The Collaboration Network of Board-Game Designers

Figure 2. The collaboration network of board-game designers. 850 designers (nodes) joined by 1502 co-design edges, from 21,721 ranked games (BoardGameGeek snapshot 2022-01-18). Only designers with ≥5 credited games are shown; 363 such designers with no co-design link to another retained designer (of 1213 retained) are omitted from the drawing. Node area scales with the number of credited games; node color encodes the unweighted mean geek rating (Bayes-weighted average, 1–10 scale, cividis colormap — yellow = higher) over the designer's games; edge width scales with the number of co-designed games. Force layout (seed 20260612): the giant component (605 designers) fills the main canvas — dense clusters are recurring partnerships and studio circles, and large nodes with few edges (e.g. Reiner Knizia) are prolific designers whose collaborations are rare relative to their catalog. The 97 independent duos and trios that share no path to the giant component are docked in the strip along the bottom. Hover to isolate a designer's collaborators; drag to rearrange.
Source: Kaggle BoardGameGeek dataset (bgg-kaggle-matrix-2022-01-18), boardgamegeek.com. Thresholds: ontology/SPEC.md §4.2. Mean rating is unweighted across a designer's games; small catalogs give noisy means (n shown in tooltip).