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Gathering of Engineers

Ludographic considerations from the Silicon Forest

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Burndown Update, Geek Changes, Geek Apparel

First, a quick update on my unplayed games burndown (original post, February update).  I feel like I’m starting to make progress – some eyeball linear regression seems to give me a fighting chance of getting close to zero by the end of the year.  Adding to my general good cheer is the fact that I didn’t just make progress on short games – I managed to play War of the Ring, Zero!, and B-17: Queen of the Skies in the past week.  I’m hoping to get in a game of Manifest Destiny at GameStorm in two weeks, probably my best opportunity to get that played this year.

Burndown20060316


Did you notice that BoardGameGeek just revised its game rating system? I think the changes are definitely for the better.  I’m curious about what Aldie has done to discourage shill votes:

Second: I've developed a secret system for dealing with shillers. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but suffice it to say that I hope it will weed out a great number of the shill votes from affecting the feel free to reratings. Don't worry... ordinary users won't have their votes affected by this. I don't expect to get many, if any, false positives on this system, and the number of voters excluded is very small.

Maybe someone will do some reverse engineering based on actual game rating data to figure out his model.

Check out how low Downtown: Air War Over Hanoi is ranked now: 6.7.  This despite well over half of the ratings of the game at eight or higher.  The 100 average votes tossed in really pulls down a game like this, which only has 81 ratings.


For a gathering of engineers, we don’t spend much time talking about technology.  Most of us are self-admitted geeks, but if you had any doubts about me you are about to have all such doubt removed.

Some of you that see me in person may have noticed a black vest that I sport most of the time.  I purchased it about 3 months ago, primarily for business travel.  The vest is a Classic Vest from SCOTTEVEST (SeV), and is the ultimate in geek apparel.  While geared towards gadget geeks, I’ve found it to be the perfect gamer/gadget apparel, doubling (squaring?) the geek factor.

ScottEVest

My standard carrying gear includes keys, wallet, spare change, BlackBerry 8700c, iPod (when it isn’t in a crashed state), ear-buds, Moleskine reporter notebook, pen, and Bluetooth headset.  Recently I’ve taken to carrying around a set of 10 tiny d6 for solo dice and other ad-hoc dice games.  I’d like to add a tiny deck of cards to the kit as well, and maybe some small chips or gems for counters.  What else should I always have with me?  What is the perfect generic gaming kit that I could carry on my back? Maybe a Havoc deck is the perfect choice – there a quite a few games that can be played with it.

By the way, the vest is quite heavy (when loaded, not by itself) and I have to be careful not to wear it all day or else risk neck strain by late afternoon.  Buyer beware.

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