I’ve talked about how board games have different weights at different times. But I think it is generally worth coming back to again because they are terms that new gamers should know. Now, a lot of the reason that new gamers need to know it is because players like Board Game Geek, which have ratings for weight can be hard to understand. And more experienced can run into issues properly explaining.

Heavy vs Medium vs Light Weight Games

Let’s start with something that I’ve talked about before, but I want to talk about it in a different way. I want to talk about it from the point of view of an experienced gamer. This came up in a conversation last night when talking about Catan and how influential Catan was and whether or not Catan is a good game. But it applies to game weight as well. When I first played Catan, and for a lot of us this will be the case. As we play more games, now Catan feels much lighter, much more random, much more mass market.

And Catan goes from when we first played it, a medium weight game, into a light weight game. And that is because of our shifting perceptions of gaming. At this point in time, I could learn and teach Catan for the first time in a few minutes, the game isn’t that complex for me. However, when I was learning it back then, it was different. There wasn’t the oral history and teaching of a game that naturally occurred with Clue, Monopoly or Uno. And Catan is more complex or as complex as those games.

What’s the Point?

I do have a point with all of that, I think that often as people in the gaming hobby versus people getting into the gaming hobby, weight can vary drastically. For example, I play a ton of games but a war game that is a 2.5 is going to feel way heavier to me because it is outside of game types I know how to learn. But for a war gamer, a war game with a 2.5 out of 5 weight wouldn’t be hard to learn.

So weights of games change depending on the experience level of the gamer. The more that you play, the lighter games will become, because the more you will know how games work and how to learn games. To pull another example of how this works, Gloomhaven is not a complex game to me, at least in how it plays. But for even a lot of experienced gamers, that is a lot to learn. So be helpful to new players and try and understand their weighting and understanding of games.

Family Weight/Gateway Games

Now a good way to get around those light/medium/heavy debates is by calling a game family weight or gateway. These two can be slightly different as an older group of people can probably handle something slightly heavier, but there will be overlap.

A family weight or gateway game is the one that you’d take to play with your family. Can you teach the game to your parents, aunts, uncles, or maybe they’re gamers, so some other group of non-gamers easily. Where the difference between family and gateway could arise is that family is going to imply for most people it’ll be a topic/style/text that is family friendly as well.

These are the games like Catan though, the ones that I might find to be super light now. So I don’t need to say that it’s a light game or an easy to learn game, because it might not be. I can call it a gateway game which makes it feel friendlier when someone is learning. Calling it light and someone not getting it makes them feel inferior, but the nomenclature of gateway, that has a very different feel.

Filler Games

Next we go onto filler games. What is a filler game you might ask? That’s a game with a quick to the table and play time. It is a game you can pull out of the box and get played with a number of people in a few minutes while waiting for another game to wrap up or more people to show up. These games don’t always add in a ton of strategy to them, instead they are meant for making fast decisions and getting onto the next turn. These games are often so fast that we don’t really consider them in gateway or family weight categories because it’s less about playing it to teach new people.

What About More?

Well, there are a lot more types of games out there. I talk about a lot of them over the years and they can be found over here and more topics on board games. I think that there is a lot of interesting game types to talk about and I can dive into them more.

But this topic of game weights and kind of the different types of lighter games as interesting to talk about. I skipped party games because I tend to think people who are looking for light or gateway games have already played a lot of party games. And there is certainly a wider world of games that can be jumped into as people play more games.

I also wanted to talk about it this because I do see people often encouraging new players to get bigger and more complex games. I think it’s a good reminder for myself and for other more experienced board gamers to remember the board games that we started out with. Even if Catan wasn’t our gateway game, we all had some game like that which we started with.

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