My friends and I have been playing a lot of games together recently. It’s quite remarkable how much time one has when no longer in school, and given how much time we spend together, it always helps to find fun, accessible activities for us to do together. Enter board games.
It turns out there’s a huge world of board games. BoardGameGeek is a great database of the ones that exist, but with so many and a decent investment to get any of them, it’s hard to know which one is right. Right now, most of them aren’t right since my housing is in transition right now, but if I wasn’t, it would be really handy to find a way to narrow down to my own preferences in games and the situations I would be playing it in. For that, I built the Board Game Chooser, a simple website that walks you through to a good fit.
All of the credit for the data goes to the Silver Oak Casino, who made a huge flowchart for picking a board game. My contribution here was just processing the data and putting it online for greater accessibility. I hope it’s helpful to you.
For a project that took only a few hours, I’m happy with how it works. All of the data is in JavaScript, so notice that once you load the first page, you never need to load another page again. Not only does this reduce the amount of traffic my server needs to deal with, it results in a much faster experience for you as well.
Given that the path does feel like a series of pages, however, I am also using browser history in HTML5 to simulate the same effect. If you’re in a modern browser, you’ll notice the URL change as you click through choices, and if you navigate directly to any of those pages, you’ll return to the same state. It even supports the browser “back” and “forward” buttons, which have become critical in surfing the web but can often be a web developer’s nightmare.
Anyways, enough about tech. If you’re still interested, you can see all of the code at https://github.com/StoicLoofah/boardgame-chooser. Otherwise, go ahead and try it out, and I hope you find something that interests you.
And as a last second pitch, if you do want to play a game, please consider going out to a local game store or bookstore instead of just buying it online. The game store I went to growing up was a great place, not only as a retail space for fun things but also as a community for people looking to play games of any sort. Internet retailers may be $10 less than MSRP, but they don’t have tables in the back to meet new people to play with.