Here's that long-promised write-up of our 2022 board game cupboard clearance--yay, lists! Yay, statistics! Since I've never done this kind of post before, it might be best to start off with a list---obviously---of everything we own, after cleaning up. From hereon, we could go forward with a yearly post discussing the delta's: the old games that left the closet and the new games that entered it. This has been a small side project for a few weeks: throwing and rearranging out everything, carefully constructing a list, adding color-coded scores, applying some statistics, scrolling through others' GeekLists, thinking about what to buy next, ...---all these things made me happy, so mission accomplished.

Since I had to digitize the list anyway to gather some more interesting insights, here's a crude table with columns as follows: game name, BoardGameGeek average score (1-10), own score (4: Great!, 3: Good, 2: Average, 1: Bad, see my grading systems discussion), BoardGameGeek weight (1-5), estimated plays (From ++; played a lot, to -; barely played¹).

I had some "research questions" (this academitis fever is getting worse, sorry) that might accompany the data so I came up with two scatter plots: one with BGG's average score and one with my own rating applied to each game. The symbols and colors encode the plays column: red/upside-down triangle is barely played (-), orange/block is played quite a bit (_) and the green/upwards-pointing triangle represents many plays (++):

All right, so what does that teach us?

1. BoardGameGeek's opinion nicely overlaps with mine. Correlations between the BGG score and my own score are as follows, grouped per play symbol -, +, and ++ respectively: 0.74, 0.94, 0.86. Those are some surprisingly strong correlations! Some games though, such as Labyrinth, Guillotine, and Al-Cabohne, I rate (much) higher than the BGG community does. (I like planting beans. Sorry!)
2. There seems to be a relation between weight and BGG score---at least for the games in my collection. Indeed: 0.63, a moderate to strong correlation.
3. What's up with all those red triangles floating on top of the rest? The heavier a game, the less likely it sees the table! I know many people judge the staying power of a board game by the amount of times it is actually played, but I disagree. My wife dislikes heavy hitters such as Fields of Arle while I love them. Since we mostly play together, the simpler games also see a fair bit of playtime. That could also mean that...
4. Since I also tend to rate heavier games higher (same correlation, 0.63), I urgently need to meet up more with friends to play the heavier games in the - range! "We should make this a recurring thing." For how long have we been saying that now?
5. Judging from the second plot, there are too many games I don't like still in this list, and don't even see many play time. Again, this is a bit unfair since (1) my wife likes nostalgic simple games like Dead End Drive or Ramses, even though we don't play them often. This is my personal score, not hers, and we obviously collectively own everything.

Okay, I know it, the graph shows it, the photograph shows it... We'll have to talk about the elephant in the room: the overload of Euro Uwe Rosenberg games that are heavy and never see play. There are still games in the closet that need to be replayed and then perhaps let go of: Le Havre (too similar to Agricola and Arle), Nightfall (Dominion with direct interaction and weird chaining that my play group doesn't like), Carson City (yet another worker placement game that's better with 3, but I love the theme), some only mildly entertaining smaller card games we're not yet sure of, etc.

I tried including a "optimal number of players" property in there, but it would be a bit too much. A quick count says the following about the collection:

1. 26 out of 45 games (58%) play great with two players. We try to keep an eye on that.
2. 15 games (33%) are card-based. I love card games. Excluding Magic, of course.
3. Only 24% of our games see regular play (++). 20% now and then (+), and 56% almost never (-). Ouch. This again isn't a very accurate statistic: we bought The Quest for El Dorado last week and so far we think it's awesome but it's obviously only seen play three or so times. It's a fairly telling estimation though.

The following games were cleared out for this 2022 edition: Amon-Ra, Rock, Paper, Wizard, Waku-Waku, Revolver, Stratego Legends, Cottage Garden, King of Tokyo, Cartagena, The Big Book of Madness, Spyfall 2, Exploding Kittens, Escape the Labyrinth, Munchkin Cthulhu.

So what's next? I just ordered Jaipur and Dice Realms! I was on the edge between Dice Realms and Roll for the Galaxy, which I played and loved, but since I already own Race, it would probably see more "shelf time" than "table time". Do you have any recommendations based on the above list? I'd love to hear about your collection!

Dang it, now I need to make a top 5 or top 10... I'll leave that for Christmas.