2012 in Review -- Games

It's also traditional for me, when a new year roles in, to look back on my board gaming in the year gone by. As with the movies, and as was the case for my gaming from 2010 to 2011, I'm on a downward trend. I didn't get together with friends over a game board quite as much as the year before, playing 121 games in 2012.

One up side in the decline, though, is that changing over from an Android phone to an iPhone near the end of the year has opened up a world of great board games translated into apps. Several wonderful games can be enjoyed at a leisurely pace as you trade turns on your phone back and forth with friends. In fact, I find that I'm enjoying a few games more in that format than I do in the traditional way. I probably should have been tracking all the iPhone games of Ticket to Ride, Ticket to Ride Europe, Le Havre, and Ascension I've played in the last few months. In fact, for 2013, I believe I will track (separately) any board games played by phone -- so long as they're against actual friends. (My several games against the Caylus AI, for example, wouldn't have counted either way. But if you have the Caylus app and want to play, please hit me up!)

Anyway, here's the breakdown of what I played in 2012:

1    Agricola
5    Apples to Apples
2    Archipelago
2    Artus
1    Belfort
2    Bubble Talk
1    Carcassonne: The City
1    Cartagena
4    The Castles of Burgundy
1    Code 777
1    Dark Horse
1    Dungeon Lords
2    Escape
1    For Sale
1    Geistes Blitz 2.0
2    Glen More
2    Guillotine
3    Letters from Whitechapel
1    Loot
1    Lost Cities
1    Macao
2    Metro
1    Mystery Express
1    Notre Dame
2    Ora and Labora
1    Oz Fluxx
1    Palazzo
1    Pandemic
1    Pandemic (with On the Brink)
2    Pastiche
2    Perudo
1    Phase 10
4    Poker
3    Puerto Rico
4    Ricochet Robot
3    Scattergories
1    Scrabble
3    Sequence
2    Set
1    Skipbo
1    Snow Tails
2    The Speicherstadt
6    Strasbourg
1    Sum Swamp
9    Telestrations
1    Thurn and Taxis: Power and Glory
5    Time's Up Deluxe
1    Time's Up Title Recall
1    The Walking Dead Board Game
1    Through the Desert
1    Ticket to Ride
1    Ticket to Ride - 1910
1    Ticket to Ride - Asia
1    Ticket to Ride - Marklin Edition
1    Too Many Cooks
2    Trajan
1    Travel Blog - Europe & USA (Europe)
2    Travel Blog - Europe & USA (USA)
1    Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar
1    Union Pacific
2    Village
4    Wits and Wagers
2    Word on the Street
1    Wrong Chemistry

This year's Most Played for me was Telestrations. I think Time's Up is still my favorite party game overall, but Telestrations is an absolutely hilarious time. The more, the merrier; the worse you can draw, the better the results. If your gaming group regularly has at least 6 people, and you don't always require strategic content to enjoy a game, you owe it to yourself to check this one out.

I was introduced to a number of great new games in 2012, many near the end of the year. (Some, I haven't even written reviews for yet, though I do plan to.) In particular, I hope in 2013 to get more plays in of Archipelago, Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar, and Village.

As I mentioned, I've been playing a bunch of Ticket to Ride, in its various incarnations, on the iPhone. But when I played the Asia map recently, it built new interest for me all over again. Asia adds a team play variant that was quite a lot of fun.

Sum Swamp is a game for teaching math to young children, which I played with my friend and her four-year-old son. Personally, I prefer kids' games that you can actually lose on purpose -- deciding for yourself whether this is the time and place to teach a child the lesson of losing graciously (on top of everything else the game might be teaching). Fortunately, my friend won and not me, so it was all on her to deal with that.

Much more interesting, the same friend (with her husband) and her son were also there for the two times I played Metro this year. I don't know that I would have thought to try Metro with a four-year-old, but don't underestimate the focus a child can muster for a beloved interest -- in this case, trains. Strategy had to be spelled out for him, of course (play here and do this, or there and do that), but he totally grasped the idea of making long tracks for subway trains of your own color. He even asks to play Metro sometimes when the family comes over for a visit.

It turns out, if you play Code 777 by the rules with a lot of people, it breaks horribly. Every time someone solves their code, you're supposed to put their cards in the discard pile and deal new cards to them. But in a game with a decent number of players, that makes it far too easy to deduce the new code before any new questions are asked. You really need to shuffle the deck completely with each new draw. Which is something we used to know, actually, but it had been so long since our last Code 777 game that we'd forgotten.

As I said, I'm planning to eventually write reviews for some of the new games I've played. If you see something mentioned in the above list that you'd like to know about sooner rather than later, drop a quick comment.

Here's to more fun in the year just begun!