Back when I was a graduate student, I spent a lot of time as a chess coach and tutor. Because I was teaching at a K-12 school, parents of some of the younger children asked if their kids were ready to play chess. It’s an interesting question, and the answer is different for each person. In general, my experience was that most students could easily learn how the pieces move when they were five, but it took another year before they understood how the pieces work in combination (i.e., strategy).

I was curious about the age at which most board games can be played, so I gathered data from BoardGameGeek (link below). These graphs include data on the 100 board games with the highest number of voters, which I’m interpreting as a proxy for popularity.

In the top left graph, I compare the manufacturer’s suggested minimum age to the players’ suggested minimum age, which is determined by a poll on the website. Out of the 100 games, the ages are the same for 50. In 34 cases, the manufacturer has an older minimum, and in the remaining 16, the players selected an older minimum.

The top right graph shows the slight trend that longer games are generally designed for older players. I’ve noted that it means older players have a longer attention span, but of course, a lot of it has to do with the complexity of the game and strategy, not just how long the player can stay seated at the board.

The bottom left graph suggests that players tend to give newer games higher ratings. I’m not sure I agree that we are creating better board games than we have in the past; as I said, I’m a big chess fan (as well as go…and I’m pretty partial to Carcassonne, which came out in 2000). But there is often a tendency for people to correlate newer with better.

The bottom right graph confirms that popularity is not indicative of quality. At best, this graph shows a weak positive correlation, but many of the highest rated games do not appear in the 100 most popular list.

Data source: http://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame?sort=numvoters&sortdir=desc