by Michael Heron
Introduction
This is the last non-patron post you’ll see on the site for a while because as I indicated in our last editorial – I’m burnt the hell out on the site and I need to take some extended time to reconnect with the hobby rather than the hustle. But today is also our fourth birthday. As is traditional I do a status update on the project at this point to show everyone how things are, how they were, and some things that haven’t yet come to pass. We’ve done several of these updates in the past – one at six months, one at a year in, one at two years, and one at three years. This is the fourth year update, although you can also expect this to be the last big update of the site status because once we return from our hiatus we’re going to be slowing down.
Man, that’s a downer note on which to start, but it’s too late now. We’re committed. The abort button is just a bit of plastic with a cheap red LED in it. There’s no way to change the trajectory. Bail out now if you can, but this rocket is headed on a collision course with reality in three… two… one…
The Findings of Four Years of InvestigationI’ve run down the content buffer of the site to reach this point, and that has an interesting impact on the stats – for the first time ever the public view on the project and my own private view is identical. There are no stats in the background that are in my secret spreadsheets. Two years ago I had to unpack all these stats by hand, but now this site is more machine than man. Lots and lots of the routine stuff of the site is done by cold, unfeeling algorithms and it means that I spend less time with my nose in a spreadsheet and more time wistfully staring out the window at the happy people playing outside.
As usual, there’s some boilerplate methodology stuff to cover here.
For calculating averages for accessibility profiles, I employ a numerical conversion from alphanumeric grades to number values. F is a zero, E is a three, and each successively higher grade is one integer greater than the one before. For individual accessibility categories, this is how the averages shake out (see link below)
You might have to be a massive nerd like me to really feel like this is exciting, but it is! I said in our last roundup that I thought the stats had pretty much converged to where they’d stay, but no. The hobby is slightly less accessible than I thought in three categories – fluid intelligence, memory, and socioeconomic. We now have 216 data points, which is an increase of 52 on where we were in 2018. I mean – that makes sense, right? It was 52 weeks ago and we do a game a week. I’d say that now the stats were almost certainly not going to change but actually – there’s a fair chance that with another 52 data points you’d see these changing categories snap back to the mean. However, given that we’ll be slowing down the pace when we come back from hiatus we’re not going to be adding 52 data points a year to the tracking unless I simply start recording values and stop writing accompanying teardowns.
The games from year four that received recommendations, tentative or better, in all categories are:
* Assembly
* Perudo
* Nudge
* Mint Delivery
* Second Chance
* No Thanks
* 6 Nimmt
* Quest for El Dorado
* Wingspan
As usual, there are a lot of games that got recommendations in all but one category, and some of them will end up on our Building an Accessible Game Library on a Budget feature when I have time to update it. Since that’s not a new post as such, it’ll be done during the hiatus just to tidy up our content.
The worst performers of the year are:
* Champions of Midgard
* Discworld: Ankh Morpork (alas! I’m sorry Terry!)
* Exodus: Proxima Centauri
* Eclipse: A New Dawn for the Galaxy
* Inis
However, no game has yet unseated Chinatown atop its dark throne of inaccessibility although Exodus: Proxima Centauri came very close.
The Scale of the Task
We set ourselves the goal of covering a meaningful proportion of the BGG Top 500. Last year we’d covered 20.8% of it. At the time of writing, according to my spreadsheet, we’ve covered 25.2%. It’s a pace of progress approximately half of what I would have wanted. If our focus was laser-precise, we surely would be at 40% by now. And if we were, the chances are high that I’d extend the violent activity of the site to at least year five to see us at the 50% mark. But we’re not making that kind of progress, for several reasons:
* A lot of the top 500 are out of print
* A lot of the top 500 that are in print are just hard to get to the table often enough to merit analysis. I’ve written a bit about that before.
* Games don’t necessarily trend into the top 500 in the way that I might have expected. I’ve covered a lot of games that I thought would rise up to land in there, but they falter.
*Games don’t necessarily stay in the top 500. I’d say a good 10% of the games that we’ve covered for the site were once in there but aren’t any more.
There are versioning issues – sometimes the specific version of a game we cover just isn’t the version of it it that’s highly ranked
And while I do have a pile of cool software tools that crunch a lot of stats for me, they don’t crunch the stats in my personal spreadsheets. So when I have a game marked as being in the Top 500, it isn’t necessarily so. At the time of writing, our site software (which tracks BGG status in real time) says we’ve covered 24.2% of the top 500. Here’s the real-time view if you’re interested – you’ll also be able to see it on our results to date page:
Read the rest of this post here.The Meeple Like Us Geeklist is here.If you can spare a dollar (or more) to support our quest to improve the accessibility of boardgames, we'd appreciate your consideration of our Patreon.
