Category Archives: game challenges

2023 A New Year, New Challenges!

bgstat, game challenges

It’s that time of year where folks make resolutions to improve themselves. I don’t do that. Let’s face it I’m a deeply flawed person who is so long in the tooth now that I’m comfortable with that flawed entity I have become.

But what I have started doing in the last year or so is using the challenge functionality of the bgstat app to set gaming challenges.

Out of the four challenges I had running last year I only completed one of them. That being the Play 40 New-to-me Games challenge.

One of the four challenges carried over into 2023 (see further down) so technically is ongoing.

2022 Challenges (minus the one that carried over)

I don’t see not completing the remaining two a failure. Both had over 50% completion. They encouraged me to get certain games to the table. And that’s the point. The challenges are there to get me to play games that are just sitting there on the shelf.

So to get over half of my big games to the table was a great achievement. As was playing so many of the purchases I made during the pandemic.

Ok with the rolling over 2022 challenge of trying to play as many of my unplayed games I’m only doing one other challenge in 2023.

Hopefully it will allow me to focus on getting those unplayed games played. I still have a lot to get to the table. Plus play those games that have one of my favourite game mechanics.

Well that’s it for my 2023 challenges. See you in my next post.

Achievement Unlocked

Fenland Gamers, game challenges, game night

Last night it was that time once again for Fenland Gamers to meet up and play some games.

I’d been lucky with my shift for the day with it finishing at 6pm. Which meant I was going straight from work to the club night. But also I wouldn’t be missing the evening of gaming.

Club night would mark the start of four days off. I couldn’t think of a better way to kick off the much needed r&r.

This was another really well attended evening with seventeen folks turning up. Which included four new faces.

Charlene and myself played Tapestry with three of them.

This wasn’t my copy of the game so we were playing with only the Arts and Architecture expansion. The cards were also unsleeved. Oh the horror of naked cards!

My Leaders were conquering artists. Sadly I got my butt handed to me, the sixty point victory point starting position for The Chosen was too much. But I did get my personal best five player score!

Our second game of the evening was the WotC “filler” card game Dungeon Mayhem.

This is a really fun card game. It’s quick and easy to play.

However it does have one “mechanic“ in it that I really dislike. That may not be a strong enough description but it’ll do for now.

That “mechanic” is the physical activity. For example I had a card in my deck that required players to perform a little dance. Charlene had one that required players to give her praise.

Why? It’s not fun!

But despite that major drawback it is a fun game. And even with players getting knocked out they are still semi involved in the game play.

This will have to join the rotation of games going into the game bag for club nights.

With the game of Dungeon Mayhem I completed one of my gaming challenges for the year.

Yep I’ve played forty new to me games this year so far.

I still find it hard to believe that I’ve played that many new to me games.

As it stands at the moment approximately two thirds of the games I’ve played this year have been new to me.

With roughly forty five percent of those new to me games being games owned by others.

Don’t hold me to those percentages I’ve spitballed those figures as rough guesstimates, they may vary by a percent or two if I actually calculated them. But they are close enough.

Using the 3×3 functionality of the bgstat you can see what those forty games were below.

I’m not going to increase the challenge even with three months of the year left.

But it will be very interesting to see how many new to me games I actually do end up playing at the end of the year.

New bgstat Challenge Created

bgstat, game challenges

The tail end of last week the idea for a new bgstat challenge hit me.

I can’t remember exactly what sparked the idea. It might have been a YouTube video, a conversation, who knows?

What is important is the idea popped into my head.

The idea being to set up a challenge to get my worker placement games back to the table.

I have one or two in the collection. Which isn’t surprising I really like the mechanic.

So I went into the bgstat app to setup a new challenge.

Sadly the bgstat app doesn’t allow you to filter games by mechanic. Which meant I had to go through each listed game (or just the ones I wasn’t sure if they counted) on the bgg website to check, and add a “worker placement” tag to the game info.

From there when setting up the new challenge I was able to just select my tagged worker placement games.

The surprising bit for me was I had eighteen games that had the worker placement mechanic in them.

3×3 of the games making up the worker placement challenge

I set the challenge date for next year. One less challenge to think up in the new year.

However…

Those that “read” the barebones bgstats posts I put up at the end of each month know that I have nearly completed the “Play 40 New to me Games” challenge.

It’s very very possible that September will see me complete that challenge.

Then the question becomes do I start the new challenge early or concentrate more on the remaining challenges?

There is a little overlap between this new challenge and the current ones. And by a little I mean the odd one or two games at most.

The list of games in the worker placement challenge

In all likely hood I might start the new challenge early.

But I can see future challenges being based around mechanics.

I just wish there was an easier way to set them up. It’d be amazing if I could filter on game mechanics, designer, publisher, etc. But that’d be a big change to the apps database to hold all that info. Which might upset bgg.

Whilst I’m discussing my wish list of features I’d love to see in the bgstat app I’d love to see the bgg rank of the game, and be able to filter on that, and see that on the 3×3. How cool would a challenge of playing all your games in the bgg top 100?

And talking of ranking I’d love them to add in the ability to rank your owned games using paired comparisons. Similar to what I did in Python a few years back and still not updated. Seeing that on the 3×3 as an option would also be super cool.

I’m sure others would find this stuff of use. I’d even pay extra to have these features! That’s how much I want them.

Anyway enough of this day dreaming. See you in the next post.

Challenge Skill Level Upgraded To “Ultra-Violence”

game challenges

I finally decided to change the Play 20 New-to-me Games challenge.

You’ve read me pontificating (poorly) about how I might have set this challenge to low. Thus making it probably the easiest of the four gaming challenges I undertook at the start of the year. So easy in fact I was pretty close to completing it.

Have no fear I’m not making as great progress through the other challenges. They are much much harder to achieve.

So I doubled the number of new-to-me games I need to play.

Let’s see how I get on with this new target.

New Year New…

game challenges

I suppose I should firstly wish everyone a Happy New Year.

I hope the upcoming year is kinder on us all than last year.

One of the things people do is set New Year resolutions. I’ve done the gamer equivalent this year and created two new challenges!

The first is the “Play 20 New To Me Games” challenge. Which is the follow up to the narrowly failed “Play 15 New To Me Games” challenge that has just ended.

The second challenge I decided on after I had a moment of inspiration. The light bulb came on so to speak whilst discussing the super duper, easily one of the top 5 worker placement games of all time, The Manhattan Project, the card game version Chain Reaction, and sequel 2 Minutes to Midnight.

Despite owning 2 Minutes to Midnight I’d never ever got it to the table. I needed something to help encourage me to get this and other games in the collection I haven’t played to the table.

That’s when the idea came to me to setup a challenge in the bgstat app to do just that.

Hence the “Play my Unplayed Owned Games” challenge.

It was so easy to set up. I just had to tell it to add all my unplayed games to the new list. After removing games I knew I had played (but that was before I started using bgstat) I was left with 57 unplayed games in my collection!

That did surprise me a little. But then when I see how many games I have in the collection, that number always amazes me. It doesn’t look that many for sure!

How I got to that many unplayed games I have no idea.

Both new challenges will run for a full calendar year this time. I don’t expect to complete the unplayed games challenge. But it sure would be nice to make a good dent into it.

My Gaming Year 2021

by the numbers, game challenges, gaming stats, stats

In my previous blog post I waffled on about the game challenges I’d set up in the bgstat app I use, and how I fell just short of achieving the Play 15 New Games to Me challenge.

You may have also noticed in that post and later on in this one the 3×3 or 4×4 image grid of game covers. I used to produce these using an app called Diptic and having to do a Google image search to find each relevant game box image. But now the bgstat generates these for me with out all that extra effort! What a great new (well to me, not sure when it was added) feature.

2021 has been an interesting year to say the least gaming wise. It wasn’t until the later half of the year before world events allowed in person gaming to become a thing again. I have to say I missed playing with others a lot. So it was really great to be doing that again.

Fenland Gamers has grown in size! By that I mean those that attend gaming sessions on a regular basis. This has been amazing, and the new members have been really great to game with. Because of this success we ended the year saying good bye to our hosts The Luxe.

We still live in uncertain times. Who knows what 2022 has in store for us. Hopefully despite what it decides to throw at us we can continue to meet up, play games, and share good times.

As with more recent stat posts I’m not going to attempt to analyse the data. I’m going to just put the data out there and let it speak for itself.

But first for those that aren’t interested in anything other than my top 9 played games of 2021, here is a snazzy 3×3 image grid of those games.

My Top 9 Most Played Games of 2021

And now for those that want more details here are the stats for my gaming in 2021. The only thing you have to ignore from these stats is the time and days figures. I don’t record that data so those figures are basically gibberish. I’d also call bs on the number of players. It’s much much lower than that, less than 20 would be my guess. But this is due to me not adding everyone I play with as a named player. They only usually get added after I’ve played against/with them on a regular basis.

My Gaming Stats for 2021

So close

by the numbers, game challenges, gaming stats

I think it was a couple of months back I set myself some gaming challenges within the bgstat app.

It’s not something I do a lot of. However I thought why not?

Over the period covered by “lockdowns” and various restrictions belatedly introduced by our Tory overlords as some sort of token gesture towards dealing with world events, I had added one or two games and expansions to the collection.

It’s not as if I needed much encouragement to get any of those purchases to the table once gaming in person was once again a thing that we did.

Remembering what had been added during that period however would be more of a challenge.

So I set up a challenge to track those plays and to remind me what games and expansions had been purchased. Apparently there were 25 additions of one form or the other in that time.

One or two of those purchases would be considered for big boardgames. For example the Prophecy of Kings expansion for TI4 or the Mother of Dragons expansion for AGoT. They would be much much harder to get to the table.

But there are some big boardgames in my collection that I’d also like to see return to the table. So I set up a second challenge to encourage me to get some of those bigger games to the table.

Both of those challenges I have given myself until November 2022 to complete.

However I needed a more immediate challenge to aim for as well. Something achievable by the end of the year. So I set up a third challenge, to play 15 new to me games by the end of 2021.

With 2021 fastly coming to an end and no more gaming sessions planned before the challenge deadline. It does indeed look like I will have failed at this third challenge.

I’ve come within spitting distance of achieving it.

As the image above shows I’ve played 12 new to me games since August of this year. Two of which belong to someone else! Who happens to be the same person, Jonathan.

I think I’ll set up a similar challenge in the new year. At the moment my gut is telling me to set the target to 20 new to me games.

Oh and finally I got caught up with the reduced to clear section at Tesco and ended up getting a poker set for half price.

A New Gaming Challenge

game challenges

Since it has become possible to game in person again there have been more and more opportunities to get games and expansions bought during the lockdowns to the table.

A while back I did a post about what I had acquired during that period and looking forward to getting to the table. And I have managed to get some of those games to the table. Which the gallery clearly shows below. However there are still a few that have not been as lucky.

But I decided while starting this post to turn getting the games/expansions to the table as a challenge within the Board Game Stats app that I have been using for years now.

What shocked me whilst setting up the challenge was the number of games/expansions that found their way into my possession in that time! I’ve given myself a year to complete this challenge. One or two of them are big games that will be harder to get to the table and thus will need longer to plan for.

But I did setup a second challenge with a closer deadline to play 15 new-to-me games by the end of the year.

As a one off below is the complete list that makes up the pandemic challenge.

Challenge Update Mar 17

game challenges

I thought I would do a challenge update post. A kind of public admission of guilt for how poorly (spoiler alert) I’m doing.

First up “My Big Game Challenge”.

I’ve actually added a new game to this challenge. That game being the epic hidden traitor game Battlestar Galactica. So does that make the challenge harder? I don’t know. But I did manage to tick one off the list, when I managed to finally get Mechs vs Minions to the table. As regular readers will know I did rather like this game. Xia: Legends of a Drift System won’t be hitting the table until the later half of the year. Mainly because I don’t have the game yet, and my copy via Kickstarter is delayed until June I believe.

The second and final challenge I set myself was my “City Building Challenge”.

There has been no progress made on this challenge. I know technically I’ve played three of the games (Dice City was played before the recording of plays) and I fiddled the start date to take into account Porta Nigra having been played. But still this should be the easier challenge to complete, or even make progress on, and I have not.

So despite a record breaking gaming month for me in February, the progress so far on these challenges is slow.