About Tabletop Lens
Tabletop Lens answers one question: what should this particular group play tonight. Choose who you are playing with, how many of you there are, how heavy the rules should be and how long you have, and it ranks the games that fit. Most board game sites organise around player count; this one organises around the occasion. The order is decided by fit alone — never by advertising.
How the score is calculated
Every game carries a 1–5 fit rating for six occasions: new faces, close friends, strategy gamers, couples, two-player duels, and strategy beginners. The fit rating for your chosen occasion is multiplied by 14, so it is worth up to 70 points.
A game gets 15 more points when your player count matches its best count, or 7 when your count is merely within range. It gets 15 points when its weight matches the weight you asked for, or 7 when it is one step away.
Games are dropped before scoring if your player count falls outside their range, if their fit rating for the chosen occasion is 1 or lower, or if their minimum play time exceeds the time you have.
If you rate games, titles similar to ones you liked gain up to 20 points, and titles similar to ones you disliked lose as many. That adjustment applies only to you — nobody else's ranking changes.
What the catalogue holds
Each game carries its minimum, maximum and best player counts, play time, rules weight (1–5), a luck/skill/read balance, a fit rating and one-line note for each of six occasions, a 30-second rules summary, and a caveat for tables it does not suit.
Weight is measured by how long the rules take to teach — 1 means under three minutes, 5 means over half an hour.
Readers can suggest new games, which are added after review. If something is missing, send it in.
How this site makes money
Buy links on game pages are Coupang Partners and Amazon Associates affiliate links. A purchase made through them earns a small commission.
Commission does not affect ranking. Neither the presence of a buy link nor a price appears anywhere in the scoring formula, and games with no buy link at all regularly come first.