Each year, I dedicated a couple of January blog posts to looking back on the things that entertained me in the year before. Today: board games.
This might not be how you would expect, but I played significantly fewer board games in the year 2021 than I did the year before. And COVID is actually the reason why.
In pre-vaccine 2020, get-togethers were limited. So I did a lot of gaming on venues like Board Game Arena. And what those methods lack in tactile, face-to-face thrills, they make up in ease of access. I played over 100 games that way in 2020... and barely a dozen that way in 2021 -- a product of vaccines, online fatigue, and (yes, at times) relaxed safeguards.
My final tally was 263 games played in 2021, a number almost exactly in line with my 2019 ("Before Times") count.
The count by game (all 96 different games I played) is below, with a few observations below that.
31 The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine
13 So Clover
10 Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig (2 with Secrets and Soirees)
10 The Crew: Mission Deep Sea
10 Wingspan (1 without both expansions)
9 Pandemic Legacy: Season 0
8 Just One
8 Secret Hitler
6 Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle (with all expansions)
6 The Rise of Queensdale
5 Atheneum: Mystic Library
5 Calico
5 Escape Tales: Children of Wyrmwoods
5 Great Western Trail
5 Merlin (2 with various expansions)
4 Master Word
4 Roll for the Galaxy
4 The Initiative
3 Azul
3 Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra
3 Bonfire
3 Concordia: Venus
3 Kokopelli
3 Lost Ruins of Arnak
3 Star Wars: Unlock! (each of its 3 scenarios)
3 The Taverns of Tiefenthal
2 Agricola
2 Anachrony
2 Camel Up
2 Cascadia
2 Dune: Imperium
2 Ethnos
2 Furnace
2 Hadrian's Wall
2 Last Message
2 Majesty for the Realm
2 Medieval Academy
2 Pandemic: Iberia
2 Railroad Ink: Blazing Red Edition
2 Red Rising
2 Sagrada
2 Space Dragons
2 The Mind
2 The Quacks of Quedlinburg
2 The Speicherstadt
2 Time's Up Title Recall
2 Witch's Brew
1 6 nimmt!
1 7 Wonders
1 7 Wonders Duel
1 Back to the Future: Back in Time
1 Bargain Quest
1 Can't Stop
1 Caverna: The Cave Farmers
1 Clever Cubed
1 Codenames
1 Codenames Deep Undercover
1 Coloma
1 Dice Hospital
1 Doge
1 Evolution
1 For Sale
1 Fuse
1 Gaia Project
1 Game of Thrones: Hand of the King
1 Hive
1 Honey Buzz
1 Istanbul
1 Las Vegas
1 Le Havre
1 Libertalia
1 Maracaibo
1 Mariposas
1 Niagara
1 Notre Dame
1 Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile
1 Ora et Labora
1 Point Salad
1 Poker
1 Raiders of the North Sea (with Hall of Heroes)
1 San Marco
1 Silver and Gold
1 Stacked
1 Suburbia
1 Telestrations
1 Ten
1 The Adventurers: The Temple of Chac
1 The Key: Murder at the Oakdale Club
1 The Search for Planet X
1 Tobago
1 Tortuga 1667
1 Twice As Clever
1 Unicorn Fever
1 Unlock!: Exotic Adventures – Expedition: Challenger
1 When I Dream
1 Whirling Witchcraft
As usual with my end of year game tallies, I don't track games that I play in the course of playtesting and development for work.
Also as usual (since the game arrived on the scene), I count only "sessions" of The Crew -- The Quest for Planet Nine and Mission Deep Sea. Counting individual "games" (attempts of a specific mission), I'd be over approaching 200 and 100 of each game respectively. My friends and I just love The Crew that much. We don't tire of it, and virtually every game night ends with a few hands.
So Clover is also a game I track by the session, as we usually play a couple of "rounds" when we do play it. And since actually scoring that game is something of an arbitrary construct anyway, it's arguably even more nebulous for purposes of counting how much I played it.
Focusing just on games with a concrete beginning and end (and with a specific winner), Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig and Wingspan are the games I played most often.
- I think I wouldn't say that the Secrets and Soirees expansion for BTCoMKL is essential -- but it also doesn't really get in the way of what's great about the original game either. If you're a fan (like I am), you might want to pick that up.
- Meanwhile, Oceania feels to me like a pretty essential expansion for Wingspan. You could argue that the nectar mechanic is too forgiving and makes the game easier, but it also lets you build engines more effectively, which to me at least is at the core of what makes Wingspan fun.
This was my "least Legacy-filled" gaming year in some time.
- The Hogwarts Battle games I played were all post-campaign single playthroughs using all expansions.
- I finished a couple of true Legacy games in 2021 after starting them in 2020: The Rise of Queensdale (a second playthrough) and Pandemic Legacy: Season 0 (an unfortunate disappointment).
This was kind of a big year for "Did Not Finish."
- Those 5 sessions of Escape Tales: Children of Wyrmwoods were breaking up the expected 9-hour game play into roughly 1 hour increments... and it became such a chore that no one was enjoying. We abandoned it around halfway through, and I doubt we'll ever go back.
- The Initiative is a campaign game that wasn't "bad," but didn't set its hooks in us deeply enough for us to have continued past a single extended session of the first 4 games.
- Oath (Chronicles of Empire and Exile) is a huge hit with many gamers, and I think its concept of "evolution, though not quite campaign or legacy" is clever. But my group did not enjoy it enough to want to even finish our first game, much less experience multiple evolving plays.
- My husband and I abandoned Unlock!: Exotic Adventures – Expedition: Challenger before completing it. Other entries in the Unlock series have been alright (though inferior, I think, to the Exit series), but we found the puzzles in this particular one to be opaque and obtuse. It just wasn't fun, so we quit.
I did play Dune: Imperium completely outside the context of work twice. I played the often-compared-to-Dune game Lost Ruins of Arnak three times. Don't read anything more into that than "I've played SO much Dune: Imperium for work."
Who knows what game released in 2022 might become a new favorite? I'm looking forward to finding out. (I can bet I'll still be playing a lot of The Crew: Mission Deep Sea, though.)
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