Two days off over the Easter weekend have allowed me to get in some late gaming for the March stats.
Saturday saw me meeting up with Jeff and Charlene at the usual place to play a game or two.
Our first game was Arabella. Which if Jeff hadn’t got his final objective card I’d have won. And my victory would have been oh so sweet. Unintentional, and literally the games equivalent of winning Viticulture (base game) by not making any wine (which I have done).
All game I had the starting engine and a level 2 engine. Eventually Jeff and Charlene bought some carriages so my early investment in their shares started to pay off. But still with no carriages my dividends were worthless to them both.
This games end was triggered by Jeff reaching the end of the 10 money track on his sheet.
Somehow until we picked up Jeff was owed another objective card I was winning! It was insane. I would have easily have bet money that Charlene and Jeff were doing much better than me, and I was going to score hardly anything.
So yes Jeff won.
We followed Arabella up with Dandelions. This was probably the worst I’ve done in a game of this. I didn’t score a single majority. Jeff won this too.
The afternoons gaming was wrapped up with me introducing Ship, Captain, Crew to Jeff and Charlene.
Ship, Captain, Crew is fastly becoming a favourite little filler game. Four or five rounds take hardly any time to play. I won this time breaking Jeff’s run of victories.
I keep saying this but it’s true I had a great afternoon gaming with two great friends.
Sunday saw me meeting up with Charlene and her daughter once again at the usual spot to yep play games.
Despite being a relaxed afternoon of gaming we got five games to the table in about two and a half hours.
Our first two games were new to me.
Spots was a cool, light, dice game. It had Roll for it, Age Of War vibes with the completing dogs, with a nice buried dice mechanic that added a push your luck element to the game.
The other new game was Kohaku a tile drafting themed around making a koi pond. This definitely had Kingdomino vibes to it. A very quick light and fun game.
We followed up with a game of all in Parks. So both the Nightfall and Wildlife expansions were in play.
Dandelions hit the table next so that Annabelle could try the game, with a view to them teaching their Nan the game on an upcoming holiday.
Our final game of the fun afternoon gaming was, you guessed it, Ship, Captain, Crew.
New Arrivals
The first batch (there will be more over the years) of a club poker chip arrived.
When it comes to this sort of stuff I’m prioritising those that attend club nights regularly and are long time members.
Fenland Gamers Poker Chip
The BattleTech Alpha Strike Starter Box arrived. I’m writing more about this in another post. The counter pack has also arrived. But it’s fair to say that I’m dipping my toes into this game.
I also picked up a Dice Masters collection which I need to sort through. And I know this sounds like a cop out but this too will be the subject of another blog post.
Finally whilst waiting for repairs to my car I made the mistake of walking into Waterstones. Where seeing they still had a prerelease kit bought into the latest ccg to hit stores Star Wars Unlimited.
I’d tried so hard to not go down this rabbit hole. My wallet can’t take another ccg. But here I am dipping my toes.
Well the late flurry of weekend gaming gave me probably my best months gaming in over six months. The makes me happy.
I couldn’t help quoting Klopp after Liverpool won their sixth Champions League title for the title of this blog post. It just seemed apt.
February saw some gaming. Not much though. Even less than January.
In total six board games made it to the table.
I was glad to get three of them to the table with a higher player count than my initial plays of them. They did not disappoint.
Getting Zombie Dice back to the table was cool. I really do need to leave this in the game bag, along with Sea Salt and Paper. Two nice little filler games for a club night.
With my upgraded dice cups for Liars Dice I need a better storage solution that would allow it with the neoprene mat for tracking bids to also be in the bag.
But as the search for that elusive bag continues I’m grateful that I got some gaming done this month.
Sadly I won’t be able to play any games tomorrow and record some rare plays for that once every four years opportunity.
But that just sums up my new normal. Hopefully Sunday will keep being a thing gaming wise, and with a bit of luck Tuesday will be a thing too.
January was a slightly better month for me gaming wise than the previous two months. But still the numbers weren’t great.
However I should be grateful that I got to play some games. Especially that some of those games were with Nathan.
Now I am hoping now that Nathan is driving, and has a new car. That Nathan will be able to navigate the British roads to find his way up to mine. Enabling us to play some of the bigger games that are not an option at his due to the clash between game foot print and the size of his table. Or in simpler terms his table isn’t big enough. To be able to at last share my favourite game of all time Scythe with him will be amazing.
My top 9 games for January 2024
What I do find incredible from last months stats is that I played 10 (not 11 as Knock Out Whist aka Trumps was not a new to me game) new to me games. That’s two thirds of the games I played in January.
I have ordered twenty new custom d6 dice for Fenland Gamers members to have. It’s a new design for the six face, that has the club name and year.
Like the previous design (which I still have some left) I’ll be giving them out to regular club members for free.
I even have a design ready to go for UKGE this year to give to club members that make it to the show and the annual club picture that gets taken there.
Plus I want to do a club poker chip. But I have to buy them in quantities of fifty to get them at a reasonable price. They are also a bit more expensive. So they will have to wait until later in the year.
There is only so much I can finance out of my own pocket for this sort of stuff. I’m not on some CEO banker salary.
I like being able to do stuff like this for members.
Whilst I’m talking about Fenland Gamers and this ties in with the last life, the universe, and coffee post, I am testing the waters on the viability of Sunday sessions. At the moment I have created one club event to gauge interest. I’ll write more on that in future I’m sure.
Payday was Friday. Which was just at the right time to enable me to order the latest offering from Stonemaier Games, Wyrmspan, along with the optional deluxe component kit. I’ll leave the neoprene playmats until the next payday, along with the Rolling Realms promo packs.
Interesting enough this release of Wyrmspan has an initial print run of 100,000 copies. That’s a crazy number. Usually (I think I’m remembering this correctly) publishers print twenty to thirty thousand copies of a game initially. Then if the game does well do a second print run.
We know Wingspan sold an insane number of copies (well over 1.5 million by now I would think). But does that incredible success translate to Wyrmspan?
I can’t wait to see the next state of the nation post/email from Stonemaier Games where they give the total number of copies sold for each of their games.
Until Wingspan, Scythe was the bestseller. I’m just curious to see if Apiary and/or Wyrmspan have it in them to challenge Scythe for that number two spot. I am expecting them both to do well.
When I was sharing with a friend at work Friday morning that I had ordered Wyrmspan she said my face lit up. I guess I’m pretty excited about getting the game.
We are two days into the new year. So it’s time to look back at my 2023 gaming.
This post is made possible by the wonderful app bgstats. I’ve been recording all my game plays in the app since 2017. That’s a lot of data. I’ll have to do a post using that data at some point.
So let’s start off with my most played games of the year.
My Top 9 Played Games of 2023
Obviously games like MtG or Dice Masters are going to be in the top spots. It’s nice to see Dice Masters back in the mix. It’s a great game that I’m glad I decided to get back into.
Dave is the new Jonathan!
It used to be Jonathan was the person I played games with the most. But since Fenland Gamers has taken off with more people attending in the last year, the opportunities to play have got less.
In steps Dave a new member to the club who joined in August! Dave has become a great friend and opponent in such a short time.
I’m glad I can call all those I’ve played with friends.
The Raw Stats
Ok here are the raw stats for 2023 as presented by bgstats.
Very Challenging
I didn’t complete a single challenge this year. I may let them roll over for 2024. I still find it hard to believe I have so many unplayed games in my collection.
I know it’s been a day or two since the last post.
But that’s the drawback of working 7 days a week and having currently 2 jobs. I just got to survive until the start of November. Then I’m down to one job and hopefully (shift dependent) more gaming.
I am going to be late or behind on posting.
Thankfully I know you will be understanding and supporting. So I feel less guilty on that front.
So how bad has the current normal hit my gaming?
Well as the 3×3 image and the underlying stats show pretty badly.
Long gone are the golden days of yester year when I was clocking up crazy gaming numbers each month.
But even taking into account the more subdued gaming stats of this year. Septembers numbers are very poor. Almost looking like my stats when the pandemic was finally taken seriously by the UK Government and we entered lockdown.
I’m not sure I’m going to beat these numbers in October. But whatever gaming I do get to do I will treasure and savour even more because I know it’s a rarity for the time being.
Finally after at least a couple of years I have returned to the rewrite of the ranking code I wrote.
I got a new copy of the data from the bgstat app that I use to record my game plays. The app also the master list of all the games that make up my game collection. And syncs all of that info back onto the bgg website for me.
The point I’m making is this new data file is different to the one I originally got from the app some six or seven years ago. Back then it was just a csv file of the game plays.
Now its a json file that contains all the apps data. So not only game results, list of games, locations, tags, etc.
Luckily using Python as the language of choice for this project means there is a nice json library I can import in to do all the heavy lifting for me to read in and process the json file I have.
Sadly for me the json used by bgstats is not a simple format. It contains arrays within arrays! A nightmare to code to get to the information that I need for this project, even with a json library.
Now if you had asked me before I had started this second attempt at a rewrite that the bits of data analysis I’ve been picking up (different projects) would be of use here. I would of been a bit sceptical.
However using the pandas library I found out I could use pandas to extract these arrays within arrays to get the data I want into a dataframe.
Having the data in a dataframe opens up all sorts of cool data analysis stuff I can do.
So not only can I do the paired comparisons, and top 10 lists, but also produce stats that not even the bgstats app currently does.
Thanks to the car taking me out of action for two weeks my May gaming was pretty sad.
But to be fair those games I did get to play were pretty cool and played with friends.
Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game;
Letters from Whitechapel;
A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition);
Terra Mystica;
War of the Ring: The Card Game;
Amun-Re;
Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest;
Red Rising;
Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition.
I’m hoping this weekend at UKGE a couple of them will join my collection.
Oh and today saw the release of four more promo packs for Rolling Realms. Three are the standard based on third party games. With the fourth being a new solo campaign for the game that can be used with the majority of cards with the game (yes that includes promos too) called Beyond the Realmiverse.
And yes within minutes of them going on sale they were in the virtual basket and ordered.
Just a brief post to share which games I played this weekend.
Friday was club for Fenland Gamers and I got to not only meet Dave and his partner Clack. But also got to play a couple of games with them.
I had a blast introducing them to Libertalia Winds of Galecrest and Survive Escape from Atlantis.
Libertalia was a four player game that saw the first two days with three of us playing the same cards. But more worrying for Clank was we played the same cards for the whole of that first voyage. No one wants to be on the same wavelength as me! That way leads to madness.
I did manage to scrape the win by a point, and introduced Dave and Clank to the name “first loser” for the runner up/second place. Jeff I will forever be grateful that you introduced me to that name.
Survive for such a mean game is so much fun for everyone playing. But I guess that does depend on whose playing to some extent.
All I know about our game Friday night was we had great fun playing the game. What’s more I some how managed to win! That’s back to back victories for me playing either of the Survive games. I’d like to claim it was due to skill but considering I don’t have a clue about the value of which survivors I get to safety it’s pure luck.
Saturday illness human and canine took out two of the three of our D&D group that could make the planned session.
So Luke and I met up, grabbed a burger (double quarter pounder with cheese, and cheesy chips), before playing Red Rising.
I really do like Red Rising and the choices you have to make during the game. How I ever thought this wasn’t for me I don’t know.
In our two games that we played (we both won one a piece) I needed a red card to trigger the end game bonus on one of my cards. Did any come up during either game? Not one. Between games I had to check the deck to make sure there was some there. Luckily I had a card that allowed during the end of the game allowed you to choose a colour.
I did use some new functionality within the bgstat app that is in beta testing and that is score sheets.
For some of the games in bgstat with the score sheets functionality enabled when recording a game play or viewing one you will see the little score sheet icon (see magnified bit in the image above).
Click on that icon and you are taken to the score sheet for the game, where you can enter or view the score sheet for that play.
I really liked how the score sheet worked for Red Rising. This is really cool. If they end up charging me to use this in the future when it’s ready for prime time (which it seems it is) I’d happily pay for it.
Bgstat just gets better and better.
Right got to end this post, plan next weekends gaming (hoping to get Doom to the table) and rearrange D&D.
