I’ve increasingly been noticing discussions lately around a board game’s “Weight” and have been thinking more about the term, both in the sense of what that means in-and-of-itself, and extrapolating from that what, if anything, that means that people should think about it.
What is Weight?
As a starting point, I thought I’d take the Board Game Geek definition. Every game has a “weight” out of 5. If you click into that for more details, you will see that the number comes from answering the question “How heavy (Complex/difficult) is this game?” There is then a mouseover clarification that this is a weighting of how difficult a game is to understand. People can then vote on a scale of 1-5: with 1 being “Light,” going through “Medium Light” “Medium” and “Medium Heavy” to 5 being “Heavy” – what’s presented on the game summary page is merely a mathematical aggregate, but by going in closer, you can see the individual breakdowns.
For a lot of games, the spread is broad, and you’ll find weightings all the way across the spectrum, from 1-5. That said, there still seems to be some kind of broad consensus: if you look at the top-ranked games on BGG (just because they have plenty of votes, and are likely to be things that people are familiar with), there’s generally one number on that 1-5 scale that got 60%+ of the vote, or else 2 adjacent numbers that account for 80%+ (Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is most definitely a 3.5 in these terms).
There’s also a broad correlation between Heavy games being the “Euro” style, whilst the Light end is populated by “Ameritrash” games. There’s definitely some scope for exploring this idea, but this article is long enough already, so let’s leave that for the moment.
4-Difficulty Good, 2-Difficuly Bad
I’m not going to go too far down the rabbit-hole of how people arrive at these ratings, but I think it’s interesting that they seem to be arrived at a lot more consistently than the ratings of how good a game is, where the spread seems to be very broad, and there are clearly people using completely different criteria to arrive at their numbers.
What I do want to think about a bit more though, is the thing I keep seeing where “light-weight” is being used as a derogatory term (specifically in relation to board games, I make no comment on anyone’s ability to consume alcohol without suffering too many adverse consequences).
It generally starts with some enquiring about a game – on Board Game Geek, Facebook Discord. For a few minutes you’ll get some civil discussion, and then someone will barge in with
“it’s really light. Only worth playing with kids”
quickly followed by
“it’s a super-light-weight game, don’t bother”
and these sort of ideas find their way into stand-alone comments like this
“This is a VERY LIGHT game, for kids. Anyone telling you it’s surprisingly deep just regrets wasting so much money on KickStarter and is trying to justify it”
A game designer/writer on Facebook, referencing Marvel United
and ending with
“we played this once and nobody’s brain exploded. Anyone trying to force another adult to play this is basically a war-criminal”
ok, I made this last one up
Final exaggeration aside, the other 3 are as close to direct quotes as I can remember without having actually written them down at the time I saw them. Even allowing for the fact that the internet has a knack for driving people to hyperbole, there seems to be a level of almost Orwellian conviction that weight is implicitly tied to quality. Heavy = Good. Light = Bad.
Now, I would consider myself a fairly intelligent and a fairly well-educated guy – I spent somewhere in excess of 25 years in full-time education, and I technically have more letters after my name than in it. Sometimes I like playing games that are really going to challenge me mentally. I’ve played competitive LCGs (Game of Thrones, L5R) to a decent tournament standard in the past, and enjoy cracking out Cloudspire (4.3) occasionally.
But here’s the thing. I’ve also got to the end of some of those games with splitting headaches. I lost a game in a tournament once due to an mis-play that still bugs me 5+ years later, and I can only put down to “too damn tired after concentrating for 6 hours straight.” Whilst I like those sorts of experiences, challenges on occasion, most of the time, I play games because I want to have fun.
And you know what? Approaching 40, doing a full-time job in 4 days because my health wouldn’t cope with a 5-day week, and having a primary-aged child in the house: a lot of the time, I wouldn’t class a game that leaves me with a headache as “fun.” Much of the time, we want something we can just sit down and enjoy. Rules that we don’t have to keep looking up and cross-referencing every few minutes.
How Hard?
It’s also worth thinking for a moment about the relationship of Weight and Difficulty. When playing co-op games (which is what we do most of the time) you’ll often find that the super-heavy games are also extremely difficult. Part of this is because of the notion that you can, ultimately find some kind of solution to the puzzle of the particular task in hand, and once you do so, that brings the challenge down significantly: ideally, the game will still have ways to surprise you, so that playing doesn’t become pointless once you’ve “solved” that particular iteration, but either way, games of this ilk can often present a seemingly-impenetrable barrier when first approached.
Winning certainly isn’t everything for us – it really doesn’t bother me that much if I lose. What gets annoying, and unenjoyable, is when I feel like I was never in the game – when the difficulty is so extreme that we never really got to do anything, all the decisions were made for us, and then we died anyway.
From experience, the types of games that work best for us are ones that are either
1) light enough that when we lose, it was down to a spot of bad luck or a couple of silly decisions, but we’ve had fun along the way. Zombicide is the prime example here for us.
Or
2) sufficiently narrative-heavy that even when things go wrong, there’s a kind of failing-forward element. The story continues, even if that story isn’t one in which you are the might heroes, more like plucky underdogs trying to find a way to muddle through. Arkham Horror, particularly the LCG would be our top example of this.
Another category that gets an honourable mention, is anything where the difficulty and complexity is highly modular. For this category, I’d point to Marvel United as the prime example. The base form is something that my 5 year-old son can play, but it has loads of built-in ways to toggle the difficult (remove wild cards, add challenge modes / additional requirements, or even face off against a Sentinel or 3) to the point where it requires fairly careful planning and consideration, and multiple attempts tweaking the same combination before we finally manage to eke out a win.
A Tale of 2 Crawlers
To see how the relative weight of a game works out in practice, I want to zoom in on 2 games that I’ve acquired in the last year – a Lightweight vs Heavyweight showdown between 2 Dungeon Crawlers.
In the Red corner is Sword & Sorcery Ancient Chronicles.
This is a game that was Kickstarted by Ares Games in October-November 2018, due to be delivered in December 2019. This didn’t happen. With some of the latter part of production taking a bit longer than anticipated, they offered split shipping (at an extra charge, that you could have recouped as extra product, but I missed the chance, due to drastically over-estimating how much stock their webstore actually carries) the first instalment finally arrived in May 2021 (17 months late) The second part should (hopefully) show up some time in the middle of 2022 (28-30-something months late)
In the Blue corner is Massive Darkness 2
Kickstarted by CMON in the summer of 2020. Due to reach backers in September 2021, I received mine in February 2022 (5 months late), with no real drama aside from some unexpected VAT issues (see below).
For both games, there were a variety of levels of pledge to choose from. For Sword & Sorcery, I added a few extra hero packs, along with familiars for the characters, but skipped the PvP expansion, a load of bling-only stuff, and some alternate versions of heroes. For Massive Darkness, I got the slightly higher-tier of pledge that included a campaign expansion, then added a box of extra boss monsters (The Four Horsemen) along with a crossover pack for Zombicide, and another box that added some more hero classes and an extra roaming monster, but ended up skipping 3 boxes of additional enemies, along with a massive dragon (and all the bling-only stuff).
For both campaigns, even with a lot of things left out, these were big projects. £180 for Sword & Sorcery, and around £230 for Massive Darkness. Given that Massive Darkness ran 18 months later, during the pandemic, and was the first campaign where VAT got charged as an extra in the Pledge Manager*, that’s probably around the same, in terms of the basic cost.
For anyone not aware, changes to VAT legislation in Europe meant that for all projects where payment was finalised in 2021 and after, we had to pay VAT on top of the pledge price. This was quite a shock for a lot of people when the Massive Darkness 2 Pledge Manager opened up, as it was the first project to be hit by the new laws, and CMON allowed people to downgrade or cancel pledges – I dropped from gameplay all-in to a much smaller selection of expansions, because 20% extra on a game this size is a lot of money.
By the time everything has been released at retail for both games, there’s a good chance that the overall price I’ve paid will work out as a decent deal – either significantly less than it would have cost to buy in shops, or the same amount with a hefty chunk of extra, exclusive stuff (it’s still a bit early to say, really, as significant chunks of S&S haven’t hit retail yet, and none of Massive Darkness 2 has).
Sword & Sorcery Ancient Chronicles has an average Rating of 8.6 based on 279 ratings, which leaves it sitting just outside the top 4000 games on BGG, and a Weight of 4.1, making it my second-heaviest game, with only Cloudspire sitting higher
(the original has been rated over 4,000 times, and still has a rating of 8, for a global ranking of 351).
Massive Darkness 2 has a significantly lower Rating of 7.8. Although the rating has held steady, the number of individual ratings has increased steadily over the time I’ve been working on this article, and it now sits a good 300 places higher in the BGG rankings. Its Weighting is 2.5.
(the contrast with the original mirrors S&S – just over 4k ratings, settled average is currently lower at 7.2, and a ranking of 970).
All-told then, I should be loving my Sword & Sorcery experience. For £50 less, I have a highly regarded Dungeon Crawler, with crunchy rules that are often cited as the envy of lesser crawlers – a sharp contrast with the bloated minis-based mess that is MD2. Right?
Well, no.
The thing is, I’ve had Sword & Sorcery for nearly a year now: long enough to play it 9 times. Or, to put it another way 11 hours in 11 months. Whilst it offers a lot of complexity, it also offers it via a confusing collection of different books and reference sheets, including an abnormally wide rulebook that needs a far better index. Gameplay is fairly slow, and most of my early sessions were spent reading, and re-reading the rules. Difficulty is high (especially when you’re still trying to figure out which particular rules nuance you missed this turn) and the odds of dying in the first corridor are also pretty high (FWIW, I find the Tutorial disproportionately challenging, compared with later scenarios). For all the money shelled out, the monster variety is pretty minimal – spiders and spider-themed stuff in the first scenario, joined by a dinosaur or 2 in the second. This is a grim-and-gritty world where death is around every corner.
Massive Darkness 2 arrived in the 3rd week of February. In less than 2 months it has been played 10 times. That’s 9 hours in the first month! – right now, it’s still worse value from an hourly perspective than Sword & Sorcery, (£17.71/h vs 16.36/h) but it’s been getting played at many times the rate. On top of that, every single one of those MD2 games has been 2-player (I’ve introduced it to my wife and to another friend), because it’s simple enough that when I read the rulebook, I didn’t think “ooh, I’m going to need some serious time figuring this out before I can introduce it to someone else” I looked and thought “yeah, I think we can do this” – in fact, if you look at the hourly rate per-player, it has already eclipsed Sword & Sorcery – 24+ hours for £8.85 per hour, rather than 11 hours for £16.36.
Now, of course, it’s still early days: a game which gets played lots when it’s brand new invariably sees less table time as the weeks and months go on, and I’m notoriously bad at predicting what I will or won’t get around to playing. If in a year’s time either of these games are still showing such poor money/hour of play ratios, then I’ll be disappointed. My strong suspicion though, is that Massive Darkness will be doing fine. It’s the sort of game, where I can just say to my wife “do you fancy playing that?” and there’s a good chance that she’ll say “Yes” and we can just get it out and play it. For Sword & Sorcery, there’s the far more complex labyrinth of finding time alone in the house – with a couple of hours spare, and no pressing domestic admin or DIY to do. Then I have to hope I can still remember the rules, and try to play through the quest, all with the long-term aim of getting enough consecutive games in to actually feel confident in introducing the game to someone else. (Or, I need to wait until the school holidays, or some other time when my wife isn’t exhausted, and is willing to try a new game which takes more than 5 minutes to teach).
The miniatures of Massive Darkness are also significantly nicer. Whilst I’ve yet to feel any kind of inclination to start painting up the Sword & Sorcery minis (quite small, only moderate detail), there’s some fantastic sculpts in MD2, and I more-or-less-instantly starting working on the Rainbow Crossing box – because, let’s be honest, who doesn’t want to fight their way through Cupids, Nymphs and Punycorns on their way to a show-down with a Unicorn or a “Hug Bear”?
– whilst my overall aim is generally to get each of my games to the point where I (personally) have played it for at least 1 hour for every £5 spent on it, I use both hours-per-player, and “all hours, including painting as well as playing” as secondary (and tertiary?) metrics, and I’m optimistic of this soon looking good through those lenses.
As an aside, included in the MD2 campaign, I got a Zombicide Crossover pack and, perhaps more relevantly, a conversion pack that allows me to take my original Massive Darkness figures, and play through the MD1 campaign using the MD2 rules and equipment. If I were to treat “Massive Darkness” in its entirety as a single game, it would already be looking like good value – but that might be cheating. I’ll work out how best to log those hours once I start playing the combined version…
Turn to the Light!
All-in-all, this has been a bit of a long walk to say “Lightweight games can be a lot of fun”. That might seem blindingly obvious, but as noted early on, I get tired of seeing comments that equate lightweight games only with children, and with the implicit assumption, which seems to be so common, that the heavier a game is, the better it is.
This doesn’t mean that I’m going to sell my entire collection and replace it with copies of Exploding Kittens and Unstable Unicorns (I still find most “party” games pretty dire), but I don’t think that a 50-page Rules Reference guide is somehow a requirement before a game can be considered worthy of a “true” gamer, and would encourage you not to either.
fistfulofmeeples 