9

I think competitive board games are quite different from recreational board games in nature and draw different communities. The typical questions asked in the proposals for go, chess,... are very different from the questions asked in the existing boardgames.SE. In each of them the commenters were against a merge into the normal boardgames.SE.

There is a similar discussion atGame specific sites but it's more in the light of a merge with boardgames.SE, and not a seperate site for competitive boardgames.

IMO the difference is similar to the difference between SO and ComputerScience.SE, physics and theoretical physics or the two math sites.

The focus is typically strategy and becoming stronger. There are tournaments and for several of them even a scene of professional players. A typical player puts hundreds of hours into a single game instead of spreading it among dozens of different games, like it is common with recreational boardgames.

Currently there are several such proposals for games like go or chess. But it looks like all of them have a hard time getting enough committers.

The main problem I have with such a merge is that there is relatively little overlap between the individual communities, even if they are similar in nature.

Should these games remain in different proposals, merged into one competitive board game proposal or even into the normal board game community?

3
  • 2
    One thing I'd like to know is how much overlap the commiters to chess, go and the users of the existing boardgames.SE community have.
    – CodesInChaos
    Commented Feb 5, 2011 at 17:24
  • Personally, I feel that this would have the same limitations as the existing Card and Board Games site (as I expressed in the game-specific sites thread), without any real advantages over it. It would be smaller, but still split itself in a similar way - along the lines of specific games. Also, calling it a Competitive Board Games makes it sound a bit unfriendly to amateurs.
    – sjohnston
    Commented Feb 11, 2011 at 21:44
  • 2
    @CodeInChaos - It is possible to see commitment overlap in the site proposals, on the right, under the heading "users also committed to". The Go proposal has 3.4% overlap with Board and Card Games. Chess doesn't have enough overlap with B&CG to be listed (nor is the overlap between chess and Go high enough to be listed. 58% and 42% of Go and Chess committers are committed to no other SE sites at all.
    – sjohnston
    Commented Feb 11, 2011 at 21:52

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
12

Except for being competitive, these games have very little in common. Looking at the typical questions for the proposals, almost none would be of interest for players of the other games.

Competitive board games are not to players as programming languages are to programmers. Advancing your skill in a game requires huge time investments, of which the major part is not applicable to other games.

1
  • Dunno about that, when you compare with the original SE: advancing your ability in a particular language or technology takes a MASSIVE amount of effort yet many different ones co-exist on the same SE.
    – Matthew Galloway
    Commented Jun 1, 2012 at 17:47
6

IMAO - no way these guys are going to survive separately.

It maybe that these topics aren't discussed on the board game site simply because the audience isn't there yet. Creating a separate site may merely exacerbate the problem.

I vote to close these and merge these all into board games. It's not like board games is doing great as is.

Maybe one day these proposals will deserve a separate site, but right now I think it would just be beta suicide for those proposals.

4
  • 8
    I don't think merging into board games will work. You can't force players to join boardgames.SE. The typical statement of such a player is "I'm not interested in boardgames, I'm interested in <SpecificGame>".
    – CodesInChaos
    Commented Feb 5, 2011 at 17:19
  • 1
    I agree, the various game sites should be merged. There is enough cross-over interest in all kinds of games that it would seem to make more sense to have Go be a tag within a larger general gaming site - much like Ruby, Python, C++, etc. are all huge subjects, but tags within the stackoverflow site. Personally, I would much rather join just a single site for all of the various games rather then every individual site for a very specific game.
    – ericg
    Commented Feb 27, 2011 at 2:53
  • 2
    @Code, true, we can't force people to ask and answer on B&CG, but without a significant number of people committing to the individual proposals, the choice won't be between individual sites and B&CG, but between B&CG and non-SE sites, or maybe only non-SE sites. It's not like B&CG is healthy right now.
    – Dave DuPlantis
    Commented Apr 18, 2011 at 20:25
  • The audience is there but just not on SE sites, at least for Chess. I would have no interest in a SE site for chess if I weren't active on SO already. There should be a better system to incorporate fresh users to participate on new sites (just like they do on SO and other existing sites), without being conditioned on their participation on some other SE site.
    – prusswan
    Commented Dec 29, 2011 at 6:53
0
  • I think that if games that are featured are clearly listed, a merger could possibly work. It might require a good bit of effort to get people to understand how the games are separated.
  • The label boardgames could potentially cause a damper in the effort.
  • Tag subscriptions could help but, current SE users would be most likely to be aware of that option upon initially using it. Users that are new to SE could find it difficult.
  • Hardcore players may still be turned off.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .