Friday, May 25, 2007

Average Rating of Games Owned

My stats program calculates my average rating of games I own (6.6) and BGG's average rating of games I own (6.5). Does the closeness of these numbers mean I choose my games based on what other people think of them rather that what I think? I investigated. In particular, I decided to trade away games that I could bear to part with and that I didn't much like. (So I've added maybe 5 new games to my trade list.)

The problem is that I have a large number of games that I own on behalf of my kid. For example, three Goosebumps games. I think they're crud, but he seems to love them. I also own a number of incidental games, e.g. dominoes, which came with the chess / backgammon board I bought, as did poker dice and cribbage. I didn't choose to own those games and I don't expect anyone will give me a BattleLore expansion in exchange for them. I also have some print and play games, such as Achi. Achi is a particularly primitive game (rather like Tic Tac Toe) but I own it and nobody's going to take my printed board off my hands. So I'm sorta stuck with it, and it sits there making my collection look bad.

The solution I feel is to tag my games as being part of the "kids" collection, or "incidental", and then modify the stats to produce separate statistics for all tags I use. In that way I can focus on managing and playing the part of the collection I really care about. I'll have to start hacking the program again.

1 comment:

mikey said...

Sounds like cheating to me John! Maybe you should divide your games up into "Games I want to include in the average ratings, IE good games," and "crap games I own."

Your collection is your collection for many reasons, all valid!