Can I level with you, my imaginary reader? I know you don’t exist. I haven’t quite figured out how to read the stats but I know no one actually reads this blog. If a few people do they definitely don’t leave any comments or any information that would help them. I also understand why they don’t, up until very recently it was not using HTTPS so just about every browser under the sun would throw a giant warning when you were coming to my site. But ignoring all those issues, this end of year post has ballooned from one post in the last two years to three different posts that are all quite a bit longer than normal posts….not that I’m complaining as I will explain shortly. The previous two posts look at both what I played just in the last month and how I felt overall about my gaming in 2025. Look how fancy I am even linking to those other posts…I’ve made it far as a blogger!
The third post in the series wishes to look forward rather than look back. Though even here we have two things that we need to look at one is the goals I have for my board gaming as a whole while the other is about my goals for this blog. I don’t want this to be too long of a read so lets just dive right into it all of this!
Boardgaming Goals for 2026
Increase my overall H-Index by at least 1 in 2026: This is what I call a “depth” requirement. If I am going to have a large sprawling collection I want to overall make sure that I am playing as much of it as I can relatively frequently. As a quick review for anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, the H-index is a value such that you have played H of your games, H times in a time period. So having an H-index of 5 over the year means you played at least five different games five times each. I don’t think it is reasonable to expect large H-index for any given year unless I am playing just a bunch of small games (which is not my goal in gaming as you may have learned from previous posts) but it is still important to play what you have. If you don’t….well why own those games in the first place? In 2025 my H-index increased from 15 up to 18 which is a fairly large jump. The goal is to have the H-index at 19 by the end of the year. To be frank with you, reader, this is a gimme. Looking at my total overall plays it requires at the minimum 4 plays to get to at this point, though more realistically probably about 6 plays if I am looking at games that are more likely to be played. The games that I need to play aren’t even particularly difficult to get to the table. This is a mission that I think will be more difficult when I start getting to an overall H-index of about 24 or 25 but it needs to be a goal because I do need to get there eventually!
Reduce my total unplayed games in 2026: If the previous goal is the “depth” goal then this would be descried as the “breadth” goal. By the end of 2025 I had a recorded play for 86% of my games. If I am being honest this number is a bit fuzzy to calculate since I group multiple games together as a single game to make it reasonable to actually record which games I play for example while I own 2 standalone boxes of Cthulhu: Death May Die, its only one actual game for counting. Now this is a particular fun goal because it has… implications. The total collection played is just a formula, number of games that have plays / total number of games. So I can either increase the number of games that I have previously not played or I can remove games from my collection that I don’t believe I will play. Ideally I want to get this stat up to 100% but I know that isn’t going to be feasible over the next 12 months. So lets make it a bit simpler. My goal is to get this to 90% whether it is through selling some games that will never get played, playing more of my games or just selling games in general. The real fun bit is that I do have an “interesting” goal once this stat reaches 100% (or close to it) and that could be a very interesting goal. Here is to looking forward to making this work. I’ve already made plans in 2026 to increase the count of games I have at least one play in by two by the end of January, so now it is just keeping the effort up for the rest of the year. I guess there is also a potential problem if I go around picking up too many new games…but somehow that doesn’t worry me too much as there is very little coming out that makes me truly feel excited to pick up that fills a new niche in my collection.
Blog Goals for 2026
I guess I should think about this one a bit more. My review of 2025 didn’t really have my blog info so lets dig into that a little first. In 2025 I had 12 posts that I published in 2025, so we are averaging about one per month. Except here is where it gets funny. 11 of those 12 posts were published after between May and December. Whoops….maybe this year our target is for consistency rather than a large number. My actual thoughts is that I should try to get one post out a month where I discuss something about board games/RPGs/any of my hobbies really… However, I already have one post a month where I discuss everything I played. So naturally the goal now becomes two posts a month. One discussing what I played in the previous month and then a second one about a secondary topic. I would joke that I am already ahead of this as this is the third post of the month, but I know that some months this will be very easy as I will be thinking a lot about boardgaming and want to share, while other months racking my brain for an idea about what to post is going to be quite difficult.
This was a year of some pretty big successes though. Notice that I did say that most of the posts were in the second half of the year. That wasn’t a coincidence. A change I made last year was giving myself permission to try to be less professional (at least in my head). Originally I tried to emulate people who do board game reviews or blogging for a living, people who I look up to as board game reviewers. I am ultimately not one of these people, I am a random schmuck on the internet trying who thinks their opinion is worth something (fun fact, it’s not). I decided to focus on shorter form posts that are easier to digest and easier to read. I also gave myself permission to delete my own drafts. For the longest time I would try to write about a topic and get stuck somewhere with losing the plot, or the thesis of the post and then just having it sit in drafts taunting me for months at a time. I got around this by letting myself just delete the drafts, doesn’t matter if I had only a sentence written or if it was over 1000 words. Just let myself delete it and walk away, even if I felt I have something significant to say about the topic. I currently have a draft that needs to get discarded specifically about culling games that I may try to rewrite from scratch in another few months. The goal is to get anything written because ultimately I do enjoy writing, even if its not always the most entertaining work.
Another large success in the previous year was finally finishing up my Loot of Lima project. I should probably write a whole post on this at some point but I went and coded my first little board game helper app, specifically for Loot of Lima that allows the game to not end for a player if they just guess incorrectly. This means that there is some incentive for players to try to guess earlier when they are lacking some info but also comes with a small penalty. Like I said this will be a post later. But, if you want to see the tool before then head over to ramifinkelshtein.com/lootolima for my crappy little web app. The thing is I have always wanted to do a bit more of helper app development particularly for games that I enjoy. So I think the next thing is for me to learn something that would allow for synchronous communication. So basically I want to learn Socket.io or something that would allow me to upgrade the app there and make it a little less clunky to use. Let’s see if I can teach myself or find a decent online tutorial to learn how to implement it (and you know…find a webserver to implement it on as the website as it currently sits can’t handle it).
Other Random Things for 2026
- Hosting RamiCon: So for the past few years I have been going to BreakoutCon in Toronto every year around mid March. However, each year I was effectively only playing with my specific group of friends, mostly playing games that I brought myself and not truly interacting too much with the actual convention. This had some advantages that we can’t ignore though. First of all there was a chance to sell and trade games there which is always sorely needed for my collection. The other was the fact that it set an “expectation” for the weekend. We were there to play games and it wasn’t surprising when all we did was play games and the focus was on getting as many good games in the time that was allotted. The thing is convention fees and a hotel in downtown Toronto isn’t cheap. So this year I decided to try something different. Rent an Airbnb that has enough bedrooms for my friends. Bring the same people to a new place and see if it can work. The worry is that removing from the con atmosphere may distract us from the “goal” here, but the cost savings may be worth it and it may just work out. And if it does maybe this becomes bigger in future years. No way to know but to try. I’ll definitely make a post about how it went.
- Make at least one boardgame day or mini convention: Last year I went to a convention by myself without anyone else where I forced myself to play with randoms and make games happen. It was a great time and I posted all about the stuff I got to play. In some ways it was very nice to not have to be the one teaching. This also lets me go and play games I don’t actually own and I am not sure if I want to own. It’s something I should think about doing more often and I think I have the ability to do so. I think that freeing out a large convention definitely gives me more options to go to some smaller things.
- Update My Boardgame Wall Poster: So I have this poster that has 3d printed tiles which has all my games on it. I made it modular so I can update it as I add or remove games. I really need to get it updated as it is more than one year out of date. I know my partner can help with making these and I even have a new printer that makes printing these stickers easier.
- More 3D printing organizer: I always enjoy printing out organizers for making my games fit better into their box. I just need to do it a bit more often.
Well there it is. Now I have another fun part of the post to make next year about how I actually did with these goals next year. Happy 2026 and see you soon!