Over the past two years, several Boardgame News readers have asked about my game reviews, so I thought I’d take a column to spell everything out, both for readers and for designers and publishers who might send games for review.
My primary goal when reviewing a game is simple: Give BGN readers enough information so that they can decide for themselves whether they’ll want to play the game. I know that my tastes don’t match anyone else’s. Each of us will approach the table with different goals for what we want out of the playing experience. Even if you and I enjoy the first ten games we play, we’ll spit blood at each other over game number eleven. On the other end of the spectrum, no matter how different your background from mine, I’m confident that we can find games that we’ll both want to play.
Given that game design is an art, I have no desire to convince you that my tastes and preferences are superior to yours. They aren’t; they’re just different. Instead I try to acknowledge those tastes and preferences within a review so that you can process the information and experience that I provide into something usable. Take, for example, my negative review of Wizard’s Gambit in May 2008. The game did nothing for me; actually it annoyed me, both through the restrictively forced game play and the poor graphics, and I said as much in my review – yet two people contacted me the day that my review was published and asked to purchase the review copy from me. For them, all the negative elements that I had found were positives, or rather they at least recognized elements of the game that they might enjoy and were curious enough to want to play it. Mission accomplished!
Nothing Personal
When reviewing a game, I focus on the mechanisms that make up the game play and how those mechanisms play out for different people and for different numbers of players. For me, the mechanisms are the game. Without the mechanisms, that is, without rules for how players can interact with one another and with the game components, there is no game. The components and graphic design might receive some attention, but they’re of secondary importance unless they interfere with your ability to play the game or they add some compelling quality that makes a game more appealing.
I’ll admit that most game themes do nothing for me as my brain just doesn’t work that way. I’ve never identified with the characters in books, movies or games, being more interested in the ideas and situations presented than in the fates of make-believe characters. (Favorite author: Borges; favorite movie: Brazil.) As I noted in a BoardGameGeek thread about Masters of Venice, a game I reviewed solely from a mechanisms point-of-view, I’m neither a merchant nor a patrician nor a patron; I’m a dude trying to win a game. Aside from being a memory aid, the setting of any game is a disposable backdrop. I can appreciate novel themes, but that’s because it’s more fun to write and talk about something new rather than something I’ve covered previously, not because I have more interest in being a bug-wrangler or nursing home attendant than a merchant or spaceship pilot. I know this approach will disappoint some people, but better to be honest about my worldview than pretend to have an opinion about a game’s theme one way or another.
While keeping the focus on a game’s mechanisms, I stay away from a topic that I feel has no place in a review: My opinion of the designer or publisher as a person. Given that I run a website about game news and travel to various conventions, I’ve met and emailed with hundreds of personalities in the gaming industry and have chatted with many of them on a personal level. All of that information and background is irrelevant when it comes to whether or not a game succeeds as a game.
Perhaps I’m naïve, but I believe that every game designer is honestly trying to present players with a creative work that will engage them. Their name is on the box and their reputation on the line, so they want to present a product of which they’ll be proud. Thus, for a game that doesn’t live up to its promise, I’ll state that the game fails for reasons A, B and C, not that the designer fails. I can still respect a designer as a person for taking chances in a creative endeavor, while simultaneously not caring for his or her creations, and that’s the attitude that I want to project in my reviews. To repeat what I said above, not everyone shares the same tastes and it’s foolish to level insults at another person because we disagree on what makes a successful game.
Tastes also come into play in another subject, that being whether a game is worth the price being charged. One person’s $30 find is another person’s $30 ripoff, and given my support of brick-and-mortar game stores and a publisher’s ability to set prices on its products, I rarely make any comments along these lines, instead preferring to lay out the positives and negatives about a game and letting you reach your own decision. Besides, price is rarely a good indicator of a game’s value. Money is spent on a game only once, while the game itself lasts for years – assuming it’s any good, that is.
All of my reviews express my honest opinion of the games covered and are not sugar-coated because I receive a free game, or know the designer, or accept advertising from that publisher. As I noted in February 2009, I’ve stopped soliciting ads from publishers and would prefer to replace all the advertising with member support to remove any hint of impropriety. By keeping the focus of my reviews on the games rather than their creators I trust that designers will accept my comments in the spirit they’re given. Finally, given the stacks of comped review copies that await my attention, some dating back to late 2006 when I first started editing BGN, I’d have no problem with companies not sending me games for review. While I appreciate the opportunity to discover new and exciting creations, I take the responsibility of providing fair and well-rounded reviews seriously and that requires time that could be spent playing other games, games that I already know and love.
Bye the Numbers
The most frequent question I’m asked regarding game reviews is why I don’t append a numerical value to each written review, and I don’t do so for the very reason that people want such a value: The number turns into a shorthand for the entire review. There’s no nuance in a number, so all of the qualifiers and details and arguments that I make in a review would be boiled down to a single digit, and that digit would be argued against or misinterpreted rather than what I took the time to spell out in detail.
Larry Levy has endured a beating along this line for a couple of years, thanks to his Gathering round-ups, such as this April 2009 report that rates fifteen games a 7. Most commenters ignored the substance of Levy’s game critiques, instead focusing on that number and responding with incredulity, as if it’s impossible for a person to play fifteen games that he feels are okay, if nothing special. Hundreds of games are released each year, and if you try games from established designers and publishers, then most of the games will be okay at a minimum.
I do rate games numerically on BoardGameGeek, in addition to posting short critiques and full reviews. Why do so there but not on BGN? The Geek functions best through the accumulation of hundreds of data points, so I do my part by contributing data. The reviews on Boardgame News, on the other hand, are meant to stand alone as the personal opinion of the author.
That said, I admire the rating system used by The San Francisco Chronicle with its jumping guy, clapping guy, attentive guy, sleeping guy, and empty chair – woe be the films that receive the empty chair! – and have thought of adopting something like that of my own for the sheer ridiculousness of it. My system, however, would use laughing and crying baby heads, with the number of heads varying based on the quality of the game being reviewed. Who’s up for hydra-headed babies?
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