February 2025 Gaming

February wasn’t a great month for me overall, in terms of posting (or mental health, really).

But it was a great month for games!

Missing the first Sunday of the month due to weather, and then only one game on Super Bowl Sunday, I thought it was going to be a slow month.

However, an all-day marathon on Saturday plus some good gaming at lunch in the office added up to the first non-convention month at over 20 plays since June 2024.

Here’s what I played in February.

And here that list is in grid format!

Thanks so much to the incomparable BG Stats app for providing this data.

Of course, I’ll talk about the new to me games in a separate post (there were six!), but let’s go over some highlights of the previously played games.

One of my new favourite games, now that I actually get how to do well in it (something that took me a bit!), is The White Castle.

This game is just beautiful to look at with the beautiful cardboard bridges to hold the dice (which were a bitch to put together until I decided to totally ignore the instructions that came in the box), a really nice board and great artwork.

I managed to get two plays of it done in February, enough (with my first two plays) to actually get down to the task of reviewing it.

Hopefully without any burger jokes.

This is just such a fun game, and I’m finally starting to really understand how to play it.

The second play of the month was actually with the new Matcha expansion, which adds a new area, bridge, and dice, granting each player an extra turn each round.

This expansion really increased the scores, and it opens things up a little bit, but it also makes some of the avenues in the game a bit easier to score.

It’s just one play, but I don’t think it really helps the Crane strategy much.

But it might!

I’d like to explore more.

This game was already in my Top 50, but I can see it going higher next year after this year’s plays.

Another great game I hadn’t played this year was Harmonies, and this is my first live game on Boardgame Arena in quite some time!

It helps that it’s very quick, especially on BGA (no setup involved). It was with two people I’ve never played with and it actually did go pretty quickly. There was one player who was a little slow, but not too bad.

And I won!

I’ve only played it twice now, but I managed 124 points, which totally surprised me.

The BGA version of this is really well done and I highly recommend it.

I recommend the game as well!

We’ve managed to get three games of Vale of Eternity in at lunch, two of them with the new Artifacts expansion.

I have to say that so far, after two plays, I haven’t really enjoyed the Artifacts expansion that much. Maybe it’s because we haven’t managed to finish either game inside of our lunch hour (though one of the two games would have ended the next round).

It definitely adds time to the game.

I’ll need to play it a couple more times before I really make a decision on it, but considering I love the base game by itself, it’s certainly not a necessary expansion.

More in my review if I get to it (I haven’t been getting to a lot of posts recently…)

Finally, I can’t avoid mentioning my Number 1 game (at least as of January 2024) and getting the first play of it in for 2025.

Ark Nova, what can I say that I haven’t already said?

This is just such an amazing game, and that was reiterated with our play this month.

However, we didn’t play with the Marine Worlds expansion, and I found that I really missed it!

It just adds so much to the game. I didn’t find the game boring, necessarily (I think that might have been just the circumstances of the day), but it definitely felt like it was missing something.

There is of course my monthly Combat Commander game, which I managed to win this month after losing the last three!

I haven’t actually managed to kill an enemy unit by direct fire in the last two months, but I was able to do so indirectly!

It goes without saying that this game is always a highlight of the month.

Watch for the New to Me Games post coming up in the next few days, but that’s pretty much a wrap for February in the “time-tested” games list.

What did you play in February?

Let me know in the comments.