Cool Board Game Stats

 Happy new year all. 

As mentioned in the previous post I have a few hobby goals this year related more specifically to Board Gaming. I thought I'd take a second to talk about and break down some stats. 

First of all I put three challenges in my list for this year. I'd like to by year end play 372 games, Complete and alphabet challenge, complete a 10 x 10, and get the percent of my unplayed games down to 20 or less

Quantity challenge:

Last year I set out to play 365 games. The numbers were looking ok until my daughter was born and I discovered that I actually enjoy solo gaming quite a bit. One game in particular caught my attention and that was Legacy of Yu. This is a solo only campaign game from Garphill Games and is basically a resource management worker placement type game. I'm about halfway thru the campaign and am expecting to finish that out this year. Unfortunately I got super sick the week of new years eve and had to cancel not 1 but 3 different game days we had planned and as a result I fell just 7 short of 365 plays. Hence the 372 this year. With solo gaming I think this is definitely possible. 

Alphabet Challenge:

This one is pretty straightforward. Play 1 game starting with each letter of the alphabet. Were only 2 weeks into the new year and have already played A, D, F, H, L, M, R and W. I expect this one to be fairly easy as well and want to take advantage of it to play some games on my shelf of shame/opportunity. The more difficult letters are all already accounted for so this should be actually kind of easy. 

The 10 x 10:

This challenge is super interesting to me. The idea is you play 10 games 10 times each. Originally the wife had no interest in joining me on this crusade saying that "I cant imagine there's a game I'd want to play 10 times." Conversely though (and ill touch on this more in a second) I need to slow down on purchasing new games and enjoy the ones I have. A good friend of mine made the point that there's so many games he truly enjoys on his shelf that he doesn't have time for already so why cloud the collection with just "ok" stuff. I'm inclined to agree to a point although if you know me you know that the collecting itself is half the fun. This is a strange hobby and in participating in forums there is a real divide when you ask "how many games is too many"

I ended up picking games that fit a fair amount of the same criteria that would be easy to justify tabling. 

Furnace
Earth
Arcs
River Valley Glass Works
Everdell
Architects of the West Kingdom
Marvel United
Quacks of Quedlinburg
Tiny Towns
Crokinole

All of these games have expansion content I haven't played except crokinole. In the Everdell and Architects categories, we're including the spin off games Duo and Farshore and for architects in particular we're counting any of the three games in the Medieval trilogy as well as Tomesage itself. (More on that when it hits the table)

For Marvel united I'm also going to count DC United which should be delivering this year I hope. 

In spirit of all this I went back and forth before finally deciding to purchase a tracker off etsy. It was expensive, (70 dollars) but ultimately worth it. All the labels as well as the meeples are magnetized and its just a super cool premium product that makes this a little more fun. I discovered a lot about myself last year in that Data and tracking things is an amazing motivator for me to follow through on stuff. 

Finally Played Percentage:

Even prior to the collection purchased mentioned last post, my wife and I have been keeping a spreadsheet of our game collection to make sure we dont buy anything we already have. We use BGG but this was a quick way to sort by player count or double check if we were in a game store if we saw something and were unsure if the other owned it. I added a column for whether or not we had each played each game and last year we had weekend dates to each pick a "new to one of us game" and try it out. 

I spent a little while learning excel and discovered I could write a basic formula to determine what percent of our collection we had actually played and to be honest it isn't pretty. As of this post 40.48% of our games I've never played. 

Now some of this is easily explained. My wife came with a lot of party games which aren't my favorite and since the pandemic large groups still havent bounced back. She also has a fairly large collection of Game of Thrones and Harry Potter games so even though I've played Scrabble in my illustrious career, I've never specifically played Harry Potter Scrabble.

The other half of this coin is that I conceptually like expansions. A lot of the list is expansion content. Something like 100 of the games by rough count are expansions. So even though I've played a ton of Furnace, we havent actually had Interbellum hit the table. Lords of Vegas was a wonderful addition to the collection but I have yet to touch Americana. 

Finally a fair amount of the problem is we keep finding games that arent on the list in addition to me picking stuff up. There are 2 specific games still on my short to buy list (Wayfarers of the South Tigris and Ezra and Nemiah), 1 additional game will be an impulse buy if i see it  (kickstarter game that I'm unclear whether it will be retailed) and then I have my eye on just two KS coming (Black Orchestra and the South Tigris expansions and Moonsaga) but other than that after a great Boardlandia Sale I'm taking an extended break from buying more. I have a ton of Kickstarters delivering this year and frankly just too much stuff. 

I have been starting to trim the collection a bit though through facebook marketplace and will continue doing that throughout the year. 

 

Year End Wrap Up

 I'm sitting here writing the wrap up a month early here on Thanksgiving day. I don't want to say I've "thrown in the towel" but the reality is I don't see my self being able to make any big project posts between now and the end of the year. I'm sure you can tell from the last post that this won't be a big exciting update. I mentioned in the last post that things were changing. I spent the last year adjusting to a new role at work (which required a fair bit of travel that has now mercifully calmed down) and more recently we welcomed the birth of our first child. Since then things have begun to calm a bit but more recently than that I've been dealing with my moms basement flooding. The damage was thankfully not too terrible but it's required me to take significant stock of what I want to bother transferring out of her house and frankly a lot of things got binned and did not make the cut. 

This isn't meant to be any sort of pity party type of post but its all to put some vague perspective on things. 

I had some opportunity to work from home recently which allowed me to paint the Vespid half of the new kill team box but haven't begun the other components yet. Beyond that I began cleaning my workspace out in a significant way. 

We had a very interesting diversion recently as well. I spent a while waxing about why I've been gravitating harder towards board games and in the very beginning of September something wild happened. Paul calls me out of the blue asking if I need any games? An open ended rhetorical question of course. Long story short, a friend of a friend knows of someone who just inherited a massive collection of games. Ill skip the gory details but in brief we spent 700 dollars and, assuming I did the math right, acquired around 3500 worth of games. I paid somewhere around 8 dollars a game and got quite a few "grail" games. The guy loved his games and most of these had sleeves, expansions or promos included. Due to needing to catalog this stuff I've found myself weirdly fascinated by data lately. I'll leave that thread dangling with my most humbling stat. We've apparently never played approximately 40 percent of our collection. 

So is this the part where I lay out lofty goals for the year? It is. Of note, theres 3 board game related ones in here. I may also dabble with board game reviews but time will tell on that front. I will for sure be making some board game related posts however as I work my way through the unplayed games in the collection.

Paint 2 factions for Crisis Protocol and play at least 2 games

Paint 2 cabinet pieces

Paint 2 complete forces for Shatterpoint and play at least 2 games

Finish a second army for Full Spectrum Dominance and try the game

Play 3 games of Trench crusade with painted models

Create a 4 x 4 Modular trench board (if we like the game)

Play 365 board games

Complete a Board game 10 x 10

Get the list of unplayed games down to 20% or less

Finish 1k of Word Bearers

Try Horus Heresy

Play Lord of the Rings with a newly painted list

End the year with a sub 200 golf score

Try spectre, arsenal, breacher or another "modern" game

Finish the TF2 Project

Paint the Halo Flashpoint box

Paint my spinespur collection

Try Blkout with painted models

Play a fantasy skirmish game

Play Mad Maximilian. 

Finish the Hivestorm Box and play Kill Team

Play a Historical Game

Finish Reading 5 books

It's not all bad news however. While perusing my list of painted stuff this year I did notice I actually painted a fair amount of stuff. 

I painted a fair bit of Legions Imperialis stuff early in the year. I also managed to paint an entire spearhead for Age of Sigmar. I got rid of quite a pile of stuff but what killed me (as always) is the cult of the new. Even though I painted the Stormcast, I purchased the new starter and have yet to make any progress on it. Same goes for the flesheater courts as well as Hivestorm. One major number killer was the purchase of 2 boxes of wargames atlantic samurai. Theyre tiny and take up almost no room but man are there a lot of figures in there. 

I picked goals this year as I always do based on what I'm into now mixed with a touch of "whats going to catch my eye soon" which is hard because come Con season I usually get distracted. With a new child we won't be attending shows this year however which should cut down on that a fair amount. 

Happy New Year and here's to the year ahead.

Mid Year Check In

 Hello,

Boy has it been a year.

I'll be honest, when I originally started this blog it was called Monday Night Gaming. That was the night our boardgame group met. The same boardgame group I would try desperately to convert into a War Game group. That never took quite right but over time that group grew and changed and adapted. It would eventually become the group that met at the Hobby Shop I worked at and it would eventually more or less come to a screeching halt with Covid. Now having moved close to 40 minutes further, changed careers and started a family, I find myself missing the regular club nights quite a bit. I still find myself buying and painting and planning but the follow thru (which to be honest was never really all there) is now even sparser. This will not be an exciting post (fewer and further between now) but its a post I'd like to take the time to write. Lets talk about my relationship to the hobby and board games. 

I've always loved table top games. The tactile feel, the dice chucking, the camaraderie. What I don't love is having mountains of figures and terrain to store, set up, transport. I've been an avid boardgamer since I discovered that board games weren't just Monopoly back in 2011. Board Games can be a lot of things, and don't be surprised if I talk about them more on this blog for reasons that hopefully make sense as this post drones on. Board games can be quick to set up, quick to play, self contained. My wife likes board games, though she'll occasionally humor me with a wargame (and has been bugging me to get Shatterpoint and MCP back on the table) 

I've found great joy in a lot of these games. Origins game fair, (our second trip was a month ago) reminds me of my first trip to Fall-in. Coming home with 30 to 40 new board games and actually playing them all before the summer ends is not something you can do with Wargames. I'd be luck to paint a warband for a game before summer is over most years. I've become smitten with big experience boardgames like John Company or Arcs. I've delighted in solo games like For Northwood, Kinfire Delve, or Resist.  Boardgames are just frankly so much more accessible and that means the world for getting them to the table.

I had all but taken my hands out of the wargame pot though I'd still buy the odd kit here and there mostly for games like MCP. I balk at the cost of some of these now thinking things like "thats a whole game" for the price of one box of figures. There are a few things I've committed to though. I bought some Wargames Atlantic knights for barons war, which in turn caused me to dig all of my First Crusades project out and actually paint some Saracens. 

I found myself looking at the pre-order for two major GW releases though. First was AOS4. I looked at the beautiful skaven models, thought hard about how I never painted my Dominion Stormcast. I had wanted to convert them a bit, make them more low fantasy, and just had never actually taken cutter to sprue. I said to myself "eh, as much as AOS has been one of the only games I've played regularly, I dont really need this" I promptly opened my Dominion box and started assembling models I already had. In about a week I've built and painted most of the Spearhead force for Stormcast. Opting for a super simple scheme to plow through them quickly. 

I found myself looking at the new Hive Secundus box for Necromunda as well. I ended up looking at that and thinking, it doesn't really fit on my "schedule" of goals. I opted to take a harder look at Mordheim. A game myself and a few of the gamers I still regularly talk to have been eyeing like hawks. I dug through my stls and found some files to print. More or less all stuff I already owned. 

A lot of this hobby spending year has been pushed hard on to board games. Big experience games like John Co, or Wonderlands War. A lot of my hobby spending has been on Kickstarters. Mostly board games but I did cave on the Song of Ice and Fire Tactics campaign. Time spent looking in hobby shops has resulted in going home to start on projects already purchased. The allure of the collection is still there but it's been a huge motivator to dig out a pile of kits I've already spent the money on and revisit them as though it were brand new. 

A decade spent working in a hobby shop changes your perspective on buying. Kits are purchased on launch to avoid them not being available when you want them. Stuff never expires but it does go out of print. I definitely consider myself privileged in that regard. As I find it harder and harder to find places to store these things though, it has really caused me to look at what I purchase now, or save for later. As I've moved out of the hobby as a career its caused me to reassess what I "need" vs "want" at a very different pace

I've talked about it before but I hate taking photos, its most of what slows this blog to a crawl. The follow thru, sure but the photos are what stop the starting. I find myself in a bit of a hobby renaissance again where I'm painting regularly and excited about figures again. Coming soon (or maybe never depending) I'll post another update to the goals but you can also look forward to

Baron's War Outremer and the First Crusades
Age of Sigmar Spearhead and slow grow
Mordheim
Some Boardgame Coverage

You can also look forward to continued poor impulse control. Some habits never die. Since drafting this original post (1 month ago) I ended up getting the AOS4 box as well as the Hive Secundus box. I've also sadly bought into the Wargames Atlantic 10mm samurai range (under the age old "but i only need one box" lie)

I do want to continue to use this blog for me but I definitely recognize that without pretty pictures my musings are a little dry. I just want stuff to show you and I promise it is coming. As a life update we're now less than a month off from our first child so we will see how that goes when it comes to hobby. 

Thanks as always

Some Book Keeping - An Update to the 2024 Hobby Goals

 Hello,

Since we last spoke I've done an enormous amount of stuff with very little to check off these tasks. As we last left it on the blog it looked something like this

Paint Legions Imperalis Army
Print and Paint Legions Imperalis City Table
Play at least 3 games of Legions Imperalis with fully painted armies and terrain
Print and play Full Spectrum Dominance
Paint 2 Complete Factions For Crisis Protocol and play at least 3 games
Paint 2 Complete Forces for Shatterpoint and play at least 3 games
Play Don't Look Back
Finish Boarding Action Table
Play Country Road Z
Play Spectre (or another modern style game)
Try Dead by Lead
Try Hobgoblin
Finish at least 2 Cabinet Pieces
Play Test of Honor at least 3 games
Play Firefight with Veermyn Army
End the year with a sub 200 score

Since this original posting I've tweaked some things. First of all, I'm going to get rid of two of these goals. Full Spectrum Dominance (which i have yet to invest more than purchasing stls into) and Dead by Lead (which occupies the same real estate as a few other things on the list) are both gone.

I've obviously added a few goals as well.

 Paint Legions Imperalis Army
Print and Paint Legions Imperalis City Table
Play at least 3 games of Legions Imperalis with fully painted armies and terrain
Paint 2 Complete Factions For Crisis Protocol and play at least 3 games
Paint 2 Complete Forces for Shatterpoint and play at least 3 games
Play Don't Look Back
Finish Boarding Action Table
Play Country Road Z
Play Spectre (or another modern style game)
Try Hobgoblin
Finish at least 2 Cabinet Pieces
Play Test of Honor at least 3 games
Play Firefight with Veermyn Army
End the year with a sub 200 score

Added
Paint 1k Points of Word Bearers for Horus Heresy
Play Horus Heresy
Finish a 2k list for Old World and try the rules
Try Kill Team
Play a Fantasy Skirmish Game
Try Guildball
Play This is not a Test

Some of these are fairly obvious to most but I wanted to add a hair of context. I always wanted to try guild ball and went as far as to get the kickoff set and a few others but when SFG shitcanned the game I lost interest and punted (ha) it on at a flea market. Since then they've relaunched the game and have released Kickoff as a free stl and print copy. I've printed the two teams and some accessories and am almost done with one of them. I have a game vaguely scheduled for 2 weeks from now so this should be a slam dunk. I made it a goal because it seems like a nice easy win and it will prevent me from painting 11/12 figures and then never trying the game.

Horus Heresy has been on my own list since the launch of Age of Darkness. I've been reading the novels and Pauls been talking the game up. We played a Zone Mortalis style game of One Page Rules today and I used all painted stuff and am actually getting reasonably close to 1k already. I'm pretty excited for this one. 

I dug all of my fantasy stuff out of my moms house and brought it home to pour through. I'm fairly confident I have more than 2k of dwarves and am probably pretty close on Tomb Kings. Enough to get started at least. I figure these figures should double for Hobgoblin later.

I want to try either Song of Blades or Thud and Blunder this year just because. I also just picked up something called Torch and Shield but more on that another time. This is not a test has always ranked on my "i want to play this game" radar and this year I may have another friend interested in playing. 

Finally how is the current stuff coming?

I have a little over 1.5k of both Solar Aux and Imperial Fists done for Legions Imp. The Boarding action table is totally printed, magnetized and test paints are done. We used the terrain today and I'm super happy with how it came out. 

I played don't look back today as well but forgot to grab pictures. I was a little underwhelmed but am going to give it a few more goes. The first edition was a lot of fun but I think some bad luck made the wrong rolls happen too soon which led to a lackluster game. 

To wrap, heres a few photos of the heresy stuff.

Legions Imperalis (1) - First game

 So in normal blog tradition, I hit the ground running. Below are some photos from our first outing with Legions Imperialis. I'm going to pic dump and then add my thoughts and opinions at the end.

The Details - 

We played a 4 player, 3k a side game. We had Fists (me) and Blood Angels v Thousand Sons, and a combined army of Death Guard and Iron Warriors. There was a mix of everything the rules have to offer. Highlights of the game include warning the Tsons player that we had AA batteries, him forgetting and then getting blasted out of the sky. My knight blowing up a whole building to get to one command stand. The BA allied warhound titan shooting a laser up the table and wiping out most of the IW in one go and the BA Kratos tanks leveling a building to "help" his assault marines win a close combat. We started at 10 and wrapped on turn two at 2pm

 

The Good - 

So the game was a lot of fun. It felt very combined arms and it was a good way to spend an afternoon. We challenged one another with a game day planned on the day of release and everyone had paint on everything with only one player not having a completely painted force. Ironically our Tsons player finished all his infantry which never left his wip rhinos. It was so rewarding to actually get my force finished and it was great to get the game on the table. I'm super happy with the terrain i contributed (need to paint still) (more details on the army and terrain at a later date)

The less than Good - 

GW reccomends 3k as the standard size for a game. The way break points and morale work, 3k is a ton to keep track of. Comments on the game during clean up focused mostly around, "it'll go way quicker when we know what we're doing and with less players" which I agree with. The game is surprisingly crunchier than I was expecting which is good but was a lot to keep track of. My quick reference sheets helped but i need to slim them down significantly before another game.

 

Whats next - 

Theres a new book on the way with more options. We've scheduled a game for 2k, 1 v 1 for next time and I plan to add to this. I may run solar aux instead though, I'm not sure yet. For the blog I'll try and take some nice glamour shots of the army and terrain along with a guide on how I painted it all at some point. For now I'm taking a break from this project to paint something totally different as a palette cleanser. 

I wanted to do a bit of a yearly preview type teaser photo but to be honest it's mostly what we discussed in the year ahead post. Theres 2 big projects I've made some very real headway on but am not quite ready to share yet, though stuffs coming soon.

Boarding Actions Build Log (1)

 I've always maintained that I like the idea of 40k even if I don't adore the game itself. The idea of a 2k army is daunting and expensive for my ADD riddled brain. I have been flirting with the idea of a zone mortalis board for a long time (see earlier posts on this very blog) but to be honest with the new Boarding Actions Game mode and terrain I'm probably scrapping that terrain. You can google Boarding actions to look at the pretty pile of sprues but in short, the idea is "lil fights in spaceships" 500 Points, limited options, quicker games.

I wasn't super interested in the box itself until I stumbled across this originally on reddit. Orkitect Studio has produced a 3d printable version of the board. Thinking I could save a bit of money, I opted to start printing.

When these tiles work they are absolutely incredible. There's a whole system in place for magnets and wires to make the tiles pop together, there's options for all magnets or snap fits for no magnets and the designer has already modeled and released some of the neat unique bits from one of the expansions. 

Cue the sound effect of the record scratch

I wrote the above in march of 2023. Its why "finish boarding actions board" made my list two years in a row. Because I'm lazy. In my defense this time I have some legitimate concerns.

The text you're reading now replaces a pretty lengthy paragraph I had written back in march and the keen eyed among you may notice the pieces are made of two different materials if you look close. One of the issues I had in 2023 was that my prusa finally took a crap and blobbed up. I spent the better part of a week disassembling and what have you to clear jams and scrape plastic. I finally came to the determination it was gonna need a new thermistor, then a new hot end, then this then that. I tore the thing apart and chipped away on repairing it for a few months where it sat unused next to my Mars 3. An idea sparked and I decided to start this project on the Mars. I won't bore you with too many details but needless to say, it was not the right medium for this project. I spent a small fortune in failed prints and broken resin and fails and cleanings. I said I'd fix the printer but with my day job (fixing 2d printers) I never had the drive to actually finish it. Around Christmas I ran some numbers and made a decision to replace the device with a new Bambu P1S. There will be more on that at a later date, but the main take away here is this

I went from this

to this in about a week.

So what you see now, is a whole boarding actions table. I purchased a cardboard mat from one of the starter sets and have since this photo glued in all the magnets. Next up is painting and wire on the column pieces.

Don't Look Back (1) - Unboxing

 Originally backed in April through Black Site Studios Backroom system, I just received my Don't Look Back second edition tier 2 bundle. I believe this one was originally supposed to deliver around Halloween but as these things go it's a little delayed. Unfortunately I'm neck deep in Legions Imperalis so I went ahead, opened and took inventory and already put all of this back into the box and onto the shelf of shame. For now though here is a quick look at whats coming down the road. 

First of all we have the new second edition book. You can see its quite a bit thicker than the original. It comes in a neat little slipcase and it's super pretty. There is quite a bit of eye candy and the production quality is lovely as always with BSS. 

Included in the starter bundle type deal is the Killer and Hero expansions. Like all of the Don't look back stuff, these are supplied in VHS cases. The theming is super cool but to be honest, kinda wasteful. I love the art work and aesthetic but the boxes arent deep enough to store the figures and all of these cases just take up space. 

You can see the high quality of the figures and components. I'm looking forward to getting into these ASAP. 

Included in the bundle I purchased are these five expansions. Each containing a few figures and a card or two with a few more rules.

The bundle included some stretch goal type stuff that included alt sculpts of the heros as well as a few odds and ends including some 3d weapon tokens.

There's a fun little map and a mdf measuring cleaver.

Finally the mdf terrain that comes with the set

All in all, I'm super excited to get stuck into this stuff but it will be a while before I can get really dug in. There was also a preorder bonus figure and not to mention all the stuff I picked up for 1st ed.