Ethan's Rule
Hi everyone! Sorry I’m late this week. I have a very good reason for this. It’s that I forgot to write it sooner.
On the menu today we have:
Fins of a feather
The 2025 Comedy Central Roast of Joel Willick
Something interesting/exciting
Enjoy!
Do You Remember The War?
A couple of weeks ago, Shmuel started a conversation about Stonemaier Games’ upcoming title Finspan.
Finspan is the latest in the Wingspan series, games about building combinations of cards and enjoying watercolor illustrations. Finspan (fish) and Wyrmspan (dragons) both build on Wingspan’s core while still staying fairly close to the original game.
But why stick to animals? The possibilities are endless.
I have yet to enjoy Wingspan, so I wasn’t going to check out Finspan until I saw Shmuel’s next message:
Wanting to find out why there was a “rating war” over a game that hasn’t come out yet, I headed to the forums on BGG, or Board Game Geek.1 Most of the “1” ratings boil down to:
And most of the “10” ratings boil down to:
There are also a bunch of reviews like this one with no score:
And there are a few reviews from people who have actually played the game, which mostly look like this:
7/10. Played at (insert convention). It was pretty much like Wingspan and Wyrmspan but a little more lightweight. (insert opinion on whether this is a good thing or not). Thankfully they put the fish facts on the cards again. If you liked Wingspan you will probably feel exactly the same about this game. Unless you hate fish. In which case you will hate this game.
This isn’t too surprising, considering Wingspan has an 8/10 on BGG, and is the 32nd highest ranked game on the site.
Wingspan is one of the most well-liked games of all time, so why shouldn’t they make a sequel? Here’s what Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier had to say about it:
A few years ago we had a big internal discussion at Stonemaier Games about the future of the Wingspan brand. We had many requests from fans to explore versions of Wingspan that focus on other creatures, but we didn’t want to just reskin Wingspan with other themes (a “reskin” is when you use the exact same rules, mechanisms, and abilities and simply change the names and art). We were interested in games that were familiar-but-different to Wingspan.
The strategy we eventually decided to pursue was a trilogy of games: Wingspan (birds) was the first, and it would be bookended by the slightly heavier Wyrmspan (dragons) and the slightly lighter Finspan (fish). One of the nice benefits of this strategy is that it would take pressure off Elizabeth Hargrave for future Wingspan expansions—she could proceed at a pace that was best for her creative process (Wyrmspan and Finspan have not impeded the progress of the next Wingspan expansion in any way).
The essay goes on, and is also posted on the forums on BGG. So why the hate? What makes people want to throw Finspan in with Monopoly reskins and Uno slop? I’ll try to answer this question after a short break.
Ethan’s Rule
Recently my friends have been playing a lot of the NYT Connections game, which asks you to find the connection between four different words.
The four connections usually follow the same pattern, with increasing difficulty:
You can even make your own! Here’s one from Ethan:
And here’s one from Joel:
Wait, what’s Ethan’s rule?
If you browse the community-made puzzles, you’ll quickly see that that most people are not following Ethan’s Rule. In fact, you’ll find the community-made Connections a wasteland where, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”2
Maybe this is the part where I should say I don’t really like the Connections…
It feels really good to knowthe subject of the puzzle. But if you don’t, the puzzle might be impossible for you to solve. Maybe it’s not that big of a deal, but it feels a little wrong to me to write something a certain number of people will never be able to solve because they don’t know David Bowie’s first four albums or whatever.3 Anyway, here are what I think are the NYT’s guidelines for a good Connections puzzle:
The four groups of words should be:
Synonyms
Harder synonyms
Otherwise unrelated words used together in a specific context
Four sets of letters somehow related to each other
Ethan’s rule states that each group should only have four words that fit the category.
If writing for a general audience, try to make the puzzle twice as obvious as you think it should be. But if writing for a specific demographic or person, do the opposite. For bonus Ethan points, you can use a word so specific it reveals its category. Examples include “Tenzin” and “poop.”
Should You Deserve To Win?
Lately I’ve gotten to play a lot of We Didn’t Playtest This At All. Here’s the description from the publisher:
The most aptly named game ever!
In this exceptionally silly and awesome game, your objective is to win! Simple enough. Sadly, all of your opponents have the same simple goal, and they're trying to make you lose. Between Rock Paper Scissors battles, being eaten by a random Dragon, or saved by a Kitten Ambush, there are many hazards to avoid.
I usually introduce the game by saying:
The goal of this game is to win.* If you lose, then you don’t win. If everyone else loses, then you win.4
In WDPTAA, players take turns drawing and playing cards until they either win, lose, win then lose, lose then win, win and lose, etc. Most cards add a new way to either win or lose:
Some cards revel in randomness:
And some cards immediately end the game:
The game also comes with some blank cards to write on. Here are the cards Joel and I made when we opened my copy, probably sometime around 2013. Of course, no playtesting occurred.
At first, we followed the general shape of the other cards.
And we also took some of the game’s elements to its logical conclusion.5 These last four are my favorites, in addition to “Narrator,” “Flavor Text,” and all the others.
You can probably tell that I love this game a lot. I even highlighted it out on my graph of the 1006 games I played last year, and was in my top 10 games of 2024.
WDPTAA’s middling BGG score was fresh in my mind while reading reviews for Fishspan. I wonder what people are saying about one of my favorite games that has a kind of bad score? Maybe I should go take a look.7
What’s happening here? WDPTAA has over 3,000 ratings on BGG. It’s no Census, but that certainly feels like enough people to have a consensus. That is, if we assume that every kind of person is posting ratings on BGG with equal frequency. If we look at the top-rated board games on BGG, I think we see something different:
The favorite games of BGG posters are big-box, multi-hour contests of strategy around the $100 mark. Contrast this to a review of WDPTAA:
What about the most rated games on BGG? While the top ten most of these have a an average ranking of 141/27,854, 8/10 of them are still competitive strategy games. Here are the most-rated games on BGG:
Given this knowledge, I think we can make a little more sense of those reviews of WDPTAA I mentioned earlier:
If you lose to Magnus Carlsen8 in Chess, it’s probably not because the game is horribly unbalanced was never playtested. But not only can a game of WDPTAA end before you get to take a turn, multiple entire games could pass before you get to play your first card. You lose. No, really! For me the question is: is this objectively a bad thing?
*Of course, if you’re me, this is the best part. But what the heck kind of game isn’t about winning or losing?9
I think it’s safe to say that BGG as a reference for game quality is subjective at best. And as the light blue line shows in my graph from last year, there’s literally no correlation between a game’s score on BGG and how much fun I’ll have:
What does it mean for a game to get a 5/10 on BGG? WDPTAA is the 201st worst-ranked game on BGG, with a 5.4/10. The lowest-ranked game is Tic-Tac-Toe, coming in at #27,854 and scoring a 3.66/10. So WDPTAA ranking 27,653/27,854 and scoring a 5.4/10 is bad. Like, pretty frickin bad.
So, is We Didn’t Playtest This At All a bad game? Did they really not playtest it at all?
Ultimately I think this question is meaningless because the answer is so subjective. Will you enjoy the game as much as me? Maybe. I think it’s fair to say that if the purpose of a rating is to tell someone how much fun they’ll have playing a game, and if BGG’s user base is a highly specific population, and if BGG’s ratings don’t even go as low as 1 or 0, and if BGG obfuscates how each individual rating is truly generated,10 then I think I can understand where such angry comments on Finspan11 and WDPTAA come from: We are in desperate need of a better way to talk about board games.
Lately I’ve been thinking about games in terms of how “interesting” and “exciting” they are. I put those terms in quotation marks because they’re so subjective that I’m not sure how useful they are. However I think rating games from 0-10 or 0-1 (binary) on their I/E factor could get us a lot farther than “good” and “bad.” I’ll use myself as an example:
It’s probably worth repeating that what interests and excites me is almost certainly different from what interests and excites you. Some observations I have:
Excitement is much more important to me than depth of strategy. For instance Cascadia was a very interesting game but had so little excitement I almost regretted pulling it out the second time.
Games with a social element are much more interesting to me than resource management or area control, some of the hallmarks of top-performing games on BGG. Most of the “greats” are simply not interesting to me.
If I was really savvy my graph would also have “politics” on the z axis. Suffice it to say there are other factors that affect my enjoyment of a game outside of interest and excitement.
Go Fish is great fun with the right six-year-old.
I totally get that this approach takes more effort to understand than “5.4/10,” but I think it communicates a lot more information. And if you make a graph for yourself, send it to me! I wanna see them! Thanks for reading everybody! Until next time!
BONUS MANGA
The foremost digital location for all things board gaming.
Communist Manifesto, “Bourgeois and Proletarians”
This is of course when writing for a general audience. And look, Ma! I saved the negative part until the very end!
Shan: You’re reveling in this explanation.
Me: And?
We weren’t thinking about any of this at the time, but it’s pretty apparent we understood the game almost right away! Pretty cool!
It turned out I played just over 100 games last year but forgot a few. Click the link to read more.
This was a bad idea.
I originally typed this out as Cals Magnesson, which I think is pretty funny.
The answer to this question, is, of course, all the best ones.
This, Will, is called lying.
Thanks for sticking with me. I got back there eventually!
i was promised a joel roast
It is interesting to note that the makers of Everdell have just released a new standalone game called Everdell Silverfrost (it looks so pretty, and yes, I did Kickstart the game solely because it has cute drawings of animals), and the BG community has not treated them the same at all, even though it is set in the "World of Everdell" and they are also expanding on a popular franchise name / treating it like a cash cow. I wonder why the hate was reserved for the "World of Span." I decided to order Finspan to spite the haters (but I have not yet left a 10 score; yet).