M635 J520

A little duo I'm part of these days, 1bisHill (What's with the name you ask? It is a long story...), was asked to play some songs at a gathering at my work the other day. (With a guest star from Brazil.) So, without thinking, I asked my partner in crime, and he said yes, so I said yes. And then I thought about things, and realised that we have lately drifted towards more and more... noise - less, what might be regarded as, ... music ... Perhaps not compatible with playing at people at a party at work. So I got scared. And then I did what I always do when I get scared - tried to find a programmatic solution! This time I created a tiny web service where people could vote for more or less noise. Noisevote, if you want. Pedals with  NSFW names like Big Muff and Swollen Pickle en masse. Basically, server side, it is a really simple Ruby and Sinatra web service with a sqlite database to store votes (running on my Raspberry Pi at home). Client side it is Bootstrap and D3.js w...

Inspired by the discovery of the API for the BoardGameGeek website , I decided to play around with some of its data by some Ruby and JavaScript scripting. One thing I wanted to look at was the interconnectedness of game mechanics, but first I wanted to find alternative ways to look at how to measure ones "use" of ones game collection, and the associated question of "can a board game collection ever be too big?". H-index and play per game For example, the concept of H-index  is being discussed quite a bit on the ’geek. In short this entails sorting your games by number of plays and finding the last entry in the list with a number of plays higher than (or equal to) the position in the list. It’s rank is your H-index. (This does, of course require one to  meticulously  log ones plays, but that is another story… For example my overall BGG H-index for the last 12 months is (or seems to be) a measly 5.) Another concept used is to take the number og games owned an...

Since the deadline for wishing people a Happy New Year here in France is not before 24h00 the 31st of January, I figured I would take the opportunity to try to jot down some musings on some of the new board games I have encountered last year before the month is up… I’ll kick off with the seven that I enjoyed the most. The Start of a Dominant Species Game... Or Candy Evolution Saga? (If the franchise was in other hands...) Darwin on Ice The very first new board game I tried in 2013 (according to my rather flaky board game geek-logging - and a little bgg scraping script ) was the fabulous Dominant Species . Pros: Excellent theme(!), and relatively fast paced gameplay. Cons: A potential flaw is that maybe a bit too many points are scored at the very end of the game - something that can potentially lead to Analysis Paralysis when it is nigh… Still early in Love Letter. But someone knows already something about someone. Velvet Bluffing One of many Japanese game-discoveries...