RogerBW's Blog

2017 was another very boardgame-ful year.

My Eddington number for games this year (the largest number E such that I have played E different games at least E times each) was seven, with eight games: Flash Point Fire Rescue, War of the Nine Realms, Red7, Splendor, 6 nimmt!, Colt Express, Firefly and Robo Rally. I played a total of 311 games, definitely helped by some very intense demo days at Essen and UK Games Expo.

I ran two PBF Firefly games (I'm still slightly proud of having run the first ever one of those), and moderated several games of The Resistance on the BoardGameGeek forums.

I kept going to the Marlow Tabletop and Board Games meetups, as well as to Handycon (one of them, anyway, as the other clashed with the Worldcon in Helsinki), Airecon, the last two Tringcons, two Springcons, and two Stabcons. For bigger shows, I went to UK Games Expo and Dragonmeet (demoing for Laurence of Wotan Games), and to Essen, demonstrating for Indie Boards & Cards again and coming back with a big bag of games.

I'm still not going to do a Top Ten list, but some games I particularly enjoyed this year:

Abstract game: Parade. I've played it three times and won every time, which obviously biases me in its favour, but I really like the mental gymnastics one has to do here.

Puzzle game: Burgle Bros. I've been curious about this for a while, then snabbled a copy at Essen directly from the designer. Great fun!

Real-time game: Magic Maze. I seem to like this set of challenges much more than the people I've played it with so far.

Huge offputting game that turned out surprisingly good: Aeon's End. The lush artwork certainly put me off at first, but this is a deckbuilder that takes all the randomness out of your play and shifts it onto the automated enemy. The manual is quite big, but does a great job of teaching the game, and it's surprisingly straightforward in play. Good stuff.

Co-op game: The Captain Is Dead. Yes, it shares gameplay elements with Pandemic and Flash Point, but it's a lot of fun and remarkably well balanced.

My List of Shame (games that I own, that aren't up for trade, but that I have not yet played) at the end of the year:

• The Bird Told Me To Do It
• Dino Hunt Dice
• Good Cop Bad Cop
• High Frontier 3rd edition
• Illimat
• Ladies & Gentlemen
• Leaving Earth: Stations (normally expansions don't count, but this introduces a lot of new gameplay elements)
• OGRE Objective 218
• Police Precinct
• Secret Moon
• Secret Weapons of the Third Reich
• Simon's Cat Card Game
• Space Race: The Card Game

I intend, or at least hope, to get this down to zero by the end of 2018. At the very least, I intend to take at least one unplayed game to each boardgaming event I go to.

Kickstarters that I've backed, which should deliver in 2018 (in current predicted order of arrival):

• Deception: Murder in Hong Kong
• Black Orchestra
• Star Realms Frontiers
• Who Goes There?
• War of the Nine Realms
• Space Race Interkosmos
• Human Era
• Dice Hospital
• D-Day Dice
• Evil High Priest