Thursday, January 03, 2013

The Numbers for 2012

Let me get this article written before I see a shiny butterfly and rush off and do something else. This is my annual article about the embarrassing state of my game collection and what a waste of space and money it is. Here are the previous articles in this series:
2007 article
2008 article
2009 article
2010 article
2011 article

There are 364 games in this collection (last year 448).

The BGG average rating for this collection is 6.54 (last year 6.43).

Your average rating for this collection is 7.34 (last year 7.04).

On average you have played each of these games 8.5 times (last year 7.75).

Your Friendless Metric is 1 (86 games played 10+ times, 45 games never played.) (last year 1, 102, 46)

Your Continuous Friendless Metric is 3.43 which corresponds to an average utilisation of 54.64%. (last year 3.49, 55.24%)

This is sort of a good result. I've dropped a load of games, through very conscious and continuous effort. It really is quite an effort to sell games, I spend a lot of time wrapping and posting things. However the amount of trading that I did resulted in a lot of played games going out, a lot of unplayed games coming in, and many of those new games not being played at all. That's not really very productive! There are games like Cuba which I could probably like that I owned for a while and then dumped without playing because it was just crowded out by all the other stuff I have.


One exercise I tried during the year was to make a list of games I own that I really do want to play. There were about a hundred, which suggests that I have an awful lot of stuff to get rid of still. I do like the constant influx of new games - I read the rules of practically everything - but I don't like that many games just don't turn me on so much and go onto the trade pile very quickly. I'm learning to resist - Kingdom Builder is an example of a game which has many good things about it which I acknowledge I wouldn't use if I owned it. Then there are games like Trajan and Milestones and Village and Macao which I do quite like but don't need to own because other people have them.

The project continues this year. The Lord of the Rings living card game has a lot to answer for with respect to underutilised games. I'll see if I can maintain the merciless momentum.