Designing The Best Board Game On The Planet | FiveThirtyEight At least as judged by the game raters who frequent BoardGameGeek | Gaming Unplugged Since 2000. The article contains several interesting graphs of BGG ratings as functions of various parameters.
The games are not just board games but also card games and pencil-and-paper games like tic-tac-toe.
Ratings: 1 (“Defies description of a game. You won’t catch me dead playing this. Clearly broken.”) to 10 (“Outstanding. Always want to play, expect this will never change.”).
A golden age of board gaming? Their ratings, by date of publication:
1950: 5.5
1965: 5.5
1980: 6.0
2003: 6.0
2013: 7.0
Scatter: roughly 1 or 2
Number of players?
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Games that support three players rate highest, with an average of 6.58. But two-player games are a close second, with an average rating of 6.55. Next closest are five-player games, which average 6.39.
A rather jagged curve, going down for 4, 6, 8 players and up for 3, 5, 7 ones. A small number of players means that one does not have to wait for several others to play in each turn, and that one has more of a chance to win.
Play time? Ratings increase from 6 for 15 minutes or less to 6.5 for around 3 hours.
The article discussed Twilight Struggle, a game about the Cold War where one plays either as the United States or as the Soviet Union: the US vs. the SU.
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Twilight Struggle is emblematic of a sea change from older, magisterial games with titles like Rise and Decline of the Third Reich, War in Europe and The Civil War. (The Civil War’s listed playing time is 1,200 minutes.) The redistribution of game information from massive rulebooks onto game cards was a revolution that can be traced to Mark Herman’s We the People, a game about the American Revolution, and Paths of Glory, a World War I game by Ted Raicer.
“What that meant was the game was a lot easier to learn,” Gupta said. “That started a renaissance in historical gaming.”
Like "1989", about the revolutions in Eastern Europe of that year, where one plays as either the Communist or the Democrat.
The Worst Board Games Ever Invented | FiveThirtyEight
The average ratings by BGG have an interesting trend as a function of number of ratings. Its database has 15,000 ratings with at least 10 raters. At 10 raters, the average and scatter are 6 +- 3, at 300 raters, 6 +- 1.5, and at 10,000, 7 +- 1. The averages themselves become more sparse with increasing numbers of raters, with hardly any more than 100,000 raters.
But some games stand out as having *very* low ratings: War (the card game), Tic-Tac-Toe (Noughts and Crosses), Snakes and Ladders (Chutes and Ladders), Candy Land, The Game of Life (Hasbro's one, not Conway's cellular-automaton one) and Monopoly. Their average ratings range from 2 (War) to 4 (Monopoly)
Of these games, War, Snakes and Ladders, and Candy Land are exclusively chance-driven, and The Game Of Life is mostly chance. "Overreliance on luck makes a game boring or frustrating or both. Good games are driven by skill, or, like Twilight Struggle, a healthy mix of skill and luck."
Tic-Tac-Toe, however, is completely dependent on players' moves. But it is a 
solved game, meaning that it's always possible to play it and never lose. Furthermore, the strategy for doing so is fairly simple. That means that unless they make mistakes, Tic-Tac-Toe players will always end up with draws.
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The one game in the hall of shame that requires a modicum of skill is Monopoly. There are even Monopoly tournaments. You have to decide whether to buy properties you land on, how to bid if a property is auctioned off, and how to effectively make trades. Seems reasonable.
But stories behind the worst of a genre can also be complicated and unexpected. And, probably due in large part to its huge popularity, Monopoly has become a bête noire for many serious board gamers. It suffers from problems that most game designers nowadays try to avoid. First, players can be eliminated. This is no fun — unless, of course, the eliminated player finds something better to do than play Monopoly — and games are meant to be fun. Second, there is often a runaway leader. Someone can snap up a juicy monopoly early on, and that quickly becomes that. The rest of the game is pro forma and boring. And games aren’t meant to be boring. Third, there is what’s known to game designers as a kingmaking problem. A losing player can often choose, typically via a lopsided trade of properties, who wins the game. This is also no fun and negates whatever skill was required to begin with.
Oh, and it also takes a really long time to play.
But these bad ones are well-known in the broader world.
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Also, these “bad” games are cultural touchstones. Through whatever quirks of history, culture and commerce, these are our first games.
Tic-Tac-Toe is very easy to learn and play. Competing to be the biggest capitalist in Monopoly and The Game of Life.
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And even if it’s not an objectively good game, Candy Land teaches lessons — playing by the rules, healthy competition, winning and losing graciously. Tic-tac-toe represents a first foray into strategy and game theory — however simple — for many children. That’s not a bad thing. These games might be “bad,” but they’re important. We start with them, and we move on to better ones.
Then, Stop Playing Monopoly With Your Kids (And Play These Games Instead) | FiveThirtyEight
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What makes a good game? Good games keep players, however young, engaged — and you’re not engaged in Monopoly if you’re bankrupt. Good games also require meaningful action and decision-making — something lacking from Candy Land or Snakes and Ladders — rather than merely blind luck. Games are fun, games engage and games teach. So, which ones do it best?
The article has a graph of ratings by suggested minimum age, from 5.4 at 3 to 6.3 at 10, with a scatter of about 2.
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The highest-rated games for each age are diverse. Coconuts, for example, is a dexterity game — players fling tiny toy coconuts into cups. Dixit is a creative storytelling game — a sort of artsy Apples to Apples. Mus is a Basque card game. Hive Pocket — a version of the game Hive — is an abstract, tile-placing strategy game. But they all have features of a good game — they engage players, and they require action. There’s something more to these games than just rolling the dice. ...
Again, it’s a remarkably motley group of games. Mijnlieff (pronounced “mine-leaf”) is a sort of advanced tic-tac-toe, first published in 2010. Schafkopf is a traditional German card game dating to the late-18th century. Zopp is soccer, in board game form. And Loopin’ Louie involves a battery-powered airplane.