Keeping Stats

On New Years Eve a year ago, I made a decision to start tracking my game plays. Part of it was curiosity; I wanted to know how many games I played, as well as how many times I played each game. Sometimes it feels like you’ve played a game a thousand times, but then it turns out to be maybe a dozen or so times, or maybe even less. I also wanted to highlight for myself what games on my shelf wasn’t hitting the table. My collection is still in the easily manageable size, large to non-gamers, but average or less to fellow game acquirers. It’s not size that forces me to cull, but more that I’ve found myself having games that either only hit the table once, or not at all and then resorted to collecting dust on my shelf. As someone put it on Boardgame Geek, I don’t want a mere collection of games, I want a library, because the games are meant to be played.

It’s now the beginning of February, and I’ve been tracking my gaming stats for 13 months. I downloaded an IOS app called ‘BG Stats’ and it’s been dead helpful. I can log the game stat right there and then, instead of adding them later to the ‘Geek’. Games can be sorted by title, amount of plays or how recent they’ve been played. And upon entering this year, I compared the stats I had accumulated to my collection. I made a list of all games I owned that hadn’t been played the past year that also hadn’t been purchased in the past year.

In the past it was relatively easy to pinpoint which games was ripe for culling, simply by my desire to play them, but when I was comparing stats, I was surprised to find a few games I really enjoy that I actually hadn’t gotten to the table the past year, like ‘The Pillars of the Earth’, ‘A Castle for all Seasons’, ‘Prosperity’, and ‘Elfenland’. Of course, I didn’t cull these particular titles from my collection, because I do intend to get them played this year (if I don’t, then I should accept the fact that I simply am not playing them). However, the list didn’t just contain titles I loved, I simply haven’t reached that point yet, and it turned out to be really helpful when deciding what games should be culled next, and which games to consider ‘endangered’. Not to say that the past month’s culling has been easy, I actually did sell off a couple of games that I appreciated, but that I acknowledged wasn’t going to hit the table anymore. One of them was ‘Witch of Salem’. Here it wasn’t the Cthulhu horror theme that kept it from the table, but the fact that it was a co-op game, something I must now acknowledge isn’t something I personally prioritise when picking what games to play.

I intend to continue logging my stats, not just for culling purposes, but also because I think it will just get more interesting to look at as years pass. It will be interesting to see how many plays certain games get before they exit my collection, what games will go beyond ‘dimes’ (10 plays) and see if there ever will be a time where I’ll have played a game 100 times (I'm already a quarter there with Codenames, so you never know), or if I will grow sick of a game before that happens. Only time will tell.

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As keeping stats has become increasingly interesting for me with time, I'm curious to hear whether any of you keep stats, and if so; why? Do you have any specific purpose for it? And if you don't keep stats, then why don't you?