June 2025 Gaming

With a convention in June (Bottoscon for the win!), I knew that June would be a much better month for gaming than May was.

That’s one reason I love convention months!

Even so, there weren’t as many “new to me” games as in previous convention months.

That does mean that a lot of great “already-played” games were played, though!

Including some old favourites.

I made a point of playing a couple of games I hadn’t played in quite a while, which included a couple of games on Boardgame Arena.

I ended up with a total of 31 games played a total of 35 times.

There also ended up being 8 new to me games, including one sliding in right under the wire on June 29.

Here’s what I played last month.

(You can click on that image to blow it up, since I know the print is kind of small)

And here it is in grid form!

That’s lots of games.

So many, in fact, that the 5×5 grid can’t hold them all!

The six missing games are: Castle Combo, Archaeology: the New Expedition, Ticket to Ride, Welcome To…, Cover Your A$$ets, and Tricks & Snipers.

Many thanks to the wonderful Boardgame Stats app that makes this kind of list possible!

Even though not as many as usual for a convention, there were still a fair number of “new to me” games, which will get posted about later this week.

How about other games, though?

Definitely some highlights.

Most prominently, I brought out Imhotep for the first time in seven whole years.

I thought my work friends would like it and it definitely fits the definition of a lunch-time game.

This is the game where you are placing stones on boats to then be ferried over to be placed on one of four building sites.

But you can (usually) either just place stones on a boat or move a boat to one of the building sites, so somebody else could move the boat you’ve been counting on to a place where you don’t want it to go!

I reviewed the game back in 2018, so you can see more about how it plays, but I was very happy to get this to the table!

Sadly, I don’t play it enough so that we can get the “B” side of the buildings played, much less the expansion I bought, which has never been played.

One day, before I trade it away.

It’s a fun game. Not sure whether it needs to stay in my collection or not, but I’d like to play the expansion that I bought first!

Another notable play was the first of the three South Tigris expansions.

This one was Body of Books for the Scholars of the South Tigris game, and I have to say that it was pretty good!

It adds another dice colour, black, and another research track.

It also adds Pages, which you can tuck under your board just like you do retired translators.

A bunch of interesting stuff and I’m eager to explore it more (especially so I can review it).

Other new expansions played for the first time this month were the Extra Salt expansion for Sea Salt & Paper and the Grab Your Passport expansion for Let’s Go to Japan.

When looking for quick and easy games to play real-time on Boardgame Arena, I did decide to play something I haven’t played synchronously (or on the table) in 12 years.

Ticket to Ride was finally played against real people!

First time since 2013.

Though it was only on BGA, so I don’t have any pictures.

It’s still a fun game and plays really fast on BGA.

I was really excited to get Prodigals Club to the table for the first time in 2025, mainly because I finally own a copy so we played mine!

This is such a wonderful game, I should review it.

I’ve certainly played it enough, and you know how I feel about it already so it should be an easy review to write!

This is the game where you are trying to decrease your standing in three areas: friendship, politics, and financial.

You’re trying to go broke, have your friends hate you, and have the people of England hate you!

It’s the first time I didn’t win in the last few plays of it over the years. Vicki pulled out the win, but it had the same arc for me that it usually does.

I always feel like I don’t have enough time to get everything done, and then suddenly the game ends and I actually didn’t do too badly.

Granted, this time I did worse than usual, but not by as much as I was afraid it was going to be.

Another game I hadn’t played in a long while was Res Arcana.

Last played in 2020, this is a great Tom Lehmann game of managing your hand of cards from a very small deck, consisting of cards that you drafted at the beginning of the game.

I really like the round structure where you are doing everything you can or need to do, one turn at a time, until everybody has passed.

Then you see if anybody has reached 10 points, and if so, the game ends.

The artwork on the cards and tiles is also really cool, dark and mysterious.

I’m terrible at this game, but it’s still fun.

Of course there was my monthly Combat Commander game, this time almost a comedy of bad luck and great play by my opponent.

I hope the After Action Report is an entertaining read.

All in all, it was a great month of gaming, aided very much by a convention, of course.

July won’t be nearly as full of games, with me being off of work for the month so not getting any lunchtime games in.

However, I do plan on attending at couple of meet-ups I don’t normally go to, and playing a few more games at home as well.

Hopefully that will take up some of the slack.

What did you play in June, other than new to me games (though if you want to tell me that here rather than on that upcoming post, feel free!).