Notes on The v2.0 Board Game Sample
To provide our readers with more context around the findings, and what gamers these findings may or may not generalize to, we’ll walk through the data collection and descriptive statistics of the sample.
Overview
The v2.0 sample consists of 104,815 board gamers (counted as unique IP addresses). The Board Game Motivation Profile allows gamers to take a 5-minute survey to get a personalized report of their gaming motivations, and see how they compare with other board gamers. The 11 motivations that are measured in our model were identified via statistical analysis of how gaming motivations cluster together.
Definition of Board Game
The following text was used at the beginning of the survey to provide guidance on what we meant by “board game”: This profile tool is for players of modern board games (e.g., Agricola, Dominion, Codenames, Twilight Struggle). Typically, board games are stand-alone products (with optional expansions) that can be played by a group. If a game expects each player to bring their own deck/army (e.g., CCGs, miniature wargames), it is likely out of scope of this profile tool.
Traffic Source
Board gamers primarily found the profile tool via social media sharing (~80% of all traffic) on Facebook (~70% of social media traffic) and Twitter (~10% of social media traffic). Referrals from other websites accounted for 14% of the overall traffic, primarily from sites like Geek and Sundry and BoardGameGeek. The remaining traffic (~5%) is from organic search and other unidentified direct traffic.
Country
Most respondents are located in North America and the EU. The countries with the largest number of participants were The United States (56k), Canada (6k), the UK (6k), Australia (2.9k), Sweden (2k), Italy (1.4k), Germany (1.3k), Brazil (1.2k), France (972), Belgium (866), and the Netherlands (833), followed by a long tail of other countries.
Note that the Board Game Motivation Profile is presented in English only.
Gender
72.7% of the sample identified as male, 26.0% identified as female, and 1.1% identified as other. Among those that identified as other, the most common descriptors (open-ended text-field) were agender, genderfluid, genderqueer, transgender, and non-binary (in that order of frequency).
Age
The age ranged from 13 to 82. The median age was 31. The mean age was 32.20 with a standard deviation of 8.24. The 25th percentile was 26 and the 75th percentile was 37.
Gaming Frequency
In the past 6 months, 19.2% of the sample reported playing board games multiple times a week, 36.4% reported playing board games about once a week, 31.9% reported about once a month, and 12.3% reported once in a blue moon.
Playing With
91.3% of the sample reported regularly playing with friends. 47.7% reported regularly playing with family. And 19.2% reported regularly playing with strangers (at tournaments and local meetups).
Crowdfunded Board Games
As a measure of engagement with board gaming, we asked gamers whether they had contributed to a board game on crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter or Indiegogo. 51% of the sample have never crowdfunded a board game, 27.5% had crowdfunded 1-2 board games, 15.4% had crowdfunded 3-10 board games, and 6.1% had crowdfunded more than 10 board games.