Dale Yu: If you’ve been following along the past two weeks, we’ve run a number of columns on this blog where writers have listed and described their favorite games of the year.  Kris Hall deserves the credit for the idea behind the entire project, and the rest of the Opinionated Gamers have contributed their ideas to it as well.  I think that reading the “Best Of” lists of my fellow Opinionated Gamers has been very interesting, and it has helped me understand why they like the games that they like.  The lists have also brought a few games to my attention that I had somehow missed in the previous year…

Like most things on the Opinionated Gamers, I tried very hard not to set any specific guidelines on the lists (no set criteria about how to choose games nor even a true guideline on how many games to spotlight)  – so this isn’t the most scientific or standardized process – but it’s still interesting to look at what games the writers chose to highlight.

We’ve had 15 lists published to the blog, and there were another 12 OG members who contributed lists privately without writing up a more detailed piece on them – for a total of 27 “best of” lists.  The most often named game, by a landslide, was 7 Wonders by Repos.

7 Wonders was named on 21 of the 27 lists, more than double the number of times of the second most mentioned game, Fresco by Queen.   Below is a summary of all of the games that were mentioned in this year’s survey.

One interesting way of looking at the results is to see who selected games very popular with others – and who made unique choices.  The easiest method of scoring this is to average the number of Opinionated Games who selected each item on someone’s list.  If a list consisted of solely unique games, the average would be 1.0.  If someone selected the 10 most popular games, the average would be 8.5.  No one quite managed either extreme.

However, because 7 Wonders was _so_ popular, anyone who selected that game naturally had a much higher average.  So the scores were adjusted by removing the single most and least popular games each person selected.

So who are the populists, and who has the most oddball pick?

The person with the most consensus picks was – by a large margin – James Miller.  He did have one unusual choice in Flash Point, but otherwise stuck to more popular selections.  Ignoring 7 Wonders and Flash Point, the games James selected were chosen by 6.7 people each, on average.  The second most populist picks were turned in by Ted Cheatham, with an average of 5.9.  The third – somewhat surprisingly, for such an iconoclast – were Larry Levy’s selections, chosen by an average of 5.7 Opinionated Gamers.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are four folks who – once the most and least popular selections were pulled – had their choices match with fewer than three people on average.  Jonathan Franklin’s was one of the few who didn’t have 7 Wonders, and thus had a less popular pick pulled, but even so still finished fourth lowest at 2.9.  Kris Hall’s raw average was over 5, but pulling out 7 Wonders lowered his average to 2.8.  Joe Huber is the only one with a raw average under three, but without any really popular games to drop dropped the least, to an average of 2.6.  The oddest picks – other than 7 Wonders – belonged to Ted Alspach, who saw the games he chose on an average of only 2.4 lists.

Dale Yu:  The full spreadsheet of the “Best of” Lists can be found here…
OG 2010 Favorites Full Spreadsheet

You can take a peek at everyone’s list and figure out whose taste in games match your own…

Mark Jackson: The following chart compares the number of mentions on the Opinionated Gamers “Best of 2010” lists with the total percentage of game played 5+ times from the Five & Dime 2010 Report.

Two notes:

• I only chose to list the games that had received 3+ mentions on the OG lists.
• The percentages for Dominion: Prosperity and Wits & Wagers Family both include plays of all the games in the franchise.