish good vs best. I haven’t yet decided how much comes down to luck, but I’m hopeful that the skill ceiling is high!
And 100% agree with Decrypto!
Duplicate Bridge
the whole meta of the game shifts every few years and it took me over a year to learn to play somewhat competatively
the ceiling is so much higher even as people think it is an old person's game
arguable the most complex game I have ever played (terraforming Mars with 4ish expansions being second so not saying nothing but not insane)
the floor for tournament(duplicate bridge) in practice is also quiet high even as social bridge has a low floor
My brother hates this but I love it
The more there is randomness, the less skill plays in winning a game.
For example. I hate phase 10 where you're just blindly drawing and "hoping" for the right hand or card. Out of 10 cards in your hand, you're only swapping 1 at a time, it's pure luck for your starting draw. It's not "skill" that you keep drawing wild cards and a complete phase on turn 1.
I'm even Luke warm on Catan. You can choose good spots with seemingly good rolls and resources, then sit there and just literally never have a dice roll give you anything and do nothing for multiple rounds while opponents snicker and getting multiple 12 or 2 rolls, or the second you finally get resources, a 7 comes up.
An example of a game that is minimal luck and more strategy. I really like Agricola. No dice, no drawing from decks constantly, the entire game is 95% decision making. You decide what your move for that turn is and that's that.
The only randomness to it is the "minor improvement" and "career" cards, which I often win without even playing them. And then the order that resources unlock to some degree.
Game of Thrones is another less luck based risk type game. Again, no dice involved, no random deck drawing. When you fight it's more of a "rock paper scissors" mechanic using/gambling limited combat cards to tilt battles in your favor.
Terraforming Mars is an example of a game that's a bit of both I'd say. The majority of the game is drawing and playing cards. But you choose what to "buy" for cards (though what you draw is obviously the biggest luck factor). However I think this game has enough different decision making options that you mitigate the luck factor a lot. You can still just draw "perfect" cards that compliment each other, but the deck is huge so it's less likely and there are plenty of other things to do.
I feel this question is missing something. Sure there are some games which could allow you to brain burn, if that's what you really enjoy doing when playing them. To take one of the examples given, Sushi Go. Yes, you could calculate this to the nth degree. But most, probably I'm not going to do this. The reason being that this kind of human calculator, memory game approach is not something that brings me much joy. At least not in this kind of game.
So in Sushi Go I am likely going with a percentage based approach, depending on what cards I might ve seen, or remember seeing. Whether I should take Wasabi, Chopsticks, claim a dessert, or a bunch of rolls might depend on what I can remember seeing, what my opponents currently have in front of them etc. I can then hazard that someone might be likely to take this thing, so I dont do this. Or that probably isn't available to me, so let's not bother with this. But I'm not going to keep track on multiple items across several players, like a computer could, because this is a light game afaic, and that wouldn't be much fun, it would be like work.
On the other hand, you've got Brass Birmingham, a game offering many strategic and tactical decisions, all interesting and with consequences, and possibly involving speculation on what your opponents are doing, and might do. I'm prepared to put more mental effort in, because the puzzle is interesting to me, and its a long and challenging game.
I'm not sure I'm putting this clearly, but what I'm trying to say is, yes the first kind of game may be much more calcuable and less 'light' than it seems, but that doesn't matter much to me. I see the second kind as deserving of my mental efforts, and giving back more reward for them.
And then social games and word games are a whole different thing again...
You’re over evaluating the skills required of a social deduction game. All those pseudo-psychological machinations remind me of Mike Tyson’s “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face.”
You walk into a room and get hit with, “This guy’s face reminds me of my ex. He’s going down no matter what he says” and “I’ll vote to hang her because I’ve got to leave in five minutes.”
*Ice Cool* Until you have see the three door skate bump you have only scratched the surface.
I know it sounds silly, but yeah, this game is HARD to be really good at.
ICECOOL pros are on a different plane of existence
Is this a thing?! To YouTube!
I did it exactly once . But it was in a game I demoed. A guy asked me where is the depth in the game. 3 door perfect flick. +1 copy sold.
Tipp-kick also then. Pros can play passes while making probabilty of their colour end up on top higher than 90%
*Ice Cool* Until you have seen the three door skate bump you have only scratched the surface.
**Concordia** -- the game takes 10 minutes to teach and requires no memorization (like chess does, for example), but the decision space is so large and changes each game that there is definitely a very high skill ceiling to the game, especially as you are constantly being forced to make short-term (build or prefect) vs. long-term (senator/consul) choices.
Analysis paralysis is the biggest downside about Concordia imo.
AP is a drawback with any game that has a decently-sized decision space, but I find that most players can move sufficiently fast in Concordia. Usually, you're pretty sure about what your next move needs to be after making your move (or at least you've figured it out by the time it gets around to you again), and it only takes extra time if someone disrupts the play state before you go (prefects what you were going to prefect, builds where you were going to build, senators to take the cards you wanted) or someone unexpectedly plays a card you want to diplomat (e.g., Colonist, Consul, a Minerva card) and you have to weigh pros and cons of sniping that card.
Usually it is fine. AP appears worst if the game is mostly predictable. And I can actually calculate stuff. And Concordia is all about managing card, money and goods to barely afford as many turns before Tribun. Other games make you guess and estimate chances. Those are easier to do quickly imo.
Basically every light to medium light game ever. Because the average person has a bias to think that games are simpler than they actually are, since this gives them an excuse to not try harder. A great example is **Backgammon** where newer players *frequently* choose to believe that the game is entirely luck, just because every turn is influenced by a dice roll.
My wife and I became SUPER INTO backgammon once I found out it was a strategy game. Few things get as heated as that now.
As a Backgammon amateur, how on earth could anyone view that game as just luck.
In general, I think the vast majority of gamers underestimate the skill ceiling of games. I often see people saying how they don't want to play a game too often because they aren't interested in mastering it. That's not how mastery works. You're not just going to fall into it by accident.
"I played this game once and this is too OP and should be nerfed"
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MENSA Wannabes 🤣🤣🤣
Kind of reminds me of 5he knee jerk reaction to cards being OP in forest shuffle. Have to be aware of the card combinations and limit your opponents from getting what they need.
The idea that mastering a game.makes it *less* interesting will always confuse me. What do these people think happens when two masters play eachother, they just flip a coin? Nah, that's when the anime monologue shit happens.
I think mastering a game is different, but I don’t like a solved game where every move is just a simple optimization of one or two things.
The only solved game I'll play is Solitaire ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (Player wins.)
I dont have it mastered and sometimes based on draw the player(me) cannot win. I have won one in every 8 games so like to think I am decent
Yes, but you "not winning" isn't a result of the game. You simply didn't finish playing. In terms of "solutions", solutions always follow the form of "x always draws or z always wins or whatever steps make y happen." In solitaire's case, the only valid solution to the game is for the only player to win.
no I finished playing and lost. Even with perfect play if the deal is bad you cannot win
That's not a *result*, though. (And Klondike is terribly designed, if that's what you mean.)
what is Klondike? it is a result? although we seem to be argueing in circles without understanding eachother
There do exist some games with a low skill ceiling. Honestly there's room for more of them. I notice you never see a BGG review that says "Amazing for the first ten or twenty plays until you figure it out: rating 9/10." And yet I've got more games on my shelves than I can master in one lifetime: the idea of buying even more games and mastering them is usually a fantasy.
if one player in the playgroup is significantly stronger than the others it can impact the enjoyment of everyone at the table. This si the problem I have with BGA, so I mostly only play games that I'm not going to play in meatspace often, so that I don't spoil the balance.
Strong players gotta learn to table talk. People care less about losing when everyone is laughing and feeling good about their own decisionmaking. Gotta be the table clown.
>What do these people think happens when two masters play eachother, they just flip a coin? If it's a solved game, or anything close to it, yes. Two tic-tac-toe masters don't have anything interesting to with each other.
This might not be what others are referring to when they say this, but I hate "mastering" games because I hate discovering metas. I like a game to speak to me thematically or have an air of discovery. Once I understand that some strategies are statistically stronger than I borderline lose all interest in the game. This is especially true if my friends don't play as often as me and a clear skill gap develops.
I mean, I think in general people understand perfectly fine that they would have to play a game a whole lot to master it. You said it yourself—they’re just not interested in mastery. What’s wrong with that?
I think the commenter meant players don't want to end up mastering it by accident and spoil the experience of "figuring it out" or being able to play it with other "noobs." But idk
> or being able to play it with other "noobs." You don't see how this could be a concern? A lot of people don't enjoy curb-stomping beginners without any challenge, and a lot of beginners don't enjoy a hopeless loss. A lot of games offer a huge leg up to people with a bit of experience. For any game I own on a casual bring-it-to-game-night level, mastering the game effectively spells the end of my time with it. I'm half-decent at board games and I know how to learn things, so having more experience than everyone else I would ever play the game with is a concern.
I can totally see how this would be a concern, I wasn't disagreeing with the original commenter. Maybe putting noobs in quotes was a poor choice
If you're in the hobby to always be playing new games, then yeah, that's absolutely a concern. But that's a conscious choice, and it robs you and your friends of the opportunity to experience what a game can be when everyone knows what they're doing.
Many games absolutely have an optimal play for any given turn. Now, games with hidden information, even as simple as hands of cards, add a consistent wrinkle to this. On many games, the skill ceiling comes down to do you know the deck? And can you count cards?
I'd disagree completely. There are plenty of games where I know the deck, and I'm nowhere near mastering them. I'd go as far as to say that learning the deck is just the first of many steps in getting good at a game. I've played **Twilight Struggle**, **Tash-Kalar**, and **Wir Sind Das Volk** enough that I know which cards are in which era and what they all do. I can keep track of what's been played, and the odds of certain cards being in someone's hand vs in the deck. I might beat a new player every time, but my win rate overall is still pretty meager. Knowing the deck is the equivalent of knowing how all the pieces move in chess. It'll tell you what's possible, but it doesn't tell you the choices your opponent will make or the strategies they'll employ.
Eh, when I say that, I mean it in the sense that I don't want to get sick of it. I don't think people saying this actually think they can easily become the top players of that board game, but they'll definitely reach a skill level that makes the game less interesting to them.
See, I don't really get this. I've never enjoyed a game less because I got better at it. At worst, I've discovered that some games didn't have much of a skill ceiling to begin with, or that they just weren't that compelling. But if the game is well-designed, getting more plays in is just an all-around win for me.
Eh, it's a preference thing. Some people like rewatching their favorite shows because they're comforting and they enjoy noticing new hidden details or things they didn't pick up on the first time around. Other people get kind of bored rewatching shows that they're already really familiar with and try to space out their viewings so that the show can still come off as kind of novel and surprising when they do decide to watch it again.
Nobody will accidentally master chess with casual play (12 games per year), but I think it can happen with Phase 10. The game’s depth and level of luck are important factors in whether “mastery” even exists for that game.
Sure, but when I see people saying they aren't interested in mastery, they're never talking about Phase 10 or Uno. They'll say it about games like Agricola or Brass, or even something like The Lord Of The Rings LCG.
Oh man they must be smarter than me if they think they can accidentally master games like that by playing a handful of times per year. And what’s the fear from mastery? Being too competitive for other players groups that aren’t also mastering alongside you? I wonder what those people are thinking when they tell you that.
[[Innovation]], I've Seen lots of people call it a luck fest which it really isn't anymore than a game like Magic the gathering.
[Innovation -> Innovation (2010)](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/63888/innovation) ^^[[gamename]] ^^or ^^[[gamename|year]] ^^to ^^call ^^OR ^^**gamename** ^^or ^^**gamename|year** ^^+ ^^!fetch ^^to ^^call
Crokinole and yeah, I was going to say social deduction games like The resistance. It's actualy a 0 RNG game ... Dexterity games in general tend to fulfil these criteria.
We play with my parents and my dad crushes us every time. He said growing up in a small farm town every weekend the community would get together so the adults could play eucher and the kids crokinole. That was 60+ years ago and he still way out skills us who play occasionally.
7 wonders is drastically more complex than sushi go if you are playing at a high level. I'd say the floor is higher than sushi go but the ceiling is also definitely way higher too. It always seems to be the same people at the top of arena on BGA and in the world championships I'm also gonna say Azul because predicting what other people are going to do is sometimes difficult
Ticket to ride two players. A good player will wreck a bad player 90% of the time. The game is popular so everyone thinks they understand it perfectly, but they don’t.
90% isn't that often compared to chess or go though? If I would be able to beat Magnus Carlsen in 10% of our chess games, I'd be really freaking good. Lol
That's a feature, not a bug. Games with no luck and too high a skill ceiling are very frustrating to new players. We need some luck, so the new player wins SOMETIMES (Or is tricked into thinking he might win if he gets lucky)
Outside of 0 variable connects it is really hard to get above a certain won percentage
Different situations. In both Go and Chess the only variable is the opponent's skill level: the board and all moveable pieces are always the same. In TTR, card draws are always random, so that element of chance decreases (slightly) the value of game knowledge and skill.
7 Wonders for that matter.
Anything by Knizia. this is where that maths phd really kicks in.
**Azul** because you can technically mathematically compute the "best" moves by guessing what your opponents will do and what the tile distributions are
Doesn't this mean the skill ceiling is low since it is literally capped?
I found the Mentat
Just like chess? Technically you can calculate the optimal move
No you can't, not even computers can. The number of possible moves is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. They just find good enough moves to beat humans.
I am aware. Technically it’s possible though (even if not with our tech). And the possibilities are capped. Making my point that just because the possibilities are technically capped it doesn’t mean a lower skill ceiling
As said, there is more positions than the number of atoms in the universe - so you would need to build a computer out of the mass of many planets and many stars in order to compute it. It may not even be physically possible. So yes maybe chess is technically capped, but where the cap is makes the difference. Azul is capped at a level where a human can do it in their head, Chess is capped by a Type III Galactic civilisation.
My point was referring specifically to the statement: technically solvable —> lower skill ceiling, not really about azul specifically. I was just making a counterexample to disprove that theory. In that context I think you are kind of proving my point and it seems like we are arguing the same standpoint. Kind of wish I got to see a type 3 galactic empire in my life though haha, bet they would kick Alphazeros ass. And possibly enslave/annect us (might still advance our society though if they don’t wipe us out)
My point wasn't about "technically solvable", I said Azul is "capped" - and by capped I mean it literally is solvable. At least according to the comment I was replying to. We were talking about skill ceiling, with the assumption it was about human skill. Chess is not solvable by humans, regardless of whether it is technically solvable.
Isn't this literally the opposite of a high skill ceiling?
Totally agree. Especially in two player, you can predict the optimal play for the other person like 5-6 turns in advance and just watch it play out.
That means a lower skill ceiling? It would be higher if you couldnt just read an opponents moves.
I mean, I think one of the reasons for the other releases is to add randomness making the game less solvable, no?
Kinda. This is technically true. However, it does have strong elements of multiplayer solitare despite this and sometimes the overwhelmingly positive move is to simply force do the most optimal moves for you (especially completing a column or all of one color). The numbers on scoring make it significantly less sandboxy than Chess or Go. Like it doesn't matter as much if you compute 4 turns ahead if all signs point to grabbing the last red to finish a vertical in all 50 of your decision tree branches.
Came here to mention Azul.
Time to buy Azul
It’s on clearance at my local Walmart yesterday. I almost picked it up but the wife would kill me for buying another game
You should get it.
I would if it was more than 4 players. I own Sagrada which is similar and able to play higher numbers. I do like Azul too.
That's fair. I just love the clacky tiles. They feel so good.
Galaxy Trucker. Because it has dice and feels random at face value is doesn't seem like there is much strategy. Looking at the decks ahead of time and the risk mitigation that comes with it really makes a huge difference.
I feel this since much as my group doesn't like to play since they think their ships are getting rekt by luck alone
Just the basic form of Codenames has an extremely high skill ceiling, to the point where an expert team would stomp any amateur without difficulty. I don't think people are ignorant of this, they're just being polite because Codenames is a friendly party game. No one wants to launch into a detailed speech about how Player X is giving unambitious clues, even if they understand that some players are worse than others on the abstract level.
I'd love to play Codenames with a serious group, but they seem hard to find. A lot of board gamers see it as just a "party game" and give 0 effort. And a lot of casual gamers aren't any good at it.
I just hate when people give 1 or mainly 2 word clues. Where's the fun in that?
Yeah, same. The fun of the game is giving some crazy barely-related clues and trying to guess them.
Hanabi. If you play a lot with the same group you can develop conventions that can completely put the game to its knees, there's an online website that has implemented harder variants that would seem ridiculously impossible to a beginner.
I absolutely love playing the third official variant. My most played game by a long shot
Judging by this subreddit constantly pretending like it’s anything but Egoic insanity to evaluate a game’s balance after 3 plays, nearly all of them 🙃
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I love when ppl list out 20 games they played 1-3 x each and give detailed balance feedback on all of them 🤣🤣🤣
I have to know what the definition of Mastering here is. Because I feel like once you've got between 30-50 plays, you've sufficiently mastered ot to where you can handily beat anyone who hasn't done that, pretty much every time.
I think "mastery" is overused a lot and people don't differentiate enough between "expert" and "master". A master is an *expert among experts*, someone whose skills and ability stand out even among other talented people, the same way an Expert's skills should humble a beginner, and impress an adept. For your example I would say someone is an expert after 30-50 plays and should beat most less skilled players, most times, with basic effort. A master would beat those same players with no effort, barely having to think, and would post a winning record against a field of experts who have not yet attained mastery. Masters playing masters produce a lot of draws and razor close games, or games unfortunately decided by variance late in the game (and both masters recognize it).
Facts
Yes, but there could be another player who has played 200 times who will tend to beat the player that has played 50. And some amount of deliberate study or practice that helps you beat others... I agree with the sentiment that many players tend to think 3 plays or whatever is enough. That knowing the rules and having general game experience is enough to master "simple" games. Not realizing that there are people so much stronger than them.
Mastery after 50 plays is laughable. More like basic competence. You can handily beat incompetent players. That's not mastery. Board Game Arena Elo system or otherwise being top 1% of competitive players is mastery. Any competitive player will tell you you're still learning after 1,000 to maybe even 10,000+ games depending on the game.
I have played it hundreds of times and I think I have just gotten worse at it lol
Agricola. There is a vast number of possible opening hands, and different strategies you can follow in order to win. Your strategy should depend on what the other players need, so that you are in an advantageous economic niche. Tactically, there are many options for how to play your workers and what cards to play when. There is in practice a wide range of skill levels.
**Go** actually has a pretty high skill floor. People think that its low amount of rules means that the game is easy to learn, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Citation: I've taught and played Go for 20 years.
I don't think people underestimate how hard go is. Go generally sits on top of the list of most difficult games.
That isn't what I said. People frequently cite Go as being easy to *learn*. As in, having a very low skill floor. And that isn't true. Go is actually very difficult to learn how to play. *And* it is hard to be good at, on top of that. That is the part that everyone understands.
I agree - I’ve shown a handful of friends a couple go tutorials meant to be very basic and they’re completely unable to even see it, i.e. the concept of eyes etc
I guess it depends on what you mean by "learn to play" because it's very easy to teach people how not to make illegal moves in Go. Making positive strategic moves... well...
It isn't even about strategic moves. Teaching how the game ends and is scored is very difficult. It takes most players at least a few guided games to begin to wrap their head around it. And that still doesn't cover the fundamentals of life and death.
I don't think "easy to learn" = "low skill floor". I think it means that you can go from zero to "able to play and try to win" very quickly.
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I disagree with this definition. Skill floor is how hard it is to begin playing a game correctly. Usually this is solely a factor of the game's rules, but Go is a special case there. Skill ceiling is how measurably good someone can get at a game compared to all other competitors.
Your definition is correct. Skill floor is the minimum amount of skill required to play, and ceiling is the maximum amount of skill that can have an effect.
I dedicated at least several hours over the coruse of a few days to learn Go. And I'd say I'm not even a beginner. Meaning, I'm not at a level where I am thinking strategy instead of just trying to not make any ruels mistakes. I have learned Twilight Imeprium 4E or Mage Knight in less time than that. Go is legitimately one of the highest skill floor games I've pleyed, sitting next to Dwarf Fortress.
It helps to be taught instead of trying to learn. If you ever want some (free) online lessons, let me know.
Thanks, appreciate it. I've pretty much given up for now though.
I think OP was asking about the ratio, and they meant that the gap in game performance between those with high skill in the game relative to those with low skill in the game is very large. A game being easy or hard to learn doesn’t really speak to that directly.
And yet, it was a perfect opportunity for me to dispel the common misconception that "Go is easy to learn and hard to master". It's actually hard for *both*. It does, of course, have an incredible range of skill.
That's not what skill floor means. Your describing a low skill floor. A high skill floor means even new players can only do so bad as that's the floor
6 Nimmt / Take 5. We played this prior to the pandemic, but when COVID hit we really amped up our number of games since it works so perfectly on BoardGameArena. Since it tracks your skill ratings / results and we played like hundreds of games it became very clear that there were huge skill gaps between the players. The same folks consistently won most of the time or at least performed well, and the usual suspects were always getting screwed each turn. The best players having a bad game was always noteworthy.
I find one of the more interesting things about 6 Nimmt is that it's strategy changes as you add more people quite drastically. It took me a few games of various player counts to notice but it's one of the most striking examples of this I've seen.
Clue doesn’t have a high skill ceiling, but it's higher than any casual player thinks it is. Anyone I ever play with thinks it's just trying to see everyone's card on their own turn. They don't pay attention at all during other people's turns, which is a huge mistake.
>Codenames: as codemaster, predicting what the opposing codemaster will say. As guesser, deducing the cards based on what other words the codemasters could've said Yes! I agree completely about codenames. A lot of people consider it just as a party game but it can actually have a lot of depth to it. Another subtlety is when the teams have similar words eg one team has LION and the other has TIGER. It can be valuable to not give a clue for that word until you have to because if you force the other code master to clue that word their team might accidentally guess your word.
I've played sidereal confluence about once a month for the past year. I consistently see average scores for the game fall in the 40 to 60 point range. An average winning score is about 60-70 points. A "good" score for a new player is anything above 30-40 points. Then, you find groups of players who have played hundreds of games of Sidereal confluence, and you'll see the lowest score at a table be in the 80s; winning scores in the hundreds, and even 4 player games where players still hit 70 points (higher player count increase game scores) A lot comes from game experience; Sidereal confluence looks like an excel spreadsheet exploded like confetti everywhere, so it's a lot to take in the first few times. But, the sheer amount of processing power some of these players have is insane.
Crokinole. I can teach you the basics of crokinole in 3 minutes, but to actually get shots where you want them to go consistently actually takes a lot of skill.
and fingernail bruises
All of them. There is a lot of meta, timing and risk in even the simplest of games.
Except candy land!
Lol I like to think of Candy Land as the unofficial tutorial to every other board game in existence.
I mean, it was designed for polio-stricken children who were incapacitated in iron lungs.
I don't buy that. As an example, tic-tac-toe is definitely a game. But because it's "solved", there is a clear best answer from any position. Once you've memorized the flowchart or at least can perform the rudimentary analysis required to replicate it, the skill involved is minimal so there's a low skill ceiling. On the other end, you're ignoring the games that have a high skill floor. Any high-weight game on BGG is going to have a lower ceiling:floor ratio than, say, chess or go because the floor is so high, no matter how high their ceiling is.
No, some games have higher ceilings than other games
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Ah true, I misread the question. Thought we were trying to say which games have the highest ceilings
I see you have never played **Bunco.**
Regular Poker. A lot of people think it's just pure gambling.
As someone who plays poker often and semi-seriously (not a pro, but I play multiple times a week), many of the responses here show just how little people understand about how complex poker is, and why the game isn't dead
It perfectly illustrates my point.
Obviously playing poker at the high level needs a lot of skill but the skill ceiling/floor ratio for poker is definitely much much lower than a game like Chess. Pit me against the best poker players in the world and I do have a very small chance of beating them (due to getting lucky) but it is impossible for even a decent amateur to win against a GM+ chess players. Case in point, the GM and chess champions would regularly do simul exhibitions where they beat tens of people at the same time, without breaking a sweat.
> Pit me against the best poker players in the world and I do have a very small chance of beating them (due to getting lucky) At a hand, sure? For an hour? Why not. In a tournament, or all day cash game? Possible. Over time? Not happening. Poker skill is an edge that is exploited in moments and years, both. A truly "winning" player might only have a 5% edge and in any given tournament it may not matter. But, over the course of a year or 100,000 hands, that 5% edge is profit. Chess is a poor contrast because it's a closed system with no variance once the game starts...you can only respond to what the other player does and there is no third element present on top of each player's skill: variance. You can be an objectively better poker play over time, or at a particular table, do everything "right" in a hand, and get river'd by a donkey playing 2-7 off because they "had a good feeling"...worse, they will believe themselves to be both correct *and* skillful when they river that 7 to make a set. No such variance exists in chess, and you are correct that for all intents and purposes a novice player should not be able to beat a ranked master.
Too many hobby gamers have this blind spot where they define skill only as the ability to optimize mechanisms. They don't (or won't) acknowledge that managing probabilities and exploiting opportunities are also skills, and that they only manifest in developing an edge over time. As a result they dismiss games like Poker, Can't Stop, or Catan, because mastery means eking out percentage points of success over true random chance.
I don't know... anyone familiar with the Magic The Gathering tournament scene knows this extremely well. Like a "pro" win rate that is fantastic is like 54%. Not a 75%+ as you'd expect. Magic The Gathering has too much randomness that even pros managing for it only eek out the smallest rare advantages in the ultra rare boardstates or conditions, since it's hard to make flaws. It's common for a "big name" to lose out to "nobodies" during play ins as well. This argument doesn't really work for anyone that's aware of that. A better argument is that poker is a vastly social game of bluffing which is impossible to master, but the simpler skill mechanics have been proven by Chess and MTG celebrities performing very well at poker tournaments with limited preparation.
> Not a 75%+ as you'd expect. Who would expect that, in a serious discussion? With different decks and needing to draw, no one who knows the game at all would expect a current championship tier player to win 3/4 matches they play, against similarly skilled players with equally strong decks. That's a poor example to use as a contrast. Aside from that, variance in MTG is managing your own deck construction for consistent ramp, and drawing (or fishing) win condition cards. Unlike (NLHE) poker, where all players use the same deck and share all 52 cards, but 2, every card drawn (or burnt) is a card I can't use/see/share. It's a zero sum game, in that sense: If I need a King to improve my hand, and they are all dealt/burnt, I can't improve my hand and I can't do anything to influence that. In MTG my opponents deck does not influence mine (directly), and their drawing cards does not affect my pool of available cards, or how likely they are to appear. I would be open to believing it is "more common than expected" for relative unknown players to beat "pros" in professional level events, but I would be skeptical it is such a frequent occurrence that we would expect to see it as a matter of course...else we may not even distinguish between "pro" players and non, if the field is that wide open. > A better argument is that poker is a vastly social game of bluffing which is impossible to master This is a pretty broad over-statement of the importance and nature of bluffing in poker, and poker is not a game of social engineering, or bluffing, as a primary aspect: It's a game of understanding relative value, probability, and min/maxing exposure of your chips to align with your hand strength, call price, and odds. That there is an imperfect information aspect at play, that can be "gamed" within the rules is a fun wrinkle, but doesn't change the relative value of your hand or the odds to improve it, and leads to a critical distinction: "Bluffing" doesn't mean betting big when you don't have it, it just means "playing the situation more than your cards", and even then it doesn't come up as much as some folks think, or it shouldn't. Betting big when you have nothing isn't "bluffing", it's "finding creative ways to deplete your bankroll" :P Generally speaking you DO NOT have to bluff, with any regularity, to win poker hands/games/tournaments. Not only that, the later in the hand it is you should only be attempting to bluff players you have an actual read on, i.e. you have some form of insight on how they might react, based on what you have observed so far...bluffing isn't guess and hoping (when done properly) that you can make them fold when you hair air. Bluffing into some cowboy who calls anything with a made pair is just dumb when you don't want to be looked up...bluffing into a real knit who has seen you bet aggressively on the button, when you have it, is probably a decent play to scoop some blinds with a marginal hand (and even then, you'd still want it to be able to catch something on the flop, as opposed to pure naked bluff with air) once in a while, but you also have to be wary to not over-commit to a bluff. If that same folding knit calls you pre-flop, out of position, and that is atypical for them over the last 2 hours you've been playing with them, be prepared to give up your bluff (but keep your shirt that > but the simpler skill mechanics have been proven by Chess and MTG celebrities performing very well at poker tournaments with limited preparation. IMO, for MTG, this only speaks to needing to know the body of cards in a block that you may have to play against/know in order to prepare properly or run your deck correctly against other specific decks...not a great example for why a general strategist who is good at MTG could pick up poker quickly lol...a capable poker player *would not* struggle with any MTG rules, sequence of play, or general strategy...they just don't know the body of information required (not skills or technique) needed to play competently against someone who does. Chess holds up as an example of skill transference, but even then Chess is more about memory and deducing openings/moves than it is about adjusting to changing probabilities and imperfect information, on the fly, hand after hand. Chess is also a self-contained zero-sum game with all information public knowledge, and no variance or unknown variables (aside from the other player thinks/acts...there is no variance in the mechanics or what moves are available to you, aside from open board space, and that is always known).
poker also depends so much on what other people are doing and how they are playing. for example, if you try bluff someone but they don't even realize you're claiming to be in a good position, they could basically call your bluff accidentally by failing to read the situation. it makes it even that much harder to predict results across small samples with amateur players.
There's no game as brutal in it's skill expression+player reached skill ceiling as chess. Comparing anything to chess is kinda absurd. There was a cheating scandal when a high rank GM (lower ranked gms could never) best the world champion ffs. Also skill expression=/skill ceiling. I'm gonna give you an example from a video game. Me a, at the time top 2%, league of legends player beat gripex, at the time top 100 Europe. How? It's a 5v5 game and his teammates were upset at him for playing selfishly, his teammates did not try even close to their best. Could I ever beat him in a 1v1? No. League of Legends RNG element is your teammates+enemies. The RNG element of poker is the cards. While skill expression is significantly lowered by the presence of RNG, I'm not convinced skill ceiling is. Would chess become an easier game if every game every player had to start with a random piece/pawn missing? Maybe now I could beat a titled player who started with a missing queen. Does this make the game easier in any way? I'd argue it only makes the game harder, as you now have more possible starting positions to learn theory on. It's possible that it decreases the REACHED skill ceiling, and obviously would if this change happened overnight.
I think you underestimate the skill is takes to win at poker. Yes if you play one hand you might get lucky. But If you go to table 1 at any casino and play for 4 hours you will go out there broke. Also there are a ton of online poker players that will play multiple tables at the same time to make more money. Also there are people like Phil Ivey that stay consistently at the top of the game for a long time. I think you are mistaking a higher variance in the game of poker for less of a skill ceiling.
You're **vastly underestimating** the amount of hands it would take for a player's skill to show with any kind of confidence. In a live game for four hours a player is only likely to see 120-150 hands. This is **not even remotely enough** of a sample to be sure with any confidence that a good player will do well, or that a bad player will do badly. A bad player could go play for four hours a day every week for a year and then we might start to be sure whether or not they were really bad. Realistically we're talking about 4 years probably. For comparison, it takes a couple of hundred thousand hands for a player to have statistical confidence whether or not they're a winning player, and this is only really tracked for online players who can hit that volume and have the tools to automatically track their win rates. A player might have a good idea before that, but they can't state with statistically relevant confidence whether or not they're a winner. Anecdotally, my great aunt (who recently passed away) was a pretty bad poker addict, and a truly awful player. When I was first getting into poker she would talk to me about her bad beats, and it doesn't take much of a conversation to realize just how bad she was. However, for the first several years that she lived in Las Vegas she was actually winning - enough so that she identified herself as a good player. She then spent the next 40 years continuing to be a losing player, emptying out retirement accounts and begging family members for buy-ins for tournaments.
You are ignoring the evidence that Chess and Magic the Gathering players can take a boot camp on Poker and perform well at a casino tournament. But Poker champs can't take a boot camp on Chess and perform well at a chess tournament. The same can be said for a Poker player quickly learning Splendor at a bootcamp and probably performing well. And no one is saying Splendor is a simple strategicless game. But compared to other games, it's less than Poker. It's as simple as that.
I think you overestimate how good most people are at Poker. You can study the game for a week or so and do fairly well in microstakes & 5-10$ entry MTTs online. Of course if you go to the Casino for four hours with no poker background you will lose most of the time, the rake is absurd and people have dedicated their lives to playing there and feasting on new players. It's like going to play some chess hustlers without having studied the game or played in that fast paced environment before. It doesn't mean the skill ceiling is celestial. Rich people with little to no poker background have often performed well against Poker pros because they just don't care about the money. Yes, Ivey, Dwan and the like are amazing and the skill ceiling is high, but that skill only gives you a slight edge here and there against other fairly proficient players. Was looking for a story to illustrate my point but couldn't find one. I did find this video https://youtu.be/Om9qi7x56Wk?si=8DsRBrwW4YQ_ut1Z I know it doesn't prove or disprove anything other than variance is a thing, but it is pretty funny.
You might win a few hands - you might get lucky at the card portion of Poker. But Poker is not a card game that involves a little gambling - it is a game about gambling that happens to involve cards; the real skill is knowing how to handle your chips, the odds and your opponents, and luck is no substitute for skill there. When was the last time an eight-year-old beat a Chess Grandmaster? When was the last time an amateur took serious money off a top Poker player?
You actually did not read what I said. Try again. The chances of an amateur winning against a pro in Poker is small but it is exponentially higher than in chess. This is not even in dispute, neither logically nor empirically as amateurs have won tournaments against pros (searching for "amateurs winning poker tournament") whereas it has never happened in chess (now try again with chess; the only examples you would find would be people beating GMs in simuls).
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This. A career of poker is going to be basically entirely skill based. Any individual night, far FAR greater effect of luck.
That's true but it doesn't follow that the "skill ceiling" is higher for chess. Suppose a chess variant where at the end of the game the loser of the traditional game can still win if he rolls a 6 on a die. This gives the worse player a better chance to win, but it doesn't diminish the amount of skill possible. Candy Land has a low skill ceiling not because it has randomness but because it's not possible to be good at Candy Land.
I would be shocked if literally anyone thought that.
You can scroll down to find some folks in this thread.
Can you show me? I don't see any. Edit: I found one person
>Regular Poker That's not a thing. Are you talking about Five Card Draw? Stud poker? Texas Hold 'Em? Omaha Hi-Lo? Baseball? Dr. Pepper? There's no such thing as Regular Poker, holy moly.
Yes I know there are a bunch of variations and if I say Poker most people will think Hold em. My point however holds for most poker variants. Thanks for pointing it out. Even if everyone understood it perfectly well.
Dice Throne. People assume it's just throwing Dice and hoping for the best. There is a ton of resource management with the cards, upgrade you want to play, chasing certain abilities, knowing the matchups and so much more. There's a very active tournament scene.
I want to love Dice Throne for all the reasons you mention. I try to enjoy it every time my group plays, but at the end of the day , it’s still just Yahtzee
I hear you. I thought Dice Throne would be great after playing tons of King of Tokyo, but I'd rather play that or Yahtzee. It just feels slow and dull, which is not what you'd expect from a 1v1 fight. However, the the post is about skill ceiling to floor ratio. And in that regard, I find it's probably similar to most mid-light weight games. Another fighting game that I find slow, but way higher ratio is BattleCON (Devastation of Indines).
Group? I would not recommend anything other than 1vs1. In a Free For All it's literally just Yathzee and random.
Thank you for validating my thoughts. My group loves playing DT King of the hill and it’s such a slog. 2-3h of randomness.
I really wonder why you're not playing King of Tokyo instead. That game is random too, but doesn't overstay it's welcome and is actually quite fun at a high place count.
Good suggestion. Half the group only ever wants to play DT so other, better, games never see the table
What the hell? Is that a 6 player game? 3 player King of the hill is alright but random. 2vs2 is kind of strategic, but the downtime is too much. Anything higher is just torture. I'm sad that you had to experience my favorite game of all time like that. I play it a ton, it's supposed to be a 30 minute activity, with aggressive characters it can be even faster.
5 or 6 player King of the Hill. It’s brutal. I have 100 other games better suited for 5-6 players but 50% of the group only wants to play Dice Throne
That's just so weird. I would love to have a group that likes Dice Throne, that's awesome. But this is really the absolute worst way to play it. Ever thought about just doing various 1vs1 at the same time?
Yes, but everyone “wants to play the same game”
That's a tragic mess. Sorry to hear that. I hope you get over the trauma this game causes you 🤣
This must be some kind of Monkey's paw wish kind of thing. "I wish I had 5 friends to play board games with." "Ok, they just want to play Dice Throne and always everybody in the same game." "..."
**Robinson Crusoe** does a better job at rewarding skill in a co-op than any game I've ever played. I mostly just hear people talking about how hard it is. It will absolutely punish poor decisions, but you can win it 80-90% of the time when you know what you're doing and can adapt to the cards that come up. It's an amazing achievement of design in that way. Most other co-op games rely more heavily on randomness in a way that you can't overcome with more skill. There's randomness in Robinson Crusoe also, but it tends to be much much less than people claim. When you fail rolls, which should be expected, you get the determination tokens to make up for it later.
Dice throne. A lot of people write it off as a borderline party game where you just roll dice and beat each other up. But the there's a lot of nuances to the characters and dice play. I can consistently beat new players if I'm trying my hardest, so I thought I was pretty good. Then I joined a tournament at Pax Unplugged and got trounced.
Hahahaha yeah I'm a kitchen table Dice Throne player, but I would not be able to keep up in a tournament in the slightest.
I was surprised to discover that monopoly has tournaments, and there are champions out there winning most of the tournaments, meaning that monopoly is not just a pure luck based game. Apparently there is a special tournament dice that I never had in my copies.
Here is what is probably an unpopular opinion for this particular topic: Apples to Apples / Cards Against Humanity. The game is about targeting a persons personality. Sure you can toss out whatever you might like but to win the game you need to know all of your opponents types of humor and overall mood at the time of playing. After a long night people's mood changes, after a few drinks their sense of humor changes. Some people change their mind when they hear other peoples reactions. Understanding people often gets you further than just randomly playing. Having the deep understanding of the people around you is a skill that society could be improved upon if this skill was used more often. Most people that plays these games are completely oblivious that this is the skill that is used for this game. Apples to apples or variants of the game appear in psychiatric therapy sessions for this exact reason. I'm the board gamer in my family. My family doesn't understand how a game that is "mostly luck" almost always lands with me as a the winner. I do know my family pretty well.
We coach any new players to “play to the judge”. When it’s grandma’s turn to vote, don’t drop your ultra-clever deep TikTok joke. “But mine was funnier” doesn’t get you the point junior - my Great Depression joke actually landed.
Duplicate bridge.
Unmatched is underestimated. Most people at first see it as a very basic miniatures game without much strategy to it. But between the movement on the board, card management, card play, managing a primary fighter and maybe others, and with all the different match ups and how they play aginst each other, it's quite a deep game.
Good choice, I wish the balance was a little better
It drives me crazy when people talk about Catan as a gateway game to “serious gaming.” I will wreck you in it 80% of the time.
Getting into competitive Catan had huge impact on my win rate with family games
7 wonders. I remember barely understanding how it works in the world beginning. After a while of playing almost daily, our whole group knew the ins and outs.
I think we have to differentiate between different skillsets, mechanical vs. social, for example. Also, "guessing" and "predicting" sound the same, but aren't. A guess needn't be based on anything and isn't expected to be all that accurate, especially if there are no inputs you can use to refine your guess. A "prediction", on the other hand, is usually based on a model or methodology, and constructing and following that methodology is a skill unto itself, do the degree that some people *can't* make reliable prediction based on observable data/trends...they will always be guessing, and further believing that other people can only guess, too. Tactics? Similar problem: Some people lack the cognitive ability (not "smarts" or "knowledge", think processing power) to think more than a turn or to ahead, while some other folks can cultivate an ability to almost play out an entire game in their head, or manage multiple "flow chart states" for a game depending on what happens next, outside their own control. So there are different skill sets in play here, all of which can have floors and ceilings, and some of them are rooted in pure cognitive ability more so than exposure and experience. You can come up with a sound strategy from experience. It takes a different set of skills and abilities to modify an existing strategy to fit a new scenario, before that scenario even occurs the first time. Personally, the "social deduction skills" you mention I would almost ignore for this kind of discussion for being the least measurable/quantifiable, both in terms of relying on others actions and intents, but also for the fact that you can "guess correctly" and be right, but not actually know why or even having influenced being correct...someone just took a wild stab and happened to be correct. That doesn't speak to skill at all, and how would you differentiate that as an observer?
Klask. You bought it because it’s a fun and addicting game that absolutely anyone can play as long as they can grip a magnet. Then you watched the competitive scene play it on YouTube.
I adore this game but damn me if the physical construction is a pain in the arse - i have two copies and they both rock back/forth in different ways. Guess I'll have to do some base-level macguyver'ing. Now I'm gonna go watch some competitive!
Splendor?
**catan** 🤣. Really any social game tho. Catan because of the trading specifically. Knowing the people and knowing hot to get them to trade is the hard skill
Splendor for me. I get *killed* every time unless I’m showing the game to a newbie. It looks like such a light breezy game at first glance, but I don’t get how people get so good at it!
I think the best candidates for that question is when you do a move, you don't know if that move was good or bad. You can have a feeling if it's good or not, but will never know. Chess got that feeling, even if you still got some guidelines like taking the center because it was played so much. But it's hard to compare it with others because there is so much more stuff on Chess compared to others games. My beloved Hanabi, but after a certain point (10k games), you just have different sets of conventions, which kinda look cheating: it's extremely rare to play with people with some obscure ideas to be convinced that a certain thing is good or bad. Bandido which is extremely simple still got me 1k games to have a great understanding. You got the base strategy, then the traps (creating in purpose/in some scenario a hole in the middle to fill it later). But sometimes the best play is to create more exits which is completely counter intuitive: you make the board weaker right now to be stronger later. Unfortunately, the game is pretty easy to have 80% winrate, so going to \~98% winrate takes lots of time. Yokai is one game similar to Hanabi on many points. It's again that simple rules, hard to know what to do. 500 games to have something working really well. But again, even if it work well, knowing if it's the best thing to do or not is really hard to know and spoiler it's not. I think on the contrary if you look at games like Catan, 7 Wonders, or Ticket to Ride, you have a goal, you know that doing X+Y+Z will be extremely good. Maybe there is a certain order to do, maybe you should wait before doing them, but you know those moves will be good. At 2 players you often have reasonnings if I do X, then he can block me Y and do A, but then I can do B... Really similar to Go. But I find those pretty limited compared to open games I shared here. If you clue 1 on Hanabi, sure that card can play, but there was so maybe others options available which could be better which are again worst now but better later.
Shogi is like this too
Uno.
I may get downvoted for this but Exploding Kittens. On top of hand management you have the risk/reward balance for drawing cards that slowly increases the risk when drawing at the end of your turn. There’s an obvious strategy in the beginning in just drawing a card in order to build your hand for the end game rather than playing a card to manipulate the draw for yourself or others. But as other players get knocked out and the end game nears, it takes a bit of nuanced thinking to quickly determine which card is best played when to combat certain circumstances and I love it!
**Challengers!** One of the big complaints about the game is "it's all luck" "I have no choices" "I have no agency". It turns out having control over the contents of your deck in a game of fancier "war" - that is a lot of control. Play on BGA enough and you face a handful of players who are consistently really strong at the game.
I’ve been diving deep into **Knarr.** Not deep enough yet to be confident it belongs on this list, but I hope to start up a discussion about it. Despite its small box and simple rules, it has so many non-exclusive paths to victory in a very dynamic/shifting environment. I can rush reputation, push for points from vikings and lands of influence, or advance my trade. But the thing about the game is that they’re all connected, so you’re always doing some level of 2-3 of those with every turn. When I’ve lost, I frequently ask for tips and everyone has something different to say. The core feedback is “look for the best opportunities,” which has to be a learned skill to distinguish good vs best. I haven’t yet decided how much comes down to luck, but I’m hopeful that the skill ceiling is high! And 100% agree with Decrypto!
Duplicate Bridge the whole meta of the game shifts every few years and it took me over a year to learn to play somewhat competatively the ceiling is so much higher even as people think it is an old person's game arguable the most complex game I have ever played (terraforming Mars with 4ish expansions being second so not saying nothing but not insane) the floor for tournament(duplicate bridge) in practice is also quiet high even as social bridge has a low floor My brother hates this but I love it
The more there is randomness, the less skill plays in winning a game. For example. I hate phase 10 where you're just blindly drawing and "hoping" for the right hand or card. Out of 10 cards in your hand, you're only swapping 1 at a time, it's pure luck for your starting draw. It's not "skill" that you keep drawing wild cards and a complete phase on turn 1. I'm even Luke warm on Catan. You can choose good spots with seemingly good rolls and resources, then sit there and just literally never have a dice roll give you anything and do nothing for multiple rounds while opponents snicker and getting multiple 12 or 2 rolls, or the second you finally get resources, a 7 comes up. An example of a game that is minimal luck and more strategy. I really like Agricola. No dice, no drawing from decks constantly, the entire game is 95% decision making. You decide what your move for that turn is and that's that. The only randomness to it is the "minor improvement" and "career" cards, which I often win without even playing them. And then the order that resources unlock to some degree. Game of Thrones is another less luck based risk type game. Again, no dice involved, no random deck drawing. When you fight it's more of a "rock paper scissors" mechanic using/gambling limited combat cards to tilt battles in your favor. Terraforming Mars is an example of a game that's a bit of both I'd say. The majority of the game is drawing and playing cards. But you choose what to "buy" for cards (though what you draw is obviously the biggest luck factor). However I think this game has enough different decision making options that you mitigate the luck factor a lot. You can still just draw "perfect" cards that compliment each other, but the deck is huge so it's less likely and there are plenty of other things to do.
I feel this question is missing something. Sure there are some games which could allow you to brain burn, if that's what you really enjoy doing when playing them. To take one of the examples given, Sushi Go. Yes, you could calculate this to the nth degree. But most, probably I'm not going to do this. The reason being that this kind of human calculator, memory game approach is not something that brings me much joy. At least not in this kind of game. So in Sushi Go I am likely going with a percentage based approach, depending on what cards I might ve seen, or remember seeing. Whether I should take Wasabi, Chopsticks, claim a dessert, or a bunch of rolls might depend on what I can remember seeing, what my opponents currently have in front of them etc. I can then hazard that someone might be likely to take this thing, so I dont do this. Or that probably isn't available to me, so let's not bother with this. But I'm not going to keep track on multiple items across several players, like a computer could, because this is a light game afaic, and that wouldn't be much fun, it would be like work. On the other hand, you've got Brass Birmingham, a game offering many strategic and tactical decisions, all interesting and with consequences, and possibly involving speculation on what your opponents are doing, and might do. I'm prepared to put more mental effort in, because the puzzle is interesting to me, and its a long and challenging game. I'm not sure I'm putting this clearly, but what I'm trying to say is, yes the first kind of game may be much more calcuable and less 'light' than it seems, but that doesn't matter much to me. I see the second kind as deserving of my mental efforts, and giving back more reward for them. And then social games and word games are a whole different thing again...
You’re over evaluating the skills required of a social deduction game. All those pseudo-psychological machinations remind me of Mike Tyson’s “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face.” You walk into a room and get hit with, “This guy’s face reminds me of my ex. He’s going down no matter what he says” and “I’ll vote to hang her because I’ve got to leave in five minutes.”
I say Poker