July 2025 Gaming

Being off for almost the entire month of July, I wasn’t expecting much on the gaming front.

However, I managed to attended a Wednesday night meet-up a couple of times, which greatly helped take the place of our normal lunchtime games at work, at least for the most part.

Of course, my number of games and plays was always going to be down compared to June, since there wasn’t a convention this month.

However, it was very comparable to May, so that’s great!

I was also expecting fewer than normal “new to me” games, but actually ended up with a lot, so that post may be a bit delayed considering I’m still kind of in my posting lull.

I ended with a total of 23 plays of 20 different games, so not bad!

Here’s what I played last month.

And here it is in grid form.

Many thanks to the wonderful Boardgame Stats app for this data!

There were quite a few highlights this month, with some plays of games I hadn’t played at all yet in 2025 (trying to pump the “unique games” number up!).

Let’s take a look at some of them.

As usual, the “new to me” games will be in the next post, so I’m not going to talk about them here.

Though there were a couple of winners!

Let’s see what I hadn’t played for a while that finally got played.

There was, of course, Favor of the Pharaoh from Bezier Games.

This one hadn’t been played since 2023!

It went down to the wire, with me snagging the Queen tile then getting beaten out by an opponent.

Even my extra die couldn’t save me, and I had even grabbed the tile that gave me extra dice for the final roll-off!

Then there was a cool game of Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria, which hadn’t been played in over a year.

Sadly, once again it was played without the expansions that I have.

We keep introducing new players to the game, which makes adding expansions tough.

It was a neat game, though, and also went down to the wire with Aleks beating Tartan by one point.

It seems that maybe doing quick and low-point battle plans might actually work?

This is still a favourite of mine, even with the one year lag in playing it.

And hopefully I’ll get Riftlands played soon.

One game that I never thought I would like, but actually really do, is Smartphone Inc.

This was another game that I hadn’t played in two years, but after its first play, it jumped into my Top 50.

After two years, this got to the table again, and nothing has really changed.

It’s still a great game

This one came down to the last turn between me and an opponent.

I was in the lead, but the attempt to bring me down actually enabled another player to pull slightly ahead.

My first game in 2023, I only managed 190 points.

This time was 223 and I almost pulled it out!

I did manage to research all of the technologies, which was cool

We’ll see if this remains in my Top 50 in January when I do those posts, but it’s an enjoyable game regardless.

Another game I hadn’t played in quite a while was NEOM, a tile-laying game with a large 7 Wonders feel to it.

This is a game where you are laying out your city by drafting tiles and then placing them (or selling them, or maybe discarding it to place one of your landmark tiles?).

It looks beautiful and it’s actually quite entertaining.

I like how the roads don’t have to all match up as long as the new tile has a road tracing back to the city center.

The true Road to Nowhere!

I’m not very good at this game, but it’s still a fun one.

I also can’t forget my monthly Combat Commander game, which this month it is kind of easy to forget because I played it on July 1!

It was a nice win for me, which was a great change from the last couple of months.

Finally, it had been almost a year since we played the very cute card-shedding game Spring Cleaning.

This is a game, similar to Scout, where you are trying to shed all of the cards from your hand, but you can’t rearrange them in your hand.

I love the difference in that you have cards in front of you that can be used by anybody (including you) and that if you can’t beat the cards that are on the table, you have to draw a card and then put another one in front of you.

Overall, it was a great month for games, a welcome surprise based on expectations!

August is shaping up to be a normal month, though I’ll be missing one of our Sunday game days.

I’ll hopefully make that up with a Wednesday or Friday, but we’ll see!

What did you play in July? Either new to you or that you particularly enjoyed?

Let me know in the comments.