Great Days in Gaming

This morning I have been working on my program which uses the BGG XML API to produce all sorts of useless statistics. I can proudly say that my program is now more useless than ever! I have added in the ability to suck down games played, so the latest feature is "Best Days in Gaming". Here's how it works - for each day, find all the games you played. Find your ratings for each of those games and subtract 5, so that bad games count as negative points. Multiply the number of times you played by the rating, but more than 1 play of a game counts as only 1.5 (otherwise playing 10 games of Nobody But Us Chickens would come out as my best day ever). Total all the numbers. That's the rating for the day. It turned out surprisingly well for me. Here are my top 10 gaming days ever.

#10: Friday, June 24 2005: A Free Radicals meeting at Kracken's flat, and my first game of Euphrat & Tigris. I must have played Trias with Snacko in the afternoon, and then played Samurai, Monsters Menace America, and E&T in the evening.

#9: Saturday, July 09 2005: Day 2 of ConVic 2, the day I met Fralissa. We played Cosmic Encounter, Fearsome Floors, and Around the World in 80 Days. On the same day I managed a game of Power Grid, a game of Hansa, and even Hamsterrolle.

#8: Saturday, December 03 2005: What a day this was - a QUGS meeting in the morning and a Free Radicals meeting in the evening. We played Key Largo at each (after I had read the rules in French the previous night). At QUGS we played Dungeonville, Orcz, Arkham Horror. At Free Radicals we played Cloud 9, Gulo Gulo, Saboteur, and Frantic Frankfurt.

#7: Friday, March 03 2006: The most recent Critical Mass meeting. We played Coloretto, Torres, Domaine and Tongiaki. Strange that my highest-rated Critical Mass meetings were the ones where Leister beat me all the time.

#6: Friday, May 06 2005: This was the first ever Critical Mass meeting. Leister showed us Star Wars Epic Duels, then beat me twice at Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation. Then we played Domaine, Caribbean, and Fish Eat Fish to close the night.

#5: Sunday, February 12 2006: This was a BIG meeting where no board gamers at all turned up (except Cyberkev, whom I brought). While the miniatures guys played their interminably long games, Cyberkev taught me Coda and Australian Menagerie, and I taught him Kung Fu Fighting, Scarab Lords and Domaine. When there were more players, we played Ca$h'n'Gun$.

#4: Saturday, May 14 2005: This day does not stick in my mind. but I think it must have been after an order of games arrived from Milsims. My first game of Trias, my first game of Odin's Ravens, and a game of St Petersburg, all against the kid. It looks like we must have played Mystery of the Abbey with mum in the evening. Not sure this day belongs up here, but the quality of the opponents is not taken into account.

#3: Wednesday, December 28 2005: This was Christmas holidays, when Brendan and one of his daughters came round and we played games all day. Key Largo, Ricochet Robot, Pirate's Cove, Coloretto, Blokus and Vinci.

#2: Saturday, September 24 2005: I played Pit with the family in the morning. and in the evening went to Kracken's house for a Free Radicals meeting. We played Coloretto, For Sale, Mystery of the Abbey, Tongiaki, Castle and Blokus.

#1: Wednesday, February 22 2006: This was a Book Realm meeting where I played my first game of Evo and my first game of Cathedral, after meeting Cyberkev for lunch and playing Pico 2. Other games played were Coloretto, Pick Picknic, Ra and Coda.

Wow, there were some great sessions in there. The metric does tend to favour whole day events, so I might fiddle with a bit because many of my games meetings are only 4 hours. Anyway, with the Australian Games Expo and ConVic 4 coming up later this year, I'm expecting some more great days ahead.