The Cody Scale
16 Aug 2024My friend Cody has been pitching a replacement for the granular 10 point BGG rating scale:
1 - bad won’t ever play again
2 - didn’t care for it, won’t actively try and play it again
3 - liked it, would definitely play again, maybe even buy it
4 - actively want to play again and would like to buy so I can play as much as often as possible
To avoid confusion with BGG number ratings, I’m going to use ⭐️ for the Cody scale. Sorry, didn’t pitch it as a star system, but it’s hard to compare without some different indicator.
My suggested rough mapping:
- BGG 8-10 maps to 4 (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
- BGG 6-7 maps to 3 (⭐️⭐️⭐️)
- BGG 4-5 maps to 2 (⭐️⭐️)
- BGG 1-3 maps to 1 (⭐️)
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Anything BGG 8 and up is something that as a board game person (someone with a collection) I want to own. These are all great. So… smoosh them all together into a single ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ rating, sure. I’d lose a bit of definition in what are my greatest of all time, but that’s fine. I’m still heartily recommending any here.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
To me the BGG 6s and 7s map to “would play again and maybe own”. I own plenty of 7s. I also own 6s, but something at a 6 is asking to be phased out of my collection. Famously, the BGG 7 rating is the most crowded, with 7.0 being borderline okay and 7.9 being amazing. So having all these (plus the decidedly situational 6s) as ⭐️⭐️⭐️ is similarly covering a lot of ground and I’d guess this is the most dominant rating and lacking in clearer signal.
⭐️⭐️
The summary of ⭐️⭐️ is “yeah, if someone else is pushing to play it I will, but I’m not going to be the one asking for it.” Which is not something I want in my collection (otherwise people will see it on the shelf, ask “can we play that?” And I’ll go “uh… sure?”). That maps to the BGG 4s and 5s, the mediocre to reluctant.
⭐️
Anything BGG 3 and under is different flavors of garbage. I have no love lost lumping that into ⭐️. It’s not like I’m going to walk someone through the nuance of why one is slightly less terrible than another. They’re all bad, run away.
Thoughts
Overall, what the Cody scale asks is “what extra are you communicating by letting people rate on a 10 point scale? I do think it’s overkill for most people, and that the extremes aren’t providing critical information. However with this system I do think you’re going to have a crowded set of ⭐️⭐️⭐️ just like you had crowded 7s. And I do think people want to know if a title is more trending towards ⭐️⭐️ or ⭐️⭐️⭐️. The question is whether individual raters communicate that or whether that’s the job of review aggregation to add in the decimal point.
Would it get more casual folks to rate things and overcome the BGG hardcore’s oversized influence of the top games? Maybe a little. But honestly, who other than the hardcore rates anything? Am I in any way contributing to the ratings on Amazon items, or what gets rolled up into MetaCritic for video games or Rotten Tomatoes for movies? Nope. I give zero input to those systems. Most of the ratings systems I’m coerced to interacting with are of the variety of “give 5 stars or you are sabotaging someone’s livelihood,” which is its own problem and leads us down the path of that Black Mirror episode with Bryce Dallas Howard. Yikes.
Thankfully that’s not the vibe here. A 4 point scale seems fine. If you can make it happen, go for it Cody. In the meantime I’m going to stick to the BGG scale because that’s the only place I know people actually look at ratings.