In the past couple of years I have not only been playing a lot of board games, but I have been working on rebuilding my collection of board games after the minimalism purge of the noughties. Being a somewhat obsessive statistician, I had a spreadsheet where I was keeping track of all of these games. But I had some problems with the spreadsheet, and so I wanted to redo it, but that was going to be a lot of work.
The Problems
The first problem was that the games were organized into tabs by different types of games: board games, card games, tile games, tile games, dice games, and so on. But games don’t always fit into these neat categories. At what point does a game mainly using tiles but also using cards stop being a tile game and become a card game?
The second problem was that I was crediting games to the companies that published them, not to the designers who created them. Certainly there are cases like Leder Games where there is a rather consistent design philosophy that can help you choose your next game. But some of the better designers like Reiner Knizia and Uwe Rosenberg have games across several companies. And in any case, they deserve credit for designing the game more than the companies do for printing lots of copies of it.
The third problem was that I didn’t know how many games I owned. And this is kind of a tricky problem. What does it mean to own a game? For example, I have Settlers of Catan. I own the rules and the pieces (three copies, in fact), and I don’t think anyone would dispute that I own the game. I also have the five/six player expansion. But I don’t think anyone would say that’s a different game. The set up of the game is a bit different, but it plays the same. Of course, I also have the Seafarer’s expansion. It uses many of the components from the core game, but it plays a lot different. Does it count as a separate game that I own? I think you could argue it either way (I say no, for historical reasons). Then I have Catan Starfarers. Similar to Seafarers in ways, but with it’s own quirks and separate components. I think everyone would consider that a different game.
Beyond the question of when a game could be considered a separate game, there is the question of when do you own a game? Say you have the pieces for a game, but you lost the rules. You can sort of play the game, if you remember the rules. If you have the rules but lost the pieces, it becomes much harder. But, as I said, I have three copies of Settlers of Catan (the first American edition, the Anniversary edition, and the 3D version), both pieces and rules. Does that count as three games or one? I say it counts as one, because I’m interested in how many different games I can play. If I was running a business trading games, I might count that differently. However, all three of those copies were sold as a set of rules and pieces. But I also have the Penguin Book of Card Games and several decks of cards (along with poker chips and bid markers). Do I own all three hundred games in that book?
Finally, there were the role-playing games, which were also in the spreadsheet. These are different from board/card/dice games in a number of ways. They are often just books, and they have more expansions in terms of more books (and magazines). While I care about playing all the board games in my collection, I’m not worried about playing everything in my RPG collection. RPGs I’m happy to keep just for the ideas they might give me. And I have PDFs of every copy of Dragon and Dungeon magazines. It would take decades to use all of that content in an RPG.
The New Spreadsheet
In the new spreadsheet all of the game data is in one tab. There are columns for board, card, dice, and tile to mark if the game uses those components. The tile component is a little tricky, as some games use tiles where they could just use cards, and that the relation of each tile to the board or other tiles doesn’t matter. Those I didn’t count as tile games. I also have a book column, which is for books that contain game rules. One thing I realized as I was doing this is that I want another column: tokens. No one ever talks about token games as a category, but they not every game has tokens. I think that would be good as additional way to categorize games, but I decided to add that in at a later date.
For each item there is an N Games column. This does two things: it marks out expansions as different (n games = 0 in that case), and it lets me count the number of games I have. This count is to some degree an estimate. I didn’t feel this was an appropriate time to go through the entire Encyclopedia of Chess Variants and figure out if I had the right components for each one (I’ve got some non-standard boards and pieces, but not enough for every game in there).
So how many games do I have? There are 252 items in the collection. The generous count of “do I have rules and equipment?” gives a total of about 2,560 games. If I don’t count any games from books, it drops to 776. However, that counts a couple of oddities. One is 504, which is a game where you choose three mechanics in order to be the rules for the game. So is that 504 games or one game that can be played 504 ways? I have a couple of others where there are multiple games in one box (notable Pyramid Arcade and Gateway Island). If we count all of those as one game per box (which I think better fits the colloquial meaning of “owning a game”), then I have 206 games.
I kept the publisher, but added the designer(s) wherever I could find that information. I also put in the year of publication, which is sometimes helpful in distinguishing different editions. There is also a notes column for that, or noting missing pieces, or whatever. I have a column that gives an ID for each item, and another column to tie expansions to the ID of the original game, for convenience.
Then I added a bunch of columns to make the spreadsheet useful for how I want to use my game collection. One tracks which games I’ve played. I want a collection of games I want to play, so I need to identify the ones I haven’t played and get them to the table. I added the standard information given for each game: the minimum age, the range of players the game supports, and the range of time the game is expected to take. This can be important for choosing which game you are going to play. I also added more columns in that vein: 2-Player (as in, good with two players), 5+ Player (important when you have more than four players, but not enough to split into two groups), cooperative (which some people like and other people hate), quick (something to play while you wait for other people to show up) and light/medium/hard (my own complexity ratings for different groups/tastes). All of these things are for picking games to bring to game night, to cover any situation that might come up. Finally, I added a 1-10 rating, mainly to help decide which games I want to trim when I have too many of them.