The Spreadsheet That Runs My Shelf

Priya calls it my other job, and honestly she’s not wrong. I keep a spreadsheet, a real one, columns and all, logging every game I play and every book I finish, and I know exactly how that sounds because I’ve watched people’s faces when I mention it. It’s not a diary. It reads more like a test log than a reading journal, and I think that’s the part that throws people off.

The columns are: title, date, player count, session length, whether I finished it or set it aside, and a field I’m a little embarrassed to admit I lifted straight from work, a pass or fail marker, except here it just means whether the thing held up to a second look or not. I didn’t sit down one day and decide to build a QA log for my hobbies. It happened the boring, gradual way most habits happen, I started jotting down player counts because I kept forgetting which count actually worked for a given game, and then I added session length because setup and teardown time is something I genuinely care about, and one column led to another until I had something that looks less like a hobby record and more like a regression test suite.

What I actually use it for, beyond the mild self-amusement of admitting it exists, is catching my own drift. I went back through it a while ago, mostly out of curiosity, and found that I rate two-player experiences almost a full point higher on average than anything that needs four or more people at the table. I’d have told you that was true if you’d asked me casually, I know I gravitate toward two-player games, but seeing the actual number laid out in a column stung a little more than the vague impression did. There’s a difference between suspecting something about yourself and having a spreadsheet confirm it in black and white.

I don’t think most people need this to enjoy games or books, to be clear. I’m not recommending it as a system. It’s just what happens when your day job trains you to distrust your own memory of how something actually performed, versus how you remember it performing. My memory of a five hour first play of a war game tends to soften with distance, the spreadsheet doesn’t, it just sits there with the actual number in the actual column, refusing to be generous to my nostalgia. Some weeks that’s annoying. Most weeks I’m grateful for it.