September 2025 Gaming

September was a weird month of gaming, mainly because I had a huge number of plays compared to August, but actually fewer games!

Part of that was because the final two Sunday game days were dominated by a huge game of Wonderland’s War (details in my next “new to me” games post), so that I only played one other game each of those days.

Some Sundays, we manage to get 3-4 games in because we play some shorter ones.

Not this month!

On the other hand, a couple of games were played a bunch, which is why the total plays beats August by a lot.

Finally, ten “new to me” games in September (with only 19 games in general) means that I won’t talk about a lot of them in this post!

Here’s what I played in September.

And here it is in grid format!

I love Boardgame Stats and how it can give me such great information.

I have to say, playing a quick filler type game can really add to your play stats when you play the hell out of it.

Let’s take a look at the non-new games I played this month!

Like I said, this may be short…

Most of the time in these “monthly play” posts, I try to concentrate on games that I haven’t played this year before now.

However, September didn’t have many of those!

One of the two that I haven’t already played this year was Shipwrights of the North Sea, the decent card-drafting game where you are trying to build Viking ships and, perhaps, go out raiding (or just become a really proficient trader and ship-builder).

I hadn’t played it in a while, and even though it’s certainly nowhere near my favourite Garphill game, I still

wanted to play it. Especially since I wanted to play something I hadn’t played this year.

It’s still a lot of fun, though it will never even come close to my top 25.

Funnily enough, we tried different strategies, and we had very similar scores!

Of course, in this game, you are building Viking ships, but you also are building up your village to give yourself additional abilities and uses for the workers that you have.

And Bryan won, of course.

I still don’t get how to win this game, though I did manage to move one of the tracks to the point where it actually scored!

That’s unheard of in our games.

Even though I lost that game, I considered that a win.

I was thinking of trading this game away, but I think I will keep it because even though it’s not a favourite, it fits the lunchtime frame really well and it is pretty cool overall.

Another game I hadn’t played live (though I’ve done some asynchronous BGA games) is Heat: Pedal to the Metal.

This is a really fun racing game with an intriguing system of using heat to do things but you have to make sure you have heat or you’ll spin out!

Funnily enough, you are never really out of this game, even if you’re far back.

You may not win, but you will catch up enough to make it an actual game.

I like this on BGA but it just hasn’t hit the table since 2022.

Until this month.

I love it!

Another milestone for September was finishing my second feature film for Final Girl.

Panic at Station 2891 is a wonderful adaptation of the movie The Thing, and it has a unique killer/monster that ramps up the tension even more.

The in-jokes almost write themselves!

Like how Station 2891 read backwards is 1982, and 1982 is when The Thing came out in theaters.

This game is so awesome.

I love the “which victim might be the killer? We don’t know!” aspect of the game, and how the Terror cards before the Organism is revealed could result in a lot of damage that you just don’t want when going up against the killer (or killers! In this game, at least)

Now it’s time to play my next feature film for the Final Girl franchise, but we’ll see if we get enough plays in October to actually review it.

I have multiple feature films and then the Season 3 boxed set, so I have a lot of films to catch up on.

As always, there’s my monthly Combat Commander game for the ladder, this time (and next time as well) in the Combat Commander: Pacific module of the game.

This one I lost really badly because I can’t draw worth shit.

Can’t draw cards, that is.

There was also a 2-player game of Taverns of Tiefenthal, which is how I originally learned the game.

However, I played a 4-player game of it earlier this year, so it’s not quite as noteworthy as it might have been otherwise.

That being said, I had forgotten a bunch of the rules so I totally tanked the game.

We played with a couple of the expansion modules from the Open Doors expansion, which was a lot of fun.

Rebel Princess is always fun as a great trick-taking game, especially when you have a bunch of players.

I of course had played this earlier this year, but the reason I’m mentioning it here is because we used it to introduce one of my co-workers into our gaming group.

And she had a lot of fun!

Finally, I have to mention Grandpa Beck’s Cover Your Assets.

I’d played it a few times already, including once at Bottoscon in June.

However, a friend of mine bought it so we used it to introduce yet another new co-worker to our lunch time game group.

She not only enjoyed it, but she kicked our butts the last two times we played it!

We’ll be introducing her to more complex games soon.

Anyway, the rest are new to me games that I’ll be talking about next time, but September was a good month!

I hope October will be just as good, though one (or maybe two) of our Sunday game days are being nuked so it may not happen.

So far for 2025, I’m ahead in the number of unique games compared to last year (139 vs 136) and the number of plays is only slightly below (243 vs 256).

That latter stat will definitely be overtaken next month, with two months left to go!

This is going to be a hard year to top.

What did you play in September, other than new to me stuff (though you can say that here too if you want)?

Let me know in the comments.