Month: January 2013

I’ve sorted out about a hundred games to sell on Ebay and the first batch of twenty five or so is currently listed with the auctions due to close on Sunday. Included in this lot are items such as the Lamont Brothers’ anthil game, Antics, some imported games from the last couple of years like Asteroyds, Snapshot and Mondo, the highly regarded Brewster’s Millions rip-off, Last Will, and many others. The full list is here.

In our game group, Nige has become a bit of a Stefan Feld fanboy (and who can blame him really based on Feld’s recent output). However, this year this prolific designer has so far got not one, not two, not three but FOUR big game releases lined up already. Rialto, Bora Bora and Brugge have today been joined by an announcement from Queen Games of the impending release in October of Amerigo. Boardgamegeek News has all the details. Start saving now Nige.

One of the good things about logging the games you play is that you can look back and see what you were playing in years past. Come next month, I will have twenty years’ worth of games club sessions (from both Nottingham and Shrewsbury clubs ) recorded on BGG so I thought I’d look back each month and see what were the standout games five, ten, fifteen and twenty years ago.

So, to kick us off, let’s look back to January 2008, 2003 and 1998, where the highlights were:

2008: Kingsburg is an excellent game and I can’t believe it’s over five years since it came out. A fairly innovative dice game for its time and I’m still enthusiastic to play it. Felix – The Cat in the Sack is an evil little card game from Friedemann Friese and, in my view, doesn’t get enough love from our game group. Another keeper. Also played Race for the Galaxy this month but I never felt inclined to invest the time to learn how to play well. Give me San Juan any day.

2003: Trias was an interesting design that had a hilarious first play at our club where Mark K’s dinosaurs could do nothing but throw themselves into the water. However, the game quickly sunk without trace, just like Mark’s dinosaurs, really..

1998: Ursuppe was a very clever design and I was quite impressed with it for a while but its appeal faded over time and I sold it some years ago. I think Nige is still a fan. For Sale is one of those evergreen filler card games that I played for the first time in this month. Still gets played as it is very accessible to non-gamers. Groo: The Card Game was also played this month, though not for the first time. It would be nice to try this again sometime as I still have a copy (and the expansion, which I’ve never played).

In December, I managed 28 plays of 25 different titles, ten of which were new to me. The new titles were Blockers: The Card Game, CO2, Le Havre: The Inland Port, The Hobbit: The Card Game, Indigo, P.I, Palaces of Carrara, Pluckin Pairs, Roll to the South Pole and Seven Dragons.

I added seven games to the collection, five of which were Christmas presents, and my unplayed games list is only down to 23. My vote for Game of the Month for December is the excellent Palaces of Carrara by Kramer & Kiesling, an elegant design and a very easy choice for my Six Picks list of the best games of 2012.

2012 saw me play 239 games of 154 different titles (interestingly, just two fewer than the 156 different titles played in 2011 and three fewer than the 157 played in both 2010 and 2009). I find it pretty remarkable how close these numbers are – is my brain only capable of absorbing around 150 rulesets over the course of a year? The total plays at 239 is up quite a bit compared with 200 in 2011, 208 in 2010 and 229 in 2009). My full list of games played is here.

My most played game was Vegas which saw 7 plays. This is a very enjoyable dice game with lots of ooh and ahh moments and it plays very quickly so is ideal for an end of evening filler. Friday and Timeline: Inventions both racked up six plays each but last year’s most played game, Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, didn’t get a single play in 2012.

Only three other games reached 5 plays and, of the 154 titles, 111 of them were played just once. My unplayed game list started 2012 at 16, dropped all the way to 4 or 5 but is now sitting at 23.

2012 seemed to produce several good games but not a single stand out game. My six picks for the year were Africana, Lords of Waterdeep, Love Letter, Palaces of Carrara, Santiago de Cuba and Vegas. As with last year, I’ve also done a six picks of solo and two-player games featuring Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small, City Square Off, Equilibrion, Friday, Morels and Targi (with Le Havre: The Inland Port just a shade behind). All in all, a pretty good year. Let’s hope 2013 is just as good.