I worked on the BoardGameGeek Gift Guide recently. As I'm always saying... BoardGameGeek.com is like the www.imdb.com of board games. Anyway, the BGG web site is awesome, but daunting for any normal person. They're getting lots of hits from people trying to find good board game gifts for the holidays. So someone smart suggested that us board game geeks should work together to make a gift guide to help those people out.
This was right up my alley. I love board games. And I hate when people have a hard time using things. In this instance I could imagine some kid's mom coming to the BGG site while trying to search for board game advice. And then I could just see her freaking out at the sites crazy complexity and then that kid would end up with another copy of Monopoly.
So I helped out! I really enjoyed working on it. I rallied support from other BGG users for some games that I wanted on the list. I suggested adding price ranges for the games and then looked 'em up up and put 'em in. And I edited the intro paragraphs to be much more concise. The coolest for me was that I learned about Wikis. I had heard about them and I use Wikipedia all the time. I call Wikipedia the new Google. It's the place to go when I want to look up something specific.
Oh, so Wiki's are really cool. I was able to suggest ideas and then implement them right away. On BGG there were no special rules about who could do what. So if you had an idea you could run it by everyone or you could just implement it and see what they thought. Anyway, here's the board game gift guide. It's got great games on it and almost every one is very approachable, even for non-geeks. :-) I own around half of the games on the list and they're all really good. I hear you saying "But Eric, don't you own like 150 games? Mathematically you'd have to own half these games." Well... yeah. But I swear, these are good games!
Anyway, Wikis are cool. And board games are fun. Check out the gift guide!
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