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BG Stats, revisited · Pick Up and Deliver

0:04
Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
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as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I walk
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home. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon, listeners. It is
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a disturbingly warm afternoon here in suburban Chicago. It is February twenty sixth,
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and my phone says it's seventy degrees out. That is terrifying. Means I
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don't have to wear my jacket on the walk home, but yikes. Well,
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on to more happy news. I've gotten some good feedback from my stats
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episode. Both Chris Hickman and Gabriel Edge reached out with comment so thanks for
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those comments, folks. Chris, his first message was like, you can't
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sort by how often you win a game? What it turns out I just
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was not looking at the right screen if you go in. Okay, So
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today I'm going to talk about board game stats the Board game Stats app some
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more, just because it felt like there was more to say after the last
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conversation, and both Gabriel and Chris offered useful and helpful thoughts, so this
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additional commentary reflects their thoughts and comments as well. And then if I have
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time left over, I'll talk about other game stuff, but I think this
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will mostly mostly be board game stats Part two. So it occurred to me
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that I haven't really played around in the app as much as I probably could
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or should have. So I spent a little bit of time today looking through
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the help menus and reading about the different features and reflecting on stuff that Chris
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pointed out to me last time, and I thought I would discuss a little
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bit more what I found. So one thing was Chris suggested instead of looking
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at the game pages and seeing how well I did it each game, I
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could just look at the player page and see how well I do it each
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game, And turns out, yeah, that's a good way to do it.
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So there are a variety of different paths that I can use to reflect
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on my skill in games. From the player page, it shows my win
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percentage, for example, and I can organize the game by win percentage to
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see how well I do overall. And one of the things is I find
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that organizing by win percentage alone is not a very useful metric because every game
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that I've played one or two times and one when I played it gives me
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a really high win percentage. So there's just this huge list of games that
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I have a very high win percentage because I won the first time I played,
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and I haven't played it again since, which makes for an interesting glance
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on my board game stats, but not a very interesting glance in terms of
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conversation with you listeners. That said, there are other things that do present
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themselves in interesting ways. You can organize by game name, or how many
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plays you've done, or all sorts of different things, and you'll get a
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variety of different stats about yourself as a gamer. I also have a number
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of different things that are interesting. So I have, for example, six
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thousand, seventy six plays logged in board game Geek or in board game Stats,
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three hundred eleven of which are ignored. I recently learned about this.
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I realized that my win stats and other things were getting screwed up by cooperative
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games because we kind of considered a personal win when there's a cooperative gamer.
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When I'm looking at somebody's win percentage how often they win at cooperative games,
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doesn't feel useful to me. So I've been slowly going through and using within
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the board game stats, there is a place where you can mark this thing
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that says ignore for statistics, and when you mark ignore for statistics, it
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still remembers the game played. It still lists like how many times you played
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it and all of that, but when it calculates your win percentage or any
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of that, it leaves out any games you've ignored for statistics. So I
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am making a habit of anytime I play a cooperative game, ignoring for statistics.
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And I'm also sometimes going back and doing that with old plays of similar
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games. But I get a lot of different stats out of board game stats.
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One of my favorites. I have logged plays with one fifty one other
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people or one fifty two excuse me. So that's pretty fun. In the
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last six years. Now this includes online play, and so in the last
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six years I have played with something like a thousand, just over a thousand
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other people, and that's pretty cool. I've also looked logged sixty eight at
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different locations, which I think is fun also, So yeah, lots of
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really interesting things. I've played one hundred and forty nine different games and my
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h index is twenty nine, meaning that I have twenty nine different games that
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I have played twenty nine times and Apparently there are not thirty games that I've
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played thirty times. There could be more than twenty nine that I've played twenty
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nine times, but definitely not thirty for thirty. So I guess I should
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go through that list of twenty nine and play them each once see if I
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can bump that up to thirty. So that's my personal player page. But
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the real excitement was in the insights page that Chris highlighted for me. Now
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is I use this regularly insights to look at a variety of things. Usually
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when I'm doing my top of the Pack episode, I will use insights to
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discuss how the different games that I've played are reflected. But what I hadn't
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looked at was a variety of different matrics that are displayed on this The person
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I played games with most is my wife. She's I've logged seventeen hundred and
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twenty two games with her, which is roughly somewhere just over twenty five percent
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of the games I play I play with her, which is a delight.
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I will say, I have a spreadsheet here that shows my in the insights
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by player, there is a list of a number of things. There's a
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list of how many games you've played. There's a list of the number of
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different games played. There is a list of number of different locations that player
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has played at, the number of different players you've played with the total time
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played. So if you use the time or feature, it will track that
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the number of wins in non ignored plays, meaning how often, how many
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times total have you won. Then it's got your win percentage, and then
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it's got your win chance, and it's win chance that is particularly interesting to
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me, and win percentage. So win chance is calculated as the likelihood that
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you'll win a game if you play it, and your win percentage indicates or
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excuse me, the win chance is the calculation of your the possibility that you
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could win. You can win the game just based on player account. It
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is literally the number that I was wondering about when we were talking about setting
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up games. The personal win percentage is shaped around the idea of calculating all
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of these numbers to give you a sense of are you more likely or less
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likely to win a game than you should be? And the nice thing about
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the insights page is that it displays that number in color. It gives you
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a cheerful green Actually it's a dark kind of foresty green if you are above
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what your win percentage would be or what I was calling your fair wind your
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fair win chance, and it's red if your number is below your win chance.
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So in any given game you play, the chance that you win the
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game is indicated in green. Your personal win chance is indicated in green if
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you're likely to win, and red if you're not likely to win. So,
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in that regard, my personal win chance is thirty seven percent. That
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means in any given well, my personal win percentage is thirty seven percent,
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my personal win chance is thirty eight percent. So I am slightly less likely
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to win a game that I play, then would be my fair share of
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games that I play. I think that's really interesting to see sort of how
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the app imagines you, what the apps has your chances are, and how
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it imagines it are. Now, what I have not figured out how to
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do is to look at that number by game. I wonder if it's possible
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to look at that number from game to game. They have your win percentage
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on games you look at, but they don't say your win chance, which
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again is determined by a lot of things, but should be determined by the
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number of players in the game, and I don't see that particular stat in
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this display. But all in all, some really interesting stuff going on in
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board game stats, And if you haven't looked around in there, I recommend
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it because there's a lot more than I realized is going on in those charts.
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So what insights have you found in board game stats? I'd love to
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hear head over to board game geet guild three two six nine and share those
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with me. Well, I've got a little bit of time before I get
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home, so I wanted to share a little bit more about games we've been
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playing lately. I'm not going to talk about any new games right now,
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but I think there's some interesting stuff to share. Particularly, I'm very excited
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the new campaign for Arkham Horror is out. It's called the Campaign or the
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Festival of Hemlock Veil. It's got a sort of cheery orange cover and beautiful
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imagery that reminds me a little bit of something like Midsummer It feels like full
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horror, and in fact that is the idea, Like there's an island and
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there's people on the island that are having some sort of terrifying ceremony and as
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a investigator. You're going there to find out what's going on with the ceremony,
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and you're probably in trouble, so that's exciting. I got both the
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campaign expansion and the Vestigator expansion for that. It was sort of fun.
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I went to the game store and I was just looking around and I saw
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this expansion on the shelf. I was like, oh, wow, how
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exciting. I really want to get this. So I wroughte up to the
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counter and I said, oh, I'm very excited for this. I didn't
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even realize it was out. I had heard they were working on another one,
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but I didn't remember whether I had ordered it or not. Can you
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check? And so they checked, and in fact, I had ordered it,
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and they did have a copy waiting for me behind the shelf or in
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the back room, which I don't know. Maybe they emailed me about it
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and I missed it, or it was busy and they didn't email me,
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or it got caught in spam or something, so I didn't have it.
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But that means I got ten percent off because I had pre ordered it,
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which unfortunately in Chicagoland, just means I don't have to pay the tax,
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but still ten percent, So very excited for that. I'm not sure when
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we'll play it next, because usually when we play that with my son,
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it's as a campaign game, and right now we just started a different win
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which I haven't talked about on the podcast yet, so I'm keeping it secret,
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but that will probably be something will do soon down the line, certainly,
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although I was looking forward actually to going back to some of the older
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campaigns that we that my wife and I played years ago, and now that
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my son is playing with us, we could return to. But we can
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play the new one. That's fine. There's one other bit of gaming news
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that I thought was interesting and maybe worth talking about for the last five minutes
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here. It is not board gaming, but rather video gaming. And you
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know, I don't do much video gaming, although I have recently bought a
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new computer, as I mentioned, and that new computer allows me to play
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games. I am able to play newer games. Mostly I have been playing
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Slay the Spire, which I had before, and I started Fear To and
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titan Fall, both of which Fear Too. I have titan Fall or titan
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Fall two, excuse me, my son had and I started playing those.
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They're both good. I just haven't found a lot of time to progress through
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them. But I saw this article and I wanted to talk about something that
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is related to the casual game fad. In the sometime in the two thousands
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to thousand and eight, let's say twenty ten, maybe twenty twelve, there
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was a new kind of game emerging in the Facebook marketplace where it was a
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plugin that you could put in Facebook and then you could play this game in
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Facebook. And the game that was most popular in this platform was a game
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called Farmville. Now, Farmville is a model of game that we see all
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the time now, which is you have a some sort of space and you
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do things in that space to get more stuff. In Farmville, you would
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plant cows, or you would start a task with your different farm things and
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or you'd plant crops or say, milk your cows or something. And the
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way the game worked, there was a certain amount of time in real time
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that you had to wait before you could get the harvest from that process.
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So, like say we're going to milk your cows. It would take five
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minutes to milk your cows. And then once you were done milking your cows,
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a little pale with milk and it would appear on the barn and you
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had to click it to say, sell that milk or put that milk in
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the dairy storage facility or something. And the trick was, if you didn't
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click that milk, then say, let's say in half an hour, it
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would spoil and then it's only worth half as much or it's not worth anything
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at all. But it would sit there spoiling until you go and click it
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to get rid of it. So either way you have to click it.
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But if you don't click it fast enough, you get a penalty instead of
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a bonus, or you get nothing. So Farmville was wildly popular, but
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there were people who said it was not good for players. It's not a
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good game. It was about activating your baser instincts, but not about engaging
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you or telling a story or helping you become a better person. It was
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sort of serotonin purified well. Game designer Ian Bogost designed a game called Cow
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Clicker, in which you would download the game and you get a cow,
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and once a day or once it'd be six hours or something, you can
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click on it and you get a point, and if you have done this
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enough times, then you can use your points to buy something like say a
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cow that faces the other way. It was all very simple, and it
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was meant to be a stre of games like Farmville. Well, his problem
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was that people started playing it as though it was not a satire, as
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though it was real, and they went kind of crazy for it. Well,
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he eventually stopped the game, and there was a bunch of stuff that
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happened. But you know, the long and short of it was the was
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this satire of this kind of game? Well, I just read the other
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day that there is somebody making six figures selling a game called like Otter Petter
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or Otter Stroker. I think where you It's a picture of an otter and
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you click a button to pet the otter. That's all it does. And
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they have a whole bunch of different ones with different animals, but they cost
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money to download, and people are paying that money. I don't really know
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what that means. I don't have any answer for it. I don't have
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a round button to put here at the end of the episode about it.
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But life imitates art imitates life. It's how I feel, and art is
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imitating life in this situation. Because yeah, because coup clicker has become a
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real thing. So with that in mind, I'm going to call it a
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day and wish you best of luck. Thank you for joining me on my
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walk today, I'll be your next walk is as present as mine was.
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Good Bye, brought to you by rattle Box