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.
Prefer to listen to my voice instead of reading these words? This post is available on the Talking Tabletop Podcast Episode 2, amongst other great board game contributors!
This weekend, I was chatting with my cousin about our new year resolutions in regard to our favourite hobbies. She mentioned that she read 170 novels last year, and is hoping to top that number in 2024. I asked how she managed to read a book every other day, and she reported that most of her reading were generic romance novels that were entertaining enough while being easy and quick to consume. My own reading habits are nearly the complete opposite. I read 3 novels in 2023, one of which left me emotionally devastated. My reading habits skew much more to the quality over quantity side of the spectrum, but it got me thinking about my main hobby and the rate at which I consume board games.
Books and board games share a problem with most forms of media. There is simply too much content to consume. There are an estimated 500,000 new books each year, 18,000 movies, 10,000 new video games, and 4,500 new board games, there are millions of hours of new content created every single year that our backlogs have absolutely no hope of keeping up, let alone going back to catch up on the gems we’ve missed. Under this deluge of content, I can see why we seek to put up some guardrails on our hobby time.
Of course, no one can experience all the content. We naturally winnow those astronomical numbers down. We ignore products that we know aren’t interested in (the entire horror genre gets ignored by our household). We count on reviews, both professional and user generated, to steer clear of stinkers. We push products made by our favourite creators to the top of the lists, and through these measures, we find ourselves with a much more manageable list of exciting new releases to spend our time, money, and energy on seeking out.
In 2023, I recorded 328 plays of 132 different games, 54 of those being new to me. A respectable showing, a little down from the previous year, but still a good year for board games. A few of the new to me games were big hits (like Akropolis and Cat in the Box) while others were stinkers in disguise (Beast and Shipwreck Arcana come to mind). Most of the new to me games fall in the “That was pretty good. No complaints, didn’t set my world on fire. I’d play it again if someone requested it” category. It’s not a bad place to be, it’s just where the average game falls in my estimation.
Akropolis was my favourite new-to-me game from last year
When my cousin told me she read 170 books over the year, at first I was amazed, then I began to consider the parallels between her reading hobby and my board game hobby. Most of the books she read didn’t set her world aflame. They were content that got consumed, then placed aside. A number in a spreadsheet, an entry in Goodreads. She wasn’t changed by the book, her world view remains unaltered. Likewise, I played 54 new board games last year. None of them broke into my top 10 (in fact, shockingly few of my top games of all time saw a single play in the last year) but a few are peaking into my top 50. This isn’t to say that they are bad games, just that they didn’t shake my world. My world view remains unaltered, and now here I stand at the dawn of a new year, reflecting on what I’m doing with my hobby. I’m understanding why people subject themselves to these challenges. Why do I spend dozens and dozens of hours playing board games that I only “like” and not “love”? Why don’t I resolve to play Food Chain Magnate or Galaxy Trucker 10 times this year? Surely that would bring me more joy than the rat race of buying, unboxing, learning, and teaching new games every week. Should I consider pivoting to only playing the absolute hits and abandon my pursuit of new games? Would I be happier playing 3 great games over and over again instead of 170 good games?
Perhaps, but perhaps not. I know that I derive a significant amount of joy from discovery. The whole process of learning about new games, the thrill of acquisition, and the crescendo of finally getting a game to the table with my friends is part of what makes me happy in this hobby. All that being said, the rat race can get exhausting, and if you spend ALL of your hobby time just grinding through new releases, it’s real easy to fall into unsustainable habits and burn out on the deluge of new releases.
All of this to say, I hope this year you take some time to reflect on what brings you joy. If you’ve been feverishly acquiring games, or playing a hundred games a single time before moving on and feeling the burn-out that can cause, I hope you take the time to shake up how you engage with your hobby. Remember, buying games does not equal more time to play games, and if playing games is what really makes you happy, then it’s worth spending some time refocusing on what aspects of board games really make you happy.
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!
