I kept having issues with my board game spreadsheet (previously mentioned here), and ideas about how I could use it better. I finally had enough of them that I decided to revamp the spreadsheet again. Here are the things I changed:
Game Designer Page
Last time I revised the spreadsheet I added a column for the game designers. I started getting curious about the game designer data. What designers do I have a lot of games by? Is Reiner Knizia really my favorite game designer? So I added a tab to summarize the game designer information I had added to the spreadsheet (technically the spreadsheet is a workbook and the tabs are spreadsheet, but that’s how I generally refer to these things).
I have 276 different designers listed in my spreadsheet. Of those, I have more than 5 items from 13 of the designers, and more than one item from 64 of the designers. I say “items” because they might be expansions or duplicates or other things. For example, I have 11 items from Klaus Teuber, but it’s all Catan stuff. I have three editions of Settlers, two of Seafarers, and two of the dice game (yeah, the dice game sucks, but I had and idea to make a better game with two copies). I have three books written by David Parlett. I have 10 items from Andrew Looney, but that includes several different editions of Fluxx. I have 14 items from Klaus-Jurgen Wrede, but those are all Carcassonne and it’s expansions.
I also averaged my game ratings by designer. I only have 9 designers where I have rated at least five of their games. Bruno Cathala actually has a higher average rating than Reiner Knizia by a hair (7.375 vs. 7.368). However, I also did ratings where I added in a dummy “5” rating, and Reiner Knizia wins that because I’ve rated more Knizia games. But given these stats I’m going to look into getting more games by Cathala. Klaus-Jurgen Wrede actually has a better rating than either Cathala or Knizia (7.667), but I’ve only played two of the Carcassonne expansions, so he only has three ratings.
Unplayed Games
I also updated my played and unplayed game data to include different categories. I have my shelf of opportunity, with the unplayed games I am trying to get to the table. If I have too many games to fit on that shelf, it becomes the shelf of shame, and I can’t buy any more games until I play some of them. But some games that I haven’t played aren’t on the shelf of opportunity. For example, two player games. I love two player games, especially two player abstracts, but I don’t have a regular group of two to get them to the table. I sometimes can get them tabled at my usual group, but that group usually plays four to six player games. Expansions are also hard to get to the table. There’s a fair amount of turn over at my usual board game group, so I am often teaching games. It’s hard to get a person new to a game to play an expansion that adds more complexity. Finally there are collectible games, that I have for other reasons than playing them. Things like historical games like Mah Jong, card games with decks similar to but different than a standard deck of cards (which are also part of my randomizer collection), or games like Outdoor Survival, which I have because it is part of the D&D0 rules.
So with the new categories, I have:
- 25 unplayed full games
- 32 unplayed expansions
- 6 unplayed two player games
- 1 unplayed duplicate game
- 7 unplayed collectible games
- 8 unplayed solitaire games
- 11 unplayed games that include multiple games (books of games or game systems like Pyramid Arcade)
- 8 partially played multiple games.
Complexity Ratings
I updated my complexity ratings. I used to have light, medium, and heavy categories. But I felt those categories were inconsistently applied. So I came up with new categories, based on the Board Game Geek (BGG) weight ratings.
Getting the BGG ratings was a trick. Writing a web scraper was problematic because the name I have for a game may not be the one BGG uses. I did manage to find a list of weight ratings for the top 1000 games from 2025. So I wrote a Python program to match my names to the list. If it couldn’t match it would give me a list of possible matches based on some fuzzy matching, and I could choose a match, or I could have it pull up a BGG search using my name. That worked pretty well, and I was able to get all the ratings with a few hours of work.
But I didn’t want to use the BGG categories, since I don’t like the very complicated games that are popular there. My sweet spot for complexity is about 3 on BGG, although I do like some games significantly over that. So I sorted by BGG weight, and then looked for points where I thought there was a significant complexity shift. That gave me five categories. I then looked at all of the games on the borders of those categories, and adjusted them up or down based on my opinion. And now I have a more consistent way to rate the complexity of games moving forward.
Getting More Games Tabled
I have a largish collection (253 by a colloquial definition), and there’s a lot of games I have not been getting to the table. I am not happy with that. I want a collection of games that I am actually playing, and that I am actually playing more than once. As one of my gamer friends who is less enamored with the cult of the new says, “It’s okay to play a game twice.”
So I came up with a slot system. Each game is given a slot based on what sort of table might play it. This is based on the complexity ratings I did in the last section. However, it includes other issues. Sometimes you have six players and don’t want to split up, so I put all the games that can play six players in their own slot. Likewise with the two player games, in case only two people show up. I also have a slot for quick games that you can play while you wait for other people to show up. Then I have several slots for games I’m not going to bring to game night: children’s games, solitaire games, games I’m trying to trade or sell, and books of game rules.
So for each slot with games I would bring to game night, I put game from that slot in the bag I take to game night. One benefit to this is that I am always ready for anything, I always have a game that will fit the table. The other benefit is that once I play a game I can take it out of the bag and replace it with another game from the same slot, keeping track of what’s been through the bag in the spreadsheet. That will help me play through all of my games.
Categorizing Games by Mechanics
This was an idea I had after playing a few games and thinking “This is a decent game, but it’s very similar to a game I already have, so I’m not going to buy a copy.” I thought I would make a list of keywords for mechanics, add those keywords to all the games in my collection, and then I could do cluster analysis on the sets of keywords to find similar games I might want to trim from my collection.
I quickly realized that you could get really detailed with the keywords, so I tried to back off a bit and be more general. Once I had a reasonable list of keywords, I started coding the games. That made me realize how much work it was going to be. And it just didn’t seem that the work was going to be worth the benefit of finding one or two games to trim from my collection. So I gave up on that idea.
Add a Token Column
I have columns to classify games by their components: boards, cards, dice, and tiles. But I realized I was missing something. Take Chess. It just gets classified as having a board, but there is a lot more going on in Chess than just the board. Or take Settlers of Catan, which is classified as tile and card, but the settlements, cities, and roads are an important part of the game. Even in Monopoly you have a piece that you move around the board. I grouped all of those components into “tokens,” and decided that tokens just use to track scores or resources didn’t count. I added a column to the spreadsheet to track that, and had it filled for the old games within an hour.
This may seem odd, but it fleshes out something I did in that last update to the spreadsheet. Originally, I had different tabs for board games, dice games, card games, and tile games. But the lines between those categories aren’t always clear. There’s plenty of board games that use dice and card, and there are tile games with boards (and dice and cards). And while we don’t generally think of games as “token games,” I think it is a useful part of categorizing games by components.