A year+ of tracking my games

I play (a lot) of board games, and in September of 2021, I decided I needed to quantify the hobby through Board Game Stats (BG Stats). 2022 year marks my first full year of tracking my game plays, here’s what I’ve learnt about my gaming habits:

What kinds of games do I play the most?

The board game geek website has an abundance of information for each game, all available through a nifty API! I summed up all of the mechanics and categories for each game I’ve played this year and found the top 5 most common occurrences

I created these (and all images in this post) through a python script. If you want to create your own graphics from the same script then check it out!

The data: Not particularly supprised with the results, as the data is squed towards games that are quicker, as I can play many more rounds of them in the time it would take to play a longer game.

Here are the other images I generated with the data

More about this python script

The code (available on github) is designed to take a file export from BGStats (a .json) and generate a range of data visualisations. Heres a summary:

• dataGathering.py reads the .json input
• imageCreation.py generates the data to go on the images and creates them,
• plotting.py plots the data through matplotlib, mostly for pasting neat bar charts onto images By default, the program looks for a file named yyyy_mm_dd.json (to ensure the most up to date data)

If you want to play with the code and don’t track your games data, I've made an annonomised file avalible data by replacing names and locations with popular people and locations from history and fantasy, have fun!