Statistics

• Popular Game Pages
• Pages with Recent Interest
• Editor's Choice
• Recently Added Pages
• Notes

Popular Game Pages

These are the game rules pages that had most visitors in each of the last three months - see notes for further details. The top 5 pages for the most recent month are listed on the home page.

Pages with Recent Interest

These are pages that have had a notable increase in visitors in each of the last three months, relative to the average number of visitors in previous months - see notes for further details. The top 5 pages with increased visits in the latest month are shown on the home page.

Editor's Choice

Recommendations from the editor (i.e. me - John McLeod). These are games that I have enjoyed playing, and which you may find worth trying if you are looking for something different to play.

Go Stop

A Korean game for 2 or 3 players using flower cards. Having collected enough scoring combinations to win, you have to decide whether to stop the game or try to improve your score at the risk of losing everything.

Mus

This popular 4-player Spanish game of betting and bluffing is unusual among vying games, in that it is played without money and with partnerships.

Tarokk (Paskievics)

This 4-player tarot game from Hungary partners are chosen by calling the XX and there are multiple objectives including catching the XXI and winning the last trick with the I (pagat ultimo).

Literature

This six-player team version of Authors or Happy Families was probably invented in southern India. It demands a high degree of coordination between team members and an excellent memory.

Burraco

A relative of Canasta which has become immensely popular in Italy over the last 20 years. There are 4 players in partnerships, both runs and sets can be melded, and each team has a third hand to be used when a player runs out of cards.

Bagchen

Tibetan domino game for 4 players using a double set of Chinese dominoes (64 tiles). Tiles are played in tricks, singly or in groups, and the main aim is to win the last trick.

Skat

National card game of Germany, a game of tricks and trumps for 3 players using 32 cards. Players bid to decide who will play alone against the other two, aiming to take the majority of the card points.

Recently Added Pages

These are the new pages most recently added to the website. See also the what's new page for a periodic survey of major additions and modifications to the site, and the site map for a complete list of pages showing when each was last updated.

Notes

The tables of popular pages and pages with recent interest are based on the number of visitors in a month, estimated on the basis of the number of different hosts (IP addresses) requesting the page. The 'popular pages' table includes only English language pages containing game rules, while the 'recent interest' table covers all English language pages that have existed for at least six months.

To find pages that have recently become more popular, the expected number of visitors per month is estimated on the basis of the previous 5 months, and compared to the number for the current month. The calculation is as follows:

1. For each English language page, for each month, the number of different hosts visiting the page (h) is divided by the total number of hosts visiting pagat.com that month (t). This normalisation is to correct for seasonal fluctuations in the total number of page views: it probably does not make much difference to the result.
2. We model visits to a page as a Poisson process, and use the average of h/t for the previous 5 months to estimate its rate.
3. Assuming this Poisson process, we use the Chernoff bound to estimate the probablity that h/t for the current month is greater than or equal to the observed value. Thanks to Niall Cardin for drawing our attention to this approximation.
4. We rank the pages in order of this probability. The lower the probability, the more remarkable it is that so many hosts visited the page in the latest month.