I was determined to finish the BGG Top 200 by Christmas.
But I’m satisfied that I only missed it by 1.
The list of #120-111 has now been posted.
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This gets a Like for the poetry in your posting alone : )
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LOL thank you!
I was going to do the whole poem and then I saw how long it was.
No sir!!! Maybe as its own post sometime. 
I got to play all bridges burning and space Corp 2025-2300 today.
Both games ran about 4 hours, which is a good length for my group as it fits our session times well.
All bridges burning fixed a few of our coin pet peeves, like bad runs of card luck. We’ll have no trouble getting that to the table if we end up with 3 players in future.
That is except for if we hadn’t played star Corp, which also plays great at 3. The games snappy, turns are short, bad luck is mitigatable, and there’s plenty of player interaction. As a bonus we didn’t have to go running to the rule book every 5 minutes, and essentially learnt the rules for the 3rd era at the table together. I could see keen medium weight players playing this, and there’s loads of space flavour.
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I released my Top 5 Games Played in 2020.
Since I only played 62 games, I didn’t feel a Top 10 list would be suitable.
These will be of little surprise if you read last year’s Top 10, as they were all on it. The other 5 games I didn’t get a chance to play this year.
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Here is my top 5 this year.
- Ticket to Ride
- Honey Buzz
- Zooloretto
- Loot
- Villainous
(we only played 6 games this year, so Sleeping Queens did not make the cut…poor Sleeping Queens)
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I can’t even think what I’ve played this year but I have easily got a #1:
The Crew
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I just got The Crew as a Christmas gift—haven’t gotten it to the table yet, but I’m really looking forward to it.
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My top 5 from this year, bear in mind I haven’t even played the cardboard versions of some of them yet:
- The Cost
- Cosmic Frog
- Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: Baker Street Irregulars
- Beyond the Sun
- Undaunted: North Africa
Those are all new new. For old new:
- Shifting Sands
- Omen
- Heir to the Pharaoh
- Shards of Infinity
- The Fog of War.
This isn’t counting games like Scape Goat, Muse, and I Am the Fourth Wall because they need more players and I haven’t had chance to play them enough.
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My two 2020 games were Imperial Struggle and Versailles 1919, both of which made this strategists cold, dead heart very full. Both games have great VASSAL implementations, and the actual, physical games are awaiting some card and board tweaks courtesy of GMT.
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I have both but haven’t got them to the table though (there’s no way I could play them with my wife).
They definitely look cool, though!
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For me it is probably;
- Wingspan + European + Oceanic Expansions. All in baby and this game never gets old for my wife and I.
- Terraforming Mars - bought the big box with 3D tiles and played the app as well as a play with friends.
- Disney Villainous - painful at times, brilliant at others
- Ecos - surprisingly emergent
- Tiny Towns - need to play this with the kids more.
Honourable Mentions - Spirit Island (solo), 7th Continent (also solo), evolution (board and iOS with kids), big book of madness (with kids) and unstable unicorns (also with kids).
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Unmatched and Too Many Bones in my house. We’ve played some other stuff; Wingspan gets requested now and again, which is heartening, and the kids enjoyed Barkham Horror, but those first two outstrip all others. We’ve now created Unmatched decks for Cathulhu and the dragon and crow from my son’s favorite webcomic, and we have two 3-D boards I’ve made. Too Many Bones was the first game ever to persuade my kids to be reckless and like it. They both played several times, and my son played solo a bunch, which was wonderful to see.
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I want so badly to play Unmatched but I as of yet have nobody to play with.
Yeah, that’s not a great option for solo, sadly. Very approachable, though.
Good to see so many great games being played in 2020.
Today’s post is the “New to Me: December” post, with one new game and two expansions.
Also, a new blog theme!
Let me know what you think.
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I played 18Chesapeake with each of my college age kids separately- they really liked it. Both games had an epic feel. We also played Tash Kalar because I got it as a Christmas present. The board was filled with our guys but we could hardly complete any tasks because they were the hard ones.
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I figured I should share my Cathulhu deck. It has two very different instant-win cards, both of which ought to be a challenge to pull off at all, but give it a bit of threat and bluff opportunity to compensate for generally underpowered fighting and modest health.
The basic idea is that Cathulhu recruits a Cultist each times it takes damage. So you want to defend, but maybe not super effectively. Cultists are weak, but one of those instant-win cards is a defense card with 0 value which simply hands you the game if your health is lower than the number of cultists in play after the damage. So you have some desire to use Cultists to slow down attackers and defend Cathulhu, or you can basically shoot the moon by defending badly. But if your opponent’s attack is either much weaker than you expect (in which case your health will be too high) or much stronger (in which case you’ll be dead before you can win), the moon will remain unshot. It ends up feeling to me like a higher-stakes version of Holmes’ Elementary, which is my favorite card in the game, because it’s hard but very rewarding to perfectly predict your opponent.
Plus, you can use pictures of cute cats as the art. Admittedly, on my copy, I mostly used references to things my kids like, like Garfield or the Bubastis faction for Cthulhu Wars.
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I finally posted a board game review (instead of an app review). I think this is the first (and last) one of 2020.
Roll Player is a great dice-drafting and placement game. I really enjoy it!
Reviews for both expansions coming in January.
This is my last post in 2020 (I’m taking tomorrow off unless something cool comes up) but I’ll be posting a blog retrospective on January 1.
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I play all my boardsgames with the kids, so my top five tends to me lighter. We added a lot of boardgames and puzzles to the collection this year as we tried to stay home.
- No Thanks. This is a game I could always coax the family into playing. Quick matches, easy gameplay, something where the kids could compete.
- Point Salad. Similar to the above, with much more strategic gameplay.
- Unmatched. We are deep into the system, and now we can have some bananas match-ups like Raptors vs. Dracula. The kids don’t handle losing well and still play too defensively, but the system is solid.
- Forbidden Desert. Pandemic seemed too on-the-nose earlier this year, so this is a great co-op game where the whole family can work together.
- Ticket to Ride: First Journey. We now have two sets of this, and it’s likely my wife’s favorite. My eldest is just on the cusp of it clicking so he can build winning strategies based on his objectives.
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