This is the fifth year I’ve done the Decay Rates analysis… I think it it yields some intriguing information. I’m not sure my work here is statistically sound (in fact, I’m pretty sure it’s bogus number crunching) but it’s interesting. (That’s your cue to smile & grin knowingly.)

Anyway, what I did was to take the top 350 games (percentage of plays-wise) from the last fourteen years – the cut-off number ended up being an average of 2.20% or better over time. For comparison…

• 2010: 1.95%
• 2009:  2.04%
• 2008: 2.08%
• 2007: 2.00%

I’m inclined to believe that this number remaining pretty consistent over the past four  years means something – not sure what, though. (Speculation is, as always, welcome.)

For this particular exercise in determining decay rates of games, I then set aside games with 4 or less years on the list… leaving me with 242 games. (Again, for comparison, there were:

• 263 games in 2010
• 250 games in 2009
• 239 games in 2008
• 230 games in 2007

To do the decay calculation, I:

1. Took the largest percentage played number from each game.
2. Compared it to the current (2010) percentage played number for each game.
3. Divided that amount by the number of years since it had first appeared on the Five & Dime Lists.

Two games showed no rate of decay whatsoever – they have appeared on the list for 5+ years and their highest percentage played is in 2010:

• Glory to Rome
• Hive
• Saboteur

You might want to know the previous years’ results, of course:

• 2010: Arkham Horror & Hive
• 2009: Arkham Horror, Descent: Journeys in the Dark & Glory To Rome
• 2008: Tichu & Chicken Cha Cha Cha
• 2007: Downfall of Pompeii, Hive & Uno

Hive is is the first game to manage a three-peat… and Glory to Rome jumped back in as well. (Saboteur is a result of publishing the MUCH-needed expansion…)

Here’s the chart with the rest of the top 20 games… that is, the games that showed the least decay over 5+ years time. (There’s actually 21 games on this chart, as the final 2 games were very close in percentage.)

For the first time, the list showed a LOT of flux… ten (10!) games dropped off the top twenty and a number of new games appeared.

In case you’re not completely overwhelmed by the statistics, here’s a chart with the 20 games who’ve shown the highest rates of decay. (Note – to show a high rate of decay, you have to start from a high position.)

I’m not sure I’m really qualified to comment beyond the numbers… but this list of highest decay rates holds almost as still as the list of the lowest decay rates. There is only one new game on the list that didn’t jump on because it just became eligible… and that’s Shadows Over Camelot.