Gaming in 2005: The Year in Review
Last year, I became more serious about keeping stats on how much and what I was playing. BGG makes this a little easier since you can log your plays at the site and query that information whenever you want to do a little analysis. I’m finally getting around to taking a look at that information. This entry and a few over the next couple of weeks will take a look back at 2005.
To start with, let’s take a broad brush view of the year. With the exception of January, I was very faithful in logging the games I played throughout the year. It was interesting to look at the month to month totals and see the ebb and flow during the year.
Early in the year, I decided to set a goal of averaging at least 1 play per day. That turned out to be easier than I thought, mostly due to the acquisition of a couple of games that don’t take a lot of time to play but ones that Jill and I enjoy quite a lot — the Mystery Rummy series and Crokinole.
Total Games 455
Avg/Month 38
Avg/Day 1.25
January (Games Played: 5)
This was an odd month since I only recorded games for 2 days. It looks like these were game nights with my regular group. I suspect I was able to recreate these entries from session reports. This is the “Lost Month” from 2005. Unlike the nearly lost BoardGameSpeak from later in the year, I don’t have any bits to recover the data for this month.
February (44)
The biggest month of the first half of the year. February is always a great month for games. Six of us started a private convention/retreat in 2000. We call it GTF and hold it on the last full weekend in February every year. More than half my plays occurred during the 4 days of this event.
March (36), April (37), May (42)
Typical gaming months in the upper 30s and lower 40s. A lot of Days of Wonder games played during this period. Ticket to Ride and Memoir ‘44 saw a lot of action. Dan and Jeff and I started a regular game night in April that we rotate from house to house. Our game group had the established annual weekend in February and would get together a few times throughout the year. I wanted to start a regular night so they’d happen with more frequency. I also wanted to see games we usually play at the annual weekend hit the table more often so everyone would be more familiar with them.
June (18)
This month puzzled me when I first looked at the numbers. Then I realized June must be when I worked on recovering the audio for the KublaCon BoardGameSpeak. Sure enough, between the 3rd and the 5th, I was working constantly on this problem. On the 6th and 7th, I wrote up and posted the solution along with the source. I spent the next week recuperating. Later in the month, I did some additional analysis of some other Apple Lossless tracks to confirm the hypothesis that there was a pattern to the audio frames that could be teased out of the audio data and used to recover the header information for virtually anything recorded in Apple Lossless. The other notable item for June was the purchase of Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper (more on this when I review my nickel and dime list).
July (41), August (55), September (29), October (33)
These were fairly typical gaming months. July and August being significantly higher due to Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper seeing a lot of play after being purchased in June. GenCon was in August but did not greatly increase the number of plays for the month. It was the first major board game event that I took all three sons to see.
November (55)
BGG.con hits in November. Just under half (40%) of what I played in November occurred during the 4 days of BGG.con. The game highlights included Caylus, Die Macher, Das Ende des Triumvirats and Railroad Tycoon plus all the folks Jill and I met while we were there. The dates for BGG.con 2006 were recently announced and you can be sure to see me there again this year.
December (60)
The week between Christmas and New Year’s turned out to be a significant contributor to the total for December and mostly due to Crokinole. I had a custom board made for Jill by the Hilinski brothers and it was in constant use over the break. Over half (60%) of the plays for December occurred during this period with Crokinole accounting for 50% of those plays!
2005 was a great year for me in terms of gaming. I made it to a couple of conventions, started a regular game night and found a nice mix of games to play with family and friends. When I return to this topic, I’ll take a look at my dime (10+ plays) and nickel (5-9 plays) games for 2005.