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.
