Nope, I don't have one of those reports for all the boardgaming I've done in 2004. Not yet, I mean. I've done those, in one form or another, since 1996, so there's no reason to stop now! Even before I did my own, I read the ones others' posted. In fact, the writeups Nick Sauer posted to rec.games.board in the early 90s were influential in my taking up boardgaming. He hasn't posted them publicly for a few years, but I know he still does them.
The hobby has expanded quite a bit since then, however. No longer do you need to scan those year-end reports to simply learn the names of games worth playing. Just like early session reports, those old reports were as much for spreading news and comparing opinions (few & far between back then) as anything else. So what's right for 2005? I'm not sure. Come to think of it, I think I made a blog post pondering this same question last year. There's nothing wrong with the reports being personal or even self-indulgent, but as long as they're being posted publicly I think it's worth some consideration about the audience.
Hmm. I'm sure a long list of just the titles & numbers of games I played doesn't do anyone much good. Snippet reviews? Better to archive those game comments with ratings on BGG. Funny anecdotes? OK if they're not just in-jokes. I'm just not sure. What do I like to read in others' reports? I think I like to take note of games that were popular with a particular game group more than the hobby as a whole, and why that might be. Put another way, I don't care much if someone played a lot of Puerto Rico last year or thinks Ticket to Ride makes a great gateway game. Yeah, fine, we all know that. But if someone played, say, ten games of Mare Nostrum, that might be worth a look. Even at that, I'm more inclined to look into stories of MY underdog games getting more attention. So maybe that doesn't help much.
Multi-year data should be interesting, but I don't think anyone's found the best way to present that yet. Games that get played every year are somewhat interesting. Games that were played every year --but somehow weren't last year--those are interesting, too. I guess game dropoffs and resurgences might be interesting, as long as you strip out the raw numbers and start describing/analyzing what the numbers mean. (That's true of all aspects of year-end reports. Numbers and statistics are too lifeless to be interesting reading.) As far as I can tell, almost all games experience a lot of dropoff. A game that goes from 10 plays last year to just 2 this year isn't very notable. Maybe the anti-dropoff cases are more interesting (along with those rediscoveries). I wonder if I have any.
Of course, this thinking just sets me up for failure with my own forthcoming report. :-)
I do the numbers for myself, mainly - I want to be able to look back and see what I've been playing.
For others I have awards - what I considered best each year. That should be of some interest for others, especially if my reasoning makes sense.
Posted by: Mikko at January 9, 2005 04:53 AM