2018 – Year in Review

Happy New Year!

We’re not sure if 2018 flew by for you, but it sure seemed like it did for us.

We passed a number of milestones as a family this year — including a 25th wedding anniversary!

And we ended 2018 with a bang by taking a family vacation over Christmas and into the New Year. After our 2nd son returned from serving a church mission this Fall, we were once again all together — a great excuse to celebrate.

I also started a new job and took on new volunteer services — all of which have their own big learning curve.

All of which makes it feel like 2018 has flown by.

 

Year in Games

As I’ve done at the start of each year, it’s time to take a look back at my game experiences for the prior year.

For starters, let’s take a look at what we’ve shared with you, our visitors/viewers/readers.

In 2018 we reviewed over 50 fantastic family games!

That’s a lot of new family board games, card games, dice games, party games, cooperative games, children’s games and more!

And that keeps us on track with averaging one game review almost every week of the year.

We’ve shared even more games than that if you include the multiple board game lists we’ve shared such us:

• 2018 Board Game Gift Guide
• 33 Games We’ll Still be Playing in 9 years
• 15 Fantastic Card Games for Family Vacations
• 5 Fun Games for You and Your Valentine
• Games Played at SaltCon
• Best Games of the Year

But that’s just the games we’ve reviewed.

I’ve played almost 3 times that many different games during the year. My total different games played for 2018 comes in at 146!

And 85 of those were games I played for the first time this year (58%). That’s a record for me of new games played in a year.

Just thinking of how many rule books that means I’ve read could make my head spin if I didn’t enjoy learning new things so much. I enjoy the challenge each new game presents in figuring out how they work and trying to do my best.

Unfortunately, my goal for the year was to play more of the games I already know — to go back to more games that I’ve enjoyed from years past. And I didn’t play as many of those as I would have liked. The good news is that I can peg that again for a game goal this year.

The 20 games I played the most times are:

• Fuji Flush
• Dominion
• NMBR 9
• Dinosaur Tea Party
• Deception: Murder in Hong Kong
• Century: Golem Edition
• Skull King
• Skip-Bo
• Spyfall 2
• 7 Wonders: Duel
• Azul
• Sequence
• Thunderstone Quest
• Kingdom Builder
• Memoir ’44
• Escape the Curse of the Temple
• The Game
• Star Wars: Imperial Assault
• Mechs vs. Minions
• Fantastic Beasts: Perilous Pursuit

Other fun statistics I like seeing are how many different places I’ve played games and with how many different people. For 2018, I played games in 17 different locations and with 97 different players. I enjoy seeing that because it reminds me why I most love playing physical board games — face to face time with others.

It’s the social aspect of gathering together that keeps me always looking forward to the next time I can play games with friends and family.

While I like looking back at the games I’ve played, years ago I stopped setting numerical goals for the coming year. That’s mainly because I want to simply enjoy the time with friends and family rather than trying to chase a number. I don’t want it to be forced.

That being said, I do have a goal to play certain games this year with my monthly game group. There are many games we’ve all loved playing over the years that we keep talking about getting back to playing again, but just haven’t been able to. This year, I plan to schedule specific dates on the calendar for those game gems. Wish me luck.

And let’s not forget that I still plan to publish at least 1 game review a week for 2019. That way you’ll still be able to get many fun game ideas to play with your family!

With a current “to review” game queue of over 60 games, we’ve got some great games to share with you this year. (And we know more will keep coming.) And we’ll be starting with some of the games that are on our “most-played” games of the year that we have yet to review (like Dinosaur Tea Party, Spyfall, 7 Wonders: Duel, and Skull King).

The best way to make sure you see each new game review is to subscribe with your email address. You can also follow us on Twitter or Facebook, but we know those algorithms keep changing as to what people actually see in their feeds.

We hope your 2019 is off to a fantastic start and that it keeps going well!