January 2024 Gaming

Has a month already gone by in 2024?

Wow, time is just flying by, really.

January had a number of gaming highlights, mainly because of OrcaCon.

The annual convention down in Bellevue, Washington, it just a remarkably-run convention, so inclusive, and so fun.

And I didn’t get sick! (Unlike Dragonflight last August).

Let’s take a look at the games played so you can see just how busy of a month it was.

And here it all is in grid form (sadly there’s no picture for I Found Bigfoot!

Many thanks to the phenomenal Boardgame Stats app for the great ability to track games played!

You can see all of the “new to me” games (the ones with the yellow asterisk).

That’s 16 new to me games! (Somehow Quantum wasn’t listed as a new to me game, but it definitely was)

That post is going to take a long time to write, especially as I’m also writing the next two Top 50 games played of all time posts, so don’t expect it as soon as I have been able to do in previous months.

But I will do my best not to wait until the end of February.

Let’s take a bit of an overview, keeping in mind that I’m not going to comment (at least not much) on the new to me games, since they get their own post.

One highlight, as usual, was my monthly Combat Commander ladder game, this time with fresh patches of despair as I totally sucked!

It was still fun to play, though I am sad that I didn’t get a 2nd game in like I usually do each month.

On another front, though, my good friend Zilla is talking about getting Combat Commander to the table in 2024, and we may actually get a live game on VASSAL sometime during the year.

A live game with Zilla?

That will be so cool!

(Speaking of Zilla, it’s been good to hook up with him in some async app games, like Wingspan and possibly Dominion coming up too).

Another highlight was a second play of John D. Clair’s Empire’s End. One more and I’ll be able to review it!

The players of the first game weren’t huge fans of it (though one was, but he hasn’t been able to come to game days since then) but I found a couple more victims people to play it, and it went over pretty well.

This was only a 3-player game instead of a 4-player game, so not all of the disasters were double disasters.

I’m sure it balances out (a 4-player game, every disaster but the first is a double), but it did feel a little less punishing.

But also less rewarding because you didn’t get as many resources from taking the disasters.

I think it will all come out in the wash, but I do want one more play before I really solidify my thoughts on it.

Another play of Cape May is always a fun time, but this time I did really terribly. I don’t think I’ve seen a spread of scores so bad as this one was.

Still, always fun!

I taught a new player the game and he ended up winning, so good teacher, right?

Now that we’re back in the office (we spent a month and a half working remotely due to getting a new floor), we managed to get three plays of Smash Up in so I could review the new expansion, Excellent Movies, Dudes!.

I always love playing that game.

We also used the new micro-expansion, Teens, but that review will be coming out next month (gotta space those Alderac reviews out a bit).

Next time we play Smash Up, we’ll be back to totally random factions!

That’s always a blast.

Finally, getting another play of the great trick-taking game, Schadenfreude, was also great.

Even greater for reasons that will be more apparent in a few days…

Ahem.

Anyway, so many January highlights were in the new to me games category that I think I will stop there!

Shorter posts aren’t bad, right?

What did you play in January?

Let me know in the comments.