This report analyzes the TidyTuesday 2019-03-12 release on Board Games — 10,532 rows after cleaning and merge. Which board games combine crowd scale with elite ratings?
Five charts track Average rating across time, category, and named entities — trend, leaders, distribution, tiers, and relationships. Where companion files exist in the repo, they are joined before analysis so reception, geography, or metadata columns are not left on the table.
FAST FACTS
DATASET CONTEXT
The source is the TidyTuesday release from 2019-03-12 (R for Data Science community). This working file contains 10,532 rows and 23 columns after merging all available CSV/XLSX tables in the week folder.
Charts are exported as Plotly JSON with PNG fallbacks. Medians are used for robustness where distributions skew. Index-style fields (row numbers, sequential IDs) are excluded from metric selection.
How to read this report: start with the chart caption, then ask what the metric actually means, what a non-expert should notice first, and what an expert would challenge in the source. The goal is not to memorize every number; it is to leave with a sharper question than the one you arrived with.
Reader path: if you are new to the topic, treat each chart as a guided tour of one question: who leads, how concentrated the field is, what changes over time, and where the outliers sit. If you already know the domain, use the same charts as a challenge: check whether the metric is the right proxy, whether the source omits an important population, and whether the headline survives the limitations section.
CHART 1 — TREND
Median average rating is falling from 6.39 in the opening period to 6.39 at the close.
Annual medians filter one-off spikes so the structural slope — not viral outliers — drives the story.
CHART 2 — LEADERS
Small World Designer Edition leads at 9.00 — 8.78 marks the median among the top dozen.
Head-of-field concentration is where quality, scale, or brand visibly separates from the pack.
CHART 3 — DISTRIBUTION
Category boxes reveal whether average rating consensus is shared or contested across tiers.
Wide whiskers flag segments where outliers — not averages — drive reputation.
CHART 4 — GAP ANALYSIS
American Civil War,Wargame sits 0.66 above the median; Card Game trails by 0.36.
Diverging from the median exposes which tiers over- or under-perform — not just who ranks first.
SUPPLEMENT — RELATIONSHIP
Joint plot of average rating and users rated surfaces clusters the averages erase.
Bubble size tracks repeat presence — outliers are archetypes, not noise.
LIMITATIONS
Community-cleaned TidyTuesday snapshots are not live APIs. Missing values, spelling variants, and week-of-export coverage limits apply. Merged tables may fan out or duplicate rows when join keys are imperfect.
Findings describe the file on hand — treat them as structural signals about Board Games, not exhaustive truth about the full domain.
CONCLUSION
Read as a teaching map, Board Games shows why one metric is rarely enough: leaders, tails, trends, and relationships each answer a different question about average rating.
The best reading is modest: use the chart to sharpen the question, then check the source and limits before turning it into a claim.
REFERENCES
Data Science Learning Community. (2019). TidyTuesday: Board Games. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/main/data/2019/2019-03-12/board_games.csv
EDITOR'S NOTE
Artometrics data report from the TidyTuesday research pipeline. Charts and aggregates are reproducible from the embedded exhibits and public source files.