Welcome Back, Me
Also a feature to help with maths trades
2026-06-19, by DrFriendless featuresAngular
Phew. I have been AFK for a while, playing in an Ingress anomaly, then being dragged off on family holidays, then getting some overdue medical treatment. I have really been out of the swing of things.
While I was on holiday the BGGers in Sydney announced a no-ship maths trade, and for a pleasant change I am ready to participate and have some games to dispose of. The last time there was a maths trade I wrote a tool to help me find games in the 1000+ items which I might be interested in. It’s on the Geek page (rainbow button) if you are logged in. It looks like this:
What it does is downloads the geeklist, then compares the items there to what you own, what you want in trade, etc. That was as far as it got until this week, and BTW it turned out to be very useful for the Small Box Game Jackets geeklist.
But this time I had a few games for trade, and a few that I wanted, so I had to do a proper wants list. The OLWLG doesn’t work for Aussie maths trades (we are special, because we have our own programmers), and although there is an Aussie tool it seemed very contorted and I didn’t know how to make it work. So I decided I had to do my own. But first I quickly got a wants list assembled by hand because I didn’t know whether I would get what I wanted done in time!
When you ask the tool to check a geeklist, the results look like this:
You can scroll through that list to check whether there’s anything you think you might have missed.
Then below that list is the wants grid. The fundamental question the wants grid is asking you is “would you accept this game in trade for that other game?”
I find it easier to do this if I sort the games I have and the games I want in order of value. That saves me thinking about whether I would offer “Roads and Boats” for “The Great Dalmutti” over and over. So the grid has facilities to reorder rows and columns, enter cash amounts, and check or uncheck spaces. So it might look like this:
While you’re doing that, in the panel below, the wants list is being generated for you:
And that’s the bit that you need to submit to the trade organiser.
I think this is a pretty neat design, in that the UI follows pretty closely how I’d like to do it manually. However the simplicity didn’t come without development cost. The checkmarks sit on top of the text describing the trade, the dollar amounts sit on top of the text describing what the money is for, and the secretish widgets to reorder the rows and columns sit on top of the corner of the boxes saying what the item is. The Z-axis stacking of components interferes with their sizing, and the logic that’s actually happening doesn’t seem to be quite what the W3C doco says it is. There are still some problems with the column headers that start scrolled off the side of the page. Note that the boxes for World Wonders and Spirit Island have wandered off somewhere:
The good news is that the boxes still work, if you can figure out which one to use. I guess the problem is something to do with trying to align the little box to be on top of something which isn’t on the page. I hope the browser guys figure it out one day.
So anyway, the trade resolves in a couple of days, let’s hope I get lots of new games!
