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How to pick the next game in a friend group

We are old friends and every year, we spend a weekend in a rented house to play boardgames and drink beer. That's great, but it's always a challenge to pick the next game. Sometimes, the most pushy person simply grabs the privilege.

Simply rotating the game vote does not seem right to me, because there's great variances in game length.

Do you have strategies and opinions? Please tell me if you do.

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  • Give everyone a paper list of the games on offer.

    Everyone anonymously scores each game from zero to five stars, zero means don't wanna play today and five means really wanna play today.

    It's OK to mark a bunch of zeroes and just one five, it's OK to give all kinds of scores, it's OK to have several fives or several threes or whatever. It works anyway.

    Then gather up these ballots. For each game, count up the stars. For the two games with most total stars, look at all the ballots again but now instead of looking at the number of stars, count the amount of ballots where one of the two games has strictly more stars than the other.

    For example let's say Ticket to Ride has 30 stars, Carcassonne has 25, Uno has 24, Caylus has 18, and Dixit has 5. The two finalists are Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne. And then let's say there are three ballots where Carcassone has more stars than TtR, one ballot where TtR has more stars than Carcassonne, and four where they are tied. Carcassonne won.

    • That actually sounds very interesting!

      • If you're looking to select more games, re-count the ballots but ignore the game or games that have already won (become selected). Or if people's moods change, redo everything 🤷🏻‍♀️

11 comments