77 of 157 mechanics × 8 categories
(pairings carried by ≥30 games), projected from
21,721 ranked games — BoardGameGeek snapshot 2022-01-18
hover: isolate neighborhood · drag: rearrange
Figure 1. The mechanic–category universe of board games. Bipartite force-directed network of 77 game mechanics (circles) and 8 top-level BoardGameGeek categories (squares), built from 21,721 ranked games (snapshot 2022-01-18; games with <30 ratings or non-positive publication year excluded). An edge connects a mechanic to a category when ≥30 games carry both; edge width scales linearly with that co-occurrence count (max 2,407), edge opacity with Jaccard overlap. Node area scales with the number of games using the mechanic / in the category. Layout: force-directed (seed 20260612), so proximity reflects shared game populations: worker-placement/economic mechanics gather around Strategy, dice/hex-grid mechanics around War, roll-and-move around Family and Children's, and voting/acting mechanics around Party. Hover any node to isolate its neighborhood; drag to rearrange. Source: Kaggle BoardGameGeek dataset (bgg-kaggle-matrix-2022-01-18), boardgamegeek.com. Thresholds: ontology/SPEC.md §4.1.