Atom feed of your recently played games

Scott and his team are a bit overworked so I wrote a simple scraper that turns your "games played" page on BGG into an Atom feed. If/when Scott gets around to officially supporting this, I'll make my feed generator redirect to the "real" one. (Atom is essentially the same as RSS and most services that support RSS support Atom)

Games Played Atom Feed Generator

For example, my games played.

I'm planning to also add feeds for plays of a particular game, or even a particular game by a particular person.

In praise of short games

I like short games. I often find myself defending short games, and the preference for short games to other gamers, so I thought I'd write my thoughts down in a little detail.

First, definitions: A very short game is one that plays in 15 minutes or less. A short game is one that plays in 15-45 minutes. A medium game plays in 45-100 minutes. A long game plays in 100-180 minutes. A very long game plays in over 3 hours. That's how I use those words.

Part of my preference for short games comes from my opportunities to play. I don't get to game as much as I used to, and some of that limited time includes lunchtime gaming at work. But, my inclination toward short games extends back to before I had any such time constraints. The constraints have simply amplified the preference.

The standard argument is that longer games have more strategic opportunities, the ability to more thoroughly explore a game system, and overall to be "deeper". For the most part, I agree. The argument goes further something like, "If you're enjoying it, what's the difference between one two hour game and 4 half-hour games?". To me, a lot. This is the key, and why I prefer short games.

To get to the root of the issue requires deconstructing how I get enjoyment out of games. I enjoy the social aspect, it's part of why I don't do "online boardgaming" much if at all. I enjoy the decision making, but that's actually a small part. I enjoy the process: Going from a start condition where everyone is equal; adapting to random factors and other people's play; developing a strategy or strategies; picking tactics to execute that strategy; executing those tactics; resolving the endgame. The whole is far greater than the sum of the parts. The positive experience of a complete game, the beginning, middle and end, is greater than the micro-activity of "what do I do next". Each of those parts of the process has value in and of itself, not just "enjoyment per unit time". It's similar to why people presumably enjoy whole movies or TV shows rather than a simple collection of entertaining scenes. So, if the enjoyment of playing a good game yields 1 EP ("enjoyment point") per minute, I'd say the process of developing a strategy is worth 5-20 EP, on top of the time it takes. For each of the 5 or so "aspects" of gameplay, that often ends up being the dominant part of the fun. Plus, as mentioned, I like novelty/variety so I'd say most of the time I'd give a game a 1-10 EP bonus depending how long it's been since I'd played it.

Now, most very short games, and many short games have the problem that they don't have all that process in one game. They tend to be just tactical games (no strategy), or dominated by random factors, or insufficient variety to make the adaptation part meaningful, or trivial enough to make the execution automatic. But, say a good 30 minute game has obvious tactics given a strategy and a mundane endgame. This leaves it with 30 minutes of gametime, the adaptation aspect, the strategy development, and the execution. If each of these parts yields only 5 EP because, say they're more shallow than they might be in a longer game, then the game yields 45 EP, or 1.5EP/minute. Then, say I have a two hour game that has all 5 of the above aspects, but at a higher level of depth, so they're worth 10 EP each. This means that game is 170 EP, or 1.4EP/minute. So, I'd have gotten more EP playing 4 half hour games, even if I play the same one over 4 times. If I play different ones to get the "variety bonus", the gap widens. The specifics of this deconstruction aren't actually that important. It may be there's 10 aspects, not 5, etc. etc. The core is that there's something to "playing a complete game" which is more than just an activity.

Fortunately, there are some short and medium games that not only have all 5 (or whatever) of the above "aspects", but provide them with comparable quality to longer games. Race for the Galaxy is certainly one such game for me. It looks like Dominion may be too. But, on the flip side, longer games often suffer from a reverse problem; I used 1EP/minute as a baseline up there, but if the core activity of the game is more or less fun, that could be different. In a lot of longer games, I actually find the core activity is substantially less enjoyable. In some cases, this is why they're longer; they have 60 minutes of interesting stuff to do and 40 minutes of mundane manipulation or bookkeepping. This lowers their baseline rate and makes them less fun, for me. But, most shorter games don't quite hit enough of the aspects, while a 45-60 minute game usually does. So, in the end your 60 minute game which hits all 5 aspects at 5-10 points each, is just as good, or better, than the above-described hypothetical 30 minute game. This means I end up playing a lot of "medium" length games.

Finally, there's the issue of winning and losing. For the most part, my winning or losing doesn't have a huge effect on my enjoyment, but usually it is more fun to win than to lose, even if it's just a marginal effect. Other people's enjoyment also matters. In any game, one turn of bad luck, one error, or the confluence of small errors or luck can turn a game against someone. In a short game, it's over soon and the feeling of being stuck in a bad place resets. In a long game, you can get stuck there for a while. So, both because I would rather not be stuck with my errors or bad luck and because I don't want others' to feel stuck with errors or bad luck, it further pushes me away from long games.

But, there's an exception. There's a small number of very long games I like a lot. For example, Descent and Battlestations. These jump out of the above logic by being a lot of fun in the steady state, as an activity, unlike many long games, as well as usually having all the "aspects" in spades.

So, that's why I have a preference for short games, and obviously other poeple's structure/model for enjoying games may be radically different, but it's why I'll keep seeking out the Races of the world; short but complete and well-rounded games.

1000 different games

I love variety in games; I don't like playing the same game a lot. It's not unheard of for someone to suggest a game and have my reaction be "Oh, I just played that a few weeks ago.", or for games that are less favored, "Enh, I've already played that this year." The most favorite and filler-y of the fillers rarely receive more than 10 or 20 plays in a year, and for a while, I was playing a lot of games each year (~800). Recently, Race for the Galaxy, has been the exception, but the general rule still holds.

So, it was with pleasure and a certain degree of pride that I recently passed the 1000 different games played mark. Of course, I haven't been keeping track of games played my whole life, but I probably played a total of 15-50 different games before I have any chance of remembering details. Further, before 2000, I didn't keep very precise records. For example, I know I've played Wiz-War, but not since 2000, and I don't remember exactly when. So, the 1000 threshold is a little fuzzy, but I can now say I've played:

• > 1030 different games in my life
• 1018 different games that I have some record of
• 1001 different games since 2000, for which I have specific logs

Of course, it also depends how you count "different" games. I count, somewhat arbitrarily, by the distinct packaged games, where plays of a game with an expansion counts as the base game. So, Ticket To Ride and Ticket To Ride: Europe are two different games, but Ticket To Ride and TTR with the 1910 deck are the same game. Further, all the games in New Games in Old Rome, count as one game. Further, if BGG considers two games to be the same game, such as Europa Tour and 10 Days in Europe (which are not-quite-identical, but close enough) I count them as the same, even though they are technically distinct packaged games.

Some stats on the 1001 games:

• I own 52% of them.
• The average (mean) number of plays is 4.
• The median number of plays is 2.
• 47% have been played once.
• 22% have been played 5 or more times.
• 9% have been played 10 or more times.
• 1% have been played 38 or more times.
• I play at least one new game in 42% of gaming sessions.
  
• The average number of new games per session is 0.9
• Unsuprisingly, the rate at which I play new-to-me games has been almost monotonically decreasing over time, looking at a window of 100 new games. There was a brief upward blip the year when I first attended Gathering, when I played 54 new games in under a month, leading to 100 new games in 6 months. Lately, it takes me over a year to play 100 new games.
  
• Since 2000, there have only ever been 4 calendar months where I haven't played a new game. (August 2004, May & September 2005, Jun 2007)
• I've never played more than 10 new-to-me games on a single day, but I have played 10 on four separate occasions.
• I've played multiple games which begin with each letter of the alphabet, except X. I should clearly correct this, since I own at least 3.
• I still want to play more new games.

Simple election Monte Carlo toy

I wanted to be able to fiddle with my own model of the electoral college. At the moment, despite the general media's efforts, the race isn't that close, but I wanted a modeling framework in which I could interpret "dramatic" changes that might occur.

So, I made a Personalized Election Modeler which lets you specify the chances you think Obama will win each state, and runs the simulation for you.

Request for online photo hosting/sharing suggestions and opinions

I'm looking for a good online photo sharing/backup solution. The three options I'm considering at the moment are SmugMug, Flickr and Picasaweb. None seem to be quite up to my requirements, so I'm hoping someone can suggest something better or how to use one of these services better. I'm leaning toward SmugMug, but I'm not entirely happy with it.

I want:

• Reasonably priced for a large amount of storage. I have over 40G of photos and don't want to pay >$100 a year. This seems to eliminate Picasaweb.
• Access control. I actually like SmugMug's access model, but would prefer finer grained (per photo control) rather than having to move photos around between albums to change access. The three tiers of public/unlisted/password-protected work well for me.
• Automatic/easy upload from iPhoto, iPhone and Android. Most seem to do fine in this regard, but opinions are welcome.
  
• Decent file management. I want to be able to search browse and share all my photos at once, not have to go fiddle in dozens or hundreds of albums. I don't want to have to keep track of what I've uploaded and what I haven't. I don't want it to end up with bunch of duplicate uploads. All of them, including SmugMug seem to have issues here.
• Reliable. I'm want this in substantial part as a backup solution.
• Good temporal organization/photo finding. I think of my photos as organized by time, not by "album" and none of the sites seem to do well with this model.
  

In all, the main reason I'm not so sure about SmugMug is that it doesn't deal well with things like duplicates, it seems very locked in to the whole "album" metaphor (as do the others), and their site is a bit slow.

Thoughts, experiences, suggestions, ideas?

Update: I think I'm going to go with flickr. Easy browsing by time, good price, and it's fast.

Played a bunch of new games

The rate at which I play new games has been relatively steadily declining by 10-20% per year, until this year, when it looked like it might fall by by over 50%. As of last week, I had only played 29 new-to-me games this year (down from 73 in 2007, and a lot more in preceding years). But, yesterday I got to play a bunch (7) of new-to-me games, and I played two others earlier this week and that's worthy of a capsule reviews post. Because these are all based on one or two plays, they're probably, if anything, slightly over-inflated since I tend to like new things.

Tribune. [BGG] This obviously has a lot of positive buzz and it's fairly well deserved. It seems to have captured the positive qualities of a lot of role-selection/worker-placement games while playing in a reasonable time. The multiple parallel paths to victory quality is very nice. A-

Dreizehnte Holzwurm. [BGG] I got this as a "sweetener" in a trade over 5 years ago and only just got around to playing it. That's a real shame since it's a cute game of tactical cardplay and brinkmanship. The comparison to 6 nimmt! is a fair, but tenuous one. A nice filler. B

Handelsfursten. [BGG] A sort of generic Knizia filler card game. The game actually feels like it ends a little quickly for the number of potential opportunities for choices. In the end, it just didn't leave much of an impression, but makes a good filler. B

Container. [BGG] This is clearly a really neat economic game. It's also as try as the theme (container ships) would suggest. The system of A produces, B buys and resells to C who then auctions it to D, where A!=B, B!=C and C!=D is a little hard to wrap your head around, especially since the auction payouts are matched by the bank and the fact that your most common good type is thrown out. A little too much arbitrariness and dryness in an otherwise strong package. If I felt at all engaged, the rating would go up a lot. B-

Neue Heimant. [BGG] A cute little little auction game, but not one I enjoyed because the game has multiple sever "cliffs" in the final scoring. By that I mean an small change in where something gets built at the end of the game has a radical impact on scores. I like that kind of chaos/subtlety in the incremental mechanisms of games, but in the final scoring it's just sort of annoying. C

Witch's Brew. [BGG] A cute little role selection game with a nice cardplay twist. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite live up to its potential, in that the cardplay ends up feeling a bit too uncontrolled. But, maybe that's just inexperience. I should try this one a few more times before I make a real judgement. B+

Jamaica. [BGG] Wow. The art on this (same artist as Animalia) is beautiful and remarkably functional as well. It's definitely a "family game" but it's clever and quick. The multiple resources required to run the race and the ebb and flow of the cards makes for a nice experience. This was the biggest hit out of this crop of games. A

Cannonball Colony. [BGG] Cute little tactical conflict game. I wasn't going to call it a "wargme", but I guess it simply is. For the right person, this is probably a great game. For me, not so much. Too much pure direct conflict and the geometric and tactical nature was just not sufficiently engaging. C

Shadow Hunters. [BGG] A nice fun hidden alliances game. Some players are Hunters, some are Shadows, and some are Neutral, but you don't know who, so you go around attacking each other and gathering information. I think I agree with Felix's comment that it's better than Bang!, but scratches the same itch. Plus, it plays in much less time than it claims (30 minutes, not an hour). Not a lot of depth, but it's fun and that's the point of this sort of game. B+

BaordGameGeek and AppEngine

AppEngine is fun. I've been fiddling on a number of personal projects using it lately, some involving BoardGameGeek. A month ago, I posted there, but forgot to post here: I made a fun BGG collection comparison tool. The combination of the BGG XML API and AppEngine with urlfetch (and ElementTree) makes writing BGG "add-ons" pretty easy. I'll certainly keep writing more, but other people should write some too. Don't know python? Well, it's a nice language and worth learning. :)

And, to get you started, here's the (sloppy, not cleaned up, but functional) bggcoll.py library for fetching collection info from BGG. It lets you do things like:

coll = bggcoll.GetCollection(username)

while doing all the nice things like stuffing it in memcache, the datastore, and only refetching it from BGG if the local copy is stale.

Quick iPhone app reviews

I installed the 2.0 update and downloaded and played with a bunch of the apps. Except for Enigmo, all the apps I tried were free. The high points are Cube Runner, Aurora Feint, Shazam, and Google Mobile App. Here's my quick impressions:

Games:
I tried several of the free ones, and based on experience with the Desktop game, I bought Enigmo. The iPhone definitely has potential as a gaming platform.

Cube Runner: This is a nice little game that uses the accelerometer. The control is nicely sensitive and the game is cute, but it gets sort of old quickly, but it's fun enough to do in an idle minute I'm unlikely to delete it.

Aurora Feint: This has some role-playing game back-story, which I haven't really figured out, but it's a great little Tetris like game. You've got blocks of the 4 elements and you're trying to get them in rows of 3 or more, in which case they disappear. It's got good use of the touch screen, and you can even rotate the phone to switch gravity, which is a nice (literal) twist on the game. Good graphics, good play, good sound, and who knows, the bigger game might be interesting too.

Enigmo: I enjoyed the desktop version of this and the iPhone version is a remarkble port. The controls are sometimes a little finnicky, but it works and the puzzles are great.

PhoneSaber: Makes your phone make lightsaber noises as you swing it around. Gratuitous fun demonstration of the accelerometer. Don't let go.

Blip Solitaire: A pretty basic game that uses the touch screen. Not really any fun. Haven't deleted it yet, but probably will.

Spinner: Another acelerometer based game, but just not that compelling. Not intuitive and once you figure it out, not that fun. I'll play Cube Runner instead.

Music/Audio:
Shazam & Midomi: These are two "music id" services. Both let you hold the iPhone up to playing music and it will try to identify the song. Shazam seems to work better for music over the radio and has a reasonably nice interface, including of course "Buy from iTunes" buttons, but also has "Watch on YouTube" buttons. Very nice for IDing a song on the radio in the car. Midomi is also pretty good, but it's key feature is that it lets you sing or hum a song, instead of just actual music. It does pretty well, and my kids got a kick out of singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and having it recognize it.

Remote: A very nice and remarkably responsive interface to control iTunes on your desktop. It makes me want to get an AirPort Express.

Jott: Transcribes little voice recordings. It's not as featureful as the full Jott service, which I hope they will fix. The transcription latency is also really high, and while you can get your notes emailed to you, it's on a daily basis, not ASAP. If this improves, it will be great. For now, it's more of a net (slow) trick.

VoiceNotes: A basic voice recorder. The interface is a little clunky for most of the circumstances I've used a voice recorder in the past.

Internet:
Google Mobile App: This is QuickSilver for your iPhone. If you haven't used QuickSilver, it's a cool mac app that doesn't do anything new, but does a lot of old things better. The Google Mobile App doesn't really do anything you can't do in Safari, but it's better at doing them than Safari. Basically, it saves a lot of typing by doing search term completion, web site URL completion and background searching. The web site URL completion alone is worth it to me, since the iPhone's (otherwise excellent) keyboard spelling correction doesn't do so well with URLs.

Twitteriffic: I'm not really big into Twitter, but this seems like a decent/nice interface to reading and posting. That said, I hear people raving about how great this is, and I don't quite get it. It's good, and includes nice things like easy posting of pictures, but really, I don't see the excitement.

LifeCast: I haven't really tried this one out much, but it seems like a nice interface to mobile blogging (Blogger or Tumblr). It doesn't seem to know about the fact that Blogger supports multiple blogs per user so I haven't tried it yet.

Yelp: I was hoping this would be great, since I really like the web site, but it couldn't find any restaurants near my home, which is just wrong.

Content:
WeatherBug: A decent weather app, but rather than showing cached results and indicating it somehow while it loads the updated information, it blanks out the information, which is annoying, especially when looking for forecasts which don't change that often.

eReader: A book reading application that comes with a couple of free books. A decent first pass, but it's missing a lot of features I'd want like bookmarking, line spacing adjustment and such. Plus, the page flipping UI gets the z-order wrong when going backward, which is a little bit dissonant.

NYTimes: Not bad, but nothing special as an alternative to the web site to read the news.

I play games with other people

Reading (and posting to) one of the latest "Do ratings matter?" threads on BGG it occurred to me that there's a subtext here that bugs me. The argument usually starts as a generic "why would you care what other people think?" kind of thing but the subtext is that the enjoyment of other people (eg, your opponents) doesn't matter, and therefore other people's opinions don't matter.

Other people's opinions matter, because I play games with other people. If one has a limited circle of people you game with, they may be the only ones you care about, but I, and most people I game with play with lots of different people, and are constantly introducing new people to the hobby and playing with more casual gamers. Even this year, which has been a really slow year, nearly half the people I've played with have been "new people". So, to that end what a "random gamer" thinks matters, in that I play with a "random gamer" on average more than once a week.

In detail, over the past eight and a half years, I've played with two new people a week, on average. My wife, who I've played the most games with only has played in 25% of the games I've played. The next most frequent gamer barely breaks 10%. Over 50% of the people I play with, I only have ever played a few games with, so knowing what games a "random gamer" is more likely to like is useful. Of course I use my own judgment, but I can't always predict what's going to succeed and fail with other gamers. For example, I personally never would have realized the extremely broad appeal of super-hits like Ticket To Ride or Carcassonne, or realized how universally I should be careful about inflicting something like Vabanque on other people.

Of course, to repeat a comment from the above thread ratings are meaningful but not oracular. For a shared activity like games, other people's opinions matter to me, and ratings are one way to get some insight into the opinions of all those gamers who I'm going to play with who I haven't met yet.

Almost 4, Almost a boardgame geek

(warning: This is an "Isn't my child so cute?" post)

I play a lot of games with my almost 4-year-old daughter.  Most of the time when I ask her if she wants to play a game, she declares "Yeah! Let's play a game I've never played before!"  While I have a large collection, this occasionally proves problematic, as lots of them aren't quite suitable for a 3-year-old.  But whenever she decides she is too overwhelmed by the rules, or is just sick of playing, she suggests "Ok, now let's play my version.", which are usually an extremely complex set of steps with no actual goal, but she imitates the general structure of game rules quite well.

A week or so ago, we were in a games store and she'd look around commenting which ones we had at home and asking about games she thought looked interesting.  Then, she turned to me, perplexed, and asked "Daddy, where's Race for the Galaxy?".  This is a game she's never played before, just heard me talk about.  In fact, she's asked, and I've demurred saying we'd play it when she was older.  Her response, "Ok, we'll play that when I'm 6."  Who knows, maybe she'll be ready.

A few weeks ago, after trying a game that was a bit too hard for her (Chateau Roquefort), I suggested we play something a little less complicated.  She protested, "I like complicated games.  Let's play another complicated one."

Finally, today we had some friends over and one of their kids said to her, "You have a lot of games.  How many do you have?" and she replied, "I don't know, but Daddy could check the database."