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So, here it finally is, the list of my favourite games from 2015. (I learned some weeks ago that one can wish people a "bonne année" the entire year, here in France (at least in some regions), not like I've been previously led to believe only the first month, so I'm not _that_ late... Heh.) This year I've decided to introduced categories - from silly to less silly, from, for the lack of a better word, slapstick to... well, worker placement games. OK, here we go... Slapstick games These are the silliest of games that still count as proper games. They manage to balance the ammount of complete bonkerness and interesting enough decisions. Winner: Incan Gold Incan Gold is an excellent push your luck game by Faidutti and Moon from 2006 (reimplementing Diamant from the year before adding, basically idols, and... more interesting... components.) Incan Gold Runner up: Colt Express Colt Express was the  Spiel des Jahres winner this year. Releas...

This year's Spiel in Essen will be a bit amputated for me unfortunately. Even more important to arrive prepared! So, I made a list. Maybe it can be of interest for others. Who knows. (A BGG Geek List with the same info: https://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/197261 ) Main Releases 504 https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/175878/504 This year's Friedeman Friese seems fascinating. "504 is a game that creates 504 different games out of one box.", they say, but will any of them be worth our time (and shelf space (and money))? 7 Wonders: Duel https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/173346/7-wonders-duel Antoine Bauza teams up with Bruno Cathala to revisit "7 Wonders" as a two player game with intriguing drafting mechanics inspired by... pyramid solitaire. Barony https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/167513/barony Splendor is one of my favourite games from last year. Marc André is back with a seemingly (slightly) heavier game. Mysterium https://boardg...

This morning I came across this XKCD strip . (I hope someone actually makes that app... Although with enough parallel ghosts chances are that you will lose more than you win, of course.) Later in the day Flowing Data published this fascinating visualisation of, well, when you might die. (Based on US life tables, mind you...) Each ball is a potential future self. (Like the ghosts in Randal Munroe 's strip.) Travelling along the life table line 'till they... die. Fascinating. And then I wondered what would happen if we somehow mapped causes of death to that? And voila, based on data from CDC , I added this colour coded death causes (along with some other minor changes) to Nathan Yau 's excellent D3.js work: (Click here for a full frame viz.) Scary. What could be next? Bar chart reflects the colour coding of causes? More detailed causes of death could lead to a better... narrative? Life tables and causes of death probabilities from other countries? Maybe ...

So, today I needed to scan something. And our Canon MP560 printer was out of ink... The beast never got past a screen saying "Ink tanks empty" on this and that colour, and thus wouldn't let me scan. Even remotely from my VueScan. And it was Sunday so our local friendly printer ink recycling store was closed. I suspected all hope was out, and cursed printer manufacturers conspirational grip on customers' use of their products, but did a quick google nevertheless. Lo and behold! " If you want to scan during an ink tank / cartridge error condition, press and hold the <Stop> button on the printer for at least five seconds, and then release it. The above procedure will disable the ink level detection. If the issue still persist, the ink cartridge would need to be replaced."  ( Source ) I put back the empty tanks. Turned on the printer. Held the red button (that I guessed was) called "<Stop>", and hey presto, I could scan.

Another year has bitten the dust, has ceased to be, is over and done for, is an ex-year, is pushing up the daisies, etc, so here’s a list of the tabletop games that impressed me the most in 2014. Suburbia The first real discovery of the year was 2012’s “ Suburbia ”. An excellent city… eh… simulator. Or, maybe, rather, “SimCity simulator”. I really enjoy the interconnected economies around reputation and inhabitants, income and money. As one might imagine, there are multiplayer solitaire aspects present, but there is enough interaction through the clever market (with a glimpse into the future) and buildings that impact all players (like restaurants that gives a significant boost to the economy at first, but slows it down for every restaurant opened afterwards). Definitely one of the best games I played in 2014. Qwirkle “ Qwirkle ” is a kind of “Scrabble” for players with different mother tongues. Or a “Scrabble” for people that hasn’t memorised an entire dictionary. Domino with mo...

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...