November 2024 Gaming

With Bottoscon at the beginning of the month, you knew that November would be chock full of gaming goodness.

And it was!

Maybe not quite as much as might have been otherwise, since we missed a Sunday game day and the next one had just one (really long) play of a game in it, and not a lot of work gaming was done, but it was still very full.

Four days at a convention will do that.

Here’s what I played in November.

And here’s that shown in grid-format! With Qwixx and Cover Your A$$ets chopped off because I played 27 whole games in November!

That was a lot.

Many thanks to the wonderful Boardgame Stats for the ability to track all of this!

What were some of the highlights?

I’ll summarize since there were actually a lot of them.

Of course, I’m not going to detail the “new to me” games since that post will be going live in the next few days.

How about games that I’ve played before and got to the table again?

The first highlight is the convention mainstay, Merchant of Venus, which only gets played at conventions because it can get very long.

And as detailed in my Bottoscon post, it was very long this time!

But you know what else happened?

I won!

(I know, I said in my convention post I wouldn’t keep doing that…but really, I did win).

This game is always fun, even when things don’t work out.

But this time they did.

(ok, last time, I promise!)

It was also very cool to get The White Castle to the table again, this time playing correctly.

Surprisingly, my points actually went down, though I’m not sure why since the way we were playing it wrong actually made the actions tighter than they should be.

But I did worse!

Now I need to play it again to make sure we were still playing it right.

But did I tell you that I won Mer…whoops, almost did it again.

Last Sunday, I played the last Garphill game that I hadn’t played yet in 2024, Paladins of the West Kingdom.

(I won’t make you drink).

This game just gets too long, depending on how many are playing and who’s playing.

But I still really enjoy it and this was a fun time.

I didn’t come close to winning, but a newbie won so that means I’m a great teacher! (at least as far as Heavy Cardboard is concerned)

Also, my favourite trick-taking game!

Schadenfreude is just such a wonderful game.

I should probably review it, but you already know how I feel about it, so is it worth it?

This is the trick-taking game where coming in second is best, and you want to be as close to 40 points as possible without going over when somebody else does.

Finally, I got a game of Ecos: First Continent to the table. First time in 2024 and in over a year!

And just rediscovered that this game should not be played to the 80-point mark if you’re playing with a full player count.

Still fun, but it…

drags.

A lot.

Looking at my 2024 stats and comparing to 2023, I am 20 plays short of last year (237 instead of 257) but I’ve played the same number of unique games (127)!

So my game count will go up this year, but unless I get really lucky in December, I won’t get the same number of plays.

You’ll be able to see how I did on January 1 when I do my blog overview post!

So stay tuned.

In the meantime, November was a good month.

Here’s to a great December as well.

What did you play in November?

Let me know in the comments.