Visions of the Future

Sure enough, the lift had shot right up through the roof of the factory and was now rising into the sky like a rocket, and the sunshine was pouring in through the glass roof.

2026-04-30, by DrFriendless meta

When I started the Extended Stats project, cloud version, in 2017, the goal was basically reproduce the existing (Python, server-based) version. People liked that version. When I resumed the project in 2025 that was still my goal. But it turns out in those years, I changed, and that is affecting the project.

In those 8 years I did a lot of work, and played a lot of MMORPGs, but didn’t play many board games. As I live in a small house, I couldn’t even buy many board games (which is of course an entirely separate hobby from playing board games). So I lost track of what was happening in the board game world.

Now times have changed - I have no work to do, I have a second niece to play games with, and I’ve found a games group that I can attend with the ubiquitous dog. So I need appropriate games. I need classic games to show the nieces classic mechanics, I need games that support large numbers of players for the new group, I need games that can make the hobby enjoyable for me in the situation I find myself in.

So I am doing a lot of looking for games, and whenever I think “how do I find out what games might be relevant to my situation?” I think of how I can add a feature to the site to help with the search.

The Tagalogue was the first big feature - it allows me to mark a game so I remember it later. The Catalist was the second big feature - it allows me to build searches based on BGG info and my own notes. I feel the next step is the Query page.

The Query page currently exists as an innocuous assistant to the Catalist - when you run a selection in another page, the Query page is the one that appears. When I was writing that page I had to confront the problem - when you get back a list of games, what information comes with them? The current answer is that I return your relationship with the game - data represented by your rating, whether you own it, whether you have it marked as want in trade, want to buy, want to play. But there are other possible answers - you may want the metadata about the game, e.g. player count, to help you decide. You may want to know what your geek buddies think of the game. You may want the Tagalogue view where you can quickly tag and untag games. Or you may want some of the graphical views that the site has on other pages.

This concept is the complement to the selector. Let’s call it a view. The selector says which games, the view says how to look at them. The Query page should support multiple views.

I’ve also been working on the usual feature pages being able to take different selectors - that’s why I added those combo boxes to the tops of some pages. In that case, the page is implementing the view and supports changing the selector.

I’ll continue noodling with the site with these thoughts in mind, and see where I get to.