December 2025 Gaming

December turned out to be a gaming lost cause for the most part.

Two Sundays cancelled for various reasons, one shortened one, and a bunch of work stuff going on so lunches weren’t always available as well.

In fact, if it wasn’t for my Final Girl plays (6) and four games of the very short Werewords in one lunch period, it would have been a wasteland!

I also didn’t really get to use my 3 days between Christmas and New Year’s for much gaming (just one Final Girl game) because of having to take care of computer issues and the like.

It looks even worse compared to November, because of the November convention.

Still, it was a restful month in other ways, and I do love the holidays.

In December, I managed to play just 13 unique games a total of 24 times (and remember, 10 of those were for 2 games!).

Here’s what I played last month.

And here it is in grid format.

Many thanks to the wonderful Boardgame Stats for the app that provides these images and lets us track our plays so efficiently!

As you can see, only one new to me game last month!

That post is going to be incredibly short.

However, there were some highlights for the month, so let’s look at those.

First, I hadn’t played Werewords since November 2019, so it was fun to welcome our new co-worker (who also games, somewhat, liking Tokaido and Azul, to name two “gamer’s games” she has).

This is a great deduction word-guessing game, marred only by the chance that the “Mayor” is also a Werewolf, and how hard it is to bluff when you’re the one saying “yes or no” to the questions!

There were a lot of laughs in our games, and I’m sure it will come out more on the rare occasions that all 7-8 people willing to play at lunch are able to at the same time.

Of course, if that happens too often, we may have to find another room where we can spread out and just play two games.

But we’ll see.

Another game I haven’t played in a while is Planet Unknown.

This is one of the few Tetris-style games I like, and I’m not sure why.

Maybe it’s the lazy susan method of taking a tile to place on your planet?

Or the track movement caused by placing tiles?

I do really enjoy this game, and as “big” as it is, it takes just over an hour which is really cool.

Another oldie but goodie I got out (though we didn’t quite finish it due to people having to leave for a meeting) was Valley of the Kings: Last Rites.

We introduced one of our new gamers to it, and it was a lot of fun!

This is the only one of the three Valley of the Kings games that I kept, and I didn’t go in on the Deluxe Kickstarter a few years ago.

The last play on this one is even older than Werewords!

Yes, I last played it on my birthday in 2018.

Woo!

There were a couple of other highlights too.

Of course, my monthly Combat Commander ladder game, that went so hilariously bad that I wrote one of my funnier After Action Reports.

While I had played Shadows Kingdoms of Valeria recently (July), I was finally able to break out the Riftlands expansion!

That was nice, and the expansion adds a lot of good stuff to the game.

If I can get it played another time or two, I do plan on reviewing it.

The Riftlands adds a new side-board with you going through one of three rifts to gain explore and gain a new artifact.

The cool thing is that you do this by taking any die from the main board.

No additional dice are added to the game.

It just gives you a new option on what to do.

The active artifacts that you have (you can have as many artifacts as you want, but you can only have two active) will give you bonuses or an additional action (like when you get a chain bonus on your battle map, you can spend 2 Magic to do it again).

The expansion also adds variable player powers, which is a godsend for an already great game.

You already have your own power, but you can unlock and even better power as part of putting a disc out (either for a battle, an objective, or whatever).

The Goblin base power is that whenever they get Gold from the Gold shrine, they can turn up to 3 of that Gold into Magic instead.

If you unlock their special power, when you draft a green die, you get 2 Gold and can increase the value of the die by 1.

It’s really neat and I can’t wait to try it again.

Finally, it was nice to get a couple more plays of Fliptoons in this month, giving me enough to review it.

I really enjoy this game, and it plays short enough that it could become a lunchtime staple (yes, I did buy it).

That’s pretty much it for a very short month of gaming.

January should get back to relative normal, then there’s a convention the last two days of February, so February’s plays should be good.

Then the last day of that convention and another convention in March.

I should be swimming in plays over the next three months!

A good start to 2026.

What did you play last month?

Let me know in the comments, and I hope your 2026 is starting off very well.