The inspiration came from this paper which describes a "Tutoring Search" wherein the engine attempts to find the worst move available that it predicts the opponent will not recognize as an error.

My implementation doesn't follow this exactly, but it does have the same aim. Two engines are used: one (Stockfish) as an oracle treated as a true measure of any state's quality, another (Maia) as a substitute for the opponent model. On each move the bot consults both of these to identify a move which:

1. Would plausibly be played by a skilled human, judged by its probability of being played by Maia.
2. Provides an advantage to the opponent, judged by Stockfish.

The idea is that, if a human would be likely to play the move, they also would be unlikely to identify it as an error. The ultimate goal is a bot which gives the player plenty of opportunities to win, but only if the mistakes are likely to go unnoticed.

There are a few other supplements to the implementation like adapting to opponent choices and some tweaks to early and end-game play, but the above is the core idea.

• Terralith - Overworld terrain upgrade
• Nullscape - End terrain upgrade
• Age Lock [Vanilla Tweaks]
• Armor Statues [Vanilla Tweaks]
• Bat Membranes [Vanilla Tweaks]
• Cauldron Concrete [Vanilla Tweaks]
• Cauldron Mud [Vanilla Tweaks]
• Custom Nether Portals [Vanilla Tweaks]
• Husks Drop Sand [Vanilla Tweaks]
• Mini Blocks [Vanilla Tweaks]
• More Mob Heads [Vanilla Tweaks]
• Player Head Drops [Vanilla Tweaks]
• Silence Mobs [Vanilla Tweaks]
• Wandering Trades [Vanilla Tweaks]

Plugins:

• BlueMap - Provides a live 3D rendering of the game world
• Clickable Links - Makes http URLs in chat clickable (only for registered players)
• CoreProtect - Records all block/container/mob changes (Anyone can look up changes with /co inspect)
• DebugStick - Gives the ability to craft debug sticks in survival
• DistantHorizons - Provides distant LOD map data to players running the client mod
• EasyArmorStands - GUI for editing armor stands
• Hexnicks - Enables Tildes usernames to be displayed
• hsrails - Allows for 4x speed rail travel
• LuckPerms - Locks down unregistered users
• Otherside - Fix for mob farms involving Nether portals
• Rapid Leaf Decay - Increases the speed of leaf decay by 10x
• WorldEdit - Used for occasional admin stuff
• WorldGuard - Prevents unregistered users from changing anything in the world

Your "backlog" is all those games you've been meaning to play or get around to, but never have yet. This event is an attempt to get us to collectively dig into that treasure trove of experiences, scratch some long-standing itches, and knock a few titles off our to-play lists.

It runs every May and November. New discussion topics will go up once a week during those months.

You do not need to sign up in advance -- the topics are open to all. If you would like to be included in the notification list, comment in this topic to be added.

• Choose some games from your backlog and play them.
• Then tell us about your experiences in the discussion thread for the week.

That's it!

Optionally: you can play Backlog Bingo which is a fun way of cutting down the choices you have to make and playing games you might not have normally selected on your own.

Nope! Not at all.

There aren't really any requirements for the event so much as this is an incentive to get us to play games we've been avoiding starting up, for whatever reason. Play as much or as little as you like of a given game.

Try out dozens for ten minutes each or dive into one for 40 hours. There's no wrong way to participate!

Yes! Each discussion thread stays live for a full week, so feel free to make multiple comments in the topic as you play different games. This isn't considered noise -- it's considered valuable participation in the event!

If you've already created a card and wish to start over, click the Settings button in the header to access your card settings. Then click the Reset button, and confirm the prompt. This will irrevocably delete your present card, allowing you to start fresh.

All data is stored by your browser in local storage. There are no accounts, and nothing is sent to the server, so it's privacy-friendly by design. This does mean that you are responsible for not deleting any browser data on wescook.ca, either manually or through automatic cleanups performed on browser close.

Backlog Bingo is open-source, and licensed permissively under MIT.

In Standard Mode, each square on the bingo card corresponds with one single game. Duplicate games cannot be entered into different squares. A winning card would have a row of five different games that each filled in one square.

In Golf Mode, duplicates are not only allowed -- they are encouraged! The purpose of Golf mode is to try to find a single game that will fill multiple categories at the same time. For example: Stardew Valley might fulfill You got it on sale, A solo-dev project, and Has romanceable characters all at the same time. A winning card would have all twenty five squares filled, but possibly only six or seven different games.

That is the "wildcard" or "free space."

In Standard Mode, there are no requirements to fill it. You can choose any game you want! Anything goes!

In Golf Mode, it does not need to be filled. Because Golf is all about stacking up categories on a single game, any game used in Golf would fill it automatically, meaning it has no real function. As such, the square will be pre-filled for you if you play in Golf mode.

The new Free list defaults to having this space turned off. Because you already have full freedom in how you fill the squares, having a free space is redundant (though if you miss it or just like the aesthetics, you can certainly turn it back on!).

Absolutely! The Backlog Bingo app reads in simple JSON files which define the available categories. We've created a couple prebuilt lists for this event, but you're free to tweak our categories, or create completely new ones. You could even use them for books, anime, movies, recipes -- anything!

If you are interested in learning more, you can find documentation on the wiki, and use an example JSON category file. You can also ask for help in the topic!