Gaming profile

[liv]

ghoti found a cool toy that tries to make inferences about what kinds of games you like. It seems to be reasonably competent, based on meaningful questions and using statistical analysis of a few tens of thousands of people, not just a near-random internet clickbait quiz.

It classified me as High Conflict / Independent; I'm well above average for liking conflict, and hardly like what it calls "social fun" at all. Which put like that is a bit weird, obviously I play games to be social and have fun. But my feeling a bit insulted at that does actually match the detailed analysis of secondary components, which says that I'm above average in liking cooperation. Its clustering mechanism thinks that liking cooperation is usually correlated with liking social fun, but in my case I like one but not the other. I think what it's defining as "social fun" is the kind of game where the rules encourage players to be silly together. And I don't hate those, but I don't think of them as board games in the sense that I had in my head when I was answering the survey.

This profile did not throw up any very good recommendations at all. A bunch of stuff that people with similar profiles to me are about 50% more likely to like than the general population, which I suspect is not much above statistical noise with the system they're using. Even when I turned down all the filters I still didn't get much. It seemed to be going for things like Mafia and Illuminati. And various specialist Fluxx and Munchkin decks – I like those, but they are far from my favourite games, and indeed I would expect it to be more recommended for people who like "social fun" rather than strategy. I suspect that because there are so many different editions they're not well represented in the data. A game called Mr Jack which sounds quite a lot like Scotland Yard, a game I enjoyed as a kid in the pre-Eurogames area where most players cooperate as detectives to catch a criminal. But I don't think that game would be improved by a rape flavour, so I think I'll pass.

The only rec that intrigued me was Mottainai aka Glory to Rome, which I might well look out for. A game which is strategic without being too unnecessarily complex sounds about my speed.

Anyway, feel free to have a go if you like this kind of quiz. You can compare your recs to mine, if you're so inclined; I didn't find any overlap between my recommended games and ghoti's, and we certainly do have a number of games we both enjoy. I think Takenoko is probably about the exact sweet spot between her sort of game and mine, but we've also been playing quite a lot of Castles of Burgundy and recently rediscovered Targi.

Comments

[ambyr]

Huh. I got a lot of recommendations for games I've never heard of; I guess that means I'm not doing a great job keeping up with the new hotness any more. I'd be willing to try Madeira and Panamax, its two top recommendations for me, but neither has a theme that particularly appeals...which I guess may mean theme matters more to me than I thought. (Food Chain Magnate, recommendation number 3, appeals even less theme-wise, although man that's a high BGG ranking, so maybe I should reconsider!)

Ora et Labora looks promising, but really I'd be happy just playing Agricola over and over again. Boring gamer, that's me!

[atreic]

Low Conflict, Relaxed, Grounded, and Gregarious

Weirdly, I got 10% conflict and 86% social manipulation, which is probably some flag of deep pathology ;-)

https://goo.gl/E6TJ3h

(I don't think I'm 'grounded' in this sense at all, I low high flavour games and play for the flavour)

The recommendations didn't tweak any sparks of interest in me at all, and were mostly D&D