Star Ratings

The "star" rating system lets you express your overall judgment on a game by giving it a score on a 1 to 5 scale. We know it's not easy to reduce something so complex to a single number, but most readers find this sort of summary judgment really helpful. You can always explain in your review why you chose the score you did.

The star scale is inherently subjective, so it's up to you to determine what the different levels mean. As a rough guide, though, we recommend something like this:

	A terrible game; completely unrecommended
	A badly flawed game, but maybe worth a look
	An average game; or a mixed bag, with some real strengths but some serious weaknesses
	A very good game, highly recommended
	An excellent, exceptional game

We recommend that you "grade on a curve" - reserve the 5- and 1-star ratings for the really exceptional games (good and bad). If you rate everything a 5, it makes it hard for your handful of all-time favorites to stand out.

Leaving out the rating

You can write a review without entering a rating. If you do this, your review won't affect the game's average rating - omitting a rating is not the same as giving a game 0 stars.

Some example of reasons why you might want to omit a rating:

• You haven't played enough of the game to feel you can give it a meaningful score, but you nonetheless want to share your impressions of what you've seen so far via a review.
• You've only played an older, out-of-date version of the game, and you've heard the newer version is considerably better/worse/different - so you don't want your rating to affect the overall score for the current version.

I want to give this game ZERO stars!

Sorry, the rating scale is 1 to 5; there's no "zero stars" rating. (We don't allow 0-star ratings because that would sometimes be confusing - it would be hard to tell the difference in some cases between "awful" and merely "unrated.")

Don't think of "1 star" as being like "1 dollar" - stars aren't bling, they're ratings. You're not giving the author of a bad game a tip she can spend at FrobMart. Since 1 star is the lowest score, a 1-star rating is saying exactly what you want: "this game is among the worst I've played."