Play session data and BGVIZ.com
It’s been a long time since I've posted here. But bgdata is not dead! I’ve recently downloaded BGG’s data on self-reported play sessions. (I’m so grateful to this wonderful site and its community!) So I will now begin a series of visualizations based on this dataset.
There are of course limitations to what can be learned from the self-reported plays. Most importantly, we need to keep in mind the inherent bias. People who prefer to record play sessions might also prefer certain types of games over the other. I haven’t yet figured out a way to assess or measure this bias. If you have any thoughts, please let me know!
In the meantime, here’s the first experiment. Let’s look at the number of unique common players between different games.
This graph shows Red7 and top 10 other games by common unique players. In other words, the top 10 games that the players of Red7 also played. The timeframe is August 2022. The size of each bubble is proportional to the number of the total unique players. The width of each link represents the number of unique players the two games have in common.
Click here to see the interactive version: https://bgviz.com/common-player-graph/161417
Go to the BGVIZ.com website and type in the name of your favorite board game to see its connections graph. I plan to add more interactive visualizations to the site in the future.
Is there a question you’d like answered using the play session data? Let me know!
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In other news, I recently designed and published an abstract board game called Treeblox. Check it out if you like plants, competitive strategy games and 3-dimensional thinking.
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In yet another news, I live in Kyiv, Ukraine and the city has been attacked by Russian kamikaze drones yet again this morning. My family and I are fine. But at least 2 people have died, and at least 17 have been wounded. This is just this morning and just in my city. I’m sharing this in order to ask: support Ukraine as much you can.
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Thank you for reading! Let me know if you have questions or suggestions for future posts. Let’s explore this fun dataset together!
Philip