What is a point worth? This is a question that comes up frequently when I’m learning new games. After the rules are done and the scoring conditions are being discussed, I have to ask what the average score tends to be. Unfortunately, I am frequently playing new games where no one at the table has any anecdotal evidence of what’s average final score, can be.
If you’ve played a lot of games, you may have run into this problem. Say you’ve just finished off a game of Castles of Burgundy. You managed a pretty good score, just squeaking over that 200 point mark. Feeling pretty good about that score, your friend pulls out Agricola. During the rules teach they mention that if you can’t feed your family during a harvest, you’ll have to take a beggar card for every food you’re short, and those are worth -3 points. “No problem” you think to yourself. 3 points is basically nothing. Flash forward to the end of the game and the winning player earned 30 points. You look down at those three beggar cards you took right off the bat and realize that 9 points is ~30% of a winning score.
In some games, it’s fairly easy to get a feel for how valuable a single point is. In Dune: Imperium, the first player to get to 10 points triggers the end of the game, and probably wins. In that case, it’s easy to see how valuable a single point is. In Food Chain Magnate, your money is your score, and the game ends when the bank is depleted. You know the total sum of ‘points’ available from the moment the bank breaks the first time.
Players all choose how much money the bank will have at the start of Food Chain Magnate
Other games have their scoring a bit more nebulous. Wingspan for instance, the final score will be highly dependent on which scoring objectives come out, which birds are available, and how many scoring cards each player managed to take into their hand. The scores in Isle of Skye can swing wildly, depending on just the order in which the objectives get scored!
Another thing to consider is some games have a fairly set amount of points, no matter the player count. Vikings and Raiders of the North Sea are two games that don’t scale with player counts. The competition for each point becomes fiercer the more players you add to the game. This is especially frustrating when someone offers anecdotal evidence, “Oh yeah, Otter and I played Raiders of the North Sea a few months ago. Our scores were in the 80 point range”, not realizing that in a 3 player game, 60 points a more average score.
11 points is a big difference in a 4 player game of Raiders of the North Sea
So, naturally, when playing so many different games, it can be hard to value a point. Knowing when to throw away a card that offers you two points in favour of something else can be key. I’m not going to take one of the 4 point buildings as my first pick in Castles of Burgundy, but in some other game, getting an easy 2 points is a worthy trade-off. And Bigfoot finally got sick of my whining, so he created Goodat.games to solve my whining.
Goodat.games queries BoardGameGeek’s user submitted scores and plots out the average score on a handy graph to answer the question, “What is a point worth?” It includes filters to sort by the number of players, narrow down the subset of data based on a year or month, and can even tell you what the average score is for each placement in a game (e.g. the average winning score in a 4 player game of 7 Wonders)
What’s the average winning score of a 4 player game of 7 Wonders? Around 58
Goodat.games is a work in progress, but it has become such a handy tool in my board game life, that I feel compelled to share it with the world. There are limitations, like it doesn’t have every game available, and adding new games requires a 10-minute buffer as to not make too many API requests and get itself blocked by BGG. Games that have the same name as others, or trying to specify which edition or expansions, are all extremely tricky things to try and solve for. But for my purposes, it has become a site that I pull out anytime I’m learning a new game. Now I never need to guess at what the value of a point is. In Gizmos, the difference between a 1 point card and 3 point card is the difference of 3% of your final score, and 10% of your final score. Meanwhile, in Whistle Mountain, the average score is 134, so the difference between a 1 and a 3 point tile is .7% and 2% of your final score.
Spoilers for the book ahead. You have been warned.
I’ve always identified as ‘a reader’. Reading books is a core part of my identity. From the Scholastic book fairs as a child to wandering through giant book stores as an adult, I’ve always loved books. My tastes have drifted from fantasy, to autobiographies, and back to fantasy, but I’ve always been rooted in fiction.
A couple summers ago, my wife took an audiobook out from the library on a lark. She had a bunch of commutes coming up and needed something to fill the time when she was driving in a straight line (thanks Saskatchewan). She saw a book by the author of A Man Called Ove called Beartown was available, and figured she’d give it a shot. She had quite enjoyed A Man Called Ove, and hopefully, this would be another hit.
And it was. But not in the way that we thought it would be.
Beartown is a tiny community in northern Sweden, stuck in the far side of a forest. The factory is dwindling, the economy is sagging, and people are moving away. Any community faced with this hardship has to rally behind something, and Beartown, is a hockey town. The junior hockey team has a chance to compete in the national semi-finals, and actually have a shot at winning! If they do, it would breathe new life into the community. A hockey academy would be built in Beartown, pouring much needed capital into the community. The hockey team represents hope, a light in the cold, dark winter night that Beartown is going though. At the head of that hope is Kevin, the star player. He’s the one who scores the goals, he’s got the skills and drive that could lead him to the NHL, and he’s the one that’s going to lead the Beartown junior hockey team to national victory.
So when they win that semi-final game on their home turf, it’s cause for celebration. A raucous house party where the players are celebrities. Copious amounts of booze consumed by lightweight teenagers leads Kevin to comit a violent act against Maya, the General Manager’s daughter, that tears the town asunder.
Beartown was a difficult read for me on a number of levels. First, I come from a small town in northern Canada. I’m intimately aware of the types of people who are drawn to, and remain in, those communities. I keenly aware in how stupid ‘hometown pride’ is, and how important it is to ‘fit in’, to ‘be a team player’, because get on one persons bad side, and suddenly you’re isolated. There aren’t any new friends to make, new jobs to seek out. Everyone knows, or thinks they know, whatever drama has befallen you.
I left my small town the moment I graduated from high school. At 17 I left it behind and moved to the big city of Winnipeg, only returning to visit once a few years later. My mother now lives in a different small town, where I end up visiting once a year or so, and every time I do, I’ve filled with such disdain. I despise the small communities and the people who choose to live away from the urban centres. I’m fully aware that it’s my own bias, but, it’s the feelings that fill my heart.
So that’s tough point number 1. I think hometown pride is stupid, so reading about a group of people who scream “We are the bears from Beartown!”, people to stay in a dying town because they’re ‘tough’, just makes me shake my head. I don’t have respect for that kind of hardheadedness, but, that’s coming from someone who couldn’t wait to leave their hometown. a hometown where there aren’t a lot of good memories left behind.
Beartown doubles down on the team mentality by putting the hockey team front and centre. Everything is for the team, the individual doesn’t matter, the team comes first. Coaches who’ve poured entire lifetimes into the club are thrown aside by the sponsers who think they know better. The players are idols, getting away with calling their teacher ‘sweet-cheeks’ in class, skipping school, proudly proclaiming that they could fuck any girl at the party. There are no concequences for their actions, because they’re the hockey team.
I’m no longer an outcast, but I sure felt like one when I lived in my hometown. I didn’t fit in, and those who don’t fit in are made keenly aware of it. If the collective turns their back on you, there’s nothing in a small town to seek out. I can’t tell you how much happier I was when I moved to the city and found a group of like-minded individuals. Hell, I wasn’t even that odd, I liked books, anime, video games. I’m a cis-gendered straight man, I can’t imagine the torture that someone who didn’t fit that mould would have felt. In a city, even if a fraction of a percent are of the same mind, it’s still a significant number of people. If there’s drama or a rift within a hobby, there’s other people that you can turn to. It isn’t so insular and suffocating, there’s freedom in being able to piss someone off, without being completely ostracized from your community.
Back to Beartown, and, here’s where the spoilers really set in. Maya, the GM’s 15-year-old daughter, is raped by Kevin, the 17-year-old star hockey player. When I first read the premise of the book, I was really worried that the main conflict of the story was going to be characters trying to cover up the crime so Kevin could play in the final. Instead, as soon as Maya comes forward with her accusations, Kevin is plucked from the bus literally on the way to the final game. Beartown loses the championship, and a rift sets in. Maya is hated by everyone, they cost her everything. “Why couldn’t she just wait until after the game?” “The police shouldn’t be involved, we could have dealt with this internally!” are phrases thrown around by the men in the hockey club.
Fredrick Backman has some really amazing quotes in this book. So many feelings and emotions that I’ve felt in my heart and soul, but never had the words to put them to.
“For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.”
“Culture is as much about what we encourage as about what we permit … That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with”
“Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.”
“The love a parent feels for a child is strange. There is a starting point to our love for everyone else, but not this person. This one we have always loved, we loved them before they even existed. No matter how well prepared they are, all moms and dads experience a moment of total shock, when the tidal wave of feelings first washed through them, knocking them off their feet. It’s incomprehensible because there’s nothing to compare it to. It’s like trying to describe sand between your toes or snowflakes on your tongue to someone who’s lived their whole life in a dark room. It sends the soul flying”
“It doesn’t take a lot to be able to let go of your child. It takes everything”
Seriously. If I had been reading this on my ebook, I would have been highlighting so many passages. I loved reading this book and coming across passages that just lit up lights inside my head. Giving words to feelings that I’ve been searching for so long. Backman also leans heavily into foreshadowing, sometimes too much for my liking. Every now and then I would feel a passage was written clumsily, but, as you can tell from my entire blog, this is just the pot calling the kettle black.
Beartown has a deep melancholy feeling to it. The weight of the struggle is almost too much to bear. Between friendship, loyalty, honour, and just plain right and wrong, Backman handles the extremely serious and sensitive subject matter with aplomb. One character I particularly loved was Ramona, the old bar owner who’s been drinking her breakfast for a decade, ever since her husband died. There’s a scene where someone is trying to proclaim that “Hockey makes people do crazy things” and she fires right back “Religion doesn’t start wars, guns don’t keep people. It’s fucking MEN” which, honestly, makes me stand up and applaud. So often we pass off responsibility for actions, make excuses for the horrific things that occur, but at the end of the day. Humans are choosing to hurt humans.
The character who I hated the most was the head coach, David. He was supposed to be this shining example, his strategy for building up the best junior team was to pour love into these boys for the last 10 years. Then, when this happens, he’s quick to say “Don’t want to get into politics, I just want to coach hockey”, as if these boys aren’t humans with lives outside the game. David is a soon-to-be parent, but offers no remorse for Peter, whose daughter was attacked. He only bemoans that they didn’t wait to present the crime until after the game. David buries his head in the sand, and, when it becomes clear that Maya and her family aren’t going to run away from town, he turns tail and takes up the head coach position for the rival town’s team. The cowardice this character displays infuriates me. As a parent, I hated his lack of empathy. As a man, I despised his adherence to the status quo.
Beartown explores a lot of themes, as there are a lot of characters, all with their own lives and struggles. Even if the book is spoiled now that you’ve read this blog post, I still highly recommend reading this book. Fredrick Backman made me feel raw feelings that I didn’t really know were there. I know I’ll be continuing onto the sequel, Them Against Us very soon, which, my wife assures me doesn’t let up on the emotional turmoil.
At the end of the weekend, I was left laying on the couch eating ice cream, feeling utterly destroyed. I had somewhat forgotten, in the age of easy to consume content, that art, real art, makes you feel things. It forces you to look at situations and events that are so far removed from our day to day lives. A Pogrom in Romaina is utterly incomprehensible to me, as is sexual violence, but they’re very real things that happen. When we forget that real people go through these traumas, we’re in danger of becoming complacient. Heaven forbid we ever fall so deeply into our own safe little bubbles and think “These things don’t really happen”. As a parent, I’m plauged with intrusive thoughts of harm befalling my children, and it’s something I have to deal with. I can’t protect my children forever, nor will I rob them from the fullness that comes from adventure and exploration. I’ll equip them the best I can, sit back, chew my fingernails and worry, and kiss their wounds that inevitably come from life. But what I can do, is champion that we as people always need to be better. We cannot protect and glorify those who seek to do harm to others. We need to protect the vulnerable around us, and hold those who live in positions of power accountable for their actions. We need to continue to tell the stories that make us uncomfortable. We need to teach everyone around us that we won’t be complacent when evil befalls our loved ones.
I hope this divergnce from board game reviews has been intresting for you. It’s certianly a very different skill, and while I don’t really feel eqipped to offer substitive critics of the art I engaged with this weekend, these blog posts are an accurate represntations of my thoughts and feelings. My heart has been hurting this weekend, and writing about my feelings is a pretty good band-aid.
I’m keenly aware that this is a board game review blog, and that I’m ill-equipped to offer a proper review on something so outside my wheelhouse, but sometimes you need to step outside your comfort zone. This weekend, I engaged with art that left me emotionally raw, and I feel compelled to share them here. I hope you enjoy this divergence from the regular, cardboard content that normally appears here.
My partner and I love live theatre. One of our first dates, I was trying to impress her and bought tickets to a local production of Pride & Prejudice, and it ignited a love for plays in both our hearts. We’ve been to dozens of plays over the years, but unfortunately, a lot less so since Covid happened and we brought a baby in our household.
This week, my wife organized childcare, procured tickets, and picked me up from my office for dinner and a date. The dinner was a delicious sweet and sour pork belly from Foo, one of the few restaurants that we go back to specifically for that dish. Then we meandered down to the playhouse, and sat down, unaware of the emotion damage we were about to receive.
Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story written by Hanna Moscovitch, directed by Christian Barry, with songs by Ben Caplan & Christian Barry is a dark folktale story about two Romanian refugees, Chaim (played by Eric Da Costa) and Chaya (played by Shaina Silver-Baird), finding each other at the docks of Halifax, waiting in line to get cleared medically. They part ways, but come back together when they meet in Montreal. He’s a plucky 19-year-old, she’s a 24-year-old widow. He remembers her, asks to marry, and she reluctantly consents “If it’s her father’s wishes”.
Much of the story is told through the rough but powerful voice of the narrator, ‘The Wanderer’ (preformed by Ben Caplan). He skips merrily from side to side of the stage, singing of the cold, the joy of matrimony, and the bleakness of fleeing your home. His bushy beard matches his strong baritone, and while his jubilant high notes get the audience clapping in beat, while in the solemn moments you could hear a pin drop. The score mixes folk, rock, and lullaby, utilizing woodwinds, violin, saxophone, and even a megaphone at one point. Chaim and Chaya perform double duty in playing various instruments while The Wanderer narrates.
Living in Montreal where everything is cold, Chaim and Chaya eventually have a baby. Chaim has been working on the railways, good work at $8 a week! One night, he tries to join his friends in watching a film at the theatre, but gets stopped by an anti-Semitic message. Suddenly, a crack forms, and he remembers the pogrom that killed his entire family. He goes home, and his child has a fever. Chaya’s sure it typhus, the ailment that claimed her husband’s life, but the doctor refuses to see her, and she doesn’t know why!
It’s at this turning point that The Wonderer, with a cloth draped over his head, sings a hauntingly beautiful Yiddish melody. My heart was in my throat, not knowing if the child lives or dies. Spoiler, he lives. And the cast goes on to live a full life. Chaya dies at 77, Chaim at 92. They have 4 kids, and 16 great-grandchildren, who all achieve so much.
The story of Old Stock is the true story of playwright Hanna Moscovitch’s great-grandparents. While creative license was taken, the story remains true. It left me contemplating humanity, and how could anyone fathom to hurt other humans! How can people have such hate in their heart that they tear through a community. I reflect on how blessed and lucky I am that I live in a place where me and my child don’t have those worries. We have safety, stability, and freedom.
Old Stock is dark and thought-provoking. I found The Wanderer’s wild energy utterly charming, and encourage everyone to seek out this play. Some parts are crass, and being confronted with the very real suffering that feels so far removed from my daily life left me uncomfortable, the raw emotions I felt are a good reminder of why art is important in the first place. In the age of media, that seems made solely to entertain, it’s a good reminder that art evokes deep and complex emotions. It lets you see a snippet of someone else’s life and story, and sometimes that reminds you that while so easy to just divide humans into Us and Them, we’re all still humans, and the pain we inflict on others is real.
I recently saw a post on one of the various online board game groups that I’m a member of that got me thinking. It was “Shelfie” (A photo or series of photos of one’s board game collection) that’s fairly common in those spaces, but the caption read “My next game not (not counting expansions) will be my 500th game. What does my collection need?” And I was a bit taken aback by it. Here was someone with so many board games that they could play a different one every day of the year, and still have 25% of their collection unplayed, looking for what more should be added to it. It got me thinking about the buying and accumulation habits for those of us who consider ourselves to be board game enthusiasts.
My Shelfie (not pictured, my other 4 shelves)
What does a game in your collection represent? What does it mean to you? Is it a trophy? A physical representation of the times you engaged with that game? Is an unplayed game a promise of a joyful experience? How often do we find ourselves buying games to fill a space where we feel lacking? When we are thirsting for a quick hit of dopamine and our compulsion is to engage in a little retail therapy? Maybe you had a hard week at work, and you feel like a little pick-me-up is in order? Maybe you’re missing your gaming buddies, and you’re preparing for the next time you host, so you pick up the hot new game that everyone will be excited to play.
Is collecting bad for your hobby? With so many games to choose from, does the analysis paralysis set in before a single piece hits your table? Does the obligation of playing one of your unplayed games prevent you from playing one of your favourites? A bit part of this question comes down to how you find joy in board games. Personally, I love discovery. I love playing new (to me) games, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t regret the fact that I haven’t played Galaxy Trucker in over 2 years.
Something else to consider is the size of your collective collections. Sure, I own ~100 games myself, but my three friends who I play games with regularly own between 80 – 200 games each. I know I want to get my games played, but so does everyone else. And every time someone acquires a new game, and advocates to the group to play this new box, it means there are 500 other games that are getting passed over.
My unplayed games as of Jan, 2023
One way we’ve tried to address our perceived shortfall, is to gather for Cabin-Con (2021) (2022), a 3-day gaming retreat. The first Cabin-Con we played entirely new games, and blasted our way through 50% of Clank Legacy. The second one saw us only play our ‘greatest hits’. No new games, only ones we already knew how to play (but new expansions were fair game). I’m not sure how we’ll approach the third one, but I suspect it’ll end up being a hybrid of the two.
Of course, there’s no clear answer that works for everyone. Myself, I play games once a week with a core group of people, and maybe one or two on the weekend, either solo or with my partner. Others may have multiple game groups weekly and can support having such a large collection. Others may struggle to get a single game played each month! Someone with limited disposable income might need to save for months to buy a new game, while others don’t have that restriction on their lives. We’re all different people with different situations. What really matters is that we find joy in our hobby, and that we encourage each other to engage in healthy spending habits!
As of this month, my blog will be 2 years old, so I think it’s time I start looking back and revisiting some of the games I talked about in the beginning. As time goes on, our gaming tastes change and I feel value in looking back at what I was keen on, and how much staying power a game actually has. It’s one thing to say ‘this game is eminently repayable’, but how does it actually fare when the rubber hits the road? When put to the test against all the other games, and it no longer has that ‘new game shine’, does it come back? Did my interest wane? Here’s where we find out.
Now, not all of these games came out in 2021, but they were new to me in 2021. So, here we go!
#10 – Regicide
Designers: Paul Abrahams, Luke Badger, and Andy Richdale
What made it special: An engaging cooperative game that uses a standard deck of 52 cards.
Thoughts over 2022:Regicide came to Board Game Arena, and I played it about a half dozen times during my lunch breaks. It’s amazing how a game using a generic deck of cards can evoke strong feelings of tension and peril. I love the ebb and flow of cards as you crush through the royal family, sending each one to their grave.
Regidice is also on Board Game Arena, which is an interesting take on the Regicide system. I found Regidice to be a bit less interesting, but still fun none-the-less. Both games require that you maintain a sense of momentum. If you stumble and falter, you’ll be overwhelmed quickly.
#9 – Project L
Designers: Michal Mikeš, Jan Soukal, and Adam Spanel
What made it special: Polyomino puzzles plus Splendor-like engine building puzzle, with candy-like pieces
Thoughts over 2022: I played this once with my mom in May, and we both really enjoyed it. It’s a great little game with great production quality. The little pieces are super colourful, and satisfying to slot into the double layered tiles.
One thing to note, I had hoped to pick up the expansion(s) for Project L, but following the crowdfunding campaign of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, publisher Boardcubator announced they were shutting down. I don’t know what that means for the future of Project L, or the availability for expansions, but I suppose we’ll see!
What made it special: Cooperative trick taking with limited communication
Thoughts over 2022: During 2021’s Black Friday sale, I picked up the follow-up The Crew: Mission Deep Sea, and I found I enjoyed that version quite a bit when playing with a group that doesn’t gather together regularly. The Crew: The Search for Planet Nine is a game that I look forward to playing with my regular group as we plod our way through the quest book, but not one that I would necessarily pull out for a casual game night.
#7 – Cascadia
Designers: Randy Flynn
What made it special: A lovely tile placement, pattern building, hex grid, drafting game.
Thoughts over 2022: I haven’t revisited Cascadia since September 2021. I have played Calico a few times (which my mom said was her favourite game that she played when she came to visit) and I think I still prefer Calico, although it seems I’m in the minority.
Cascadia has received a lot of acclaim over 2022, including winning the prestigious Spiel des Jahres! Congratulations to Randy Smith and Flatout Games!
#6 – Beyond the Sun
Designers: Dennis K. Chan
What made it special: It’s a big, interesting tech tree! That changes every game!! That you get to control!!!
Thoughts over 2022: Beyond the Sun is another game that I keep playing on Board Game Arena, which is really exciting. I’m impressed with the variability of each game, and playing it again in person during Cabin-con was one of my highlights of the weekend!
I’m eagerly awaiting an expansion to Beyond the Sun to ratchet up the asymmetry and give us more excuses to return to this wonderful game!
#5 – MicroMacro: Crime City
Designers:Johannes Sich
What made it special: It’s Where’s Waldo, but you can follow people’s actions backwards and forwards through time! Everything is happening all at once!
Thoughts over 2022: My partner and I have played through MicroMacro: Crime City – Full House, and thoroughly enjoyed it. There’s no way around it, it’s exactly the same, just, more of what you’ve already seen. I just got game #3 in the series, MicroMacro: Crime City – All In. I do enjoy this system, and I continue to be invested, if only to see what the whole city will look like with all 4 maps stitched together.
What made it special: A tile placement, pattern building, hex grid, drafting game. BUT WITH CATS!
Thoughts over 2022: Calico remains one of my favourite pattern building tile laying games. It’s simple to play, but has sharp teeth that can make you regret the very first tile you place in your double layered player board. I like how bright and colourful Calico is, and the variety in the patterns you need to build and the objectives that are slotted right into your board.
I played Azul: Queen’s Garden in 2022, and halfway through reading the rulebook I looked up at my friends and said “This is kinda like Calico!”. That framing helped learn Azul, but as soon as we were done, I think we all agreed that we would much rather play Calico.
What made it special: One of the few legacy games we’ve actually completed.
Thoughts over 2022: The first few chapters of My City filled me with excitement and wonder. Just what would we be discovering in each of the envelopes. As the chapters wore on, mechanics came and went, the forest got cut back to make room for more tiles, and we delved too greedily and too deep.
In the end, My City was a great game, but the campaign ended on a whimper. No great climax, no revolutions to the gameplay, just small twist after small twist until the engine sputtered and finished.
I enjoyed my time with My City, but I just wish then ending was a bit more exciting. A bit more impactful. Nevertheless, I’ll be playing both My Island and My City Roll and Write as soon as they become available to me.
#2 – Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated
Designers: Andy Clautice and Paul Dennen
What made it special: Lots of discovery and humour sprinkled throughout the gameplay
Thoughts over 2022: Near the end of 2021, we played Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporatedfour times in a single day. Early on, it becaome clear that my goal wasn’t to win any specific games, but to hit as many story encounters as possible. I mourned when I failed to complete a goal before it’s time limit was reached and we had to read the ‘failure’ text.
Over 2022, Bigfoot chose to bow out of the campaign. Fair enough, he wasn’t enjoying himself, and our hobby time is too precious to waste on playing games we don’t like, even for the sake of the group. So Clank! Legacy has become the game we play when Bigfoot is unavailable to us.
We still haven’t finished it, but we’re close, I think only 2 plays remain. I’m hoping the campaign ends on a very exciting note, but playing a game once every three months makes it hard to remember the narrative continuity.
#1 – Bullet❤️
Designers:Joshua Van Laningham
What made it special: A very clever push your luck, puzzle-y, pattern matching game with an excellent solo boss battle mode.
Thoughts over 2022: Suzanne Sheldon said it best when she said “some games spark“. A spark game is one that captures both your mind and your heart. They feel fresh and excite you!
Now, I might be struggling with burnout, but sometimes, it can feel like board games sort of, blend together. Nothing stands out, nothing really elicits that joy that I felt when I was really getting into this hobby. Bullet❤️ is a game that sparked for me.
In 2022, I picked up Bullet⭐️ and mixed both sets together. This has become one of my go-to solo games. The evenings where I don’t really want to sit in front of a screen, or if I only have 30 minutes to kill before moving on to something else. Every character is unique, and each character doubles as a boss mode to crash against. I love exploring this puzzle and this system.
I did play the multiplayer game a couple of times, but found it a little lacking. It’s real-time and tense (which I love), but it’s extreamly heads-down. During the real time phase of the game, I have no idea what my opponents are doing. Not until I pop my head up and see the mound of bullets they sent my way.
If someone was equally enthusiastic about Bullet❤️, I wouldn’t hesitate to play it with them over and over and over again. Until that person makes themselves known in my life, I’ll be content with the solo mode.
It’s the start of a new year, and with every turning of the calendar comes a deluge of people taking this opportunity to set goals and challenges for the coming year.
As board gamers, I believe something we share is a love of creating rulesets and then trying to excel within the rules we’ve made. With that in mind, there are various challenges that people partake in. Things like the 10×10, the 5×10, the 1×100, the H index, The Alphabet challenge, the Play a game every day of the year, and playing a set of games that share an attribute, such as publisher, designer, or even publication year. We use these challenges to encourage ourselves to interact with our hobby in different and interesting ways.
Some of the challenges available on the BGStats App
I think many people who would call themselves board game enthusiasts or hobbyists have identified a problem with our hobby. We love discovery, we’re always ‘chasing the new hotness’, we fall victim to the ‘cult of the new’, terms which showcase our desire to play the latest and greatest games. An unfortunate side effect of always chasing the newest games, is many great games fall to the wayside. Games that we spend our hard-earned money on, expend the effort to learn the game, only for it to languish with a single play in our statistics.
That’s where the concept of a challenge comes in. In a “Play X Games Y Times” challenge, you pick X number of games you enjoy but want to play more, and set a goal. Maybe it’s a game you recently got and are really excited to explore, or it’s an old favourite that just hasn’t hit the table very much, this is a good way to lead your decision-making when it comes to your hobby time. Instead of hemming and hawing over your entire board game collection trying to pick one game from the dozens that you own, you now have a pre-vetted list of games you want to tackle.
I attempted a 10×10 challenge (play 10 games 10 times) a few years back, and while I was unsuccessful, I saw the value in attempting it. Getting a game to the table 10 times gives you the opportunity to see depths that you may have missed before, and there’s a joy in plopping a game down that everyone already knows how to play and is comfortable with, especially if you’re always learning and exploring new games.
My current pile of unplayed games
The H-Index challenge is similar to a “Play X Games Y Times”, in that you’re trying to play games a number of times, but the values are linked. Like, for an H-index of 8, you’ll play 8 games 8 times. I’ve had an H-index tracker on for a few years, and I’m currently sitting at 23. One more game of Crokinole, and I’ll achieve 24, then I’ll need to play my top 24 games again to push it up to 25. It’s an interesting way to view your games played, but a bit more nebulous than a hard value, such as a 10×10.
For some, they want to explore games that they might not otherwise pick. That’s where “Play all my Unplayed Games” challenges, or “Play Every Game in my Collection” come in. Games that you bought years ago that you always wanted to get back to, but always end up slipping just shy of actually getting played, this is their time to shine. This challenge is also great as a preface to a great cull. Maybe a game that you loved in 2016 just isn’t doing it for you anymore, and it’s time for that game to leave your collection.
Games that are leaving my collection
For some, setting a challenge might be for them to refocus their attention on the hobby they once loved. Setting a “Play a Game Every Day of the Year” challenge is about intentionally choosing to play a game, instead of wasting hours mindlessly scrolling through social media or otherwise squandering your time. A similar challenge is to pick a friend to play X number of times with, this can encourage you both to prioritize spending time together, and gives you an activity to engage with.
All of this to say, challenges can be a fun way to interact with your board game hobby, but it’s important they’re approached with intention. Just throwing 10 random games onto a 10×10 challenge can become a drag, and it’s important not to prioritize the challenge over your enjoyment of the hobby. If playing board games is something you do for fun, or to relax, it’s important not to turn your play time into a grind. Setting a challenge can be a great way of getting you out of a rut, or to discover games that you may have forgotten about. Whatever you choose to do, just have fun!
