Board Game Choices Explored
The skills the author demonstrated here can be learned through taking Data Science with Machine Learning bootcamp with NYC Data Science Academy.
Introduction to Board Games
Board games 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.
| Names | Total Votes | Average | Board Game Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7 Wonders Duel | 564 | 8.1 | 'Ancient', 'Card Game', 'City Building', 'Civilization' |
| The 7th Continent | 422 | 8.3 | Adventure', 'Card Game', 'Exploration', 'Science Fiction' |
| Concordia | 374 | 8.1 | 'Ancient', 'Economic', 'Nautical' |
| The Castles of Burgundy | 1037 | 8.1 | 'Dice', 'Medieval', 'Territory Building' |
Data Analysis
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 more than a hundred votes. 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 inputted into the dataset. This column is called 'average'. Let's dismiss the games that 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 may find out the most popular categories and select the top ten. However, some of these categories are very niche and encounter 3 or fewer 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 the top ten games within each of the category. Tada, 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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