Board Games with Recfiles

1 min read · data recfiles games

You can play with a board games database from boardgamegeek.com.

Download the Database

1mkdir board_games
2cd board_games
3curl -Lo bg.zip 'https://www.kaggle.com/api/v1/datasets/download/threnjen/board-games-database-from-boardgamegeek'
4unzip bg.zip

The header line shows fields with a bunch of colons, which will confused recutils, so we'll have to get rid of them.

1sed -i '1s/://g' *.csv

Convert the games to .rec format.

1csv2rec games.csv > games.rec

Queries

If you try to look at older games, you'll find lots of results.

1recsel games.rec -e "YearPublished < 1800" -c
2recsel games.rec -e "YearPublished < 1800" -Cp Name

But most are wrong. The problem is games with a YearPublished date of 0, probably because the year published is unknown.

1recsel games.rec -e "Name = 'The Goblin King is Angry'" -p YearPublished

Fix the query by removing games published in '0 AD'.

1recsel games.rec -e "YearPublished < 1800 && YearPublished != 0" -R YearPublished,Name

Or fix the database setting YearPublished to 'unknown':

1recsel games.rec -e "YearPublished = 0" -Cp Name
2recset games.rec -e "YearPublished = 0" -f "YearPublished" -S 'unknown'

Strategic games which work best with 3 players, sorted by Average Rating:

1recsel games.rec -e "BestPlayers = 3 && CatStrategy = 1" -CR Name --sort=AvgRating