GNG Ratings Explained!

April 18, 2017 by Sam

If you’re looking through the games pages and wondering why we rate so many games a 3, when other numbers are available (the underwhelming 2; the alluring 4; the firework-accompanied 5) it’s worth explaining why you might well find our 3-star game to be your 5-star game.

One reason is obviously subjectivity. As much as we strive to picture the person who’ll love a particular game (and we do), we are only human and our tastes and biases inform the site.

Another is the flip side of that coin: We like puzzle games like Gold West, for instance, but we can see that as an abstraction of the gold-mining theme, it won’t be for everyone.

And overall we felt it better to err toward a baseline rating being 3 (good game!) rather than 4 so as to avoid the perception that the ratings were essentially meaningless. Here’s a rough guide to how it breaks down:

1. It takes a lot of badness for us to give out a 1. Even a game we both dislike for a plethora of objections won’t award a 1 if we can imagine the person who loves if for the same reasons we don’t.
2. A game that we felt didn’t quite live up to its ideas/potential, or gets bogged down in opaque aspects of play. There may be something worth exploring here, but overall we’ve found the fun hasn’t matched up to the time invested. And that is saying something, because we like investing our time in games!
3. A good game: a great game for the right group. Most games on GNG are threes and that’s not because our experience of them is ‘average’, just a reflection of the huge amount of games out there that are good. Both of us could handpick twenty 3-rated games on GNG that we love to bits, so don’t any account discount a 3 on the basis of the number.
4.  A game we (or one of us!) adore and will pretty much always be happy to play. Sometimes there’s a distinct reason, such as a great experience that’s instantly accessible. Sometimes there’s a sense that this game will massively appeal to not just the strategist, the tactician, or the player who just wants to have fun – but all of them. And sometimes we’ve allowed our love for a game to let us break the rule of 3: Tinner’s Trail, for instance, is of a similar ilk to Steel Driver, and objectively we wouldn’t necessarily argue it’s a ‘better’ game – but many plays of it have endeared TT to us like an old friend.
5. Very few games on GNG hit the 5 and when they do it’s either because they have provided us with a unique and memorable experience – for the right reasons – or because they almost always guarantee that elusive sense of Play, the best kind: that leads to laughter, that isn’t engineered by the game directly but facilitated so the players are finding the fun within themselves. It doesn’t mean that everyone will love, or even like, Decrypto as much as we have, but the games in question have simply engendered so much joy that we can’t bring ourselves to give it less than 5. The caveat here being that we might mean joy, fun and play in the sense of painful back-stabbing, agonising decisions and tortuous planning, etc.

In fact… if put on the spot, our advice is to ignore our ratings completely and simply go by what you read in the overviews and thoughts. We don’t always agree with each other!