Top 5 "New To Me" Board Games of February

 I've been hammering away on playing the unplayed games in my collection and wanted to highlight a couple of the better ones in a post. 

Honourable Mentions

Fellowship of the Ring: Trick Taking Game

    We play a lot of trick taking games. (My current favorite is Fishing). FoTR:TTG is a co-op trick taker similar to the crew. It has a campaign that introduces new mechanics slowly. We played the first 4 chapters in one go. Each chapter has you playing a relatively basic trick taker with the catch that each player has specific objectives. As an example you may need to win a specific number of tricks or not have won the most tricks. Its quick, its snappy, the art is great. 

Rallyman Dirt

    I will do a full write up some day on the Rallyman games but I really adore them. Push your luck racing games that offer a fair amount of strategy and a non-overwhelming amount of luck. I do see a place for both Rallyman GT and Rallyman Dirt and I quite like some of the additions to Dirt from a bookkeeping Quality of Life perspective. Solo mode works great but without a "par" track time I have no idea if I'm doing well unless I play a race multiple times. I prefer this one with people but the staggered start times make me want to put GT on the table instead. 

Top 5 of February

5 - Hansa Teutonica

    Hansa Teutonica (acquired through that collection) is more of a "dry euro" than what I tend to table. On the surface it's a route builder like something like Ticket to Ride, though theres a lot it brings to the table that make it a much meatier game. Each route will contribute points and help with a players overall strategy but specific routes will allow players to upgrade their player boards to make each turn more effective. Couple that with a super simple but effective "route blocking and player bumping" system as well as a scoring system that rewards players for being near the action, this is an incredibly interactive game for its looks. This did not go over at all with my usual group but I'd play it again in a heartbeat with players into this sort of thing. 

4 - Wayfarers of the South Tigris

This is one of the Garphill Renegade Games Historical "Worker Placement" Games I've become very obsessed with. Our 10 x 10 includes the ...West Kingom Trilogy this year but this is the first of the ... South Tigris set. Mechanically this is quite the step up from our last foray of Paladins of the West Kingdom but I found the game super interesting. It's effectively a tableau builder with a game timer of a central board that includes a sort of "race to the finish." Your turn consists of placing a single die, placing a single worker, or resting to recover your played dice. It has the usual Garphill feel of passing the same tokens back and forth but I found this one considerably more involved than Architects, Raiders of Scythia or Legacy of Yu. I'm excited for the expansions as well as the other two in the serious (which i believe on bgg have even higher weights.)

3 - Last Light

Last Light is a 4x with a promised play time "a fraction of Twilight Imperium." I've never played a board game 4x but I have some familiarity with the genre. After watching How to Play videos I was worried the game looked quite uninspiring on the table. The board is quite bland and it has quite the "pile of plastic" look to it. 

In practice the game was a heck of a lot of fun. We played twice in a row. The game is simultaneous (which frankly I don't like at all) but it capture the essence of a "big game" without all of the hassle of getting a "big game" to the table. I think of the headache of tabling the Blighted Reach Campaign for Arcs and some part of me just wants to put this on the table instead. 

All of my positives of this are what I love about gaming, the puzzle, the trash talk, the comradery, the physicality (the board literally spins around the center at differing rates) and the shared experience and emergent story telling. 

All of my cons come down to the same time play. I quite literally had no idea what the player on the other side of the table was doing until it was too late. I would love each player to say what theyre doing but it all just sort of happens and then its too late. The scoring is incredibly tight and it has some ability to recover from a bad start. I was the one who hit the 20 points to trigger endgame and I ended up losing by 3. It does "suffer" a bit from "bash the leader" mechanics but I think the right (communicative) group can over come this.

I played a friends kickstarter deluxe copy but already have the retail edition on my shelf of shame from last year which means I don't need to run out and get this one haha.

2 - Slay the Spire

Aside from having to sleeve 500 cards before I could play, Slay the Spire (the boardgame) mimics Slay the Spire (the less board game) so very well. Adding a coop mode as well as rebalancing the numbers a bit to make it a bit more accessible without needing to bust out a calculator makes this a great table presence. I enjoyed it a bit more than my non-video game playing wife did but I think it was a solid enough deckbuilder that she enjoyed it enough to start act 2. I really am impressed with how well the game translates to the table and am looking forward to playing more. The unlocks and upgrade system are solid and seem to allow for a full reset which I appreciate. The components are wonderful and the core gameplay loop is fun. I really really love roguelikes and roguelite games so to see it translated so well is just wonderful. I felt similarly about Dorfromantik but this really takes the cake.

1 - River of Gold

This reminds me a lot of when I first started board gaming and all I knew was big Fantasy Flight component heavy monster games but I didn't yet know there was a lot more to the hobby. I mean that positively I think as I remember those days with a fond nostalgic glimmer. River of Gold sees players sailing down a river based of a die roll and either building new buildings, moving their ships, or deliver orders. The single roll of a die each turn means your options are limited but not in a way that made me feel that my decisions were locked. The components are really lovely and although the iconography was a bit dense at first it clicked pretty early on. There actually a lot of meaningful decision making but the turn by turn choices are not overwhelming at all. I definitely want to play more of this. It was on my wishlist but out of stock everywhere when I tried to pick it up late last year, so when I saw stock I jumped on it. 

I have not done much in the way of painting this month or non board game hobbying. We did a fair amount of cleaning and reorganizing this month though and I partially blame that. I did paint crossbones for MCP and got most of the way through Clea. I also got most of the way through one of my first Display Kits for the year, a Troy McDevitt Dr. Doom figure. I did pick up a couple of historical things in the form of Nam 68 and a few 3d prints from 3D Breed as well as some stuff for Chicago Way. 

End of January Check In

 Checking in for the end of January

Shame Golf - 

Nice and easy so far. Im up to positive 13 points. I purchased Spectre Mythic and painted Master Chief for Flashpoint

 

Hobby Goals -  

So far, not a ton of progress. I'm a hair over halfway on a cabinet piece, the McDevitt Chibi Doom Figure purchased at Wonderfest who knows how long ago. I was showing a friend Marvel United and debating whether or not im going to start painting my collection when I remembered I might have something that would scratch a similar itch. 3 somethings actually. I have Doom, Hulk and Black Panther from this series. Base coats and the base are mostly done, on to highlights and shading. The biggest roadblock on this is just that its awkward to handle. 

I have been doing good on the board game related challenges but more on that in a bit. 

We managed to play a game of Trench Crusade (I enjoy it quite a bit and am looking forward to more) and I have most of my starter list at least base coated with a few figures just waiting for basing. 

I've somewhat cemented a more scheduled plan for the year to get in some  more regular gaming so hopefully that will help.

On the non hobby side, I've already read 2 books and am halfway through a third. Perhaps 5 books was a low bar.

Alphabet Challenge - 

Alphabet Challenge is going fantastic. 

Avant Carde
Bloc by Bloc
Cat in a Box
Distilled
Earth
Fishing
G
Hoplomachus Victorum
In the Footsteps of Darwin
J
K
Lords of Vegas
Moving Wild
N
O
P
Q
River Valley Glass Works
S
Trailblazers
U
V
Whirling Witchcraft
X
Y
Z

 

Percent of unplayed games - 

I am ecstatic to announce that I have finally crossed the 40% Threshold and am sitting at 39.87 percent unplayed as of this post. This was from what I can tell mostly due to adding expansions in this month. We played 2 Marvel United expansions as well as expansions for Arcs, River Valley, Cubitos and Lords of Vegas.

Total Games Played - 

This is also going well. 29 Games so far for January with one or two more planned hopefully. At this rate it should be no problem at all to get in the 372 I am shooting for.

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.