Grading a Board the Same Way I Grade a Dresser

When I started writing these reviews, I didn’t set out to grade games the way I grade furniture, it just happened, because that’s the only framework I actually had built up after years of pricing secondhand goods for a living. You learn early in this trade that a piece of furniture’s condition gets assessed in a specific order, structure first, does the thing actually function the way it’s supposed to, then surface, does it look the way it should, then originality, is what you’re looking at the real unaltered piece or something that’s been repaired or replaced along the way. I didn’t consciously decide to apply that same order to a board game box. I just noticed one day that I already was.

Structure, for a game, is whether the components actually do their job, whether a card holds up to shuffling, whether a board lies flat instead of curling at the corners, whether a die feels solid instead of hollow when you roll it in your palm. That’s the part I check first, same as I would with a dresser drawer, does it slide the way it’s supposed to before I even care what it looks like. A game can be gorgeous and still fail this test, and when it does, I notice, the same way I’d notice a beautiful dresser with a drawer that sticks.

Surface is the part most people assume review writing is entirely about, the art, the theme, whether it looks good on a shelf, and it matters, but it’s second in my head, not first, same as it would be with furniture where a beautiful finish over rotted wood underneath is worse than plain wood that’s actually sound. I think this is where I part ways a little with reviewers who lead entirely with aesthetics, not because I don’t care how a game looks, I clearly do, but because I’ve spent too many years watching a gorgeous piece fail structurally to ever fully trust looks first.

Originality’s the trickiest one to translate, honestly, and I’m still working out exactly what it means for a game rather than an antique. For furniture it’s straightforward, is this really from the period it claims to be, has it been substantially altered. For a game maybe it’s closer to asking whether a design is doing something the box claims it’s doing, whether the mechanics and the theme are actually the same object or whether one’s just glued onto the other for marketing, pasted-on theme is the phrase I’ve heard other reviewers use for exactly this problem and I think it maps onto originality pretty well once you sit with it.

I don’t know if this framework would make sense to anyone who hasn’t spent years doing the furniture-grading version of it first. It’s just the only honest way I know how to look at anything I’m being asked to put a number on, whether it’s a dresser or a deck-building game, structure before surface, and the real thing before the thing dressed up to look like it.