Category Archives: bgstat

September 2022 Gaming Stats

bgstat, by the numbers, gaming stats, stats

I hope you like the new image for these posts. Don’t worry that’s the only change. I’m not going to start changing the current no thrills, just the data format.

No onto the data.

My top 9 played games for September 2022

Ok here are the stats and games played for the month.

Bgstats for September 2022

Finally here is my current challenges progress.

Current challenge progress

My bgstat Origin Story!

apps, bgstat

I’ve been logging my plays of boardgames with the bgstat app since 29th December 2015.

To date that means I have played 374 games (not all mine!)

My all time stats to date
My 16 most played games to date

But why did I start recording my game plays?

Back in 2015 things were not brilliant at work.

I was being bullied and it made me ill.

I was off work with depression. I was not in a good place.

My line manager was doing nothing about it apart from enabling it.

Luckily I was referred for cognitive behaviour therapy (cbt) and didn’t have to wait months to get my first appointment. Something I’m not so sure would be the case now.

During the treatment I decided I needed a way to try and have an early warning sign that I was becoming ill again.

So I started logging my game plays with the bgstat app.

The logic being if I started to become depressed again then I’d be playing less games (pandemics not accounted for). I’d start to withdraw. My monthly stats were my canary down the mine for my mental health.

My journey to becoming well involved leaving that toxic environment (I quit my job and did a short stint doing supply teaching), as well as doing things I enjoyed (or used to).

Since then logging my game plays has become an addiction. The app itself has grown considerably since those early days. In some ways unrecognisable.

But I love the insights it gives me. Not just in what I’ve played, but into me.

The challenges I’ve started using aren’t just gaming challenges, but also another way to encourage me to do something I enjoy.

And to be totally honest September was never a great month for me with it being the anniversary of Dad’s death. But with the first anniversary of my Nan passing away so close to Dad’s. This year it’s a pretty rough month emotionally.

It’s going to take some Herculean effort to get through this month. And any little trick I can use to get through it like the bgstat app and forcing myself to play games will help.

I don’t know how to end this post. So I’m just going to stop and see you in the next one.

New bgstat Challenge Created

bgstat, game challenges

The tail end of last week the idea for a new bgstat challenge hit me.

I can’t remember exactly what sparked the idea. It might have been a YouTube video, a conversation, who knows?

What is important is the idea popped into my head.

The idea being to set up a challenge to get my worker placement games back to the table.

I have one or two in the collection. Which isn’t surprising I really like the mechanic.

So I went into the bgstat app to setup a new challenge.

Sadly the bgstat app doesn’t allow you to filter games by mechanic. Which meant I had to go through each listed game (or just the ones I wasn’t sure if they counted) on the bgg website to check, and add a “worker placement” tag to the game info.

From there when setting up the new challenge I was able to just select my tagged worker placement games.

The surprising bit for me was I had eighteen games that had the worker placement mechanic in them.

3×3 of the games making up the worker placement challenge

I set the challenge date for next year. One less challenge to think up in the new year.

However…

Those that “read” the barebones bgstats posts I put up at the end of each month know that I have nearly completed the “Play 40 New to me Games” challenge.

It’s very very possible that September will see me complete that challenge.

Then the question becomes do I start the new challenge early or concentrate more on the remaining challenges?

There is a little overlap between this new challenge and the current ones. And by a little I mean the odd one or two games at most.

The list of games in the worker placement challenge

In all likely hood I might start the new challenge early.

But I can see future challenges being based around mechanics.

I just wish there was an easier way to set them up. It’d be amazing if I could filter on game mechanics, designer, publisher, etc. But that’d be a big change to the apps database to hold all that info. Which might upset bgg.

Whilst I’m discussing my wish list of features I’d love to see in the bgstat app I’d love to see the bgg rank of the game, and be able to filter on that, and see that on the 3×3. How cool would a challenge of playing all your games in the bgg top 100?

And talking of ranking I’d love them to add in the ability to rank your owned games using paired comparisons. Similar to what I did in Python a few years back and still not updated. Seeing that on the 3×3 as an option would also be super cool.

I’m sure others would find this stuff of use. I’d even pay extra to have these features! That’s how much I want them.

Anyway enough of this day dreaming. See you in the next post.