As Silene said, the popular list doesn't have any gradation. We can't tell if number #30 has a few more or a ton more tables than #35.thoun wrote: ↑14 February 2024, 11:37It seems to be the exact same list in the same order as the old one, isn't it ?Silene wrote: ↑14 February 2024, 11:32I can't take a collection of pictures where it's not obvious what the tag "popular" is based on seriously.thoun wrote: ↑14 February 2024, 10:47
If it's to see popular games, you have a filter on the game list : https://boardgamearena.com/gamelist?isPopular=
We also can't tell which games have more turn-based versus real-time tables. Most cases, popular is still popular, but some games are quite skewed.
And a tiny detail - a listing of images is bad for copy/paste.
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Putting it all together:
I like learning a new game once or twice a month. I rarely have an uninterruptable time block for a real-time game. Ever so often I would scout down the old list, copy game titles to notepad that I had heard of at IRL game nights or that just sounded interesting to me. I skipped titles where real-time tables outnumbered turn-based as a proxy for mechanics that might not work well outside of real-time. I'd stop once I either had a good set to look into further or had gotten too far down in active table counts.
Sometimes I would do this in reverse - start with a short list of games a friend mentioned and just Ctrl-F on the original BGA table count list. That way I could quickly see if BGA had the game and, if so, the active tables and relative popularity. I can technically still do this, but now it requires searching for then clicking into and back out of each game's individual page to get that popularity. You can't use Ctrl-F on BGA's isPopular list since it is images, and, even if you could, without a popularity rank listed next to the game you can't check from isPopular against the other games in your list. Meaning, if you start with a set of game names, it requires a lot more effort to order that list into most to least popular on BGA.
Having the active table information for all BGA games in one text list helped me narrow down what game was the best bet for me to try next.