I have this taxonomic model of games that I’ve thrown about for a few years now, mostly in conversation with friends when I really get into heavy game talk. The model has four domains: Strategy, Skill, Social, and Chance.

An Explanation of the Domains

Strategy

In strategy games, the outcome of the game relies primarily upon the choices that the players make. In their purest form, they’re games of complete information; everything about the current game state is known to the players, who can (theoretically) predict every possible outcome, and make their choices accordingly. Chess, Go, Checkers, and Tic-Tac-Toe are quintessential examples of this domain. These games are entirely defined by the choices the players make, and how those choices interact to change the game state as the players try to drive that game state toward one that spells victory for them. Strategy games are fun because you can deeply analyze these games even without an opponent, and since they’re purely mental, there’s nothing to frustrate your efforts in a game except the choices of your opponent, all of which you’re able to anticipate.

Skill

In skill games, the outcome of the game relies primarily upon how well players execute mechanically relevant actions. Most sports are skill games, because how well you are able to, for example, shoot a basketball into a hoop dramatically influences whether the game is going to swing in your favor. In these games, the choices that the players make are only as good as their ability to make it happen. Anyone can move a knight into a forking position once they see it, but Michael Jordan can make the decision to drive to the hoop much more valuable than I can. Skill games are fun because you can get better through practice, and the skills you pick up in one game are often transferable to other games or facets of life. Being a good basketball player means you’re probably a decent athlete overall—as long as you stay out of professional baseball.

Social

In social games, the outcome of the game relies primarily upon reading and influencing players’ emotions. (I do mean to include “opinions” in with “feelings” in this definition.) Cards Against Humanity and Apples to Apples both require players to know their opponents’ personalities and senses of humor, and are thus almost purely social games. Ultimate Werewolf also hinges heavily on reading the players in the group. Social games are fun because you feel very much like you’re playing with the other people, not just with the game or their skill at the game. You can use what you know about your friends (perhaps use it against them) and learn more about them in the process too. They’re usually good party games because there’s minimal learning curve.

Chance

In games of chance, the outcome of the game relies primarily upon events that the players can neither control nor (precisely) predict. Candyland and the card game War both rely entirely upon the order of the cards in the deck. It doesn’t matter what the people drawing those cards think of one another, there’s no skill involved in drawing the cards, and the only choice that the players can make that will influence its outcome is whether to play the game. Games of chance are fun (I suppose) because you can try to anticipate the outcome of events. They also require the least amount of knowledge or practice, allowing for any two players to be able to play against one another without ending up with very uneven match-ups.

Some Examples

Most games are not entirely one domain or another, but are instead some combination of the four. Some examples:

• Monopoly involves a good bit of strategy in trade evaluation and plenty of chance in piece movement, and minimal skill and social mechanics. The lattermost shows up surely in your ability to keep track of the Chance and Community Chest cards, and perhaps your ability to recall or calculate the values of properties, but there’s nothing in the rules saying you can’t just keep a crib sheet. Negotiating is also arguably a skill, albeit a social one, but if each player has a confident valuation of a proposed trade, then the skill of a negotiator becomes less relevant.
• Poker depends largely on the level of play. For many people, it’s primarily a chance and social game. At higher levels of play, when players’ abilities to hide their tells and deceive their opponents improves enough, then strategy comes more strongly into play, though I wouldn’t ever argue that it’s absent. You can argue that deception is a skill, and I wouldn’t disagree.
• Beer Pong is pretty much entirely based on skill, with some occasional strategy showing up when players decide how and when to rack or go for bounce shots. Although the game is usually played in a social context, the mechanics of the game don’t depend on those social dynamics; pretty much all that matters is how well you can throw the ping pong ball and hold your alcohol.
• Baseball is, like most sports, primarily skill-based as far as players are concerned, but entirely strategic for the coaches, who can do nothing but make decisions and tell the players what to do. There’s some glimmer of a social element in how morale can influence player performance, and perhaps in how well you argue with the umpire when you don’t like his call, but these are fairly incidental; the game isn’t designed toward these elements. There’s only negligible chance involved.
• Dungeons & Dragons is difficult to categorize, because it’s played so differently across groups. There’s plenty of room for strategy in how you build and control your character, especially in combat. Like most tabletop games, there’s not a lot of skill involved. And obviously, there’s plenty of luck in the dice.
• Yahtzee obviously involves a lot of chance, because all you’re doing is rolling dice, but the strategy comes in how you choose what you’re going for each turn (e.g. full house or a large straight), and whether you go for riskier sets because you’re behind.

A Few Parting Thoughts

I have a strong bias against games of chance. I find the lack of agency very frustrating. I favor instead strategy games when considering my own selfish enjoyment of a game, and social games for the enjoyment of my friends, some of whom don’t derive the same pleasure from quantitative problem solving as I do. I realize I am using a narrow definition of “skill.” Most people would say that Bobby Fisher was a “skilled” chess player, even though I’m calling chess just a strategy game. There’s some argument that could be made that there’s a skill in the ability to recall previous games of chess, which is, in a fundamental way, what much of a chess player’s ability is based on: their past games, their study of others’ games, and their study of theory. Trivial Pursuit is mostly a game of skill, with the skill in question being, like chess, information recall. But the difference with Trivial Pursuit is that the ability to recall the information directly affects the game in a mechanically significant way. In chess, the information recall only indirectly affects the game; the direct effect comes from the decision made based upon that information recall. As I mentioned with poker above, there are also plenty of social skills, and the line is pretty fuzzy whether something is social or a skill. Or maybe there are just some elements that are inherently both social and skill-based, with no way to tease the two apart. This feels like a failing of system, and I would like to refine the definitions to eliminate it. I would solicit from you (perhaps in the comments below), Dear Reader, your own ideas on this taxonomy, your own examples you find interesting in this model, and your critiques of my own examples, which are certainly up for debate.