​​Boardgames have been on the rise since 2012. ​​​​A Star, Will Wheaton, created a ‘Table Top’ show on Youtube, where he gathers with his friends around a table and plays a board game. Your favorite Barnes and Noble has a wall dedicated to games for all age categories. There are board game cafes and stations. Due to a huge variety of choices it might be tricky to select a game  for one of these places. The audiences come from vast backgrounds and, in general, people have different tastes.

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Let’s explore a dataset of 20,000 games. The table above contains the columns I’m going to talk about.

Each game in the said dataset receives a number of votes (see ‘total votes’ column). We’ll dismiss the games that don’t have sufficient data, leaving those with a 100 and up votes for it. Next, let’s look at the ratings for each game. The fans submit a vote for a game on a scale of 1-10, that’s been averaged and inputed into the dataset. This column is called ‘average’. Let’s dismiss the games that rated have less than 6 points on them. The dataset shrank to 950 games in total.

There’s a column called ‘board game category’. Each game is listed under several categories. If we group the whole dataset by categories we find out the most popular categories and select the top ten. However, some of these categories are very niche and encounter 3 or less games. This could be avoided if we show a dependency of the highest voted categories on their popularity so to speak, meaning the number of games listed under it.

Finally, after arriving at the top ten best board games categories we can easily select top ten games within each of the categories. Ta da, the work is done. The link to my Shiny-Project GitHub is here

My Shiny app can be found here

Created for tik-tok anticafe

Thank you for reading,

Khamanna

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