Hello and welcome to the latest edition of “Cool New Ranking Engine Thing”! This time, I’m excited to announce the new Game Ranking Details page! This is a feature that has been on the horizon for the Ranking Engine for a long while - since the beginning actually. The Ranking Engine has been slowly collecting (completely anonymous) ranking and ranking history data for the past few years but none of it has been available to peruse, until now.

A quick aside before we get into the details: when data is being presented in charts, those charts certainly can be viewed on mobile but operate best on a larger screen. Larger screens give the data points room to spread out making them more readable.

How to find this data

The portal to all ranking detail data is found on the Rankings page. Each game in the overall rankings list is now a link that will take you to the game ranking details for that game when clicked.

In addition, you will see a new tab on the Rankings page called “Search Games”. The top rankings only contain the top 500 games. If you don’t find the game you are looking for there, you can search all the games in our database by clicking the “Search Games” tab, entering a search string and seeing what you find.

What will you find there?

The first thing you will find on the game ranking details page, besides the name of the game, is a trending indicator. This indicates if a game is recently trending up in the rankings or down. Next you will find a link to BGG if you wanted more details about the game.

Game Rank Info

Now we are getting into the details. There are three main time period categories of data that the Ranking Engine tracks:

  1. All-time - this incorporates all of the ranking data since May of 2018 - when we began collecting this data.
  2. Current Year - this contains only the ranking data for the current year. This allows each year to be its own contest. A game may take some time to climb the all-time rankings but may have a better showing in a given year.
  3. Last 30 Days - this contains only the ranking data for the last 30 days. This is interesting for the same reason the yearly data is, but for a more focused time period.

Let’s look at the different columns.

  • Current Rank - the rank the game currently is for each of the time period categories
  • Peak Rank - the highest rank a game has reached within the time period category
  • Times Ranked - how many times the game has been ranked for that time period category.
  • Score - this is the score calculated for the game based on all the rankings in a time period category
  • % of Lists - the percent the game was on of all lists ranked in the time period category. This is an indication of how many people play or own the game.

All-time Rank History

This combination line and bar chart shows all-time rankings and times ranked over time. The line chart tracks a game’s all-time ranking history. You can easily see if a game is trending up or down. The bar chart shows how many times the game was ranked for each time period.

Rank Distribution

This bar chart compares different rank ranges. It shows how many times a game was ranked, say, in the top 10 compared to other ranges. The last range in the chart is 101+ which is a total of all times the game was ranked over 101. It can be interesting to see a game with many ranks in the top 10 but also many ranks over 101 - indicating a polarizing game.

What’s next?

  • More charts - I will be adding more charts to show yearly history and maybe some other interesting data.
  • What do you want to see? - If you have other ideas of ranking details you’d like to see, please contact us. We’d love to hear your ideas.