The Rise of Cooperation

Are cooperative board games trending?

Welcome to the Looking at Board Games newsletter. I am Philip Olenyk and I invite you to join me on my journey of learning about the board game industry, board game design, and game theory.

Each post in this newsletter will be centered around one question I am curious about. Today's question is: are cooperative board games trending?

If you are here for a quick answer, here’s the chart:

Now let’s look at the absolute numbers behind the first chart.

The number of games published each year has been rising at a growing rate since 2014. The numbers shown here include all kinds of board games, including self-published, web-published, and indie press games. Some games have nearly empty profiles on Board Game Geek (BGG) and few votes or reviews. Some games are shown as owned by tens of thousands of BGG users; others’ “owned by” counter is at zero.

As you can see above, the games owned by fewer than 10 players represent a significant share of all board games on BGG. How does that affect the share of cooperative games? Can it be that cooperative games’  surge in popularity  is fueled by the less popular games? Let’s find out.

The trend is even more pronounced in the pool of more popular games. It is safe to say cooperative games are experiencing a sharp rise in popularity, at least among the publishers and designers.

Where does the data come from?

The data for this post came from BoardGameGeek.com’s API. I used a slightly modified version of Markus Shepherd’s board-game-scraper to download the data. The date of the database snapshot is November 10, 2020.

What are the limitations of the data set?

This data set only speaks about the behaviors and preferences of the BGG users. While BGG is one of the biggest websites dedicated to board games, there are far more board game players than BGG users. When it comes to self-reported metrics such as ratings, owned copies, and play sessions, an additional layer of bias is added to the mix. One might argue that recording one’s play sessions and tracking a collection is in itself a game and a preference. The data will be skewed towards the preferences of a certain subgroup of the users: the “supertrackers”. There are some statistical tools to correct for the skew, but there is no remedy for the fact that some information from the less-eager-to-track users is simply not there.

What titles are included?

BGG’s database tracks original games as well as expansions, translations, adaptations, etc. For the purposes of this analysis, I decided to only count the original games. For example, Root is counted as a 2018 title and Root: The Riverfolk Expansion is not.

What counts as a cooperative game?

The BGG definition of the cooperative genre is the following:

Players coordinate their actions to achieve a common win condition or conditions. Players all win or lose the game together.