I personally am in awe of the people who always track their plays. I love seeing the data charts it can produce, and the stats on who has won games versus how many times they have been played. The information really excited me. However, whenever I think about starting to do so myself, I really struggle with it.
I find that during game night, we tend to play many games back to back. For those games, I am almost always the person who is teaching and setting up the game, so I don’t want to make everyone wait while I record the play into my device. By the time the game night is over, I have forgotten who won what, and what the final score was. It is unfortunate because I really do like the idea of tracking plays, and even have the boardgamegeek app downloaded to try to start to do it.
My question to you is do you track each of your plays in some way? If so how do you keep up with it and what app do you use?
The Meeple Street 
We just started tracking our game winners by writing the winner, date and score on the inside of the box. So far it’s working well but we’ll have to see if we keep it up!
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Okay first, get the BG Stats app. It costs a few dollars but is well worth it for the excellent user experience compared to most others and especially the BGG app. It syncs with your BGG account if you want to keep things tracked there.
Not sure what your policy on phones at game nights are, but quite often you could get away with one or two photos to capture the game state and timestamp of the end of the game (could even just do one for the start). This works especially well when there are clear score trackers or even score sheets, something that you covered recently, right?
If you play with the same group of people often, you will know their player colours, roles, etc if you even want to track all that.
Otherwise, ask one of the other players to just scribble it down on some paper while packing up a finished game, before getting the next one out!
Keeping stats can be especially helpful if you plan on doing any challenges and/or have to deal with a shelf of shame!
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I use Score Pal. I keep track of most plays except some of the quicker games that take 4-8 minutes to play and games with big groups that include a lot of people I don’t know.
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We don’t play many games during our weekly games nights – usually one big one and then maybe a filler. So tracking stats isn’t too difficult for us. We have a rule that any game that someone has played for the first time isn’t tracked. After all, that would be unfair to the person who hasn’t played before. Other than that, I used Google Sheets to share the stats with the group and then link that to bar charts near the end. At the end of the year I then print out everyone’s stats sheets for them to keep and cherish.
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I’m not sure about other methods but BG Stats has a particular icon when a player is first recorded as playing a game (i.e. new to them, and you can manually toggle it too).
Since in tracking all my plays, it seems relevant to still track someone else’s first game, assuming we play it all the way through. You can also mark plays as incomplete and ignore for win stats, etc.
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I don’t track my games. I feel like tracking the board games you play comes from the same idea of taking pictures when travelling. We (a general we as a people) are so afraid of losing the memory of the experience we had that we find ways to record it. So when travelling we take pictures so we won’t forget the experiences we had, and we track our board games we played because we are afraid of forgetting the joyous experiences they bring us. I understand the urge to track, but personally, I’d rather just play, and if I forget, well, then it won’t really matter will it, because I’ll have forgotten. : )
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