I spend a decent amount of time looking at game listings on BoardGameGeek, and over the past year I've started paying attention to the relation between two numbers on those listings:
- The total number of forum posts on a game listing
- The number of posts in the "Rules" subforum of that game listing
The image at the top of the page highlights these two numbers on the BGG game listing for Tomáš Holek's SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which Czech Games Edition released in 2024. The sum of all forum posts on that page is rounded to 1K, but if you add up the individual numbers, you'll get a sum of 1,003 — which means that SETI has a Rules Ratio of 50% since half of the forum posts on that game listing are in the "Rules" subforum.
Let's look at a few other games in the BGG database:
- BGGers tend to love involved, rules-heavy games, and near the top of the rankings we can find Brass: Birmingham with a Rules Ratio of 39%, while Ark Nova's RR is 52%, Gloomhaven's is 42%, and Terraforming Mars has a modest RR of 26%, so having a metric ton of cards with unique abilities isn't always a recipe for confusion.
- My beloved Innovation has a RR of 40%, whereas Innovation Ultimate is at 55%. More cards = more questions about interactions! As for one of my other top games, The Mind has a RR of 14%.
- Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island had a reputation for a challenging rulebook, but its Rules Ratio is "only" 41% (at 1,766 rules questions out of 4,332 total forum posts). Portal Games' spinoff title First Martians: Adventures on the Red Planet has a RR of 42%, whereas Portal's 2009 title Stronghold has a 62% RR — the highest of any game I've looked at — and its 2010 release Prêt-à-Porter has a 53% RR.
- The original Puerto Rico has a RR of 19%, El Grande is at 26%, CATAN 16%, and Ticket to Ride only 8%.
- Looking at a few other Spiel des Jahres winners, Cascadia's Rules Ratio is 39%, which seems incredibly high for a family-weight game — until you look at Bomb Busters and see a RR of 48% or Dorfromantik: The Board Game with 52%. (Maybe the German rules are cleaner and more comprehensive than the English ones?) Just One, by comparison, is at 26%, Sky Team at 34%, and MicroMacro: Crime City is an outlier beyond all others with a Rules Ratio of 0%! That's right — no one has asked a rules question in 162 forum posts. What is MicroMacro doing right?!
What does the Rules Ratio say about a game? Possibly nothing. I realize one objection to this concept is that some say people ask "dumb" rules questions all the time despite the answers being clearly explained in the rulebook. I would counter that (1) what's clear to you is not clear to everyone and (2) if this concept applies equally to all games, which is debatable, then it's not much of an objection since subtracting all of the "dumb" questions from the count would lower all RR percentages proportionally.
One might expect that more complex games will (inevitably?) have a higher Rules Ratio, which means that comparing games of differing complexities will likely favor the simpler game, making it look less fraught with ambiguity and ankle-breaking rabbit holes, so perhaps we need to update the stat to equalize all things.
This brings me to RRW, or Rules Ratio by Weight, in which we take a game's Rules Ratio and divide it by the game's weight as listed on BGG. Brass: Birmingham has a 3.86 weight, making its RRW 10.1, while Ark Nova's RRW is 13.7...which is proportionally the same difference from Brass: Birmingham as with RR alone — that is, one-third higher — but that's because Ark Nova's weight is 3.79, which is nearly identical to Brass: Birmingham's weight.
Bomb Busters, by comparison, has a RRW of 23.9 and Dorfromantik: The Board Game is at 31.7%, which suggests those games are relatively less internally coherent and comprehensible than the previous pair of games. If you've played all four of these games, does that finding line up with your experience?
Even more surprising, The Mind has a RRW of 13.4 thanks to its 1.07 weight, which suggests that as simple as the game is, folks still have questions. (Six of the 31 rule questions relate to throwing stars, and another half-dozen are about playing high cards on purpose to "accidentally" clear a level at the cost of only one life.)
CATAN has a 2.28 weight, making its RRW 7.0, while Puerto Rico's RRW is 5.8, Ticket to Ride's is 4.4, and MicroMacro: Crime City still beats all comers with a RRW of 0.
What are the Rules Ratios of your favorite games? Does this metric seem meaningful, and while acknowledging that a low score is clearly better than a high one, what seems like a "reasonable" RR for games on today's market?
