Thursday, February 09, 2006

Five & Dime 2005: Lo, How The Mighty Have Fallen

These are games that have appeared on the Five & Dime lists before... and have fallen in overall playing percentages.

Gamepercentage loss from 2004
Attika-36.26%
St Petersburg-32.22%
Ticket To Ride-29.19%
San Juan-24.24%
Goa-17.88%
Liar's Dice/Bluff/Perudo-16.46%
10 Days/Europa Tour-15.66%
King's Breakfast-15.45%
Puerto Rico-15.35%
Alhambra-14.24%
Power Grid/Funkenschlag-13.94%
Hansa-13.54%
Tongiaki-13.43%
Flaschenteufel/Bottle Imp-12.02%
Santiago-11.92%

Note that many of these games are still highly rated on the overall and/or five/dime lists... this year, with the much larger sampling group, high percentages common to the top games (60%+) completely disappeared. So, Ticket To Ride, San Juan & Puerto Rico can all take pretty big hits in number of players... and still end up in the top ten of the overall five & dime lists.

Here's what I wrote last year:

Likely to be here next year: Ticket To Ride (which will combine natural attrition plus the release of T2R: Europe to take a bit of a fall), Goa (which will succumb to the "gamer-d out" syndrome along with Saint Petersburg), and Tonigaki (which is South Sea Islander for "jumped the shark last spring".)

It's always nice when your predictions are right on the money - contributes to your ego and all that. :-)

In 2006, it'll be Ticket To Ride: Europe (what with the new version & all), Louis XIV (suffering the same fate as Goa) and For Sale (which will drop back down again following it's rerelease) that'll end up here on the "fallen" list.

I'm not sure what to predict about Ingenious, Blokus, & Memoir '44. All three have managed to hold (Memoir '44) or gain over time (Ingenious, Blokus), which confounds the normal patterns for the five & dime lists.

1 comment:

JonBen said...

I agree with Joe... a list of this magnitude every year must be very tasking... you should do a weekly pod cast instead :-)

In any event I disagree with your For Sale prediction, I think it will drop by ~5% but it should stay off of this list. It's a quick game, and still gaining some momentum from it's English release.