This week’s Explorable Favorites (Aug 3)

@stratagon – great ideas!

The least appealing of those to me is #2 – because I can’t do it myself (unless I do something really cheap looking like writing “This Games Has Been Explored” in the Publisher Overview section – and I’m not going to do that). As for the floodgates, I’m not worried – an educated guess is that there are at most 50 active users left with a combination of favorites that we could explore (defining “active” as logging in at least weekly). So many of us have Arkham Horror, Sentinels of the Multiverse, Dominion (654!), etc. on our favorites shelves that it’s searching for 2 un-explored titles out of 3 or 4 on a favorites shelf – pretty hard to come by. If we open it up to “non-active” users I’m sure there’s more to be had, but then we lose the excitement of getting to know you’re explorable and sharing your thoughts on a game (as well as the excitement of getting a bunch of “likes”), and of course the “meta-game” wouldn’t happen.

I’ll probably think on this a little, but I will likely incorporate a few of your ideas. I should be able to make (and update) a page listing all games and users that have been featured so that everyone can reference it, then keep a link in the weekly articles. And the idea of one featured favorite and one “staff pick” is a pretty good fall-back should finding people with 2 explorable favorites become too onerous.

Shelf rearranging is a great idea – the thing is, we get 5 to 10 favorites on our shelves, but most of us have far more “favorites” than that. If you haven’t played one in a year (even if it’s in your all-time top 5), you can bump it for a month or so while you obsess over a newer game. Just move it back in when you tire of the newer game. I kept my shelf the same for 2 years, then realized I’m playing many games not on my favorites shelf 10x as often as some “favorites”. They were my favorites because I enjoy playing them and deeply admire aspects of the design, but they’re not that relevant to my gaming experience anymore if I haven’t pulled them out in a few years.

However, the review problem I mentioned above still hovers over us. Fallen is probably the most popular 2015 game on our site – bunches of plays, an insane amount of hearts, and it’s currently our top-rated game (by 31 users even though it’s only been out 8 months)… but it only has 2 reviews, so it’s not eligible for exploration. I mentioned Imperial Settlers before. While not as “new”, Yedo is an outstanding game with 49 owners and 32 user ratings but only 2 reviews. Arcadia Quest. BattleCON. Hyperborea. Ancient Terrible Things. Among the Stars. Legends of Andor (57 ratings! 2 reviews). All very popular games that many of us own and love, but none are explorable because they lack the reviews. And none of them are newer than Fallen – I’m excluding stuff like Forbidden Stars, which many of us will own and love but has only been out for a month.

Maybe posting reviews is more of a burden now as users know they’ll only get significant “likes” if they hit a certain word count, and don’t want to post a 200-word quick thought on a game just to get blasted. I’ve formed the opinion that 400 words is about the requirement to have people listen to you and rate you honestly – and to me 400 words is pretty easy. But it may not be to everybody. No proof on any of this, just an idea.

I, for one, will be making an effort to try to post more user reviews. I’m as culpable as anybody here – of the 9 games listed above I own 6 of them and have played 5 of them bunches, but I’ve only put a user review up for ATT. If I can find an extra 2 hours every couple weeks for a user review – and a few others can do the same – we’ll have explorable games for years to come.

@burgerchief – I took some time to think about this one. There’s one big problem – we’ve had 240 explorable games to-date, but we don’t have a published list of those games anywhere (anybody can build the list themselves by clicking on the “Explorable Favorites” news tag above and going into each article, but the only users I know have done so are @Andy and myself). If possible we don’t want to repeat any of those, but a user that’s only been around for a year may not be aware of the first 100 games that were explored. I could post the complete list here, but it would be one big comment.

Other than that, I really like the idea. If a user sees someone with 2 qualifying games on their shelf that they’d like to explore (and “qualifying” means: 1) at least 3 reviews and 1 tip; or 2) if no tips, at least 4 reviews) they can nominate them here and save me some searching time. Even pointing to yourself is OK with me.

If anybody dislikes this idea for a reason I’m not thinking of just speak up!

@ Account Deletion

No need to feel bad. Personally I don’t mind it either, as I feel the idea is to explore new games and not new gamers. Or as it is for me, explore my owned, yet unplayed games… 😉

@inmarg – whoops! That is not supposed to happen… you are correct, @Takras was our explorable shelf over a year ago, on 5/27/2014, with Escape and Civilization. An explanation…

Each week it gets harder to find active users with two explorable-but-previously-unexplored favorites. It used to take me around 20 minutes each week to identify a user and two games. This week it took over an hour.

I always (well, clearly not always!) cross-reference any selected user with two qualifying games to make sure they haven’t been explored before. After having the first 30 or 40 selections this week bounce back because they either didn’t have 2 favorites with enough explorable content that hadn’t been explored before or because the user him/herself had already been explored, I was apparently just too excited to find @Takras’ qualifying selections and forgot to do the user search.

I don’t have any personal objection to a user being selected twice, but my general attitude toward it is “everybody should be featured once (if their favorites allow) before anybody gets featured twice”. And I also avoid users who haven’t signed in for weeks (or months… or years), because being featured won’t mean anything to them.

One thing everybody could do to help out is post reviews when you feel you’ve got something to say about a game rather than waiting for it to be explorable. At least 3 of the users randomly selected this week had Imperial Settlers on their favorites shelf – easily one of the most popular games since its release 10 months ago, currently sitting on 16 favorites shelves with 61 owners and 24 user ratings, but only 1 review. I won’t use a game unless it has 3 user reviews, and while all of those selected users had 1 other game on their shelf that fit the criteria, none of them had 2, so I had to move on. If we all wait to post our reviews for Imperial Settlers, it will never be explorable. And I hold myself accountable here – I’ve played Imperial Settlers bunches, and could easily post a review for it (although Portal is still waiting on a site review, so that will have to come first). I’ve done a lousy job of posting user reviews since I started helping @Jim out, and I still buy a bunch of games so that’s unfortunate.

Anyway, sorry for the double-selection (unless you’re @Takras… then, you’re welcome!). I’ll keep spending whatever time it takes to find acceptable users to feature each week, but any help from you all would be appreciated!

Congrats to you, Takras! Tzolk’in and Neuroshima Hex both get rave reviews, but I haven’t yet played either. Tzolk’in looks a bit intimidating to me, so I may have to hone my skills a bit before tackling it. Keep submitting the great reviews.

Tzolk’in was one where I always looked at the cover and it did nothing for me but after reading some reviews, I am now intrigued!

In other words it is possible to be picked a second time? I do remember Takras being picked a few months back ( Escape and Civ I think). As I know him it’s easier to keep track of these things 😉

I usually like worker placement games, but there’s something about Tzolk’in that’s kept me from giving it a try.