What board games should you buy for a data rockstar?

Hello and welcome to the data zeitgeist: stories about the culture of data.

This time, and just in time for Christmas, a list of board games?for data geeks. I've listed just four?in this article, but I recommend you watch my deep dive (part 1?and?part 2) with leading game design Geoff Engelstein to discover much much more about what board games teach us about data visualization.

MicroMacro Crime City: a game with no preattentive attributes

Data visualization works by encoding information in order to draw your eye to a particular data point, or location on a dashboard. Colour, size, length: these are some of the preattentive attributes we use to help our audience. What if you presented an overwhelming amount of information to people with no preattentive attributes, and asked them to explore it? It would be a terrible chart, but it makes for a great game: Micro Macro Crime City. You get a huge map to lay on your table, representing life across Crime City. It's all in black and white and overwhelmingly packed with activity. All is not as it seems in the city, and your job is to look around and solve various crimes that are taking place. It's a very clever game that does the exact opposite of what a good chart should do: it forces you to look closely at everything. I promise you, it's great fun. It deservedly won the prestigious?"Spiel des Jahres" award this year.

Illusion: a game about shape and colour

Talking of preattentrive attributes, colour and size are two often used in data visualization. How about a simple game where all you have to do is place cards in sequence according to how much of each card is covered by one colour? Easy? No: each card is deviously designed to trick you. Even though we're great at estimating the differences in length (that's why bar charts are so good), we're hopeless at accurately decoding size, especially when the shapes are as deceptive as they are here. For example, what percentage of the card in the image above is red??Illusion is easy to understand, and a great family game. You'll never make a bubble chart again after playing this!??

Wingspan: the importance of icons and layout

Visualizations need to encode a lot of information. You might use colour, layout, and iconography. Board games use all of these to aid players. My favourite example is Wingspan, a marvelous game about collecting birds and placing them?in various habitats. Each bird has special abilities that can be activated to help you gather more resources. This "engine builder" has sold over one?million copies, not just because it's a great game, but because who could resist the wonderful theme and gorgeous artwork? From a data communication perspective, it gets my support because of the amount of information encoded on each card, alongside the gorgeous illustrations.

Terraforming Mars: Board games: similar to business dashboards?

Many of us build dashboards. We have to consider layout, the flow of information and how individual parts come together to make a coherent whole. Any game with a board has to do the same. They need to make sense to players, allowing them to easily navigate the different areas. Of course, there are thousands of board games I could choose, but my all-time favourite board game is Terraforming Mars, so it gets its place in this list. In this game, you lead a corporation whose goal is to most effectively terraform the Red Planet. It's the most complicated game in this list, but you should play it to look at how they designed the board.?

What did I miss? Are there any board games you love? Did they teach you anything about data communication?

If you want more on this topic, go watch part 1?and?part 2 of my conversation with leading game design Geoff Engelstein on the links between game design and data communications.