One Light, One Medium, One Heavy

Restaurants figured out pacing a long time ago. You don't open with the ribeye. Game nights benefit from the same thinking, which is why this site deals three courses instead of one suggestion.

A concrete example from a real collection at four players: Cartographers as the opener, Battlestar Galactica as the main event, Arkham Horror waiting as the heavy option. The opener works while people trickle in, because a latecomer can watch a round of Cartographers and join the next one. Nobody joins Battlestar Galactica halfway through, and nobody should try.

Starting heavy is the most common pacing mistake, and it's easy to see why it happens: the heavy game is usually the one somebody's excited about, so it feels natural to lead with it. But teaching forty minutes of rules to someone who just walked in with a coat still on and a drink in one hand goes badly more often than it goes well. The energy in the room hasn't caught up to the game yet. Ending on heavy instead gives the same rules explanation to a table that's already warmed up, already fed, and ready to concentrate.

A second example, at two players this time: Jaipur as the opener, a mid-weight two-player title like Lost Ruins of Arnak as the main, and something like Twilight Struggle held in reserve as the wildcard. Two-player nights have more room to reach the heavy course than a five-person game night usually does, since there's no seventh person still deciding whether they're in.

The courses map to BGG weight bands: under 2.0 is light, 2.0 through 3.5 is medium, and above 3.5 is heavy (the reasoning behind those exact cutoffs, and why the number itself is worth some skepticism, is covered in the article on weight). Most collections are shaped like a hill, thin on both ends and thick in the middle, so the medium course usually has the deepest pool to pull from and the widest range of picks on a reroll.

One thing that never happens across those three courses: the same game showing up twice. Whatever gets picked for the opener is off the table for the main event and the wildcard too, even if your collection is thin enough that the same game would otherwise be a good fit for more than one band. Three real options beat one option repeated three times with different labels on it.

You are not obligated to eat all three courses. Some nights the light game catches fire and gets played four times, and that was the game night. Other nights everyone shows up caffeinated and you skip straight to the heavy. The menu's job is to make the options visible, not to enforce a schedule. And once a course is actually finished, whether that took twenty minutes or the whole evening, generating again gives that same slot a fresh set of picks rather than repeating itself.

If your collection is missing a whole band, the site borrows from the neighboring one rather than leaving a course empty. A collection with no true heavies gets a medium game as the chef's special instead, and a collection with nothing light gets a medium game as the opener. That fallback pick is drawn from the neighboring band the same way it would be from a full one, at random rather than hand-picked for being the closest weight to what's missing, so the course still gets a real game from your shelf instead of sitting empty. If that bothers you, BGG's community would be happy to recommend a purchase. They're helpful like that.

None of this is a rule for every table, either. Some groups exist specifically to grind through one heavy game for four hours and have no interest in an opener at all. For that kind of night, generate the menu anyway, skip straight past the first two courses, and either take whatever landed in the wildcard slot or reroll that course alone until something matches the mood. The three-course structure is a default for a table that hasn't already decided what it's doing, not a requirement for one that has.