Introduction
Sure, I track stats – who won, what game, and when. But scorekeeping is just the tip of the iceberg. Starting this week, I'm going to blog about my game summaries. Forget dry stats - I'm writing down the whispers of strategy, the roars of laughter, and the quiet tension that fills our tables. This past week... Well, let's just say familiar favorites took center stage.
This past week, the wife and I began with Skulk Hollow. I’m itching to play a few more rounds before crafting a review. My City, however, is nearing its epic finale. Tension crackles like static as we dive into the final chapter. Katie holds a comfortable lead, but a defiant spirit ignites within me. Can I snatch victory at the eleventh hour? After all, who cares if she’s won most games if I can lead My City into the campaign's victory?
Tuesday Night
Our Tuesday night group kicked things off with a raucous game of Raccoon Tycoon. We played until the cards and buildings ran dry.
This basically happened simultaneously. It was a good reminder of why this game holds a special place in our hearts – the cutthroat competition, and the pure joy of seeing your furry empire rise or crumble. Oh it was such a great game! It was such a close game too. This led to a discussion about our shared favorites, and we decided to curate a list of "staples" – games we all know, are somewhat long, we all enjoy, and want to play at least once this year. The rules were simple. Everyone has to know the game, it must be a longer game meaning that it plays for at least 45 minutes, and it needs to be a game that we all have enjoyed together. I thought the list was going to be humongous. Surprisingly, the list only reached 37 titles! This may sound like a lot, but considering we've played over 200 unique games together in the past year, that felt strangely short.
It is fascinating to me how games evolve with repeated plays. Strategy changes as you play a specific game more and more, and how some board games that you haven’t played in a while are familiar in the sense that you don’t have to read the rules and relearn them, but they feel new because you have to figure out how to beat your (sometimes new) opponents.
After writing the board games on a piece of paper, we upped the ante by vowing to conquer 5 games at least 10 times in 2024. Our decided games for the challenge are: Stone Age, Search for Lost Species, Viticulture, and Dominion. Narrowing down the list was brutal. For that coveted fifth spot, the battle lies between Great Western Trail and Castles of Burgundy. We are going to have a showdown next week to determine which of those will go on our challenge board. I am very curious on how many times each of the other games on the list will make it to the table. This will be our first attempt at doing an h-index based on Tuesday game nights.
What is an h-index? It is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications. In board games, it is the maximum value of h (a game) that has been played h many times at least h times. Meaning that if you have 100 games in your collection, and you have played a few of them at least 3 times, your h-index is 3.
We are giving our h-index a spin. We want to see how many games we play together on Tuesdays only this year and then compare that to the past few years and keep counting them in the years to come. Will some of these old favorites pass the test of time? Do you have any bets? Mine is that Viticulture, Castles of Burgundy, Great Western Trails, Stone Age, and Teotihuacan will always make it on the list. These gems will never be dethroned, at least not when it comes to playing with my wife on our date nights.
The Rest of the Week
We continued our journey with the second game of Ticket to Ride Legacy. We are doing this with four players. After dominating the first year, I found myself trailing behind in the second. But hey, who's complaining? Witnessing my wife, a self-proclaimed Ticket to Ride hater, actually enjoying the game is its own reward.
Although I always wish I could play more games, this past week consisted of five nights of gaming. Here's to another week in plays, and to the countless stories, strategies, and moments of laughter that unfold on our tabletop battlefields. Cheers to familiar favorites and future discoveries!
The Games Played
Carcassonne (2-5 players, 30 mins): Tile-laying game where players build the landscape claiming features like cities and roads. The rules are simple, the game has endless replayability, and the game perfectly blends strategy and luck. Played the game at 2 players with the three tile variant. I lost.
Delicious (2-X players, 30 mins): Simultaneous 12 round card game where you are trying to grow your plants and fruit garden. Played with two other players, and I lost.
Illiterati (1-5 players, 30 mins): Fight the evil society that wants to take over the world. Form words and cooperatively save the world! Played at 4, we won!
Kluster (1-4 players, 10 mins): Abstract strategy game where players place magnets inside a delimited cord trying to not have the magnets collide. First to run out of stones, in this case me, wins the game!
Mists over Carcassonne (2-5 players, 30 mins): Expansion or standalone Carcassonne that adds fog tiles and hidden features, creating a more mysterious and tactical experience. Played at 2 and 4 players. Stuck at level four! Please send help and strategies my way.
My City (2-4 players, 20 mins): Card drafting and tableau building game where players design their own city districts. Played the penultimate chapter won 1 of 3
Next Station: London (1-4 players, 30 mins): Draw the best London Underground network, connecting stations, tourists traps and crossing the Thames. Played it at two, and you guessed it! Katie won.
Number Drop (1-6 players, 20 mins): Picture Tetris and Soduku’s baby. This is a dice drafting game where players roll and manipulate dice to score points based on the shared tetromino. Played it at 2 and 3 players. Won once.
Point City (1-4 players, 45-60 mins): City-building card game where players draft and play cards to construct buildings, score points, and fulfill contracts. Came in last place out of 4 players.
Raccoon Tycoon (2-4 players, 45-60 mins): Worker placement game where players gather resources, bet their income, build businesses, and earn money. Did not win and played with four players.
Railroad Ink (1-4 players, ~30 minutes): Roll-and-write game where players draw dice-inspired train and road routes to score points. Came close but lost at 3 players
Scattergories (2-4+ players, 30 mins): Word association party game where players race to write down words based on random letters and categories. Played four rounds at three players. Came in second place!
Silver & Gold (2-4 players, ~30): Simultaneous flip and write set collection game where you flip cards and try to complete islands to score the most points. I won.
Skulk Hollow (2 players, 20 mins): Battle the guardians against the clever Foxen clan! Played a few rounds and lost every single one!
Space Base (1-5 players, 45-60 mins): Dice drafting and engine-building game where players build space stations and roll dice to earn resources and activate abilities. Played at 4, did not win.
Ten (1-5 players, 15-20 mins): Card-counting game had us twisting our brains and racing to score sets of ten. I Love this game and came very close in our game of three, but I did not claim victory.
The Game (1-5 players, 10-20 mins): We squeezed in a few tense rounds of this cooperative card-playing challenge. With its ever-escalating difficulty and nail-biting decisions, The Game never fails to put our teamwork to the test. One minute we're celebrating bringing the piles up or down by ten, the next we're scrambling to recover from a devastating setback. It's a rollercoaster of emotions, and I wouldn't have it any other way. We won against three players. We started out BAD, so this was a nice surprise.
Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West (2-5 players, 60 mins): Our campaign through this Wild West-themed Ticket to Ride adventure continued. I was fourth place in a game of four.
Twice As Clever (1-4 players, 30 mins): Roll-and-write masterpiece had us filling sheets with dice results, scoring cunning combos, and cursing our luck in equal measure. I thought I had it, but I did not. Played it at 3.
Wingspan (1-5 players, 60 mins): We traded the cutthroat competition for this cutthroat beautiful competition of collecting beautiful and sometimes scary birds of prey. This engine-building game never fails to surprise me, even though I didn't win our three-player game.
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