With the beginning of a new year, we tend to stop and evaluate our life choices, set some goals and do some organizing of our lives. For us nerds, there’s a ton of cool options to geek out on. Anyone tracking their game play? If not, let’s talk about options!
I’ve heard of all sorts of ways you can track your game plays, and I never really slowed down enough to appreciate the opportunity this presents. Why would you care that you played Splendor 3 times and Everdell 6 times - and once was enough for that game that makes you groan ‘never again’? [ScorePal pictured right]
Let’s start with what you can track.
Game Collection - not only what games you own, but what you want to try or purchase
Specifics - what games you played, when, how long they took and who played with you (just to name a few)
Scores - how did you do? How can you improve next time?
Frequency - how many times you’ve played games in a certain time period
Let’s talk about why?
What’s been played. Let's face it, most of us have games that we love that sit on a shelf because we haven’t had time, we’ve been playing someone else’s games, or we’ve been playing something new. There’s a ton of ways you can track this - through aps, which we’ll get to in a minute, and grids like 10x10 or 5x5 challenge (playing 10 specific games, 10 times in one year).
Bragging rights. “I played 300 hundred games this year” (Wow, wouldn’t that be cool to say?) Or you could brag about how many times you won the games you played (although I wouldn’t recommend this one).
Our need to track stuff. Tracking often gives us pleasure to look back and see what we’ve done, a little dopamine hit of coolness.
So how can you track your games*?
Boardgamegeek.com (BGG) has the ability to track all these things through their own website, or fan-created apps such as mybgg. Some apps that are available will also sync with BGG. They even have game covers from the Hotness List (shiny!) [Pictured left]
Board Game Stats is an app for $4.99 that’s pretty sweet. It has amazing insights and track capabilities
ScorePal has a very clean look and can even breakdown rounds of the game and specific in game play.
Board Record - Scoresheets & Stats - this one even has a ‘game picker’ which allows you to filter through player count and type to see what games you could play (sure fix for “I don't know, what do you want to play?) [Pictured Right]
10x10 Challenge was a challenge that showed up on BGG in 2014. There’s a great article about it from One Board Family that explains how it works and includes a pdf scoresheet for tracking.
Pen and Paper - Nothing wrong with tracking the ole fashion way if that’s your jam.
All of these apps are pretty awesome - they can track and report just about anything you put in it - some even have cool graphs and pie charts (oops - too geeky?). So feel free to poke around and try one for 2022.
*this is simply a list of suggestions. Some apps may charge a fee, but typically all are available on most platforms.