All the News You Didn't Know You Didn't Need

Work has been a little slack recently so between filling out applications and cursing perfectly innocent (but employed) third parties, I’ve had time to go back through the blog and assemble a comprehensive list of placings, from the very first GNN on the blog to this week's shenanigans - and here they are, broken up into seasons and unhelpfully resized by Blogger:

If we look at who has won the most games, it’s as follows:

Adam 50
Sam 46
Joe 31
Andrew 16
Quentin 15
Hannah 8
Steve 7
Jonny 4

- No-one else has really played enough to come under scrutiny.

No great surprises there. Obviously though, Adam has played a lot more games than Jonny, Hannah and Steve have, so how does the overall ratio look, in terms of wins to games played? That might be a little more reflective of overall performance:

Player	Games	Wins	Win Ratio %
Adam	129	50	38.8
Quentin	44	15	34.1
Sam	143	46	32.2
Hannah	30	8	26.7
Joe	124	31	25
Steve	34	7	20.6
Jonny	30	4	13.3
Andrew	153	16	10.5

Although Adam remains convincingly top, Quentin leapfrogs over me into second, and Hannah jumps over Andrew and Joe into fourth. Andrew drops like a tub of Neopolitan ice cream from a hot-air balloon to bottom, despite impressive wins in the likes of Serenissima and Taj Mahal.

But how to measure one victory against another? In the above table, a win in Poison counts the same as a win in Agricola or Caylus. To paraphrase Ann Robinson, who is this lazily generic summary doing a disservice to?

I went through the individual games and removed victories gained in the short-ish, filler games (Bacchus Banquet, Tsuro, Poison, Pitch Cars, No Thanks, Ave Caesar, Dancing Dice, 6nimmt, High Society, For Sale, Mord Im Arosa) and a couple of the longer games that seem to rely heavily on luck rather than strategy (Robo Rally, I’m the Boss, Roll Through the Ages, Innovations). I left in Citadels, Condottierre, Thunderstone, Blockers, Hey That's My Fish, and Trans America/Europa. Kind of arbitrary, but then I’m the one sitting here wasting my life away, so those are the perks. The results:

Player	Games	Wins	Win Ratio %
Adam	97	33	34
Quentin	30	10	33.3
Sam	105	28	26.7
Joe	90	23	25.6
Hannah	22	6	25
Steve	25	6	24
Jonny	27	4	14.8
Andrew	113	11	9.7

(Corrected from last week, when I had only subtracted wins from overall total instead of all-filler-games played) Congratulations to Joe, Steve and Jonny, who all improve their ratio. Quentin's ratio holds steady though, and and it's still very congested in the middle of the table. Mine is the worst affected, as clearly racking up wins in the likes of Poison had given me a false position.

It’s not good reading for Andrew, lodged convincingly at the bottom. But wait a minute – it’s not all about winning, is it? What about coming consistently high-placed, but forever just missing out on first? I’ve broken down the placings into a visual chart-type-thing to show the percentage ratio of final positions for each player, and they make interesting reading (click to view):




Obviously Adam looks the most impressive here, with a lovely 1-2-3 spread and then hardly any finishes outside the top four (bear in mind a few of these games will have only had 3 players, occasionally 2) but Andrew’s healthy spread of second and third placings put his relative lack of victories into perspective. Quentin also looks formidable in this light, but can he do it over 150 games? Over to you Quent!