How we match games to skills

You tell us what skills you care about and what kind of game night you're planning. We do the rest:

The system runs on a three-layer knowledge graph. We use board game mechanics as the bridge between the skills you want to practise and the games that let you practise them.

We've hand-curated 950+ mechanic-skill links, each with an effectiveness rating from 1 (minor benefit) to 5 (primary developer of that skill). For example:

These mappings let us compute a relevance score for every game-skill pair. A game that uses three different mechanics linked to "Strategic Planning" will score higher than one with just one link.

A game might involve negotiation through one small mechanic, but if that's just a side-note in a game about something else entirely, it's not a great match for someone who wants to practise negotiation skills.

So we look at how central a skill is to each game. If most of a game's mechanics tie back to a skill, that game is about that skill. Games where the skill is central score much higher than games where it's incidental.

When you submit your skills and preferences, each candidate game is scored on three factors that combine into a percentage out of 100:

Your preferences for player count, play time, and complexity are used as filters, not scoring factors. A game either fits your logistics constraints or it doesn't - we don't penalise a great skill match just because it takes 10 minutes longer.

Complexity tolerance adapts to your preference: if you want very light games (≤1.5 complexity), we use a tight ±0.7 range. For medium complexity, ±1.0. For heavier games, ±1.5.

Sometimes a niche skill combination with strict logistics (e.g., "Emotional Regulation" for 7 players, 30 minutes) produces very few results. When we find fewer than 5 games with strict filters, we progressively loosen constraints in the order that matters least:

What if someone picks an unusual combination of skills? The way the layers connect handles it: