I'm not sure what else to call it besides a "Game Chart." This is my recent attempt to categorize some of my favorite games into a chart broken down by optimal number of players and approximate playing time. I'm looking for feedback on it so I can revise and improve it since this is just my first crack at the idea. Please post which games you think are miscategorized into the wrong box. Please also post any games that you think are missing and should be added, including which box they belong in. I'm very interested in hearing people's thoughts and comments. I was hoping this could supplement "I Don't Know, What Do You Want To Play?" ( http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/28567) in helping speed up the process of picking a game for me to play. You can click on the image to see it all on one screen without having to scroll.

I think Mr. Jack is "short". We play Goa, Torres, La Citta, Amun-Re, El Grande, and Princes of Florence in 90 minutes. I'm not sure if this qualifies as "long". This is certainly much less than some of the other long games.

Thanks for the feedback Jim. I guess Mr. Jack depends on whether you normally play both sides back-to-back with each person having a chance to be Jack and the Investigator... or do you manage two consecutive games so quickly?

Indeed the Short, Medium, and Long descriptors are pretty vague and not entirely useful. I considered breaking it down even further into 5 separate length categories, but figured I'd start from here and see where it leads.

I was thinking that short would be under 45 minutes, medium would be from 45 minutes to 90 minutes, and long would be over 90 minutes.

I'm impressed that you can fit all those games in under 90 minutes, I don't think we're that slow, but am pretty sure all of them take us at least 120 minutes. Torres and Goa with only 2-players are close though and could possibly go to the Medium box, but something like El Grande or Princes of Florence with 5 players can take us a while I think.

Tigris & Euphrates over 90 minutes? You need to speed up your play(ers)

Game Chart Lesson #1: Apparently we play abnormally slow...

Game Chart Lesson #2: It would seem that this makes my chart somewhat inapplicable to the masses.

Solution - Read the above chart as follows:

a) Short = Ultra-Short

b) Medium = Short

c) Long = Medium

And here I thought the main feedback would be telling me to bump things from Medium to Long, such as possibly Louis XIV and Before the Wind

My only thought is that it would be great to be able to dynamically generate these pages based on a few other things:

1. Weight. Sometimes people come over and want a light game, but weight is not always tied to length. Another way to think of it is non-gamer, gamer family, and gamer games.

2. It would be cool to be able to extract the info from BGG, link it to your collection, using the tags for number of players (if accurate), complexity, and time to generate these on the fly.

3. We are a slower group as well, so I'm not sure your times are that far off. A group that plays Goa six times a year is also going to be faster than one that plays it once or twice a year. There is just a hurdle to get over when the rules are not all on the top of your head.

You can export your collection (and any related data about the games) to a CSV file, making it simple to drop into Excel or something. After that it should be straightforward. I'd imagine that a programmer who know's what they're doing could do even better than that, though.

As a side note - this is the second time today an interesting, game-related project has come up that I wish I had time to tackle. Stupid grad school...

That would be very cool Jonathan, although I'm not sure I'm up to the task. Maybe I'll appoint Matthew Gray (mkgray) to carry it out and see it through

I've updated the chart as of today since it's been just over 1.5 years. There are a few more games on it now... See:

http://games.fooville.net/nycgamer-article-PickingThePerfect...
(or http://tinyurl.com/mvbjvv)

Comments are still certainly welcome