The Top 20 Games on BGG Using Word Frequency?

March 8, 2015 - 1:38am

BoardGameGeek.com (BGG) is naturally one of the most well-known and well-used websites for all things board-gaming, and therefore is the source of some of the most interesting data on board game trends. Towards the end of 2014, BGG user A. Mandible (user name grasa_total) created a "Geeklist" that presented multiple top-20 categories of board games, each ranked by the frequency of certain key words in games' comments on the BGG site. Only games ranked in the top 1000 overall on BGG were eligible to make the list. Some of the frequency-words used for the categories include "dice," "filler," "luck," "fun," and so forth. A. Mandible makes it clear that the games on these lists are not necessarily represented accurately in that category, just that the word appeared often in the comments. This is expressed in his comment thus: "Think of it as a cross between conventional wisdom and what people actually think." Here is a sample list created by counting the games in the top 1000 that have the word "luck" in the comments:

luck

What fraction of comments use 'luck'?