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Uggh, Now I look at my pitiful 2012 gaming year. I’m sure it’s awful and there are probably not any of my favorites on here. We got bitten by the Risk Legacy Bug in our group, so our game nights for the last several months are dominated by this game. And we’re a pretty lax group, who tend to go to bed at a decent hour, so we usually only get the one game in.

In any case, here they are, presented with comment.

Dimes

Harry’s Grand Slam Baseball — Will likely always be a dime, as I probably play this game more than anyone else on the planet due to it being our lunchtime staple at work.

Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization — All plays probably completely online (Maybe one of those is F2F). But this is a great game, and one I’m glad is on the list. I need to get that same crew into Reef Encounter online too so it will hit this list every year. Can you play Age of Steam online anywhere?

Risk Legacy — Of course all of these plays are due to the world changing. I actually have a post in the works about the game, but I’ve never hit the publish button, because I wanted a bit of time to refine it.

Fives

Jungle Speed — Most of these plays are with the kids, or visitors. It’s a quick game, can be entertaining to play, but can also wear out its welcome. I only think it’s okay, but the kids love it, and I got it for insane cheap on clearance.

7 Wonders — Hard to see this not hitting at least the fives for several years to come, quick to play, easy to teach.

Scrabble — Likely every one of these plays is a Words with Friends play that I log as scrabble, I kind of dropped out of playing WWF though since it takes up so much time deceptively if you have a lot of games going, plus it’s pissing me off lately with the always wanting to log in to facebook, can’t I just say no once and leave it, do you have to ask me every time I open the app?

The Resistance — A favorite game of mine, this one is werewolf like but in a small package. It is also playable with less players, and although I like werewolf with a small number of players, it requires some skill to play in those smaller games. And the big games are hard to get together sometimes. This is the solution to all those problems.

Werewolf — And Werewolf, didn’t get to play it all that much in 2012 because I tended to sleep at decent times at the conventions I did go to, and skipped a few that I like. But it did make the five list, and is probably my favorite game ever due to the infinite re playability and complexity levels that are enormously tweak-able.

And there you have it. I’ll send these to Mark Jackson as soon as he’s ready.

written by Chris \\ tags: Boardgames, Dimes, Fives

Like so many others in the boardgaming hobby, I enjoy looking back at the end of the year and seeing the games that actually made it to the table during the year, reflect upon what I wish would have made the table, and be surprised at what actually gets played in our group.

We call these lists our Five & Dimes. Those games which have gotten at least five plays or ten plays by myself during the past year.

I haven’t looked at the list yet, so I’m going to be shooting from the hip on this one.

So here we go:

DIMES

Harry’s Grand Slam Baseball.
No surprise here. I play this one at work with a lunchtime gaming friend at least once per day, usually twice a day. It’s a great little 10 minute game that does a pretty good job of feeling like baseball.

Scrabble
Also no surprises, as most of these plays are actually ‘Words with Friends’ games on the iPhone not really face to face scrabble games. I count and log all games played against humans. I don’t care what Hasbro says. They are basically the same thing. If they hadn’t screwed up their whole facebook thing, they could have been king of this territory, as it is now, a nice simple clone holds the crown.

Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer
It sucks that this game makes my dime list. But again it’s understandable. It has great asynchronous multiplayer on iPhone, and thus, nearly all the plays are on that platform. (I’ve only played this once in real life.) The kicker is I think this is a pretty weak game and I don’t think I’d ever play it face to face again. And surely would never buy a copy of it. The expansion does add a little bit to it, and makes the gameplay a bit more interesting though. I just started playing it though.

FIVES

Thunderstone
The bulk of these plays were from the OMGA gameday. AEG was nice enough to donate a copy for us to give away in a ‘play to win’ promotion. This game, Monkey Lab, and abandon ship got the bulk of the plays on this day. I liked all of these games, a friend ended up buying a copy of Thunderstone shortly after the gameday based on the fun we had with it, and a couple of the plays came from that. I really need to try the epic variant. I think I would enjoy the game way more with that variant as it is described.

Werewolf
I’m sure most of these plays were from Midsouthcon. I did not go to BGG.con this year, which is usually the one that puts this one on the top of the list. Which is likely why this one made it to the fives list but not the dimes list. Ultimate Werewolf box is shown as that’s actually the set I use, but the werewolf link goes back to the main game as I log my plays as that. It’s stupid that they are separated in the database, but oh well.

Poker
Well, the bulk of these plays were two or three tournaments I entered while I was in Las Vegas early in the year for a convention. Plus I tend to play this at night before bed sometimes using the Zynga app. I’ve played this way more than five times, but I often forget to log these plays. But obviously I did a couple of times.

Blokus
Most of these plays were either two player with my daughter, and a few were at the OMGA gameday teaching new people.

Unpublished Prototype
A personal game that I’ve worked on the rules for. It’s a very light game, but after a couple of initial plays I stuck it in the box with some notes and updated a few cards, but haven’t gotten around to trying those new cards again yet. No link on this one, as the game doesn’t exist in the database, and likely never will.

There you have it. That’s it. My gaming really took a bit of a hit this year. All my running and those goals I had for that this year made it difficult to play games late into the night and still be able to get up early the next morning for that 5:00 am run. Also, My group is very fluid, not managing to get the same game to the table very often, or many times in a row. There were a few games that came close, and many many that got two or three plays. But didn’t quite make the final cuts.

In a day or so I’ll take a look at the Game collection and check out the how I’m doing on my purge. (Foreshadowing, it isn’t good).

written by Chris \\ tags: Boardgames, Dimes, Fives, rant, Reflections