Understanding markets is a difficult task, and I can understand why someone would want to have a grasp on it outside of their own experiences before reaching critical mass on their projects development.

Perhaps a self-service tool that analyzes the BGG statistics for the most popular X number of games, including things like player count, tags, etc would be useful. If I could find a database download of BGG I'd be happy to plug it into Tableau so users could play with the data themselves and see. I guess knowing how to extract meaningful data from a series of graphs would spawn a thousand basic questions on it's own, though.

Would some sort of community consensus/poll/faq be appropriate, then? It could perhaps be inferred that users asking these sorts of questions have not yet produced anything that has been playtested extensively, in their current project or any other. For example, in video game development, the community consensus answer to most questions of this nature is to stop whatever they're doing and make a game, any game, as quickly as possible, no matter how small. It's my understanding that users that follow this advice learn much more than they could from 1000 simple question threads. Perhaps the board game answer could be similar?