The OSAI Project is an attempt to use Open Source Artificial Intelligence to rank, review, and rate board games.  The first part of the project was to have OSAI use it’s database to rate from 1 – 10 the top 100 BGG board games in terms of several categories:

OSAI Top 100 Board Games – Price Is No Object

OSAI Top 25 Board Games ranking – Bang For Your Buck

An Interview with OSAI – Learn more about its methodology from the bot itself!

• Strategy – The amount of strategic decisions during a game
• Complexity – How difficult it is to learn and master
• Player Interaction – How much player vs player orplayer with player action is there.
• Replayability – How often can it be played where every game feels new
• Game Rating – An average of all known board game ratings or scores for the game
• Cost – the relative cost of the game

From thats several scores were calculated:

• Weight = Strategy + Complexity
• Playability = (Player Interaction + Replayability + Game Rating) – Complexity
• Play Rating = 2*(Weight + Playability)
• Value Rating = Play Rating / Cost
• Final Score =  Play Rating + Value Rating

In addition to ratings and calculated scores, OSAI also recommends up to 10 games similar to the game it reviewed.  Each individual review is available by clicking the game name in the chart below.

The chart shows the following information about each game:

• BGG Ranking
• Name of the game – click to read the review
• BGG Geek Rating
• BGG Average Rating
• OSAI Final Score
• OSAI Rank
• Change in Rank BGG to OSAI

While this is inteded as a summary of the project, a few details about the OSAI Top 100 Board Games results:

• The OSAI database is only through 2021. Games made in 2022 or later can’t be reviewed ceurrently.
• While the final score includes the bang for the buck rating, the ranking can be filtered to show ranking with no value coefficient, the heaviest games, the most playable games, the best easy games, and more.  The analysis of these alternate rankings will be covered in it’s separate blog posts.
• OSAI seems to know what it like.  It tends to rank multiple editions of a game very closely, whether that is love or hate.
• OSAI also seems to know what it hates.  That would tend to be shallow games, particularly if they are not cheap.
• OSAI cannot see, therefore it gives no points for aestethics or how pretty a game is(at least I don’t think it does).  However the game ratings score would include such subjective criteria in its value so it is accounted for in some fashion.  But OSAI does not seem all that impressed by pretty games that don’t have much to the game play.
• OSAI can come up with different scores on different queries.  This may seem troublesome, but the ratings don’t wildly fluctuate, just move +/-1 point or less.  However a human reviewer if reviewing a game at different times would probably have the same small amount of variance, as many times a game will sit between whole numbers in a rating(is it a 7 or an 8?).

Right now it would appear the best way to look at the OSAI Final Score is:

Hall of Fame  90+

Great Game   85 – 89.99

Cross-Genre  82 – 84.99

Genre Game 77 – 81.99

Niche Game  70 – 76.99

Vintage Game 60 – 60.99

Children 59.99 and below