Well another year and another stack of stats. Going to be playing around with the format just a little bit, though its not like anyone is noticing:
Feels before Reals
So I felt like I definitely played less games, with less people, less often this year. Could be that I just took on other big projects, could be that other hobbies and activities got in the way but I don’t feel like I board gamed as much as I did in 2023. This is before really looking into the data too much so we can see if it holds true after all of this!
The stats of 2024
As before I am using my BGstats app data to figure out how this went. I track only in person games that were played mostly by the rules (this is a key point for some games I play with my kids beings excluded) and played to completion (ditto).
Rather than type it all out lets look at things in a table format this time so that we can instantly compare it to last year.
| Metric | 2023 | 2024 |
| Total Plays | 245 | 228 |
| Games Played | 91 | 85 |
| New-to-me Games | 24 | 23 |
| Percentage of collection played | 45% | 36% |
| H-Index | 6 | 7 |
Oh that doesn’t look too good year over year does it. about a 10% drop in both total plays and unique games played. The interesting bit is I seemed to have played approximately the same number of games for the first time, though this may be a data error of games I have played before but never recorded, though we let the numbers speak for themselves. The only bright side here is that we had a yearly h-index increase of one. However, this 4 out of those 7 games are games I primarily play with my children while that was only 1 game last year. I mean at least my children show interest in games right?
Other fun blips in the data is that my oldest child is now the person I played the most with. One hundred and seven (107) of my plays, or nearly half of the games I played last year involved my eldest child. He managed to beat out my wife who is usually the person I play most games with by 9 plays.
While I find this data less insightful I will include this table for completeness.
| Player Count | Percentage Played |
| 2 | 28% |
| 3 | 28% |
| 4 | 22% |
| 5 | 15% |
| 6 | 4% |
| 7+ | 3% |
Generally stay low count here. Half the games or more are with 3 people or fewer and this is kind of what I expected this year as I had fewer chances to go out and play more games.
For frequency I played games 83 days out of the year compared to 99 last year. This still comes down to about one every four days. Many of the “gaming droughts” came in the second half of the year particularly starting in August. Many 2-3 week droughts there, mostly due to the other big projects in my life taking up too much time. UNO: Super Mario yet again took top billing of my games with 27 games played. A new to us this year Here to Slay took second with 15 games and Paku Paku, a wonderful game that many should play took third with 13 plays. But that is what I played a lot of lets go to the arbitrary awards of the year!
Arbitrary Awards of the year
Favourite new to me game of the year: This is legitimately a hard decision. I want to highlight this because i played several games that I felt were all amazing and ones that I would love to get about a dozen more plays before I can tell you which of them are my favourite. Fro my own collection I managed to get Assault on Doomrock: Ultimate edition and Cthulhu: Death May Die to the table both great co-ops (though one definitely more difficult than the other). In the Euro space I got Argent: The Consortium and El Grande AND Tribune to the table which were all quite interesting and require more exploration for me to understand just how great they can be. In games I don’t even own I was introduced to Sakura Arms which was a very interesting 2 player card battler. Not sure if I see myself owning the game but I have thought about it since playing. Maybe as my kids get older they will enjoy it. Thinking all this through I think I have to give the best new to me award to the game that I think about getting back to the table most often which is Cthulhu: Death May Die. It is such a simple game system and yet it is so enjoyable to try to figure it out and survive. I like replaying old scenarios, trying out new scenarios and new characters and new monsters and it all seems like so many options!
Most shameful unplayed game in my collection: While I could yet again pick the same game as last year I think that is…disingenuous to this award. I feel like the best use of this award is to talk about the games that I look into, take out the rules once in a while, read and then put back because ughh…not this time. This years award goes therefore to 51st State: Master Set. I got the master set as a game that really seemed up my alley, and it is, and I know I would enjoy it with others but I just can’t find a time to bring it to the table! I WANT TO PLAY THIS, it shouldn’t be this hard to play this…man maybe even my oldest can play this with me, its not that hard of a game. *groan*
Game(s) I am most glad to have played last year: Yea Yea I know it’s not a single game again. But I still think there is a good place to showcase games that I am very happy to have gotten to the table, so lets get started. Kremlin made it out this year and it was a pretty fun romp. I have a weird edition of the game and I should probably just find a way to get myself a better edition of the game but I will make due with what I have for now. These two games feel like cheats at they appeared above but Tribune was a wonderful game to get to the table. I am amazed at how fast it plays considering how complex it seems. I am pretty sure I made a whole other post about it. It is such a weird game in it’s genre and I love it! Argent: The Consortium also gets a mention here as an absolutely insane worker placement game I want to get this out again to try some of the other combos that are possible as I feel we didn’t go “crazy” enough on our first play. I would also like to proxy in the summer vacation module as I have read it is a better way to get the game going when you have less experience.
Weirdest game of the year: This is to award a game that definitely introduces something “weird” to it’s genre. Something I haven’t seen before. This has only one true candidate in this years plays and that is Dro Polter. The game is so simple but just having to know that you have to drop the right things and only the right things otherwise DO IT AGAIN! Also don’t drop your points…which are also in your hand. My only weird note on this game is don’t play it with someone who has carpal tunnel in their hand. They don’t like it at all.
Feels after Reals (or Conclusions)
Though it definitely was a bit of a down year compared to last year I do feel like I did get some very good quality gaming in with some quality people. I think time will free up with kids as everything goes forward and maybe I can get some of the bigger games out more often. And in a continuing trend, the biggest take away is that I probably need to get rid of more games.