The Year in Review -- Games

As in 2005, I kept a list running all year (thanks to BoardGameGeek) of all the games I played during 2006.

I came up with a total of 233 games played, 7 games shy of where I fell in 2005. I would have expected more in 2006, actually -- during 2005, my moving back to Colorado caused a nearly one month gap where I hardly played anything at all. I can't explain how that all added up the way it did.

In any case, here's the 2006 list:

25 Words or Less (5)
Apples to Apples (11)
Apples to Apples Junior (1)
Attika (1)
Augsburg 1520 (1)
Blackjack (1)
Carcassonne (5)
Carcassonne - Hunters & Gatherers (1)
Carcassonne - The Discovery (1)
Cartagena (3)
Caylus (10)
Cribbage (1)
Detroit-Cleveland Grand Prix (1)
Eurorails (1)
Fearsome Floors (2)
Finish Lines (1)
Goa (1)
Hearts (3)
Hunting Party (1)
Linie 1 (6)
Lost Cities (1)
Louis XIV (2)
Metro (3)
New England (1)
No Merci! (8)
Palazzo (6)
Perudo (5)
Poker (10)
Power Grid (1)
Pueblo (1)
Puerto Rico (6)
Ra (4)
Ricochet Robot (21)
RoboRally (1)
Rumis (1)
Samurai (1)
Scattergories (3)
Scene It? - TV (1)
Set (16)
The Settlers of Catan (5)
Sleuth (1)
Speed Scrabble (1)
Squint (1)
TAMSK (2)
Terra Nova (1)
Through the Desert (1)
Thurn and Taxis (6)
Ticket to Ride (4)
Ticket to Ride - Marklin Edition (12)
Ticket to Ride Europe (2)
Time's Up (10)
Titan the Arena (1)
Tongiaki (1)
Too Many Cooks (4)
TransAmerica (10)
Trivial Pursuit Totally 80s Edition (1)
Tsuro (2)
Der Untergang von Pompeji (2)
Up and Down (16)
Werewolf (1)

And here are a few things I find notable about this list:

No Blokus. Blokus is a great little abstract strategy game. And yet I didn't play it once all year. I think it's a victim of "number of player" squeeze. The box tells you 2 to 4 players. Which is a complete lie. It works great with 2 or 4. Try it with 3, and it's a complete joke. That's why they made the "Trigon" version of it.

Only 1 game of Goa. I like this quite a lot. It has enough of the general feeling of Puerto Rico to scratch that itch -- since the friends I most commonly play games with hate Puerto Rico but like Goa, it's a way for me to still enjoy that kind of game. (I know, I'm still disbelieving that there are people in the word who don't like Puerto Rico.)

Only 1 game of Attika.This is another game I quite like, and used to play all the time. I'm gonna have to drag it out more regularly in 2007.

No Princes of Florence. Before Puerto Rico came along (say, circa 2003), this was the game I played every week, at least once a week. I still love it. I just haven't ever pushed to try it out with the local game crowd. A shame.

Only 1 game of Sleuth. This is one of only 3 games I've rated a 10 over on BoardGameGeek. But compare it to how much I played the other two (Time's Up and Up and Down, or as some call it, Up and Down the River). That's just not right.

Short games always show up. I do like Ricochet Robot and Set. They're not among my absolutely favorites, but I do like them. Still, the fact you can play either in 20 minutes or less means they get played a hell of a lot.

Something we haven't played in a while. Some time around September or October, my most regular gaming friends and I decided that every week, we'd make an effort to pull out one board game we hadn't played in a long while. (Or, something completely new.) This led to a number of extra one-shot entries on my list, and I'm glad it did: Detroit-Cleveland Grand Prix, Eurorails, RoboRally, Samurai, and Through the Desert, among others. I want to keep that idea rolling in 2007. Especially because I compared 2006 to 2005, and found the variety of games I played in 2006 was a lot narrower -- 60 different titles in this past year, when I managed 80 the year before that.

But in all, a good year in games. And I'm hoping for even better in 2007.