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What are all of the games that have ever reached the #1 rank on boardgamegeek.com's Geek Rating list? The current #1 is Pandemic Legacy, and prior to that it was Twilight Struggle.

doppelgreener
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Hal
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  • This would probably be a better question to ask on the BGG forum. Here's a little bit of context though: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/75946/history-boardgamegeek-completely-useless-statistic – LeppyR64 Jun 10 '16 at 01:48
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    I don't think that [twilight-struggle] and [pandemic-legacy] are appropriate tags for this question, because it's not about those games but rather the list they were part of. Unfortunately, I don't know what tag this question should be tagged with. – Thunderforge Jun 10 '16 at 02:32
  • I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out what tags I could put for this, and none of the things I wanted to put existed, and I didnt have enough reputation to create new tags. – Hal Jun 10 '16 at 02:33
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    From the Help Center: "For a question to be on topic, it must relate to a game that is on topic [...]" This question is about a web site, not a game. Therefore, it is not on topic. – Rainbolt Jun 10 '16 at 14:42
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    @Rainbolt: A question like "What are the best board games ever?" wouldn't be closed as off topic, but it would be closed as opinion-based. By writing a similar question grounded in fact instead of opinion (what games were demonstrably considered the best by one of the largest online board game communities), I'd think that OP avoids the opinion-based closure without veering off topic. – Benjamin Cosman Jun 10 '16 at 18:57
  • @BenjaminCosman That the opinions are from a large board game community does not make it fact. – Rainbolt Jun 10 '16 at 19:31
  • I'm not saying those games are factually the best, only that this question can be answered factually. (I would not approve of Q:"What are the best games ever?" A:"BGG says it's [these 6]".) A true opinion question is a mess - several opposing answers with the "correct" one chosen entirely at the whim of the asker. This question however has (Jefromi's and SocioMatt's versions of) one clearly correct and useful answer. – Benjamin Cosman Jun 10 '16 at 20:02
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    @Rainbolt I'm not a fan of the logic there, using "this is about X which is about games, not about a game itself" as a close reason. Some questions in that category are certainly close-worthy, but I don't think all are (e.g. we've had questions about logistics of game tournaments), so we should always need a more specific close reason. This question in particular seems on par with, say, questions about the history of Spiel des Jahres, which I suspect people would be okay with. – Cascabel Jun 10 '16 at 23:04
  • @Jefromi Fair point. I retracted my close vote even though I think the question is primarily opinion based, just because the user is new and I want to be more welcoming. I do not think that the opinions of a community any more on topic here than the opinions of individuals. On another note, where are all of the "too broad" close votes coming from? The answer is a finite list, and a pretty small one at that. – Rainbolt Jun 11 '16 at 16:40

2 Answers2

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Strangely, Wikipedia had this information:

  • Paths of Glory (August 19, 2001 - February 20,2002)
  • Tigris and Euphrates (February 20, 2002 - 2002)
  • Puerto Rico (2002 - August 2008)
  • Agricola (August 2008 - December 2010)
  • Twilight Struggle (January 2011 - December 2015)
  • Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (January 2016 - Present).

As Jefromi's answer shows, the dates aren't quite as nicely laid out as Wikipedia shows, but these are the games that have been #1 at some point in time based on persistent user ratings.

If we expanded it to games that rose to #1 because of bugs or user coordination, three more games are added: (1) The Game of Life, (2) Monkey Auto Races, and (3) Die Macher. The specific reasons for each are described on the Wikipedia page.

The games that have hit #1 are also listed on BGG in one of the Completely Useless Statistics threads.

Update:

As of December 29th, 2017, Gloomhaven is the #1 rated board game.

SocioMatt
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  • Trigis and Euphrates says it's "February 20, 2002 - 2002", and I see that it's like that on Wikipedia too. Is there a way to find out the accurate dates? – Thunderforge Jun 12 '16 at 05:55
  • @Thunderforge My guess is no, unless BGG is keeping that information somewhere else that we haven't been able to find. Nowhere seems to reference exactly when it switched to Puerto Rico, and there aren't screengrabs going that far back for BGG. – SocioMatt Jun 13 '16 at 12:15
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If you scrape all the versions of the current browse page on archive.org (that's sorted by geek rating, right?), you get this:

2009-02-05 Agricola (2007)
2010-04-07 Puerto Rico (2002)
2010-11-05 Agricola (2007)
2010-11-21 Puerto Rico (2002)
2011-01-06 Twilight Struggle (2005)
2011-01-16 Puerto Rico (2002)
2011-02-03 Twilight Struggle (2005)
2016-01-01 Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (2015)

Note that those are the date archive.org scraped the page, not necessarily the exact dates the rankings changed.

The page was at different urls and formats before that (and wasn't always crawlable, it looks like) and I haven't bothered scraping any of them yet.

Cascabel
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  • Does anyone know what it was prior to 2009? – Hal Jun 10 '16 at 02:01
  • @Hal Look at the link Leppy provided, plenty of them are there. I'm sure I'll get around to going through some of the older versions at some point if no one else does. – Cascabel Jun 10 '16 at 02:01
  • I don't know how to do 'scrape' but maybe someone knows how to check. I seem to remember quite a few different games reaching top of list on 1st April as April Fools Jokes. I believe that many users all rating something 10 for the day. Should these be included as well for completeness? – StartPlayer Jun 10 '16 at 10:53