November 2023 Gaming

With a convention at the beginning of the month, it was a no-brainer that November would be a bigger gaming month than October had been.

However, after working remotely for most of the month (so no lunch-time games, since I’m usually doing stuff around the house, or maybe for this blog (!) on lunch when I’m home) brought it back down a little bit to earth.

Even with that, though, it was a great month for games!

Though the quality of some of those games was a bit…iffy.

Here’s my games played in November.

I played 23 different games a total of 28 times, which was pretty cool! There was a bit of lunchtime gaming in there before we ended up at home, plus the convention of course.

Bottoscon was amazing! Four days of it helped.

Here are the games in grid format.

Even better was the 8 new to me games (I’m counting 9, though, as you’ll see in my next post, where I talk about new to me games…or maybe I’ll just spoil it in this post).

I also managed to get a few “first time this year” games in, which was a great thing.

Only three, but who’s counting?

Let’s take a look.

(Writing this early since I’m not playing anything else in November. Just pretend it’s December when you read this, ok?)

Many thanks to BG Stats for the wonderful play-tracking app!

Last month, I did my “new to me games” post first because it made writing this one easier. I didn’t need to be cagey about them.

However, with so many new to me games this month, I thought I’d get the easier one out of the way first.

Because I’m lazy that way.

Probably the highlight of the month was my play of Dominant Species at Bottoscon. This is a game that I’ve been greatly anticipating since we talked about it a couple of months ago.

This is a game that I first played back in 2012 when I first started gaming, and I wasn’t ready for it.

That’s why I’ll be talking about it next post.

(Damn, I did spoil it!)

Because I consider it a “new to me” game. I barely remember it.

However, let it be known that I was the biggest species murderer in the game.

Man, that was fun.

Anyway, highlight of the month, definitely.

Even though it was a really long game!

I’ve had bypass surgeries that were shorter than that.

(Don’t ask).

Anyway, another highlight, mainly because it means I can do another game review, is getting not one, but two games of Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria in!

This was a game that I backed on Kickstarter and brought out to game day very shortly after the pandemic lockdowns were over.

And then it never got played again.

I brought it a few times, but it just ended up getting discounted and ignored.

This month, it was played twice.

And I really enjoyed it!

It has a couple of issues, but you’ll have to wait for the review for that.

I now have two expansions (one that came with initial Kickstarter and then one that I recently backed and received from Kickstarter) and they’re both modular, so we’ll see if we can get them played.

This is a dice-drafting game set in the Valeria universe where you are actually one of the monster factions, trying to fulfill battle plans to attack and defeat the good guys.

It’s an interesting twist and it has some pretty cool concepts.

But more later…

Of course there was my monthly Combat Commander ladder game, which you have all read about.

You have read that, right?

Don’t make me sad…please say you read it.

This is always fun. Ted and I didn’t get a game in this month (I may still do an AAR of our October game), but we’re playing on December 1.

So maybe we’ll get two December games in to make up for it!

Another month, another game of Ark Nova. This one a very close one where I came in second by just 3 points!

This game is always a good thing.

Gee, I wonder if it will be appearing on my Top 50 games played of all time when I do that list in 2024?

Anyway…there were a bunch of highlights in November, but the final one I want to talk about is playing Flash Point: Fire Rescue for the first time in something like 5 years (Editor: “Gee, I wonder if you had some app or something that could help you be more specific?”)

This cooperative firefighting game is always fun and I just haven’t brought out my copy of it. Mainly because I have so many expansions that it’s an effort to bring it out. I have a box full of maps and then a box full of the other pieces.

It’s unwieldy.

But we played my friend’s copy of the base game, and even with a rulebook that was so fuzzy that we couldn’t read some of the pages, it was a blast!

Even though we only rescued five victims before the house collapsed.

I enjoyed every game I played in November…well, with a couple of exceptions (but both are new to me games, so more later! I am such a tease).

November was a really great month for games, much more than December will likely be.

Still working remotely through at least half of the month, with co-worker vacations going into effect after that, and with Christmas being on one of our normal game days, December could be lean.

But November was great!

What games did you play in November?

Anything noteworthy? Anything that you haven’t played for a while but finally played again?

I’ll save the “new to you” question for the next post.

Let me know in the comments!