I’ve got a problem with adding scores to board game reviews. In fact I’ve got several problems with it. I think it’s a bad idea
I’m in the minority when it comes to reviewing without awarding a score. Hop onto Youtube or the BGG forums and check out the reviews, see how many give you a score at the end of it.
At the time of writing, I’ve been posting board game reviews for almost four years. In all that time, with goodness knows how many reviews and previews under my belt, I’ve never graded a game. I’ve never said “This game gets 8.5 out of ten” or “This one is a C+ for me”. If you want to know what I think about a game you’re going to have to read the review I’m afraid.
Feeding the machine
There’s a belief that giving a score will help your review gain more visibility on Google. We’ve all seen Google’s search results when you’re looking for opinions on a certain thing, and you may have noticed that search snippets include a score when it’s available. Google will take whichever format you’ve used and convert it to the Amazon-style de facto stars-out-of-five.
Some people include a score specifically because they’re trying to game the system. They want their score aggregated, they have a belief that adding a score will bump you up the rankings. Maybe it does. I’m no SEO expert, and I sure as heck don’t know what Google’s mystical algorithm does. In the same breath though, I know that you don’t need a score to do well on Google. Content is king, friend, and I’m living proof that you don’t need to add a score to top the results. In fact, here’s what a search for “oath review” displays as its top four results right now (for me, incognito mode. your results may look different).
.If you’re adding scores just to make Google happy, why bother? Write good reviews with relevant content in them and explain why a game is good or not.
What does a ‘7’ mean?
Let’s imagine you’re on the hunt for a new game. There’s one which has piqued your interest, so now you’re scouring the internet for reviews to decide whether to spend your money on it.
You come across a review and at the bottom of it is a big, bold 7/10. What do you do now?
Is 7 out of 10 good? What does the reviewer use as their scale? Perhaps most importantly of all, would you ever buy something from Amazon that has a 3.5 star rating? Because that’s what a 7/10 boils down to, it’s 3.5/5, and let’s all be honest with ourselves here, we don’t buy anything below 4/5 from Amazon, right?
You might think I’m being ridiculous using Amazon as a reference here, but I’m not. Amazon as a service and the way it displays items’ ratings is ubiquitous now. I’m the same, I completely ignore anything below 4 out of 5. I’m indoctrinated. The Pavlovian response to adding something to my basket, because it has more than 4 stars, is too strong.
So my question to you, fellow reviewer, is “What does a 7 out of 10 mean for your consumers?”. Unless you can communicate that very clearly, it’s pointless. Don’t even get me started on the question of “Why bother differentiating between any scores lower than a 6?”.
Skip to the end…
How many reviews have you read where the first thing you’ve done, before reading even the opening paragraph, is to skip to the end to see what score it was given? There are an awful lot of nodding heads out there right now.
If that score is an 8 or a 9 then the reader might go back and listen to your gushing about how wonderful it is. If you’ve given it a 7 or below, do you think they’re going to stick around? Would they bother reading it all? They might if it was a 1/10 and you had a morbid curiosity about what could possibly be so awfully wrong with a game, but you don’t want people to read your work in the style of rubbernecking at an accident on the motorway, right? Right?
Here’s a follow-up question. If you skip to the end and see the score proclaim ‘6/10’, will you bother reading the review? If it’s a video, will you skip back to the start and lose half an hour of your life listening to a review of a mediocre game? Probably not. People like extremes when it comes to opinion. They want to know why someone who loves something, loves it. They want to know why someone who hates something, hates it. Anything in the middle is chaff.
You spend hours of your life crafting a review, you slap a 6/10 on it, and nobody watches or reads it. What’s the point?
Housekeeping
Here’s the biggest problem for me when it comes to adding a score to a review.
Let’s say you reviewed Lords of Waterdeep a few years ago. It’s a great entry-level worker-placement game set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe. When it came out it caused a real stir, and rightly so. There wasn’t much like it available. You loved that game so much and gave it a 9/10. Awesome.
Now let’s fast-forward a few years. You’ve churned out another couple hundred reviews and probably played twice as many. You might still have a soft spot for Lords, but you’ve played games which did so much more. As far as you’re concerned your copy of Vinhos wipes the floor with it, but you only gave Vinhos 8.5/10 because around the same time, you also picked up A Feast For Odin, which as far as you’re concerned is the best worker-placement game ever. You gave Feast 9.2/10, for reasons known only to yourself, because the number after the decimal is meaningless, but I digress.
Are you now saying that as far as you’re concerned when it comes to worker-placement games, A Feast for Odin beats Lords of Waterdeep into second spot, above Vinhos?
Probably not, and this is the problem. Scores are point-in-time opinions. They’re relevant when you award the score and for a short while afterwards. Reviews are by their nature subjective, which means comparisons are unavoidable. When you say “This new game is better than this previous game”, does that mean that the 9 you gave that game in the past is now more like a 7 or 8?
Unless you’re prepared to go back through your reviews and update scores periodically, you’re left with a body of work, each of which culminates with a score you potentially no longer agree with. Why have the score there at all?
Summary
I understand why reviews have scores attached. I understand the need to assign something a value to define its worth. For online stores, it’s a powerful, attractive thing. It’s about making your product appear higher in listings than others, resulting in a more profitable business. When it comes to reviewing media though, it’s a different story.
The only thing it’s useful for in media critique is when taken as part of a much larger aggregate. Just have a look at Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, Goodreads, Steam etc. for example. Someplace where you need a huge sample set to get something meaningful from a mean or median average.
When you go through the reviews I’ve written on Punchboard you’ll see a few things I’ve done to circumvent the problems I’ve mentioned above. I never post a score, first and foremost. When I think a game is similar to another but better or worse, I talk about it in context and link to the comparable review. I’ve also used some pretty comprehensive taxonomy which means that if you read an older review, related, newer reviews are suggested at the bottom of the page.
So over to you then. What do you think about scores on reviews? Do you think they’re a good thing or a bad thing? Let me know in the comments here, or head over to the Punchboard Discord server and join in the chat.
I’d rate this article 8.4/10 🤣
Completely agree on scores being pretty useless and subject to become troublesome as time marches on.