Board Games Motivation Profile
Everyone loves online personality quizzes . . . right? Well, I'm a fan of the sort that crunches a lot of numerical data and shows its work.
Quantic Foundry has a fun, interesting, and detailed Board Games Motivation Profile quiz. You'll answer questions about what you enjoy in a board game, and get a personalized profile of the sort of games that you enjoy. After that, you'll list some games that you like, and then you'll get recommendations of games that users with similar taste profiles to yours listed as their favorites.
I took this quiz a few years ago, and it told me that I was way more likely than the average user to enjoy Food Chain Magnate. Sure enough, when I eventually got a chance to play, the game became an immediate favorite. I still haven't gotten a chance to play Pax Pamir or Cyclades yet (other games that it said I'd enjoy), but after reading descriptions of them, I'm decidedly intrigued. Here's my personal taste profile, for the nosy among you:
There are four primary motivations in their system, each with at least one secondary motivation (though only one secondary motivation shows up on the graphic for each axis). You get your scores in percentile format (so an 80% means you scored higher in that category than 80% of gamers who took the quiz). Here are the primary and secondary motivation categories. I put my scores for each in italics at the end of the blurbs.
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Conflict scores how much you enjoy games where players can act directly against one another. 97%.
- Social Manipulation scores how much you enjoy playing mind games – bluffing, deceiving, and persuading. 85%.
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Strategy scores how much you enjoy cognitive challenges vs. more relaxing moment-to-moment gameplay. 87%.
- Discovery scores how motivated you are to explore a broad range of rulesets, game mechanics, and play spaces. 98%.
- Need to Win scores how much you care about winning specifically vs. the journey of the game as a whole. 60%.
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Immersion scores how much you want to roleplay in a coherent fictional world. 6%. (I think it's funny that I scored so low on this one, but I do play a lot of roleplaying games, so I guess it follows that that's not as much of a priority for me in my board gaming. I do enjoy abstract strategy games a lot.)
- Aesthetics scores your enjoyment of the sensory experience of a game, like art and component design. 69%.
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Social Fun reflects your motivation to have a good time with other people – the board game is serving as a means to that end. 45%.
- Cooperation scores how much you enjoy, well, cooperation. 58%.
- Chance scores how much you enjoy luck elements in your games. 57%.
- Accessibility reflects a preference for games that are easy to teach to a wide variety of people, especially those with little to no board game experience. 15%.
If you take the quiz, I'd love to see your results on the forums – and hear what you think of the recommendation engine! They've also got a video games quiz if that interests you.