Here are the ten boardgames that I played more than four times during 2017. The year’s total was 78 different games.
- Magic: The Gathering (1993)
- No Thanks! (2004)
- Patchwork (2014, a new arrival on the list: a textile-themed two-player, perfect for couples who sew!)
- Plato 3000 (2012)
- Heimlich & Co. (1984)
- Keltis (2008, travel version)
- For Sale (1997)
- Lost Cities (1999)
- Innovation (2010)
- Sechs nimmt / Category 5 (1994)
Cousin E’s presence in the Rundkvist household with its convenient geek uncle lies behind this year’s emphasis on two-player games (MTG, Patchwork, Lost Cities). The games on the list are mostly short ones that you can play repeatedly in one evening. Innovation is a bit longer. A longer game that I played four times this year was Castles of Mad King Ludwig, though this one was too much collective solitaire for me. All the others are highly recommended!
Dear Reader, what was your biggest boardgaming hit of 2017?
Stats courtesy of Boardgame Geek. And here’s my list for 2016.
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 
Not exactly a boardgame, but we’ve played a lot of Sushi-Go in the past year.
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Since you changed host for your blog each one of your blog posts is published twice in my blog reader. Why is that?
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Don’t know. What blog reader is that?
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This year I purchased iOS implementations of two classic board games: Clue and Settlers of Catan.
The premise of Clue is a murder investigation, but the implementation is anti-realistic in many ways. The six people investigating the crime are the six suspects, and the perpetrator starts the game not knowing that (s)he did it. There are six possible weapons, and while the three blunt instruments (the candle, the lead pipe, and the wrench) would cause similar injuries, the other three weapons (the knife, the revolver, and the rope) produce injuries that should not be mistaken for one another or for the blunt instruments (OK, it’s possible to use the revolver as a blunt instrument, but that’s doing it the hard way). And the body is somehow moved from the scene of the crime to the place it is discovered without leaving a trail of blood (not a problem if the rope was the weapon, but hard to explain otherwise). The iOS version adds an amusing detail: all of the suspects are left-handed. The default board has the same rooms with a similar placement to the board in the classic version, but spacings between rooms are different, and all of the suspects start in the center of the board rather than the perimeter. And of course you get the usual artificial stupidity that comes with computer games: for instance, in one game Mrs. Peacock made four suggestions that Prof. Plum (the character I was playing, who plays just after Mrs. Peacock and is therefore the first to get the chance to disprove her suggestions) was the guilty party, and each of those four times I showed her the Prof. Plum card in my hand.
The iOS version of Settlers of Catan is, AFAICT, a straightforward implementation of the board game, with no obvious peculiarities. Difficulty level is reasonable: I win some, I lose some.
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Civilization: New Dawn was a very pleasant surprise at the very end of the year. Other than that- Star Wars version of Carcassone is probably the most played.
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The new Civ game looks interesting!
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Not much actual board-gaming in 2017, sadly. Managed to play a healthy dose of GURPS, managed to take a card-game design from “rough idea” to “actual playable prototype”.
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In what genre did you play GURPS? How many peeps around the table?
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