The wise teacher is gazing absentmindedly out of the window. Finally she asks: “Why did some people believe that the Earth is flat?” After a short pause one of her pubils responds: “Well, it does look like the Earth is flat.” “Oh”, she responds in slight amazement, “Imagine we were living on a spherical Earth. I wonder that would look like” I don’t remember where I read this joke and I don’t think that on the very rare occastions I have told it anybody ever found it even funny. And yet I consider it the most supreme joke I have ever come across. Not only do I personally find it funny, but it also offers the hint of an answer[…]

Board Game Geek is an awesome resource for finding new interesting board games. There is however one shortcoming I have run up against more than once. When looking for a game for a specific player count, the available search filters and sort options are not very useful. I finally decided to tackle this myself based on the following idea. Board Game Geek includes a poll which lets users vote for a given player count to be the best, recommended, or not recommended. Under the assumption that votes for “best” and “recommended” reflect the Board Game Geek rating and that “not recommeded” reflect a rating of 2, we can compute an adjusted rating as To adjust for polls with a small[…]