lies, damned lies, and statistics; more fun with BGG URLs

Thanks to Pelle Nillson, I now have a Python script that enables me to download BoardGameGeek game data using their XML API. I hope to do a number of posts based on this data in the near future, but I first wanted to correct a post I did recently.

In more BGG stats: fun with numbers, I shared a snapshot of a spreadsheet table listing the fifty games with the highest wanted in trade / offered for trade ratio in the BGG database. I included a caveat:

I didn’t go through the entire BGG database looking for the twenty games with the highest ratio, instead I assumed that they would all be in the top 100 games wanted in trade. And this might well be a bad assumption.

It turns out it was a terrible assumption. If you look at all games in the BGG database, the top twenty come out quite a bit differently:

So now, the top 10 include Julius Caesar, Hive: the Ladybug, Big Boss, Dominion: Cornucopia, K2, Railways of the Western US, Airlines Europe, Santorini, Olympus, and German Railways. And that’s quite a different list.

Sorry ’bout that….

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To end this post on a more positive note, however, I’d like to share another little URL hack anyone can use to get at the data on BGG in a slightly nonstandard way.

In fun with BGG URLs, part III, I showed how it was possible to sort the games by number owned. Did you know it’s possible to do the same thing with just games in the family category? Just add “familygames/” before “browse/” in the URL above, and you get: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/familygames/browse/boardgame?sort=numowned&sortdir=desc. Cool, huh? You can also do this for strategy games, for abstracts, for party games, and for wargames.

And if you don’t want to sort by number owned, you can also sort by other things, too: number wanting (sort=numwanting), number trading (sort=numtrading), number wishing for (sort=numwish), and pageviews (sort=views).

The general principle, here, is that you can add the type of game you’re looking for before “browse/” to limit the results you get.

Now I think that’s pretty neat. :-)