Over on Boardgamegeek, you’ll see plenty of references to weight. And I’m not talking about the size of the players.
Games tend to be divided in a spectrum from Light to Heavy among the BGG ratings. Something like Coloretto, or the great Loopin’ Louie is in the light category. Light-Medium includes such favorites as Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne. Medium is Settlers of Catan. Medium-Heavy is Power Grid, and Heavy is Twilight Imperium 3rd ed.
There are some generalizations to be made, with which there are plenty of exceptions. Card games tend to fall on the lighter side of games. The more pieces a game has, the more likely it is to be heavy. The longer it takes, the heavier it tends to be. And in general, the higher luck or chaos factor there is, the lighter it is considered.
To me, though, the distinction is mostly psychological. (This is part of the reason that BGG has the users rate the heaviness of a game instead of there being some kind of weird formula, and why there doesn’t seem to be a consensus on nearly any games.) When people feel like there’s a lot going on, that’s a heavy game. If the game can be played “thought optional”, even if that means you lose, then that’s a light game.
Heaviness is a measure of the perceived complexity of a game, and the amount of impact you perceive your decisions to have on the course of a game. While there are many who think that weight is a function is how complex the rules are, I believe it’s how complex the game appears while playing. While Twilight Imperium is considered to be quite heavy, I find it has quite a lot of luck in it that can’t be overcome by skillful play. I consider Schotten-Totten to be quite heavy in the amount of planning that I have to do to win and the amount of mental energy I have to devote to do well- and it’s relatively short, and played almost entirely with cards. Caylus is one of the heaviest games that I enjoy, but it’s not rated as heavy as many other games, since it can be pretty easy to see what is going on and how things will play out.
Is a heavier game necessarily a better game? Definitely not. I think that’s a common mistake among designers: to wave away issues by saying that it’s “only a light game.” (Is it any surprise that most party games are considered light?)
Even light games should be chock full of interesting decisions, and shouldn’t have luck that overwhelms the player’s ability to make decisions. Meanwhile, there’s no excuse to have heavy games that aren’t as elegant as they could be. While there are many heavy game fans who love learning the ins and outs of a game system, I doubt there’s anybody who really has fun looking through rules to find the one they need in a specific rare situation, and probably nobody who likes accidentally playing a game incorrectly (unless, of course, they end up winning.)
The weight class of a game can help you to find new games to enjoy. Once you know your style- or at least, what you’re in the mood for- you can track down similarly weighted games. But don’t confuse weight with quality- many of my favorites are considered light. (By the way, BGG considers Poker to be Medium.)
Where would you place all of the Games Workshop games in your classifications, and how would you correlate their weight to their complexity,etc?
Good question. I would put the big ones (WH and 40K) in the heavier area, but maybe only in the medium-heavy. The special abilities of every unit means that there’s a lot to consider in every round of play, but you only have a limited control over how much impact you have on the state of the game by the roll of the dice.
That’s why I like Blood Bowl more- while I’d consider it more medium, the strategy of where to move your players and what to do with them makes for more interesting decisions.
What do you consider poker to be? Heavy because of the decisions and betting or Light because of the luck?
Yeah, that’s tricky. I’d say it falls on the lighter end of things, because the APPARENT complexity is light and there’s a lot of luck and a limit to the amount of planning you can do. But like many games, there’s much more depth to it. It’s one of those great, tense-decision-filled light games.