Wayback When? is a review of the games I was playing five, ten, fifteen and twenty years ago with me highlighting the most memorable titles of each particular month in the vain hope that I might dig out some of them to play again. This month we’re looking at February 1994, 1999, 2004 and 2009.
 
 
Five years ago was the first chance I had to play Matt Leacock’s excellent civilisation dice game, Roll Through the Ages, which is still fun today. We also got to experience Bonnie & Clyde, another in the Mystery Rummy series but a game that had been delayed so long people had forgotten how good the rest of the series had been and it, sort of, passed people by. I really enjoyed it though. The third game of note was the elegant little auction game of Byzanz designed by Emmanuel Ornella. I miss playing these clever little card games and should probably go about setting up another session outside of our current cycle to try and play some of these again.
 
In February 2004, I managed to play only two games and the only new game was Martin Wallace’s Princes of the Renaissance. This is a good game set in Renaissance Italy between warring princes and with a smattering of backstabbing and intrigue. Five years earlier, although I played a few more games (still only seven, what is it with February?), again I only played one new title and this was an obscure maze race game called Hey Culligan Man, later released in the U.S. as Switchboard
 
Twenty years ago, I played two great new games. The first was Jolly Roger, a fun set collection game with a push your luck scoring element. The second was the World Cup Tournament Football game, which was a great game of hidden teams in which the players were interested and you played chits to help their progress through the tournament. Probably a bit dated now and The World Cup Game probably does the same thing a little better.