SonicChicken blog

I started up a Facebook profile a few days ago, after Joseph linked to the Facebook platform wiki. Looks like a less juvenile version of myspace. Let’s hope it stays that way. And please, God, don’t allow people to start spamming my speakers with their current favorite tune if I browse their Facebook profile!

Some of the (user-written) Facebook apps look pretty cool. I’ve added the Board Games, Where I’ve Been, and Bookshelf apps. I had a spot of trouble importing my Delicious Library book list into the Bookshelf app, so I wrote a little Perl script to filter out the ISBN’s from Delicious Library.

I originally started this post because of the game store locator that I learned about via the ‘Geek. The store locator relies on user-supplied store information, so if your favorite game shop isn’t listed go ahead and add it!

This would have been a pretty short post, but while I was checking out the website hosting the store locator I found out that the author is Matthew Gray , one of the BGG admins. I read the Games section of his blog and stumbled across a post about BoardGameGeek Recommendations. I already knew about Geek ratings on games, and I have used “GeekBuddy Analysis” extensively for purchase advice; however, Matthew’s post was where I learned about the improved games rating page — very cool!

So, how is this an improvement over the regular GeekBuddy analysis? The biggest difference is that with GB analysis, you start with a particular game that you may be interested in and see how your buddies rate it. The improved page shows all games that your buddies have rated. This can result in a huge number of games, so there are several filters that you can apply: only show games that you don’t own and/or haven’t rated; only show games on your wish list; and require a minimum number of ratings. Great stuff! I just wish I had known about it a few days ago when I was working on my Christmas list…

Now, there are a few potential improvements that could be made. Clicking on the sortable column headers clears any filter settings you’ve entered, which can be a real drag. Another issue comes up if you filter by a particular GeekBuddy list: all the list members’ names show up (which is cool!) but they have no whitespace separating them, so,the,browser,sees,the,list,as,a,gigantically,long,word,with,a,bunch,of,commas,in,it,which,makes,the,browser,display,them,poorly! This works fine as long as you only have 10-20 buddies on a list, but once your buddy list starts widening the browser window it can get pretty ugly. (It’s especially bad if you enable the “Include buddies of buddies” feature on a large list.) One final thing I’d really like to see is a setting to filter out game expansions, which Matthew has already suggested.

In spite of the previous paragraph, I think the improved games rating page is awesome. Thanks for putting this together, Matthew!

Last month I stopped by Viking Hobby and bought myself a new boardgame, Tigris & Euphrates. I would have preferred to give the game a trial play at one of the Sacramento Boardgame Meetups, but I hadn’t seen anybody bring it. Since this is the highest rated game (after Puerto Rico) on BoardGameGeek I figured it was a pretty safe purchase anyway. I’ve played this game twice and been very pleased with it. It’s proven very popular at game nights, but sadly my family hasn’t been interested in playing at home.

Lucky for me, Simon invited me to play an online version of the game hosted by BoardGameGeek. I’m a few turns into my first PBEM game, and the mechanics seem perfectly faithful to the original board game. The only thing I don’t like about this implementation is the lack of socializing–I much prefer playing in person, especially at The Fox and Goose with some friends and a few pints! But in all honesty, there are some advantages to the online game: scheduling is a non-issue, since all the players don’t have to be “present” simultaneously; one can spend more time considering a play, since there’s no rush; and finally the game accurately tracks the score. (I often forget to collect points for monuments when I play. Doh!)

I see in this post that Nicholas enjoys Tigris & Euphrates. I hereby invite him (and any other readers) to join this game. The password is “sonicchicken”. You’ll need to know how to play already, as this isn’t a tutorial. If you’re not a BoardGameGeek member, just register (for free). Leave a comment here when you join so that I know when to start the game, as well as to see who’s playing.

A few days ago I was browsing the ‘Geek when I found another cool feature: session reports by gaming group. There’s not much to this–it merely allows one to search the session report database by gaming group, but this simple addition to the feature list could be a great help to members of groups (such as the Sacramento Boardgames Meetup) who want to find session reports on BGG by and about members of their group.

There is some discussion among the session report authors in the boardgames meetup about the group name we should use. Since this is a freeform text field, and the group name must be a case-insensitive exact match, if we do not agree to a single name then the feature will be almost useless. Currently the two contenders are Sacramento Boardgames Meetup (no reports as of 2005-08-15, merits include being the official group name) and Sacramento Meetup (for brevity, “boardgames” being somewhat redundant on a site called BoardGameGeek).

Other groups of interest (to me) include:

• Sac Boardgame Group, another name used for the Sacramento Boardgames Meetup?
• Sacramento and Sacramento Gamers Association, both started by Kimbo.
• Sacramento Arden Park Sessions (SAPS), which I am using for games I run at home. (Hopefully, it will eventually include other people in my neighborhood as well.)

I registered a profile on BoardGameGeek (BGG) back in February of 2004. At the time, I was using a dial-up connection which was only reaching about 30 kbit/s. This proved to be painfully slow for the BGG site, particularly when I was trying to enter all the games in my collection. But I’ve now got a nice DSL connection which makes the site pleasant to use, so I’m back on BoardGameGeek. Hopefully all my gaming friends from the Sacramento Boardgames Meetup, the Sacramento Boardgames Club, SABA, and the Sacramento Gaming Community will drop by to check out my boardgame collection once I’ve got everything entered. My only problem now is that most of my games are in storage until my remodeling project is completed.