As board gamers, we’re all acquainted with the idea of a ‘Shelf of Shame’, or ‘Shelf of Opportunity’ if you’re looking to put a positive spin on your pile of unplayed games, but recently I found myself thinking about my Shelf of Dust. The games that have gone the longest since I last played them, and yet, they’ve survived multiple rounds of culling, selling, and trading.
What are these games that are just gathering dust on my shelf, and what are the qualities that keep me from moving these games out of my house? I think first I need to examine why I move games out of my collection.
The primary reason for me to move a game on is space. I have a game closet, and the agreement with my partner is that I keep all of my games in that one closet. Now, it’s full, but definitely not bursting, but if I want to acquire a stack of new games, I need to make room for them. The second main reason I move games out is for money. If I can sell a game, I turn around and use that cash on a new board game acquisition, and I love getting new-to-me games! I recently sold Massive Darkness, which I had last played in 2018 for $150, and used that cash to buy Castles of Mad King Ludwig: Royal Collector’s Edition. A worthwhile trade in my opinion.
The third reason I move games out of my collection usually comes down to the fact that I’m just not playing those games anymore. Games that I feel like I’ve played enough, and I’m not likely to be pushing my game group to revisit, gets the boot. I’m lucky in that I haven’t had to re-acquire any games I’ve gotten rid of (yet), as I feel like I have a pretty good handle on knowing when I’m done with a game.
So, what are my dusty games and why have I kept them around?
Some games are just so small, that I literally have no reason to move them along. The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game was last played on August 5th, 2016, but the box is less than the size of a paperback book, and I’m not exactly going to reclaim a lot of space. There’s no real point in getting rid of it, but if I’m not playing it, there’s no point in keeping it, right?
Other games are fairly precious to me because they were fairly influential in my origin as a board gamer. Forbidden Desert (last played on October 6th, 2018) was the first cooperative game that my wife and I got REALLY invested in. We have a ton of coop games now, but every time I consider which games I want to get rid of, I look at the metal tin and immediately think “Not that one, moving on!”
Some games are games I’d really love to play more, but my current game group just doesn’t allow for it. Games like Tak (last played December 24th, 2018) and Le Havre: The Inland Port (Last played June 12, 2020) are because I’ve pretty well stopped playing 2 player games. I used to play two player games a ton with my wife, but since our kids were born, we’ve both been too tired in the evening to play a game against each other.
Writing this post has encouraged me to pull a few games off my shelf and put them up for sale. Games that I KNOW I’m never going to play again (The Settlers of Catan, Apples to Apples, Harry Potter: Codenames). There is great value in keeping a well curated collection. More choices aren’t always better, and if you’re not going to play these games, getting them out of your space gives you more room to manoeuvre. Maybe you’ll feel less stress when you look at your games as they’re precariously stacked and crammed into every spare square inch. Less stress means you’re more encouraged to go to your games and pull one off the shelf!
What are the games in your collection that have sat dormant the longest? What’s kept you from moving them out of your collection to make room for new games? Let me know in the comments below, especially if your games are dustier than mine!
Sometimes I feel like I’m becoming a curmudgeonly old man. Bitter at the world and have a deep disdain and loathing for ‘fun’. Soon I’ll be chasing the roaming street youths off my lawn with a stick, how dare they play? Everyone should be out working! No one wants to work anymore!
Sorry about that. Ticket to Ride by Alan R. Moon and published by Days of Wonder in 2004 needs no introduction. In a world where the latest and greatest board games get a mere 10,000 copy print run, Ticket to Ride has eclipsed 10 million copies sold. It is eminently popular, beloved by many, and I just don’t understand why!
A game of Ticket to Ride begins with a map. Tones have been printed, so pick your favourite region and go to town. Each player gets a hand of 3 destination tickets, of which you must at least two. Players start with 4 train car cards in their hand, and a pile of plastic trains on front of them. On a player’s turn, they can choose to do one of the following 3 actions:
Take 2 normal coloured cards from the face up display, or the face down draw deck. Unless you take one of the wild face up cards, then you only get to take one.
Play cards to place your trains on the board, and score points for doing so.
Draw 3 more destination cards, which you must keep at least one of those cards, but you can keep all the cards if you wish.
Players continue taking turns until someone has less than 3 trains left. Everyone gets one more turn, then the game is over. At game end, players reveal their destination tickets, and earn points if they were able to connect the two cities on their tickets, and lose points if they failed to do so. There’s also a 10 point bonus to the player who has the longest continual path of trains. Then, the player with the most points is the winner.
Listen, it’s not that I think Ticket to Ride is a bad game, because it’s not! It’s more that I just don’t understand why it’s so popular. The turns are fast and simple, sure. It’s rules-light, so the whole family can play, okay. There’s a constant stream of new expansions to keep the experience varied, check. But I just find the core of the game utterly uninteresting. So much of the game is just “draw two cards”. Over and Over again.
In 2 and 3 player games, all the double routes are knocked down to 1, making the game tighter at 3 players. I know skilled players can and will watch what routes another player places, and specifically try to get in their way, but at my level of play, it’s fairly arbitrary. There’s no hate drafting going on, each person is just trying to complete their routes. Yes, you could be keeping track of what cards everyone has drawn, and deduce what they can and cannot play on, but in reality, it’s a crapshoot. Destination and hand cards are hidden, and without all that forethought and really watching the board, you don’t know what the other players want to do, and blocking each other becomes accidental, which is frustrating for the person being blocked and boring for the one who is doing the blocking.
I often find that as the end of the game is drawing near, everyone fills up their hands with useless cards as they mill the deck, trying to get one or two last routes to complete a ticket, ending the game with a mittful of useless cards. Turn after turn is wasted drawing cards from the top of the deck, waiting to draw 2 yellow cards, because nothing else really matters, isn’t my idea of fun. I also hate the idea that some winning strategies can really be to just horde cards for the first 20 turns of the game, then just start placing down routes that work for you.
I played one game recently where I kept two cards with the Vancouver destination. I was 3rd in player order. The first player played 3 trains from Vancouver to Calgary, and the second player played 1 train from Vancouver to Seattle, locking me out of Vancouver for the rest of the game. Like, come on!
I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, but Ticket to Ride is a hard pass from me. Alan R. Moon has designed games I like a lot more, like 10 Days in Europe, Elfenland, and Incan Gold. There’s other route building games that I like a lot more, with actual decisions to make, like Thurn and Taxis and Hansa Tetunoica. Almost anything else would be a better use of my time.
And before anyone gets on my case about how the Europe map has stations that allows you use other players routes, I know. I played it, and it helps the getting blocked out part, but I still find the core of the game boring. Thanks for reading.
Way back in 2003 I picked up my first manga. The Monthly Shonen Jumps just started getting stocked at the local pharmacy and while my mom was looking over the newest set of romance novels that had just come in, the bright colours and exciting cover lured me in. I was instantly hooked, and started saving up my pennies to buy it every month. This was the start of my fast descent into what would be a decades long anime and manga obsession. I was already a hopeless nerd, with my love of reading and voracious Super Nintendo habit, I was already an outcast in my tiny village, so, in for a penny in for a pound, may as well embrace the nerd-life.
Over the next few years, I managed to convert two others to my hobbies. Together we devoured the Shonen Jump every month, discovered fan translations online (that we downloaded via our pitiful dial-up internet), and spent every favour we could with the librarian of our high school to include some new manga on her yearly book orders.
Now, I’m not really here to tell you about my anime and manga roots, although it’s important for context later. Thanks to Shonen Jump’s inclusion of the Yu-Gi-Oh series, we eventually got into the de-fictionalized card game. That was a fairly special time in our lives, having a close group of friends all equally invested into a TCG as each other. We’d develop metas, craft specific strategies against certain decks, and our worlds were rocked every time someone got an awesome new card and revealed it for the very first time during a match. This special time in my life is exactly what Millennium Blades by D. Brad Talton Jr. and published by Level 99 Games seeks to replicate.
Cards, cards, glorious cards
Millennium Blades is a TCG simulator for 2–5 players. Each game takes place over 3 years, with each year containing a deck building phase and a tournament phase. During the deck building phase you’ll be dropping fat stacks of cash to buy random packs, buy and sell singles on the used market, all in an effort to create both a tournament winning deck and an impressive collection in your binder. In the Tournament phase, players take turns playing a single card from their hand, resolving the effects to earn points. At the end of the tournament, the player with the most points is the winner, and earns victory points. At the end of the third tournament phase, the player with the most victory points is the winner.
It sounds simple when I condense the game into a single paragraph like that, but like most TCGs, the basic rules of the game are fairly simple, but the devil is in all the cards effects and how they interact. First off, the stack of cards that makes up the pool of potential cards is absolutely massive. And, that’s not even all the cards that are in the base game! Prior to your first game, you’ll need to combine several sets of cards into a huge deck. Each set features a different mechanism or twist that can interact with other sets in various ways. On one hand, it’s a pain if you’re pulling apart that store deck every game. On the other hand, you can just leave it assembled for several plays, and refresh it when it’s getting stale.
The other pain point is ‘assembling’ the currency. Yes, Millennium Blades uses paper money, but it’s wads of bills taped together to give it more heft. It’s incredibly effective at evoking the feeling of throwing down entirely too much money on a coveted single, or getting a huge influx of cash from selling your rarest card. Paper money gets a bad rap in board games, so much so that I have a difficult time thinking of the games I’ve played in the last decade that use just plain paper money. The cash stacks in Millennium Blades don’t look as nice as, say, the Iron Clays from Roxley, but they’re simultaneously hefty and cheap feeling, so players have no reservations about flinging them across the table, creating a small mountain of spent currency. There’s a childlike fantasy whimsy the throughout the production, and it shows up even in the cash.
Millennium Blades, the game, is broken into two parts. The preparation phase and the tournament phase. Unfortunately, to play one, you kind of have to know how the other plays. The preparation phase is where all players build their collections and try to craft a winning deck. This phase is broken into 3 real-time chunks, where new cards and money are injected into the system. This phase lasts literally 20 minutes, and in those 20 minutes players are frantically heads down reading dozens and dozens of cards trying to figure out a combination. It’s genius that the cards that go into your collection need to share an attribute while being a different star value, and those cards are ineligible for tournament play. You’ll find yourself with the card that would be perfect in your deck, but it’s also exactly the missing value in your collection, so you choose to rework your deck with a different strategy, but then someone just sold a card into the market that could fit into your collection, so you pick it up and start rebuilding your tournament deck, only to find the combo you thought was awesome is 2 cards short, so you start looking for alternatives, and then the timer goes off.
Like many real time games, Millennium Blades gives players a frantic feeling. Playful stress in being under a time crunch that can and will force players to take actions they’ll regret. Selling a card for money only to realize its true value later. There are so many things to consider during the real time phase, and you’re constantly being barraged with new information, that it’s impossible to make a fully calculated choice on every card. Eventually you’ll just default to “Not a fire card? Then into the sell pile it goes!”
There’s real effort here to try to impart the feeling of collecting cards from a TCG. Every 6 minutes, you get new cards to mull over. If they don’t match your deck or your collection, then they effectively become money. You sell singles to the market to buy more cards. Your friends will unwittingly sell cards that would be perfect for you, so you snap it up. There is some anxiety here, when trying to decide which cards to sell and which of the many packs you should open up. There’s a rule in the book that explicitly forbids ‘take-backs’. If you make a mistake, you’re supposed to just own it and live with that regret. Anyone who’s made a bad trade, only to realize their folly later, is intimately familiar with that feeling.
The Tournament phase is comparatively simple, you selected 8 singles, 2 items, and a deck box, then players take turns playing a single card to their tournament row one after the other until they’ve filled up their card rows. Every card does something different, and can earn you points at different times. Some of the best cards only earn points at the end of the round, and goosing a single card for a boat-load of points is really just painting a target on that card’s back, as some cards can trigger clashes which results in a card being flipped face down, effectively voiding the card all together.
The Tournament phase feels short, comparatively. In the collection phase, you spend 20 real minutes just reading and preparing and reading, and sorting. Then in the tournament, you only have 8 cards to worry about, and a plan on how you want to play them. Sure, some unexpected moves from the opponents can make you pivot, but there’s only so much you can change when you’re in the thick of tournament play.
That isn’t to say that the Tournament phase isn’t important, or fun. The two halves of Millennium Blades make a whole, cohesive game. The Tournament phase gives purpose to the deck building phase, and vice versa. I love the fact that you keep your tournament deck in the subsequent rounds, and you really could just run a winning deck again, but now your opponents have seen your tricks, and will have baked in specific counters to your old deck, and you’ll find yourself ground into the dirt. Adapt or be left behind, as they say.
Millennium Blades is a fantastic game. It absolutely nails the “CCG-Simulator” game that it set out to emulate. Nostalgia is a tricky thing, and Millennium Blades hits me right where it hurts. From the dozens of on-point references to 90s anime and video games, to the actual betrayal I felt when I got targeted during a tournament. When I play Millennium Blades, for a brief evening, I’m not a 30-something year-old father of 2 kids and husband. I’m suddenly 14 again, back in my buddy’s basement, salivating over the sweet mythic he pulled from the pack he bought last Friday. Drinking soda, blasting tunes and playing game after game after game, refining our decks each match until the sun rose the next day. All my adult worries abate for an evening, and I’m just a kid playing a game again.
I’ve had so many fun moments playing Millennium Blades, and the real praise here is that it actually makes me feel something. A tall order for a board game to do, but it does. I wholeheartedly recommend Millennium Blades, especially if you have any experiences with TCG/CCGs and/or anime and video game knowledge from the 90s. To this day, I haven’t had an experience that nails the meta commentary or pulled at my nostalgia heart strings as well as this game does. Do not pass on Millennium Blades because it was published 8 year ago, this game about collectible card games and the gamers who play them, offers a timeless experience.
I think I’ve mentioned it before, but we recently welcomed a new child into our household. He’s our second kid, and what’s different this time around is my partner is now self-employed, and is not eligible for parental leave, meaning I get to be the recipient of 35 weeks of parental leave. To celebrate, I’ve refreshed my top 100 games of all time, but the in the process of doing so, I was left pondering how I rank games, and how to generate this top 100 list.
I know a lot of people swear by the Pub Meeple ranking engine method. For those who don’t know, Pub Meeple is a website that lets you import your BGG plays and helps you rank them. It shows you two games at a time, and you simply select which of those two you like more. It’s a great system, but I’ve run into a couple of flaws that made me not want to use it this time around. First, I’ve played too many games. To generate a list via Pub Meeple, it would take around 2,500 comparisons. It took me, like, 4 days last time, and what’s weird, is that my feelings about certain match-ups would change from day to day depending on my mood! It’s a great system, just, not for me anymore. Side story, I recently had my mom use it to find her top 50 games (we’ve only played 50 games together) and it took her, like, 20 minutes. Eventually I’ll share that list, but not today.
What I did instead was to revisit all the games I’ve played and give them a 1 to 10 ranking. I more or less follow the BGG standard for user ratings. A 10/10 game is ‘outstanding, always want to play and expect this will never change.’, a 7/10 is a ‘Good game, usually willing to play.’ and a 3/10 is ‘Likely won’t play this again, although I could be convinced. Bad.’ You get the idea. Some other reviewers have their own ratings scale, like Blue Peg Pink Peg have a 0 to 6 rating for all their games, where a 0 is a terrible game and a 6 is a collection essential. I’ve seen everything from a binary thumbs up and thumbs down, to 5 stars, to a 100 point rubric system where each part of a game gets a score and the final rating the sum of those scores.
If you’ve read any of my reviews before, you may have noticed that my rating for a game is absent from the review. And this is because I feel like putting a number rating on a review doesn’t tell the whole story. A game for me might be a 10/10, but it’s a real-time game, which automatically makes it a thumbs down for someone else. I try to make my game reviews a more nuanced discussion where I talk about what I like and dislike in a game, and hopefully give you enough of my opinions to make an informed decision whether it’s a game you might like to play as well. But I’ve gotten off-topic.
I went through all the games I played and refreshed their ratings. I then sorted the games by their ratings, with 10 being the highest and 1 being the lowest. Then, within each ranking, sorted each set of game based on which ones I like the best. Not all 10s are created equal, you know! The end result was a list of over 100 games, roughly in the order that I prefer them. I’ll start posting my top 100 in early March, so look forward to it then.
One thing that quite surprised me about my top 100 games, was that there were a significant number of games that I ranked an 8/10 that didn’t even make it into my top 100! We live in an age where a game can be a Very good game that I like to play. I’d probably suggest it and would never turn down a game, and still not be in my top 100. Too many great games is a good problem to have.
I don’t often delve into the world of book reviews, but when something leaves me in a heightened state of emotion, I find the best resolution for myself is to blog about it.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver is the story of the titular character, Demon, as he takes the blows delivered by life. A modern retelling of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (which I haven’t read), Demon Copperhead is set in a rural community in the Appalachian mountains and examines the deep-rooted problems of poverty and addiction.
Trying to decide between reading fiction and non-fiction. As usual, fiction won.
Where does the road to ruin begin?
With his father dying six months before he was born, Demon was raised in a single-wide trailer by his mother next door to his best friend, Maggot (Matt Peggot). The book begins in earnest in the late 90s when the boys are 10 years old, and the Peggot’s take Demon on two-week trip to the city. Upon their return, Demon’s mother has married her short-term boyfriend, Stoner, and he’s moved in with them.
I have my own complex feelings when it comes to being a 12-year-old boy and having a bald, tattoo-ed step-father suddenly in the picture that I don’t particularly like revisiting. Within the first 100 pages of Demon Copperhead, I was mad. I had such rage and fury inside my soul at Stoner, and how he showed up and upended Demon’s entire life. His bullshit alpha-dog, macho, ‘my way or the highway’ stance, his proclivity to teach with his fists, his verbal and emotional abuse, I was furious. When he for no real reason banned Demon from seeing Maggot, to standing over the boy and forcing him to scrub the floors several times over while inhaling cleaning fumes for mindlessly tracking in mud, I wanted pain to come to Stoner.
Further to the abuse of a man to a child, Demon Copperhead tells the story of Maggot’s mother, and why she’s in jail. Another horrific, awful tale of cold-blooded abuse and trauma. This was not a good tale to read while I was holding my 3-month-old son.
Demon’s mother was characterised as being an on-the-wagon, off-the-wagon type of person. She’d be sober for months to years until something slipped, and she ended up back in the throes of addiction. One day, Stoner busts into Demon’s room and says “Your mom wants to show you how much she loves you”, then has Demon help his overdosing mother. Fighting tooth and nail against calling 911, until they show up, then he’s the dutiful husband. Scum.
This event lands Demon in foster care, working the tobacco fields for a crusty old farmer. Demon’s mom goes into rehab and things seem to be going well until, on Demon’s birthday, his caseworker informs him that his mother has OD’d on Oxy. Stoner ghosts, and Demon, is left to the state.
At this point, my rage had boiled up into a fire, I wanted divine retribution against Stoner. I didn’t want Demon to get his hands dirty, nothing short of the divine hand of God, personally smiting Stoner from His green Earth would satisfy me. Alas, that’s not how life works. Stoner gets a fresh start, and Demon bounces between foster houses.
The rest of the book is life happening to Demon. He’s a naïve child, but has a strong sense of what is right and wrong. A foster family moves out of state, leaving him behind, he chooses to track down a long-lost relative who finds him a place to live. He takes up Football, ends up being a rising star for the team, he’s pegged as a gifted person, albeit behind due to his foster care’s lack of care. He’s popular, but never loses the sense of inferiority that comes from sleeping behind dumpsters. He’s keenly aware that at any moment, life can get rattled and everything can get snatched away from you, and he’s insular. He refuses to rely on others and knows that he can only stand on his own two feet.
Then a football injury destroys his knee. The whole back half of the book is Demon, falling into the rabbit hole of pain medication and the addiction therein. It seems like everyone in the county is on something, whether it’s Percocets, Oxy, blow, or something else. Demon flunks out of high school, moves in with his girlfriend, Dori, after she loses her father, and the two teen addicts take a stab at playing house. Demon, for all his worth, tries to keep it together, despite the addiction. Unfortunately, and predictably, Dori OD’s and passes away herself. Several characters turn up broken by addiction, other characters die, not necessarily due to someone’s malice, but more thanks to the cruel twists of fate, and Demon eventually finds his way into rehab and gets clean.
In the final chapters, Demon returns to the county and touches all the places that were home to him. He’s duller now, damaged goods. But he’s alive, and that’s something. He revisits several locations and reminisces about how he sheltered in a barn overnight here, and how he was robbed by a hooker over there. These places are quiet now. These places that were so influential and formative are now just, sad, empty, derelict buildings.
The images along the cover are a lot more poignant after you’ve read the book
As I alluded to above, the first 100 pages made me angry. The next 450 pages just made me sad. I sit here with the novel concluded, feeling like a pile of ash. Everything has been burned up, and for a glorious moment, we were alive and bright. Now, it’s destroyed. Gone.
Life doesn’t conclude in neat little bows, and not every storyline gets the ending it deserves. And in this, I feel Demon Copperhead does a pretty good job of emulating that structure. I’m used to fiction having a dramatic climax and resolution, but Demon’s story didn’t really have that. It was like a boot in a tumble dryer, a constant hum accompanied by random bangs, as the shoe hits the walls. The hits of life keep coming, then they ebb for a season, then another tragedy befalls our hero. At the very end of the book, he rides off into the sunset, leaving his county behind. The ending didn’t make me feel good, or resolve any feelings that I had in my soul, some of the characters that I wanted to see more of didn’t return, but it didn’t end in a tragedy. Demon keeps living, when so many others don’t.
Demon Copperhead was a very good read. Emotional, personal, and brilliantly written. I’m amazed that Barbara Kingsolver can write from a perspective that seems entirely outside of her own. It’s intimate, dark, and beautiful. If you can stomach the tragedy that is the opioid crisis, the failures of the foster care system, and the pain that humans inflict upon each other, I highly recommend Demon Copperhead. It’s only March, but I’m almost sure this is going to be my favourite book of this year.
