Starting Content Creation with Board Games

 

Image by Andy from Pixabay 

I'm back with another post, this time for my data visualization class. For this assignment we were asked to create a data story with a visualization. I decided to look at some board game data from Board Game Geek that I found on Kaggle (Thank you Nikita Fedorov!) and come up with a list of board games that a new content creator might use to begin creating board game content.

There are about 2000 entries in this dataset and contain information on when a game was published, average user rating (and bayesian average ratings which I am going to use), mechanics, publishers and quite a bit more. After doing my storyboard I decided I wanted to focus on games that were highly rated and people owned. That would give me the most variety in content as I could do let's play content alongside sit down sessions and potentially allow for something like discord rooms for digital gaming. 

You can see that I had most played on here as well, I decided to go with the most owned games with the highest ratings mostly because I can use a scatter chart (and I didn't want to go on too long for my assignment :).

I used the data for the bayes average and number owned as my two inputs, then ran descriptive statistics on both of them to come up with a target equal to the mean plus two standard deviations. This gave me a much smaller set of games to work with, 85 games. 

A quick scatter chart of the remaining points gives a good starting point for games. This being in Excel means I just had to take a snip to put in here. I recreated the sheet in Sheets and the link below will take you to that page. 

Board Games Ratings and Ownership 

Looking at the chart, the nine board games I would suggest for a new content creator are:

• 7 Wonders
• Azul
• 7 Wonders Duel
• Wingspan
• Scythe
• Terraforming Mars
• Gloomhaven
• Pandemic Legacy: Season 1
• Brass: Birmingham