Category: General

This year for the first year ever I attended a formal BGG (Board Game Geek) event. I was able to snag one of the last tickets ($75 if you’re wondering) and got connected to someone with a hotel room for me to crash in for a few nights. What is BGG Spring?

Fun. Squared. Fun Squared Squared. In other words, a bunch of fun.

It’s basically an event where you can see some new games, shop at the exhibitor hall, but most importantly you can play games. New games, old games, complex games, simple games, it doesn’t matter. Board Game Geek provides a bunch of games from their library, or you can bring your own. (I did some of both.) During the four-day event I played a couple dozen games, some of which went for hours and hours.

I played Merchants of the Dark Road twice. Tekhenu and Everdell were two other games on my list that I wanted to play, and I managed to do both. I had three goals for the event: Play some games I knew (and could help teach), Play some games I own but haven’t played yet, and Play some games I have never heard of. I did all of that.

Games I knew (and taught) included Chai, Whistle Stop and Merchants of the Dark Road. Games I had in my library but had not played included Tekhenu and Everdell. I had hoped to learn one Lacerda game (he’s notorious for designing complex games) and I didn’t manage to do that. But I did play several games I picked up at the Virtual Flea Market including Crusaders and Fae.

Yes, the event cost me $75 (plus some hotel costs…I brought my own food). But as a door prize I got a copy of Zapotec and as a first-timer a bonus copy of Wingspan. The first is roughly a $35 at most online game stores, and the second is $45-ish so basically I paid for two games and got to use the game library and hotel facilities for free! Woo!

BGG has a fall event as well. It runs a few days longer, is a bit more expensive ($150), and takes place just before Thanksgiving. Since I normally reserve my vacation time for family at that time of year, I don’t think I will plan on going to the fall event. But I am already thinking about what games I might try to play next Spring.

First, Happy New Year! Woo! 2021 is in the books. Here’s a look back at my gaming log for 2021 and plans for 2022.

For 2021 I set up my 10×10 with 9 specific games and one special row called “Pick It!” The extra row was designed to allow some flexibility in which games actually got played, while the other 9 games were (hopefully) going to be ones that I have either had for a while (and really enjoy playing) or have had for a while (and needed to get to the table). Ultimately I completed, officially, five of my ten rows. One, of course, was the Pick It! row, as you might imagine. 🙂

I played ten games of Defenders of the Realm last year. I completed this one playing a couple of games solo (lost both) and several games in person plus a couple over Zoom. Enjoyed them all. I still find this a fun game.

I played ten games of Carcassonne, mostly because that’s a shorter / quicker game that I can play in the evenings with my wife. I had put Calico on the list for the same reason but we only played that six times last year so we didn’t make the full row.

We did play ten games of Pandemic mostly because we picked 2021 to finally get around to playing Pandemic Legagy Season 1. I have already written several posts about that; all I will say here is that it was part of the best gaming for the year.

My “must get this game to the table” game for 2021 was Wingspan. It was all the “Hotness” a few years back, and I bought and sold several copies during the times that it was going in and out of print regularly. I finally opened my copy and got it to the table. I had a Game Weekend with a friend, and we played eight games in two days, and he went out and bought a copy for his own family to enjoy.

Those are the five games that I completed my 10x challenge. What else happened? As mentioned, we got in six plays of Calico. We added five games of Takenoko, six of Dead of Winter, a couple Red Dragon Inn and several Codenames. Overall I filled in 72 slots of my official 10×10 grid. Does that mean I failed?

I say, “No, not really.” In the margins of my sheet I wrote down all of the other games that I played for the year, and how many times I played them. The goal of a 10×10 is to get some games to the table. While I was 28 short of fulfilling that goal with the limited ten games I listed, I added 62 additional games to my “played in 2021” list. It included four games of chess and 14 games of Quarto with my younger son. I met a new group of gamers who meet on Wednesday evenings in downtown Carrollton. With that group I played Stone Age and Deep Vents (both of which I had played before) as well as Colosseum (an older OOP Days of Wonder game), Village (a worker placement / resource management game where your meeples have to eventually die to win the game), and Merlin, recently released as a “big box” edition from Queen Games. Our regular gaming family played a couple of games of Red November with us. And much to my surprise, I managed to get one new game from 2020 to the table almost immediately and played two sessions of Lost Ruins of Arnak.

So, for the year 2021 I played (or at least logged) 134 games. As I am writing this I remember we played some games during a summer camp (Zombie Dice and Travel Qwirkle and Hive) that didn’t make it to my game log notes. That means I won! Woo!

For 2022 instead of a 10×10 I have opted to set up a 20×5. For the past two years I have noticed that it’s harder for me to get one game played ten times than it is to get multiple games played. A 20×5 is now twenty games I plan to play at least five times, which seems to fit my game playing patterns better. And yes, some of those 20×5 games will be “Pick It!” as before.

What are some of my tentative plans for 2022? Well, Nemesis is coming in. I picked up a used copy of Spirits of the Wild and it has been a fun evening game to play with my wife. I forgot how much I enjoyed Stone Age until it came up with my Wednesday night group; I hope to play it some more. And my “game that’s sitting on the shelf for far too long without being played” game (the role Wingspan played for 2021) is going to either be Quacks of Quedlinberg or Everdell, still to be decided.

Oh, and Flamecraft is scheduled to ship in 2022. I hope they make it, and assume that if it does, that will definitely be one of the games that I want to see get to the table. 😎

This is my second year for putting together a 10×10 for the year. If you are not familiar with that concept, it’s a list that I created at the beginning of the year that included ten games that I wanted to try to play at least ten times over the coming year. This year I included Pandemic (we had the goal of playing Pandemic Legacy finally) as well as Wingspan (a recently published / well received game that we had not yet tried) as well as a few others.

How am I doing?

I have completed several of my selected games, made minimal progress on others, but overall, here in the middle of December, I can say (with pleasure) that I have played over 100 games over the past twelve months. Were they all on my list? No. Did I enjoy them all? Yes. Did I learn some new games this year? Also yes.

That means while I have not yet finished my official 10×10 grid, the unofficial goal of playing at least 100 games has definitely been completed.