Crazy Crazy Man

I just wrote an app using the BGG XML API to find the games I own with the highest disparity between my rating and the average on the 'geek. I thought I'd quickly discuss the top 5 entries.

1. Cranium - average 5.92, my rating 2. I intend to never play this again. It is the most party of party games, and involves lots of skills neither I nor anyone I play with ever possesses. Inevitably, all the players are drunk. There's lots of screaming. My wife is really bad at it. There are *so* many better ways to be spending my life than playing this. I actually like to play games because it is an alternative to drinking myself into a stupour every night, so a game that people play only when they're drunk or Christian is not acceptable.

2. Magic: The Gathering CCG: average 7.29, my rating 4. It's just boring. It's a whole culture I don't want to be part of. Some of the cards have great art and great ideas, but I just don't care.

3. Mystery of the Abbey: average 6.79, my rating 10. I love this game. It has great production, it has fun bits, it has thinkiness and tension, it has a bell! It's much much better than Cluedo. You can drink Benedictine while you play it. I play this with my wife and kid, and I don't think we will ever stop having fun with it. The freeform questions mean there's always the chance you can infer or guess something on the flimsiest of evidence, so you know you are taking a risk but it might be worth it. This games is rated 0.22 below TATATA! - how can that work? TATATA! is a boring game with shonky Italian rules, Mystery of the Abbey is a masterpiece!

4. Stock Market Game: average 6.18, my rating 3. This is a pretty boring game. Many of the choices you might be able to make, e.g. where to move, are taken away from you. This game stinks of the time before people knew how to make great games, and it isn't punished for it. My guess is that most of the people rating it haven't played it in the last 20 years.

5. Trias: average 6.91, my rating 10: Trias is a cool little game, it has dinosaurs and the board keeps moving. There's heaps of thinkiness in there, and screwage. Maybe if Days of Wonder released a nice version it would score very well. As it is, people rate Trias below TATATA! as well. I don't get it. Trias is one of my id games. The question is, it is *me* that's crazy, or all of you?

When mkgray gets the BGG XML API doing a few more fun things I will release my app to the world at large. If you'd like to see what it can do at the moment, just send me your BGG id and I'll run it on you and send you the results. You crazy crazy man, you.