One of my numerous hobbies is boardgaming: getting together with family, friends, or total strangers to push bits of plastic around on a cardboard playing surface, and incidentally socializing with the aforementioned people.
Sacramento is blessed with a large number of boardgamers, but many of these folks don’t realize how many new people they could be meeting and playing against. One way to find potential players is to hang around in local game stores, such as Viking Hobby. An even better idea is to join the Sacramento Boardgames Meetup — These dedicated gamers get together at least once a week to socialize and play various games. (Disclosure: I’m the so-called Organizer of this group.) We’re currently meeting every Tuesday night at the Fox & Goose Public House, and we also arrange several other public and private events every month. Check our upcoming events for details.
One of the many cool things about the BoardGameGeek website is the ability to research games prior to purchase. Whenever I find a game I’m thinking about buying, I add it to my BGG wishlist and set the priority field to “I’m thinking about it.” You can then view and compare these by going to your BGG “Collection” and selecting “Owned: No” for your criteria. I usually sort the games under consideration by BGG rating and work my way down the list. Since I’ve normally got more games on the list than I have money to purchase them (or space to store them!), I’m initially looking for reasons to eliminate a game from my wishlist — if I find a reason to drop the game, I just uncheck the “Add to Wishlist” setting.
Once I winnow the list down, I start making entries in the Comments box. The first thing I put in is the price, then any reasons I might be particularly interested (or not) in this game. I also make judicious use of the “GeekBuddy Analysis” feature. (In fact, some day soon I’ll write an entry devoted entirely to GeekBuddy features.) After commenting on my wishlist games, I set/adjust the priority (from “Gotta have it!” down to “Thinking about it.”) These settings don’t appear in the unowned games list, but they are a sortable column on your BGG wishlist — This is the link I give to family and friends when they ask what I want for Christmas.
The only shortcoming of the wishlist screen is that the Comments field isn’t shown. I’d like to see both Wishlist Priority and Comments presented on a combined screen. Maybe a note to Aldie is in order…
