If you’ve been following some of board games largest and best creators on social media, you may have noticed that trick taking games are enjoying a bit of a renaissance at the moment. With dozens of fascinating games appearing, all with their own interesting spins on the genre, it can be a little intimidating if this is a genre of game that you haven’t spent a lot of time with. From Cat in the Box, to The Crew, to Jekyll and Hyde, to Ghosts of Christmas, all of these games are “Trick taking +” for the new millennium.
Going WAY back to 1997 for a moment, I want to introduce NYET! by Stefan Dorra to the mix. NYET! is a semi-coop trick taking game where the players determine the parameters for the round. Let me explain. In a round of NYET!, all the cards are dealt to the players. Then, beginning with the dealer, players take turns choosing one of the aspects of the round to be covered up. It’s less bidding for what to do, and more vetoing. Maybe your hand is void of blue cards, so you ensure that blue is not the trump for the round. Maybe you have nothing but low cards, so you really don’t want each trick to score for much, so you cover the 4 point spot. Around and around the table, players place their tokens on a little board, determining 5 aspects. The first player, how many cards are discarded, which suit is trump, which suit is super trump, and how many points the round is worth.
Once the parameters have been set, the first player chooses their partner, and the game commences! Like any other trick taking game, a lead card is played, players must follow if possible, if not possible, can play any card from their hand. The highest value card played that matches the lead suit takes the trick, unless a trump is played, then the highest trump card takes the trick, and the winner starts the next round. One more hook, if you take a 1 from an opponent, it’s kept as loot. Once all cards have been played, score points based on the board for every trick and loot you and your partner managed to capture. The first player to pass 100 points is the winner.
There’s a few things in NYET! that are just fascinating to me. First, the board offers a dramatic, dynamic game. Each round, you assess your hand and then veto the aspect that would be most devastating to you. Some rounds you’ll have several things in your hand that, if they go right, means you’ll have a killer turn. On the other hand, someone arbitrarily vetoing the yellow 1’s as super trump can leave you with a handful of loot that you might have to give away. Those 1’s can either be the most valuable thing in your hand as a super trump, or, the worst thing in your hand as loot for your opponents.
There is no way this ends well
The next thing that makes NYET! shine is the fact that the start player every round chooses who their partner is going to be. Shifting alliances means the scores will rise unequally, and there’s a surprising amount of information that can be gleaned from what your opponents chose to veto. There will be times when you think the player across from you would meld well with your hand, but they’re in the lead. Are you going to assist them in earning more points, or do you choose one of the other players in the hopes you’ll close the gap?
The other fascinating aspect is that your partner won’t always be across the table from you. There were a few times in our plays where we got caught in a nasty pincer trap. The first player would lead a card, my partner and I would follow, and the lead player’s partner would come in with the hammer and win the trick. Not leading or concluding a hand felt like a tough position to be in, but I find it fascinating non-the-less.
There are lots of moments of tension in NYET!. When playing with odd number of players, the group with fewer players gets a doubler card, which creates some amazing come from behind victories. If you’re not careful, a round could end up with every trick and loot being worth -2 points, causing chaos and strife as everyone tries desperately to slough off their best cards at the right moment. Because the teams are ever-changing, players are playing for themselves. Moments of comradery are short-lived as you immediately stab each other in the back. There is humour and excitement in this trick taking game, especially when someone slams down their super-trump and completely changes the temp of a hand. A game of NYET! never fails to get me and my friends shouting.
NYET! is a fantastic game from a by-gone era. I’m sad that more people haven’t played this, especially as Trick-takings games continue to rise in popularity. NYET! is a game that I love to play, and while I’m not particularly good at trick taking games, the auction board makes me feel like I have just a little bit of control. And the chance that each trick in a round could be worth -2 points adds a tiny bit of chaos that I absolutely love.
I feel like everywhere I look, people are expressing their distress at the#666666 amount of stuff we all have. Our kitchen counters are full of air fryers, coffee machines, and tea kettles, our drawers are overflowing with knickknacks, and our board game shelves are buckling under the weight of triple layered cardboard. People everyone are calling out game boxes that are mostly empty, while praising other games for reducing their footprint on our shelves. Bezier Games looks at this landscape and says, “you know what the people want? Colossaleditions“
I know that Colossal Editions are not for me, but I couldn’t help myself when I saw a new in shrink Royal Collectors edition pop up in our local used marketplace. I hemmed and hawed, sold off my copy of Massive Darkness, and used the funds to procure this big fancy box for myself.
Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a 1 to 5 player game, where players are trying to build the best castle. Each round, the Master Builder takes all the tiles available for purchase this round, and sets their prices by placing each one below a spot on the market track. Then in player order to the left of the Master Builder, all players can buy a single tile, handing their money to the Master Builder. The Master Builder themselves gets the final option to buy a tile, but their money goes into the supply.
Players take the tile they purchased, and place it into their castle, adjoining rooms via doorways, and scoring points accordingly. There are 8 different kinds of rooms in a variety of sizes, and each room has different scoring opportunities. Some tiles will give points by being connected via an open door to other specific types of rooms, while activity rooms have a high intrinsic value, but will lose points if they share a wall with other kinds of rooms. You don’t want a bowling alley next to your bedroom after all. Then there’s the basement rooms, which will offer points based on specific types of rooms found throughout your entire castle, adjacency not required.
Rooms are considered complete when all of their doorways are connected to other doorways. When a room is completed, it triggers a special bonus based on the type of room that it is. All players will have secret goals in which they’ll earn points at the end of the game, and there’s some public scoring objectives that are revealed at the start of the game as well. When the deck of room cards runs out, the game is over, and the player with the most points has pleased the Mad King, and I’m sure the others are banished to the dungeons for their failures.
I already knew that I lovedThe Castles of Mad King Ludwig before I bought the Royal Collectors edition. There’s tension and conflicting decisions all over the place. From the Master Builder setting the price of the tiles, to deciding where to put the rooms into your castle and which bonuses to chase down, I’ve never felt bored when playing this game, but I’ll expound on that later. This new edition gives the game a gorgeous face lift. All the tiles are now vibrant and speckled with art and Easter eggs. I found a couple copies of Suburbia littered amongst the tables in my castle. The look of the game is great, but the functionality isn’t perfect.
Starting with the whole Big Box experience. All the tiles and game pieces are kept in 4 trays at the bottom of the box. Generally, I expect a Game Trayz inclusion to assist in setting up the game, but that’s not the case of Castles of Mad King Ludwig. Instead, you need to lay out the board, slot in these green PVC looking holsters, pull all the tiles of each shape out of the trays, shuffle them up, and count out a certain number of tiles of each shape depending on the player count. I understand why this is necessary, as any stacks of tiles that are depleted at the end of the game are worth extra points, but I hate it. It feels tedious, and then I need to put the trays aside for the rest of the game, as they aren’t needed past the initial set up. Then, all the heaviest pieces, the Kings Favours poker chips, the metal coins, and the player pawns are all in a single tray, making it significantly heavier than the rest of the trays. I cringe as I pull that tray out of the box and feel the plastic bowing under its own weight. It hasn’t failed yet, but I have my concerns.
As for the player pawns, there are 20 colours to choose from. 20! In a 5 player game! Someone can say “I’d like to be blue please” and have 4 slightly different options! Combined with the 20 swans, there are 20 foyers as well. It feels even more excessive and unnecessary. On one hand, hooray for choice. On the other hand, I’m probably never going to play with more than half of these pieces, they were created for nothing.
My own production qualms aside, the gameplay of The Castles of Mad King Ludwig remains largely unchanged from its original debut 10 years ago. Each round a number of tiles comes out, the Master Builder chooses the price for each tile, then all other players get a chance to buy. I love this phase, the master builder has to balance making the best tiles expensive, but not unreasonably so. The other players similarly need to choose between giving the master builder all their money and taking the tile they want. The ‘I split-you choose’ bidding mechanism is great for creating delicious decisions.
Then building your castle is its own bundle of trade-offs. Rooms want to be adjacent to certain other rooms, but not adjacent to some. Sometimes you’ll really want to complete a room to earn its completion bonus, but the only tile available to you that round does nothing to help your score. I love building the castles, and seeing how sometimes they sprawl horizontally, and other times they seem to twist in on themselves, creating a crowded and hilarious castle.
The Royal Collectors edition also came with a couple of expansions, namely the Moats, Swans, Secret Entrances, Towers, and Royal Decrees. Each one is a small addition to the game. None of which are overwhelming, but each one being a separate entity that you need to teach. Most of them you could include with new players, but some, such as the Secret Entrances, I would leave out just because they can be quite influential if played right.
It’s hard to say much more about The Castles of Mad King Ludwig, because the summary of my experience is “it’s good! Real good!”. Years ago, I picked up Ted Alspach’s other game Suburbia, and felt like it was the better design. As time has gone on, however, I find myself much more inclined to return to the Mad King’s Castles. The dynamic market feels much more interactive, and I always find looking at each player’s castle a delight at the end of the game. There’s a whimsy here that Suburbia is missing. Not to say that Suburbia is a bad game by any stretch, heck no. But my appreciation for The Castles of Mad King Ludwig has grown over time, while Suburbia has stayed consistent. I love this game, and would play it at any opportunity. Yes, the Royal Collectors Edition has some missteps with the production, and I did read some people being displeased about a new expansion being announced before this “complete version” of the game was even delivered. That doesn’t bother me, I don’t need expansions to this game. I’m so happy every time this hits the table, and I get to play in my little sandbox building a glorious castle.
Want to hear this post in a podcast? Check out the Talking Tabletop Podcast Episode 4 to hear my voice read these words, amongst other great contributors!
I feel like this post may be preaching to the choir, as I suspect the intersection of person who reads a board game blog and person who takes an active role in teaching and introducing new games is close to a circle. Regardless, it’s something that’s been on my mind lately, and for those of you who listen to this and aren’t the primary game teacher, I hope you appreciate the person you have in your life for the role they fulfill.
Firstly, my background. I am the primary rules teacher for our game group, and our usual cadence is that we meet on Wednesdays at one of our houses (we rotate who hosts for the evening). Usually on Monday the host will drop a couple game suggestions, and everyone will give their opinion on what they’d like to play, in addition to confirming their attendance.
That’s a lot of rules…
I am usually the one who pulls up the rulebook and give it a read through. Then, on game day, I generally take the rulebook and give the abridged version to the group. If any questions come up, I usually know where to find them in that book, just due to the fact that I’ve read the book at least once, so I’ll read out the rule as written, and sometimes we’ll debate the meaning of the rule.
I don’t always learn well from JUST reading a rulebook, and in fact, I learn best when I have the game in front of me and I can move pieces as I talk through the rules, that’s how I best internalize rules, by doing. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at teaching my friends how to play, one of the tricks I’ve learned works well is to get everyone’s hands on pieces during the set-up. Get one person to shuffle cards, get the next person to sort components, get the third person to place tokens on the board, things like that.
That said, by the time game night rolls around, I’ve generally already spent 30 minutes to an hour researching the game, even if it is just reading a book and looking for FAQs and Errata’s. It’s a hidden time cost, one that doesn’t always get recognized. Depending on the complexity of the game and the quality of the rulebook (Hansa Teutonica, I’m looking at you), that can flex in either direction. Personally, I find it incredibly difficult when rulebooks have thematic names for all the different aspects that’s only mentioned once at the start of the book and never again. Like, the first time I read the rule “For 1 action, a player may displace another player’s trader from a house along a trading route (not from an office). To do so, he removes the other player’s trader and replaces it with his own trader or merchant from his personal supply; however, the displacing player must pay a penalty by moving an additional trader or merchant from his own personal supply back into his stock.” I had to stop for a second and just shake my head. It makes sense when you’re actually playing Hansa Teutonica, but out of context, just as words on a page, it’s hard to make sense of it.
In Hansa Teutonica, cubes are traders and discs are merchants.
Going a bit further, game teachers have an extra cognitive load to bear. In addition to playing their own game, developing their own strategy, they also end up being the arbiter of the rules, watching each other player’s turns to make sure no rules were missed. If rules questions come up, the teacher needs to stop thinking about their strategy and pivot to looking up the specific question in the rule book.
Now the ugly part. With new games comes rule mistakes, and sometimes, hurt feelings. I get an awful, sinking feeling in my gut when I teach a game one way, only to realize halfway through that we’ve made a critical error. Sometimes it comes up on a player’s turn and I get a “I didn’t know that was a rule! I wouldn’t have done this if I had known that!”. I get it, it sucks when the wind is taken out of your sail because of a mistake. Thankfully, no one in my group gets really heated, we all know it’s just a game. We’ll debate how best to rectify the situation, either play out the rest of the game with the rule as we’ve been playing it, or undo turns to make the aggrieved party whole
Leaning and teaching a new game is difficult. There’s a lot of nuance that you don’t always glean from just reading a rulebook, sentences that don’t make sense when taken out of context of the gameplay. I recently had someone tell me a story of a time they taught a rule wrong at a public meet-up, and one of the players threw a bit of a fit and just… left.
There’s a lot of stuff in the Voidfall box
The inspiration for this post mostly comes from my recent Voidfall experience, whereby the time we took the first turn, I had invested like, 6 to 8 hours in unboxing, organizing, re-boxing, learning, and setup. 6 hours of my time that I’m spending, so our group can have a better experience.
In the end, all I’m trying to say is, if you have a game teacher in your life. Say thanks! Acknowledge the effort they’re putting forth for the group, and if they make a mistake, be lenient.
And if you’re not willing to be lenient, then take on the task of teaching the games. Be the change you want to see in the world.
I’m writing this post as a first impression, mostly because I don’t actually know if I’m going to be returning to Voidfall or not. Not because it’s a bad game, quite the opposite. It’s a fantastic game that I really enjoyed, but the reality of my gaming life means that I may never play this game more than twice.
Let’s tell the story from the beginning. I did not back Voidfall on Kickstarter, Bigfoot did. Sci-fi heavy economic Euro games tend to be his jam. A few years ago at our first Cabin-con, he brought the Anachrony Infinity Box, which we spent an entire evening (from 8pm until 2am) unboxing, learning and playing the game. While it was a great game, and one I’ve always meant to return to, that experience remains the only play I’ve ever had of Anachrony.
In a bid to make getting Voidfall to the table easier, I volunteered to take Voidfall off Bigfoot’s hands to unbox, organize, and learn how to play ahead of time. Bigfoot has said before that he doesn’t enjoy the unboxing experience, and anything we could do to make it more likely to play the game he paid an arm and a leg for, is worth it.
Holy smokes that’s a lot of stuff
So Voidfall came home with me, and over 2 or 3 sessions I pulled everything out of the box and started familiarizing myself with all the components. The cardboard tokens were beautiful, they practically fell out of their sprues. Chef’s kiss. The GameTrayz insert on the very bottom tray, on the other hand, had a shattered corner. I’m not sure if Bigfoot will seek out a replacement, but it remains functional, although sharp.
My biggest frustration with setting up the game was assembling the resource wheels. Pushing the cardboard disks into the very tight plastic pegs gave me a fair amount of anxiety. Considering the long resource board has 10 holes in the centre, I was sure the cardboard would buckle under my pressure. But to my surprise and delight, it held strong! One more annoyance with those dials was that nowhere did it say to use the darker colour pegs on the science wheels. It wasn’t until I finished all 4 resource boards and started on the victory point boards did I realize that I didn’t have enough of the light grey pegs. So with a butter knife I managed to pry the light grey pegs off the bottom of the resource boards, then installed the dark grey pegs. Easy-Peasy.
Damn resource wheel
Assembling the houses wasn’t terrible in its own right. The decks of cards were fairly well organized, but because I didn’t know what all needed to be in each tray, I felt like I was guessing. For those who are curious, there’s 1 fallen house card, 6 technology cards (4 basic, 2 advanced), and 2 starting resource cards for each house. Some houses have different focus cards as well. Perhaps it was my own ignorance that made this process harder than it should have been, but here we are.
So with all the components unpacked and assembled, I repacked the box and started learning how to play. Gaming Rules! has a 1-hour long how-to-play video was excellent and meticulous. I ended up watching it twice, and by the end felt fairly confident in my ability to at least get us going.
On game day, we all arrived around 3:30 and pulled the lid off of Voidfall. Not wanting to waste time playing the tutorial (after all, if this was going to be our only play, we didn’t want it to be a pared down version of the game, and we weren’t confident in our ability to play the tutorial AND a full game in one day), we chose the mission that had the lowest conflict and complexity, and began setting up.
Setting up for our first game
I’ve read several times that while the iconography of the game is INTENSE, once you get into Voidfall and learn the language, the iconography really does become second nature. Everything makes sense, and there’s a pretty good cohesion between the icons. During setup, we quickly we realized the table we were playing on wasn’t big enough for everything, so we pulled a second table over to put the trays of miniatures on, giving more space to the Agenda board and the other main board that holds the player turn order and galactic event. We arbitrarily chose our houses (as the person who watched the rules video, I took the most complex house of the ones that were suggested), and with an iron grip on the Compendium, I talked everyone through the considerable setup.
One of the players was coming in cold, he knew next to nothing about Voidfall aside from the fact that we were playing it today. So I launched into the core concepts and side rules of the game. One part where I did deviate from the Gaming Rules! video is I did go through every focus card and agenda that was on the table. The Glossary book was invaluable at helping us really decipher what the iconography meant, and once we knew what some of the cards did, we became a lot more adept at figuring out what every icon meant and how to apply it to the game.
Actually Playing the Game
So, Voidfall. How does it play? We purposefully selected a low conflict map, but I wasn’t quite prepared for just how isolated each of us were. I took a fairly aggressive stance and pushed into my boarders, but none of us came next to each other until the very last turn. While that will be different in other scenarios, I can definitely say that our scenario was very multiplayer solitare. There were precious few moments where our actions affected anyone else at the table. Perhaps a technology card was taken a turn before someone else, or someone missed out on a specific agenda card, but that’s really about it.
My starting Agenda card
Voidfall is a very determinstic game. Nearly no information comes out during each cycle aside from the offer of agenda cards, which having the right ones is literally the difference between victory and defeat. I’m not against deterministic gameplay at all, but this does mean that at the start of each cycle, all players will spend 20 minutes just figuring our their actions for the cycle. That part isn’t bothersome because everyone is doing that at the same time, but midway through cycle 2 one of our players realized they miscounted their resources and had to reconsider the rest of their cycle, stalling them for an additional 30 minute. That stall did have me thinking that Voidfall would make an excellent solo game.
Each action in Voidfall is generally quite simple. The complexity and challenge comes in understanding the ramifications of each action you take. Because all the actions are tied to nearly every other mechanism, everything you do is consequential to your game. If you squander actions, you’ll be left in the dust. A game of Voidfall lasts for 3 cycles, each cycle gives players between 3 and 6 turns. Each turn, players can do at least 2 actions, with a 3rd and 4th action being available if you spend resources. Voidfall is a tight experience, you’ll constantly be calculating and recalculating the resources you have and the best way to convert those resources into victory points.
Hand of focus cards and agenda cards, sorted in the order that I want to play them.
At first I was quite enamoured with the production of the Galaxy Box. This huge cube containing dozens of plastic ships and seeing everything assembled on the table for the first time was exciting. What I really didn’t like was that come the end of the game, we literally ran out of guild tiles and had to use some suitable proxies. The corvette ships, the basic ship type, while looked great, were fiddly as all hell, trying to keep them balanced on the little plastic sticks. Again, come the end of the game, we stopped putting the ship on the stick and just used the plastic bases to move our cubes around the map. For a box that crowdfunded at over $200, I feel like these are really obvious problems that could have been resolved.. Perhaps 4 players isn’t the optimal player count, and if I were a solo-primary gamer, I’d instead be complaining that there’s too many components in the box, but alas, I am not a solo gamer.
There’s also a breathtaking amount of variability in Voidfall. The Compendium has a dozen specific scenarios for every player count and play mode, each with a different map layout, different fallen houses/techs available, different suggested houses, each one having a special ability and making you choose between two different starting techs and resources. Each one has dramatically different amounts of enemies and resources on the map, leading you into a myriad of different directions. I felt excited flipping through the book of scenarios, just imagining on how the subtle changes would dramatically affect how the game plays.
Thoughts after my first play
It’s obvious that Voidfall is a labour of love for the designers Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi. Everything feels thoughtful and interesting, and I can tell that every action has been considered and could be vital given the right circumstances. The part that bothers me is that isn’t that the game is just deterministic, but that that the actions the other players take really don’t affect anyone else’s game at all, aside from a missed tech or an agenda card being snaked. Nothing the other players did during the game mattered to me. Come the end of the 3rd cycle, we compared victory points to see who amassed the most points in each of our own individual solo games.
I feel forced to compare Voidfall to my #1 game of all time, Food Chain Magnate, which is also fully and wholly deterministic. There is absolutely nothing random in FCM, but every action from every player affects you and the board state. It’s a knife fight in a closet, everything you do matters to everyone else. I realize they are two very different games, and the scratch different itches. Talking to Bigfoot, the interaction of FCM is exactly what he doesn’t like about it. He hates that he can have a grand, superior strategy only for someone to ram a branch into his spokes.
Those voidborn don’t stand a chance
I think the key to enjoying Voidfall has to come with expectation management. Yes, there’s a big time investment in getting started, from preparing the box, learning the rules, and getting the game to the table. It’s a very special and satisfying game, provided you’re not looking for a big 4x experience. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, 4X is a genre of game that refers to 4 main characteristics that happen throughout the game. Explore the world, Expand your territory, Exploit the land/system for resources, Exterminate your enemies. I’d argue that Voidfall is a 2X game at best, Expand and Exploit. Yes, there is combat, but not really. And the whole board is laid our right from the start, there is no exploration during the game. This isn’t a grand space combat game, if you want that, look towards Eclipse. Instead, Voidfall is a grand strategy game for those who want to puzzle out their way through a tightly designed game, and not have anyone get in their way.
I suspect I’ll play Voidfall again, but I doubt it’ll be at 4 players. Having more players doesn’t expand the number of interactions or decisions that I get to make during the game, but each additional player is another opportunity of analysis paralysis to drag the playtime to untenable lengths. I do think Voidfall is a absolutely faboulous solo game, one that may rival the infamous Mage Knight as the heavy solo game of choice. Designers Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi seem keen on supporting the system, with monthly challenges and an expansion announced for early 2025.
Energy Production is for suckers
If you’re eager to get into the world of Voidfall, I’d recommend picking up the retail edition for $115. It doesn’t contain the plastic minitures for all the ships, but instead uses perfectly functional double layer ship tiles. They hold your power cubes perfectly, and even assist players with keeping the rules straight, as the non-basic ships have a reminder that they can only hold a single cube until the ship tech is upgraded.
I’m curious to see how my opioning will change after a few more plays. For now, I’m going to dig into the cooperative mode rules. If the regular competitve gameplay won’t give me the interaction I’m looking for, perhaps the coop mode will at least push me to engage with my fellow players.
I know I’m not alone when I say that I don’t get to play board games as often as I would like. Between being a parent, a husband, and an employee, my hobby time feels like it’s constantly shrinking, and it’s the first thing that I choose to cut when something comes up.
My first fallback when I’m experiencing a drought of board games is Board Game Arena. Personally, I don’t really like playing with random strangers, so I never join games unless I’m invited, or it’s arranged outside the site, such as on a discord server. I don’t know why accepting an invite from someone on The Nerd Shelves Discord server is different as opposed to just joining an open table for the game I’m wanting to play, but it is.
Actually, I do know why it’s different. It’s because every time I join a random open table, I get obliterated. In both Race for the Galaxy and Tobago, I would join an open table, excited to learn a new game, only to be matched up against someone with hundreds if not thousands of games under their belt. Those experiences kind of chased me away from playing games with random strangers.
I wonder how many days it would take to play all these games, assuming we were playing games for 12 hours a day.
All that being said, Board Game Arena isn’t a long-term sustainable fix for my board game habit. Eventually, I yearn to have the physical pieces in my hands. And when I can’t play games, I start to seek ways to acquire new to me games. I constantly have to remind myself that buying games does not equal time to play games.
When I can’t play games, I sometimes feel like the only way that I can engage with the hobby that I love is by buying board games. Retail therapy is a real thing that taps into my little lizard brain and gives me a rush of happiness. Adding items to my board game bliss cart, or popping into my favourite friendly local game store, can make me feel the same happy feelings as I felt when I was last playing games with my friends. Unfortunately, these feelings aren’t an adequate replacement for the hobby that I enjoy so much. And it can even kick off a downward spiral of shame when I’m staring down a shelf full of unplayed games.
I tell myself that I get a lot of joy out of unboxing and organizing my new games. I love the feeling of punching out the cardboard tokens from their sprues, and the satisfaction of having a game perfectly organized and ready to play it. I justify my purchases by saying “I’ll play it solo!” but honestly, my solo games are few and far between.
This did not feel like joy. This felt overwhelming
What really inspired this post was when I considered my board game acquisitions over the past few months. At the end of November my partner and I had a baby, and I’ve only been out to my regular game group, like, once since he’s been born. But in that time I’ve bought, like, 12 games. 5 of them I bought used for a really good price, and 5 of them came in via a math trade, but now my shelf of shame has grown dramatically during a period where I’m just not playing many board games
I don’t even really have a conclusion for this, I have no solutions to anyone who may be suffering from the same ailment as I do. The best I can offer is to look for opportunities to engage with this hobby in ways that make you feel connected. If you lack a regular gaming group and are filling your hobby needs with consumerism, consider joining some board game discord channels or engage with your favourite board game content creators on social media. This is inherently a social hobby, and engaging with others who are equally as passionate about board games as you are creates some special bonds that can lift your spirits when life otherwise gets you down.
New (to me) games I got in Janurary’s math trade
Just be aware of the FOMO that comes when those creators go to large conventions and post their ‘haul’ pics. It’s absolutely unreasonable to go and buy 30 to 50 games at one time. If it’s not obviously disclosed in the haul pic somehow, I highly suggest asking for clarification on which games they received for free and which ones they paid for themselves. It can help dispel the illusion that buying dozens of games at one time is reasonable or sustainable.
