How LudoExplorer ranks, classifies and recommends board games — our method, taxonomy and scoring explained.
We read the intrinsic features of each game — how it plays, what it's about, who it scales for, and how heavy it feels — and we build everything else on top of that.
Four intrinsic features anchor every page on this site. Filters, comparisons and recommendations all read from this same short list — nothing else.
Mechanics are not a flat list. We group them into a small set of meaningful families.
We use the Engelstein Classification Model to organize game mechanics into a handful of fundamental dimensions — Core Action, Spatial, Resolution, Uncertainty, Mode, plus more specific families like Resource Management, Card Play, Player Interaction, and Progression.
Each mechanic in the catalogue is tagged with one or more families, so when you say I want a worker-placement game, we know exactly which family of decisions you're after — and which games genuinely deliver it.
Not every mechanic in a game is equally important. We mark the ones that are the game.
A game can list a dozen mechanics on its sheet, but only a few of them are doing the heavy lifting. A core engine is a mechanic that genuinely drives the gameplay loop — without it, the game would be a different game.
We attach a significance score between 0.0 and 1.0 to every mechanic on every game, so the catalogue can tell you whether worker placement is the whole point of a title or merely a flourish.
From the catalogue all the way to the recommendation you see — here's every layer in between.
Four complementary models, each reading the same intrinsic features but in a different way. Tap to see what each one is good — and bad — at.
English, French and Dutch are first-class citizens — not afterthoughts.
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