Template talk:Physical games

Too many subheaders

I understand this might be pedantic, but is there a reason this navbox has so many rows consisting of only one link? As someone who likes breaking up categories into subcategories of reasonable sizes, I'm all for breaking up headers into subheaders to make it easier (in this case, to make it easier to scan the navbox for specific kinds of games), but I think this navbox does this too excessively and wastes a lot of horizontal space. It's especially odd when a section already has a "miscellaneous" subheader... Dive Rocket Launcher 00:42, May 7, 2026 (UTC)

@Dive Rocket Launcher Yeah, I get what you mean. I'm not quite sure how to stick these together, but I do agree that a slightly different method of formatting this template is probably in order. Maybe this is something that could be decided via a proposal, akin to what was done with the "browser" template? Nelsonic (talk edits) 00:46, May 7, 2026 (UTC)

I think for now we can just condense a lot of the single-link subheaders into "miscellaneous" subheaders. Some sections already have them, after all. Dive Rocket Launcher 06:04, May 7, 2026 (UTC)

Presenting my redesign so far.

I think part of the issue with the original navbox layout is that it tries to group games up by series, but unlike video games, physical games in a series often aren't all in the same genre.

Something I wanted to ask is: is there a better way to categorize handheld games about shooting balls into targets? Donkey Kong Pin Ball Game and Wii U Piranha Plant Catch have essentially the same gameplay (from what I can tell, because I don't own either), but the former is considered a pinball game right now, while the other isn't. Not sure if that's an oversight. Then you have games like Dokan ni Shoot where the objective is to shoot balls into the other player's target, which definitely isn't pinball, it's more like ice hockey.

We currently classify all of the Mario Kart 8 Dokodemo Game Collection games as ball-in-a-maze puzzles, which feels wrong because only the Anaboko Meiro games are actually mazes, the rest are launcher-based games. I don't know if there's a better general term for these types of games that aren't about guiding balls through mazes. "Ball-catching games"? "Ball-launcher games"? Maybe there's also a term that encompasses both the launcher-based and maze-based games, since they're both about moving small balls in plastic containers around. Physical game taxonomy is my passion. Dive Rocket Launcher 09:09, May 30, 2026 (UTC)