Non-scientific.

That describes how games are rated for popularity. Everyone who makes surveys has their own approach. Some simply ask people to vote without really counting who voted or how often. Some look at sales numbers and generate a popularity list based on that. Some do random polling to reflect a more scientific approach. In the end the results are a popularity contest of which games people love or play most often.

Family Playing a Board Game by Bill Branson.

We looked at polls conducted by Beaumont Enterprise, List Challenges, Ranker and The Richest to generate our own list of the most popular board/table games. Why did we pick these four? They were the best query matches that Google offered. Our selection was certainly non-scientific. We simply trusted Google to come up with a sampling of the best lists.

The good news is that only 19 games made the top 10 list among the four surveys, which makes things reasonably consistent and to normalize these results, we considered the top 20 games in these surveys to help balance deviations where participants in one survey thought a game is great while participants in another survey thought that the same game sucked (or at least was not as good).

It’s not scientific, but it’s a good intersection for the surveys and we will talk about the top five games over the next five days. None in the top ten are a surprise, although personal preferences can easily force us to reconsider the order of these games. Take a look at where the 2014 rankings fall and if you agree with the selections. And on Saturday, to wrap up National Games Week, we’ll post the list of top games as rated by the public. There were 32 total that made the top 20 across all surveys. Not surprisingly, they are all very good games!

[whohit]2014-11-23 Non-Scientific[/whohit]