I don't play a lot of rated online boardgame matches because I'm not excited to game with internet strangers, but I did some recently to get a rough calibration of how strong my local game group and I was surprised to find how weak online play is below the absolute highest level. Even top 50 folks (p99.9, game has 50k rated players) regularly blunder as badly as p95 video game players do in https://danluu.com/p95-skill/.

I wonder why board game skill is lower than video game skill.

Jamie Brandon pointed out to me that, in retrospect, this shouldn't have been surprising because, e.g., if you look at any major video game, there's a ton of strategy content out there, top streamers make > $100M/yr ("only" > $10M/yr if don't do gambling ads), people can hire coaches for something like $40/hr, etc.

But if you look at the current most popular modern board game, Ark Nova, there's one youtuber who does strategy videos and they get ~1k views per video and earn zero.

And, per https://mastodon.social/@danluu/110510472295851204, almost all of the strategy content out there is quite poor (the one Ark Nova youtuber is pretty good, though).

So then my question (which I suspect is unanswerable) is, what fraction of the higher blunder rate comes from decisions being richer decisions that are easier to blunder and what fraction comes from players being worse?

My guess is that this almost exclusively comes from players being worse, but I wonder if there's a way to figure this out.

@danluu Which youtuber is this? I searched youtube and only came up with generic board game channels.

@danluu oh, maybe it's https://www.youtube.com/@victorypointgaming/videos ?

@ouguoc Oh, I wasn't familiar with that one! I guess there's more than one!

I was thinking of Sam at "No Wonders" who's done videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfIKe9v1lLU and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbHZHNrAz6E.

@danluu Ah, fantastic, thank you.

(For what it's worth, I agree that very little of the play space has been deliberately mapped out in Ark Nova, and that swamps any other effects that might be at play.)

@ouguoc although this is now par for the course, I find it odd how bad the top ranked BGG strategy articles for Ark Nova are. The #1 article has these 5 points and I would say (1) and (2) are completely wrong (you sometimes want to do 2, but should not particularly prioritize it), (3) is meaningless, and (5) is true, but extremely obvious (there is no 4). The #2 article is a map tier ranking which is wrong on the map rankings and even more wrong on specifics, like the highlighted bit.

@ouguoc The first article is at least written by someone who says they just want to open the discussion, so they don't claim to be correct, but the second is by someone who claims to be a very strong player with deep knowledge. I briefly wondered if they had some kind of really interesting unorthodox strategy and then I looked them up. They're rated 260 with enough games that their rating is meaningful.

IME, people rated 150-200 play as if they don't understand the rules of the game

@ouguoc or are so bad at the game that they somehow can't beat players who actually don't know the rules of the game. Somehow, someone in that rating range has the #2 rated strategy article and, really, the #1 thing that claims to be an article because the #1 thing is really just trying to be a starting point for a discussion.

The #4 article is also basically totally wrong from the major points to minor asides. Another one written by someone who has no idea how to play.

@ouguoc There are a bunch of questions I have that I think would be interesting to discuss, but I don't know where a good discussion could happen. On the BGG forums, there are maybe 5 players who know what they're talking about and 60-ish who are clearly terrible at the game and the people write a lot more messages for some reason.

I miss the golden age of BGG strategy discussions, where people who actually knew what they were talking about had strategy discussions.

@ouguoc An example question I have is, what criteria do you use to determine when to not upgrade Association? In some games, it makes sense to do an early upgrade and the question is moot, but that isn't super common, so what do you do in other games? When the game has 40-60 points before the end of the game, if you have strong cards in hand, you can often plan the entire rest of the game and see that upgrading Association isn't worth it because the money spent on donations would

@ouguoc mean that it takes 1-2 more turns to force the end of the game. But sometimes you don't have strong enough cards in hand to know that you can force the end of the game in N moves or less, so then what are your criteria for upgrading Association?

Another question is, what enclosure sizes do you target when you opportunistically build enclosures with no animal in hand (mid-game and later, not early game, of course) and when would you not do an opportunistic build?