2019 – Year in Review
Happy New Year!
Sure we’re a few weeks into the new year, but we still hope it’s off to a great start for you.
2019 marked a huge milestone for The Board Game Family. We celebrated 10 years of doing family board game reviews!
With our video reviews hitting 2 million views and our written reviews and articles being read by millions more, it’s been an amazing 10 years.
But today’s not about looking back on all 10 years (we’ve already done that). Instead, we’re just looking back at 2019.
As I’ve done at the start of each year, let’s take a quick look back at the games we’ve enjoyed the most from 2019.
Year in Games
The first thing we’ll look at is the number of family board game reviews we’ve done this past year.
It turns out that during 2019 we reviewed over 38 fantastic family games.
While that’s a bunch more games than a typical family has on their game shelf, it’s the fewest number of reviews since we started. Most years we review over 50 games. However, last year there were a few factors that had us dip on our number of reviews.
The three biggest factors were me changing jobs and moving into a role that takes up more time and attention, having less kids at home to play games with, and taking the summer months off for a break.
But the number of games we’ve reviewed is still a lot less than the games we’ve played!
I’ve played almost 4 times that many different games during the year. My total different games played for 2019 comes in at 126!
(Thanks to the awesome Board Game Stats app, I can track my plays with ease.)
And 69 of those were games I played for the first time this year (55%).
That’s a lot of new games to learn rules for. So it’s a great thing that I love learning things and experience new game mechanics.
The 20 games I played the most times (click on the game name to see our full review):
- Dominion
- Skull King
- Fuji Flush
- Sequence
- Aeon’s End Legacy
- Coup
- Decrypto
- Spyfall
- Deception: Murder in Hong Kong
- Karuba
- Memoir ’44
- Kingdom Builder
- Codenames Pictures
- Dinosaur Tea Party
- Drop It
- Tiny Towns
- Harry Potter Labyrinth
- Barenpark
- Camel Up
- The Quacks of Quedlinburg
We’re never surprised to see our perennial favorites on this list such as Dominion, Memoir ’44, Sequence, Kingdom Builder, and Deception: Murder in Hong Kong. But it is fun to see that the list isn’t comprised of mostly new games from this year. Which means that I’ve done better at playing games we’ve enjoyed from years past.
Fun fact — we played Skull King so many times that we finished off the included score pad and had to print off more sheets.
And Fuji Flush is such a quick and fun game to play, it’s easy to play that 20 times over the course of a year.
Now let’s check out some other fun game stats:
Different locations where I’ve played games: 16
Number of people I’ve played games with: 93
Those numbers are close to the highest I’ve recorded for both locations and people.
I enjoy looking at the number of people I’ve played with because that’s one of the best reasons for playing games — to get face-to-face time with friends and family!
2020 Family Board Game Goals
I’ve learned a while ago not to set specific numerical goals for family board games.
That’s because I want to simply enjoy the time with friends and family rather than trying to chase a number. I don’t want playing games to feel like a chore.
That being said, for 2020 I do plan to play more games currently in our game closet than new games. Which means the stat I’ll be looking more closely at during next year’s review is the percentage of new games played. My goal is to drop below 45% for playing new games.
However, that doesn’t mean that you’ll see less reviews. I still plan to stay on track with an average of 1 family board game review per week this year. So you’ll still get lots of ideas for games your family might enjoy playing.
The best way to make sure you see each new family board game review is to subscribe with your email address.
We hope your 2020 is off to a fantastic start and that you have an awesome year!
