I wanted to take a look at the best years of games, but didn’t feel like going through everything and ordering it manually. Fortunately, I was able to come up with an automatic solution.
I have logs of all my game plays since 2001 and could use that data to rank the years. The solution was simple: my game stats system can already provide me a list of all games with their years and the Huber Happiness Metric.
I took that list, then summed up the Huber Happiness Metric for each year based on the games released that year. That way I got a score for each year and could order the years by that.
Huber Happiness Metric for a game is roughly number of plays × average length of a play × rating – 4.5. To make the numbers smaller, I’ve taken a 10-base logarithm of the values.
The logarithm makes individual games less significant: without the logarithm, something like Magic: the Gathering would contribute almost 14,000 points when it now contributes 4.14, while, say, Terraforming Mars now contributes almost as much at 3.61, but without the logarithm would only contribute 4,000. With the logarithm in place, the best years will be the years with many games that I like and that I’ve played a lot (and accounting for the length of the plays balances between long 18xx games and fillers, making one three-hour play equal to six 30-minute plays).
The logarithm also makes individual plays less significant. For Magic: the Gathering, each play adds 67.5 points to the base value, but in the logarithm that’s just minor decimals. So, 1993 doesn’t really get any better if I play more Magic, unless I play a lot – and even hundred plays would add a whopping 0.17 to the logarithm score. If I find a new, interesting game from 1993 (unlikely as that may be), rate it as an 8 and play it for two hours, that’s 2.6 points more for 1993.
The list includes the best 30 years; it starts to get pretty dry by the end of the list. Since this list is based on plays and ratings and those change, it won’t take long before the results would be different. For example 2019 is listed at #21, but as I play more games from 2019, it might end up higher.
The actual list is a GeekList on BGG.
I’ll list the years here, for my best-ranked games for each year check the GeekList.
- 2015 (186 points)
- 2016 (171 p.)
- 2013 (144 p.)
- 2004 (140 p.)
- 2005 (138 p.)
- 2014 (138 p.)
- 2012 (129 p.)
- 2003 (124 p.)
- 2011 (119 p.)
- 2010 (114 p.)
- 2009 (113 p.)
- 2007 (100 p.)
- 2017 (99 p.)
- 2006 (92 p.)
- 2018 (90 p.)
- 2002 (82 p.)
- 2008 (79 p.)
- 2000 (79 p.)
- 1999 (72 p.)
- 2001 (62 p.)
- 2019 (59 p.)
- 1997 (34 p.)
- 1998 (32 p.)
- 1995 (24 p.)
- 1996 (21 p.)
- 1993 (19 p.)
- 1991 (13 p.)
- 1992 (12 p.)
- 1994 (11 p.)
- 1987 (11 p.)