We are nothing if not opinionated. Â One of the benefits of playing lots of games is that you form opinions about them that seem harsh or lukewarm by the light of day. Â The Top 1000 is an attempt to give some context to where we are coming from.
 After you have played lots of games, more and more fit within a standard deviation of the bell curve.  But the important part of that is the sample size is large.  In a side discussion, we wondered how large the sample size was that we were bringing to the table.
 Some idiot suggested we take the top 1000 games from BGG and note which ones we had played.  This was an insane idea.  Who in their right mind would spend their spare evening(s) annotating a huge spreadsheet?  Us.  Yes, we can argue about whether we took the highest 1000 by average, Bayesian average, or Dale’s favorite 1000 games, but in the end, we must have filled out/not filled out over 25000 checkboxes.
Why should you care?  Good question.  I think that the stats heads around here will be extracting all sorts of interesting information from these grids.  I’ll spill the beans about one of the shockers – we don’t have many among us who have played many of the top wargames.  It might be that a disproportionate number of the top war games have super high rankings, but we are sorely lacking in that arena – Wallenstein/Shogun, sure.  World in Flames, not so much.
 Also, this is not ‘how many times have we played it’ type data.  I don’t think it will be that useful for funding ‘if you like x, you’ll like y’, but who knows.  Anyway, welcome to the Top 1000 and stay tuned for even more surprises.
Over the course of the week, we’ll be talking a bit about the Top 1000 and how we scored on the project. Â But, that won’t start until Wednesday. Â Why? Â So you can take a few minutes and do it yourself too! Â (My guess it will take between 30 to 60 minutes to complete…)
Download the .xslx spreadsheet here, and simply type the number “1” in the box for every game that you’ve played. Â I have left one of the OG’ers columns intact so you can also try to guess which one of us is the mystery gamer.
Get you spreadsheet fingers ready, and you can compare scores with us on Wednesday…
My stats:
Top 100 : 89%
Top 250 : 87%
Top 500 : 84%
Top 1000 :76%
I found this an interesting exercise more for what I hadn’t played and why. I suspect there’s 100 games of this lot I’ll never play, but probably 100 or so I probably ought to play. I look forward to seeing the results of your analysis. It sort of ties in with the 100 top games being described on the boardgames to go podcast.
Alan, as you’ll see, your top 1000 total is well above that of any of the Opinionated Gamers. Congratulations (I think)!
I’ve been in the hobby for just a shade under 3 years, so my numbers kind of reflect it:
Top 100: 39%
Top 250: 29%
Top 500: 21%
Top 1000: 13%
Not too disappointed in these stats. I’ve played 27 of the top 50 (and own three of them that have yet to get played). I’d echo what Alan said above, good to see what I probably “should” get played.
A mini-analysis comes tomorrow…
And you’ll have access to all our data, so you can help us mine the interesting bits out of it!
Thanks for going thru the spreadsheet
hopefully it wasn’t too burdensome!
30+ years pays off…
Top 100: 91%
Top 250: 90%
Top 500: 85%
Top 1000: 71%
OK, I couldn’t resist.
Considering that I haven’t been in the hobby too long, and that I play more prototypes than finished games nowadays, I think 30% for every category is surprisingly good.
But I’m even more proud to have 3 games in the top 1000! (It would be interesting to see which designers have the most. I suspect people like Feld and Rosenberg probably have almost ALL their games there:-)