April 2025 Gaming

As expected after last month’s post, where March had a huge number of games because of a convention, April came back down to earth with a much fewer amount of games.

However, it was much better than February!

Which means it was a good month.

Especially because I got a few older games that I haven’t played in quite a while

Would have been better without missing a Sunday and a couple of work lunch days, but still.

Two of the games, it had been 2 years since I played them.

In April, I played 16 games a total of 20 times (so the total plays was the same as February, but a couple more games).

Here’s what I played last month.

And here it is in grid format.

Many thanks to the wonderful BG Stats app, which lets me keep track of all this and produces such beautiful work!

There were also some great new to me games played, but those will be in another post.

Let’s take a look and see what was out there.

A more recent highlight of the month is a second play of Resafa, the great game of merchants and canal building taking place in the Ancient Roman Middle East.

I still need a third play before I feel comfortable reviewing it, but the first two plays have been really great!

This time I did much better than in my first game. Still didn’t come near first, but much more respectable.

We ended up in a 4-player game, so we were able to see how different that would be.

The fourth player added another half-hour, but two of the players were new so I’m not sure how long the game will be once we have people who know it.

It was still really fun.

A second highlight would be playing the Deluxe version of Rebel Princess. BG Stats counts it as a “new to me” game because of it having a separate BGG entry, but I’m not putting it in that post.

The Deluxe version has an additional two princesses and six new round cards, and the princesses are tiles rather than cards.

I’m not sure if we played with any of the different ones, but I do like the tiles!

Check out the review I linked to above, but this is a great trick-taking game.

Let’s go back in time a bit, though, and check out a couple of old, but good games.

I am really bad at spatial puzzles, trying to picture how things should be placed to all fit together in tandem.

You would think I would hate Minigolf Designer, but I actually really like it!

I’m not very good at it, but I like it.

In the game, you’re drafting tiles to build your own minigolf course to try to satisfy various conditions, as well as a couple of investors.

You have to fit the tiles you’re playing to match the map grid that you chose at the beginning of the game, and you’re trying to make sure the course has 9 complete holes in it.

I have no idea why I like this one so much when other spatial tile-laying games, where you have to look ahead to what you may be designing, really turn me off.

The best part was that I hadn’t played this one since 2023.

It was good to get it back to the table.

Another game last played in 2023 that I managed to play last month was the classic Knizia card game, Lost Cities.

There’s something about the simplicity of card play in this one that just makes me love it.

The classic “build sequential card paths in five (or six) different colours, draw a card after each turn” gameplay can be so frustrating but so rewarding as well.

If you need a quiet 2-player game at lunch where you don’t need to burn your brain too much, but you don’t mind some good frustration, you can’t go wrong with this game.

Of course there was my monthly Combat Commander game, which you can read about here.

Go read the after action report and learn how you really shouldn’t piss off the gods by bragging.

They don’t like bragging.

Finally, there were a couple more plays of a really great filler game, Faraway, this time with the People From Below cards added to it.

The expansion adds some good stuff with almost no rules overhead at all, so it’s a great addition to the game.

Of course, there were more games played, but those were some of my noteworthy ones.

What are your thoughts on these?

And what did you play in April?

Let me know in the comments.