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Most corrections to game listings submitted by users fall into various categories — name changes, artist additions, family additions, category and mechanism additions or deletions, even more category and mechanism additions or deletions — and two of the most common categories were changes to the listed playing time for a game and the classification of a game as an expansion for something else.
Problem was, though, that we couldn't make these changes. In regard to playing times, when BGG was started lo these many years ago playing time was represented by a single field. Thus, you could enter only one number for the playing time no matter what was listed on the box. For the games that I've added to the database — 1,427 at last count — I'd split the difference when a publisher listed a range of values for a game's playing time: If a game said it played in 60-90 minutes, I'd write 75; if it said 45-60 minutes, I'd (probably) write 50; if it said 15-20, I'd put either 15 or 20 based on a gut feeling after reading the game's description. It was an inaccurate science, yes, but that method seemed best to me.
Well, sort of. When confronted by something like Caverna, with its listed playing time of "30 minutes per player" and a player count of 1-7, I was left to enter 120 minutes for the playing time despite that number being far from either extreme.
No one was happy with that split baby or with many of the other incomplete playing time figures in the database. Thus we'd get lots of corrections stating that the time on a game should be 60 minutes instead of 75, or 90 minutes, or 60-90 minutes, or (worst of all) "60-90 minutes" with the word included in the correction field. These corrections made sense because the game listing didn't match what was on the box, but any correction made would be re-corrected by someone else because no matter what we did, we couldn't match what was on the box.
Until, of course, we could by changing the database to add a second field. Seems a simple enough suggestion perhaps, but I'm not a programmer and Daniel Karp is. He made the changes required to the game listing page itself and the correction page and the submission page and the advanced search function and probably many other places that I don't know about, and as he reported on Jan. 19, 2015, this functionality is now present in the database, with Caverna sporting a 30-210 minutes playing time as God and Uwe Rosenberg intended. (Wait, is that redundant?)
Now, please don't all rush to the queue to submit playing time corrections for every game in your collection. I imagine those will all come in good time, and with 600+ corrections already sitting in the queue at the moment, it's not like we'd be able to fly through those corrections anyway. For now, Dan simply took whatever number was present in the playing time field and plopped it into both the minimum and maximum playing time fields. That's how we've functioned for years, so it'll do for the time being, and I'm happy to see those corrections spread out over many months.
What's more, if a game listing does have a range of playing times and it doesn't exactly match yours, consider that another publisher's version of the game might have slightly different values and maybe just let it be. I've wondered multiple times whether we should attach the player count, suggested age, and playing time to game versions instead of the main game listing — especially when something as popular as Puerto Rico carries a 2-5 player count on some versions and a 3-5 player count on others, thereby leading to ping-pong corrections one way or t'other — then I realize that's madness and drop the subject.
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Over and over again, people would submit "corrections" that would make, say, Smash Up: Monster Smash an expansion for Smash Up and while that's sort of technically correct, this process would remove Monster Smash's status as a standalone game, meaning it would no longer be ranked in the BGG database. What's more, Smash Up should technically be listed as an expansion for Monster Smash, which would leave no base games in the system at all and nothing from the family being ranked.
We wanted to record these possible interactions between standalone games somehow, though, so we'd leave notes in the game description boxes stating that this item integrates with games X, Y and Z, with those game names being linked. It was an ugly set-up, and with each standalone Ascension game released — that is, with every Ascension game — you'd have to go back and edit the description box of every other Ascension game if you wanted to keep the lists accurate. What a pain!
Now, though, Karp has embedded this data in the main info box of the game listing with a field titled (naturally enough) "Integrates with":
This link works in both directions, so when I link Ascension: Dawn of Champions to Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, a reciprocal link is created automatically in the other direction, which is also how reimplements, contains and expansion work, but we do get corrections from users adding both links in separate corrections — now you know not to do this!
I've already taken care of many families that fall into this category, including Ascension, Smash Up, Dixit, Lost Legacy, Nightfall, Sentinel Tactics, Timeline and Dominion. If you know of other such families — and remember this is only for standalone expansions, that is, games that are both standalone items and expansions for other standalone items — feel free to submit corrections on the game listings to help the database move just a smidge closer to accurately representing the relationship between the games included in it.
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