Yes, I realized that when I was talking about the Monday streams, I forgot to factor in that it’s that time of year where I’m doing my Top 100 Games. You can find the previous years here. Like every year I went and used Pub Meeple to rank all the games I’ve played. A few exceptions to that, which I’ll talk about below. I also recorded the process. That’s not ready to debut yet, it’d spoil the whole list. But if you want to play along at home, I really recommend it.

What Is Pub Meeple?

So, like I said already, Pub Meeple is a great way to rank board games or anything really. When I do my Marvel rankings, I use Pub Meeple for that. So you can import or copy in whatever list you want. But for board games, it has a great feature where it uses Board Game Geek‘s API (think a connection to that systems data) to pull in by username. This can populate a list of all the games you’ve rated, own, put on a wishlist, anything like that.

Then you add them to the list and you rank them against each other. I’ll explain a bit more about how the rankings work below.

How It Ranks

Pub Meeple uses a single point comparison to rank. You get two options – Gloomhaven vs Monopoly – and then you pick your favorite. Now let’s say you have played more than two games. And we’ll use letters for this to show how it works:

Pick Between A and B -> A
Pick Between C and D -> D

So you have two groups AB and DC, then Pub Meeple will give you a comparison like below:

Pick Between A and D

Let’s say that you pick D, it would now give you:

Pick Between A and C

If you pick C, you’d get a group of DCAB, you wouldn’t ever compare C and B. If you pick A, you then compare B and C. Basic idea and why if you pick C you’d never compare C and B is that if C is better than A and A is better than B, then we know that C is better than B.

Does It Work?

Yes, it works. If you watch other Top 100 lists, The Dice Towers for example, or other channels do Top 50 or something like that, a lot of them use the ranking engine on Pub Meeple. A number of them also tweak their list after the fact. They do that because if A and B, in my example, are really closely ranked, it might be that in that moment A looks better than B, but when you look at the group of CAB, B might look better than C and because it was so close with A, they might flip stuff around to BCA.

For me, and for some of them, we pick our list and let it be. If in the moment A looks better than B, than, it probably should be ahead of B. Now, this isn’t the “right” way to do it, it is just the easier way for me to do it. I means that I don’t need to go through and look at everything. It also means that I can sometimes surprise myself. There are games that missed the list, which is fair, that I thought might be in my Top 100.

Final Thoughts on Pub Meeple

Pub Meeple is great for what it is, a simple ranking and comparison engine. But in this case simple is good. However, simple also means that you need to take your time to think about it as you go. When I premiere my ranking video, you’ll see that there are a ton of rankings I do and that it takes a while. But that is because I’m talking and also because I want it to be right.

And I said I’d talk about exceptions. So a few to note, I have played a few games only on TTS (TableTop Simulator). Those games were in the rankings early but I removed them until I can play a physical copy. Also, there are some games where they aren’t really different. Aeon’s End has a lot of version. I own a ton of boxes and sets of Dice Throne. Pandemic might be tweaked with Legacy and other versions but it’s still Pandemic. So I put one of them on the list, same with escape room games.

So again, starting tonight at 8:30 PM Central Time, my Top 100 list gets going with 100 through 91. Rank your games that you’ve played and rated and join me then.

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