Front Page

Content

Authors

Game Index

Forums

Site Tools

Submissions

About

You May Also Like...

T
thegiantbrain
October 19, 2022
MT
Matt Thrower
February 01, 2021
Hot
T
thegiantbrain
May 22, 2020
Hot

Getting It

Rants & Raves
AL
Andi Lennon
April 08, 2020
Hot
AL
Andi Lennon
March 18, 2020
Hot

Kingdom Death Cult

Rants & Raves
U
ubarose
March 06, 2020
Hot
U
ubarose
February 07, 2020
Hot
U
ubarose
January 17, 2020
Hot
U
ubarose
January 10, 2020
Hot
T
thegiantbrain
December 17, 2019
Hot

Critical Faculties

Rants & Raves
U
ubarose
September 13, 2019
Hot
U
ubarose
August 30, 2019
Hot
U
ubarose
August 16, 2019
Hot
U
ubarose
August 09, 2019
Hot

Ameritrash Game Ratings 2009

Hot
MT Updated
There Will Be Games

Around this time of year, for the past few years, I’ve made a habit of listing a top fifty games according to the boardgamegeek ratings of people who hold the “ameritrash” microbadge. The idea originally was to get a better handle on what, exactly, the term was supposed to describe but as time has gone on it’s become more of a matter of interest onto itself, simply to recommend the best games to fans of the genre, even as the term itself has, perhaps, become even more ephemeral. This year, due to time constraints I’m barely able to find the space to keep up my article output, let alone make lists on BGG, so compiling an article around the statistics instead seemed an obvious solution. Hopefully in a few weeks time, when things have calmed down a bit, I’ll be able to post that list with some actual numbers on it and you’ll see the exact ratings and positions of the games I’m going to talk about. In the meantime I’ve picked out a few highlights for you to enjoy.

The Gold Standard

This list is compiled according to the average BGG rating for a given game for users with the Ameritrash microbadge. A game needs at least 30 ratings amongst people with the badge to qualify, expansions don’t count, and for multiple editions of the same game only the highest-rated one counts.  One problem I’ve noticed this year is that ever more games are popping into the list with around that minimum of 30 ratings, and this is especially true of a lot of wargames - unsurprising perhaps given the close relationship between the two styles of game. But it is problematic in the sense that it skews the list away from what hardcore Ameritrash fans or those sampling the genre for the first time might want in terms of good recommendations, and it’s worth noting of course that at 30 ratings, a single bad rating can make a dramatic difference to the score and the position on the list.

There’s also been an ongoing problem with a lot of games, mainly Euros but a few Ameritrash titles as well, popping into the list one year with very high ratings and then vanishing the next. This also isn’t very helpful either for recommendations or in terms of pinning down what styles of game Ameritrash players tend to favour.

On BGG they combat these problems by doing all the fancy stuff with Bayesian averages and so forth. I can’t really do that. So instead I’ve invented what I called the Gold Award. To earn the Gold Award a game simply has to meet two additional criteria: it must have at least sixty ratings, and it must have been on the list in a previous year. This is actually a great way of pinning down what most people would see as the core Ameritrash classics (such as Arkham Horror and Descent and so forth) and a good twenty out of the top fifty this year qualify for this award. Rather than name them all - which would be dull - instead I’m indicating the award in this article by writing the game name in gold font, so you’ll know them when you see them. I’m going to go on and talk about some of these in other sections of the list, but for now I’m just going to give a mention to one of the less obvious recipients: Star Wars: Queens Gambit. I’ve never played this game so I can’t comment on what might make it great, but I’m amazed it has the legs to get the gold award because it’s so rare and such a pain to set up! Clearly there must be a bigger hardcore of dedicated collectors out there in the Ameritrash community than I imagined!

Eurogames

I’ve always thought it was particularly interesting to look at what Euros the Ameritrash crowd favour because I think that’s actually a better window onto the heart of what Ameritrash means than the AT games themselves. Why? Because Euros are more mechanically stripped-down so it’s easier to identify particular mechanics, styles and trends in this genre than in the more gloriously chaotic combat games that we profess to love.

The top three Euros on the list this year are particularly surprising because none of them are the “usual suspects” in terms of the Euros that we like to celebrate. Indeed I’ll wager that if you tried to guess what they were you’d get none of them right. Third goes to Martin Wallace with Brass, a game that’s been on my wish list for ages (I find it hard to resist games that are rooted in English geography and history) and which I now have a rather larger incentive to buy and try. Second place, out of the blue, goes to a new entry: Dominion: Intrigue. The parent game was the favoured Euro last year and has now dropped like a stone to vanish off the list completely so it’ll be interesting to see if the sequel does the same. But I hear it’s a rather more interactive version of the original, which is what we were all asking for when it came out, so perhaps it’ll retain a position after all. Top spot though goes to a game that you might perhaps imagine would be making waves in this particular community, and that’s Through the Ages.

None of those three were old favourites that won the gold award though. In those terms the big winner over a number of years is Railroad Tycoon which has retained a reasonable position on ever iteration of it that I’ve produced. The only other Euros to make the gold grade were Galaxy Trucker and my own favourite Imperial which are only just hanging on to the top 50 by the skin of their teeth.

Does this tell us anything about what Ameritrash fans like? I think it does. There’s one trend that stands out as uniting those titles: five out of those six games have unusually high levels of interaction for a Euro (the odd one out being Galaxy Trucker). You can stir up other vague connections about theme and weight and so forth but interaction is really the only one that stands up to scrutiny. That’s what we like.

Wargames

I mentioned at the start of the article that there were more and more wargames making into the list. However, it’s still instructive to point out the top three not least because two are gold award winner and so likely to be games that anyone with a passing interesting in Ameritrash should try - you never know, you might find them an excellent gateway into the compelling world of historical conflict simulations.

No prizes for guessing the top historical game on our list: Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage, the wider gaming world’s favourite consim since time immemorial. Well, 1996 in any case. The second position goes to a well-known but relatively rarely played game that has garnered huge superlatives from everyone that’s tried it: Here I Stand, a great choice if you can find five other gamers with an entire day to spend learning and playing this careful balance of maneuver, mechanics and diplomacy. It’s perhaps not so surprising to see it ranking here given that it’s widely seen as one of the bes multi-player wargames around, and of course Amertriash gamers tend to like their multi-player option as much as everyone else. Third position goes to Combat Commander: Europe another game which I want to try but never really seem to get round to. The lack of armour originally put me off, but the more I learn about the game the more I’m beginning to believe that this is a strength of the design rather than a weakness.

The New Guard

Having made a big song-and-dance about signifying the older classics that have earned gold status, it would be remiss of me I think to go on and name the games at the very top of the list without spending a bit of time talking about the new kids on the block - highly rated games that have arrived on the chart only this year. It will surprise no-one what the top two new entries are: Chaos in the Old World and Middle Earth Quest with the Old World offering comfortably outstripping its Tolkienesque rival in both rating and number of raters. What might be more surprising is just how well-received these games have been: both have an average rating comfortably over 8. Only time will tell if these imposters have what it takes to stick around.

The third place new entry is Dominion: Intrigue which we’ve already discussed, so we’ll skip over that and take a look at the next contender: Tales of the Arabian Nights. Even though this is a reprint, the original never made it into any of my previous top fifty lists so all the work that Z-man put in to bring the game up to date seems to have paid dividends. It also has a lot of ratings already, and so should be an easy gold status game next year.

I also can’t leave this section without giving mention to the biggest mover of 2009 which shot from lurking around the 50th position right up into the top five and gold award status, helped immensely by a new edition to make the game widely accessible to a new generation of gamers. That game is Comic Encounter, a title that I’m still trying to get my head round after several plays. Is it a negotiation game, or a mechanical strategy game, or complete chaos? I’m not sure yet, but I’m looking forward to some games of it and an upcoming expansion while I try and figure it out.

The Crème de la Crème

For my own amusement I update these ratings on a fairly frequent basis and take a look at the resulting chart to see how new games are doing. Throughout all the time I’ve been watching the 2009 ratings, three games have been clamouring for the top spot. The actual number one has been changing position fairly frequently, and given that it’s always been these three games in the running and that they’re a comfortable distance in terms of average rating in ahead of the #4 game, whilst being very close in average ratings themselves it seemed a bit rude to separate them. So I’m presenting them as a team - games anyone with a passing interest in the genre should check out.

And given that this is a genre-based analysis and given the taste crossover we’ve already mentioned, it seems fitting that two of them are very solidly Ameritrash games and that one of them is (arguably) a wargame. It’s also interesting that between them they seem to cover all the basic elements of what makes an Ameritrash game interesting to play, albeit each game specialising in a different aspect: detailed tactical combat, heavy social and personal interaction, and aggressively interactive risk management. Given that FFG is commonly seen to dominate the Ameritrash publishing output it’s also nice to see that all three are from different publishers. Guessed what they are yet?

Our three top dogs this year are Space Hulk, Battlestar Galactica and Twilight Struggle, great games all and ones I’m very happy to see occupying the lofty heights of this years chart (I rate them 9, 9, and 10 respectively). Space Hulk took a bit of a knock over the GW content-pull storm in a teacup but hardcore fans of the genre don’t really seem to have taken much notice and continue to rate the game very highly indeed.

However I feel it would be remiss of me to close without mentioning one more game. The game itself is comfortably in the top ten, but what really makes it stand out are the marks given to an expansion. Now I know I said I wasn’t going to count expansions but the statistics in this case speak for themselves as to why an exception should be made. Whilst those games at the top of the chart are averaging around 8.6, this expansion alone exceeds the 9 mark - a huge gap that makes it worthy of comment. The expansion is question is Shattered Empires and the game itself, the erstwhile king of Ameritrash if only my rules were a little different, is of course Twilight Imperium 3.


Matt is the founder of Fortress: Ameritrash. He is also a regular columnist for Board Game News. Click here for more board game articles by Matt.

There Will Be Games
Matt Thrower (He/Him)
Head Writer

Matt has been writing about tabletop games professional since 2012, blogging since 2006 and playing them since he could talk.

image

Articles by Matt

Log in to comment