January 2026 Gaming

Hard to believe that we’re already a month into 2026!

My, how time flies.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from January, especially because we had some really small Sundays and long games played.

Which is good!

But also means that not a lot of games are played.

January, however, burst past December in big way.

I ended up playing 20 games a total of 29 times.

Of course, 7 of those plays were Final Girl, as I work my way through all of the feature films I have.

Still, it’s quite impressive!

Here’s what I played last month.

And here it is in grid format.

Four new to me games that I will be talking about later (a bit later than usual, as I haven’t even started writing the post yet!), but also a good mix of older games.

Let’s look at some of the highlights.

Of course, all of the plays were “first time in 2026,” except when I played the game more than once.

However, a couple of them were games that I hadn’t played in 2025 at all.

River Valley Glassworks I last played in 2024, when I learned the game at the Dragonflight convention.

This play was on Boardgame Arena and the implementation there is very good.

Here’s a picture of it from my table play a couple of years ago.

I love Subastral and its scoring, so having a similar type of scoring in River Valley Glassworks already heightens my opinion of it.

But I also really love the river mechanic in this game, where you have to place a certain shape of onto the appropriate space on the river and then take the glass from a neighbouring space.

You score each row from left to right until there’s a break, and then your two highest columns.

This is a really great game!

I should probably get this game so we can play it at lunch.

The other game I hadn’t played in 2025 was Claim, the great 2-player trick-taking game with some really inventive mechanics.

We have a bunch of people in our game group at work, so 2-player games don’t get played anymore.

But last week, it just happened that only two of us were available, so I taught this to one of my co-workers.

And it was a hit!

I love how the trick-taking works, where the first phase’s tricks are designed to prepare your second phase hand.

But taken Undead will actually score for you, even in the first phase.

In the second phase, you’re just trying to collect cards to your score pile, but for Dwarves, the loser of the trick actually takes all of them in the trick.

Each player gets one point for each suit they have the most of in their victory pile, so scores are going to be something like 3-2 (or 5-0, like my new player blasted me with in her first game…what was that?)

At 10-15 minutes per game, this works really well. We got two games in!

I then taught her Lost Cities, another great 2-player card game, though we only did one round rather than three.

I should probably review this one, actually, even though it’s old.

Anyway, this is a Knizia classic that I really love to play.

Having to choose which columns you’re going to play cards to, because when you first start a column, you will lose the 20 point “fee,” but then you have to make sure that the cards you put into the column add up to more than 20 to get your fee back.

And wagers that will double, triple, or even quadruple your total once you subtract the 20 points, really can make scores high (or really really low if you don’t manage to get at least 20).

I like how the end of the game is controlled by players and you can delay it somewhat if you draw from the discard piles rather than the draw pile, because the round/game ends when the draw pile is empty.

She really liked it, and when I told her it was a game from 1999, she said “that’s older than me!”

That was hilarious

Another highlight of the month was introducing a new co-worker to Rebel Princess, the trick-taking game that’s basically “Hearts on steroids.”

This one is definitely up there in my rank of trick-takers and I do love the individual player powers as well as the new effect every round aspect of it.

She really seemed to enjoy it, which is good because I’ll probably make her play it again!

There was also our 2nd annual January play of Arboretum, which we also introduced two of my new co-workers to.

They seemed to enjoy this one too, though the one who really enjoys inflicting pain on other players was disappointed because she spent more time trying to get her own arboretum organized than she did attacking everybody else.

But she did enjoy it.

I love the cutthroat nature of this game, where you are trying to get connected lines of trees set up to score, but you have to earn the right to score them by keeping some of their cards in your hand.

Maybe the next time we play this will be January 2027?

Moving away from the office, a second play of Sanctuary (the “streamlined Ark Nova, though it really isn’t) just reinforced my positive opinion of the game.

I’m not sure why this one appeals to me so much, but it just does.

It’s not the Ark Nova connection, at least not exclusively.

I just like the tile-laying aspects and how the action selection system works.

Speaking of, we also managed to get Ark Nova played. Twice!

Will it be my Number 1 game again in this year’s Top 50?

Stay tuned to find out later in this week.

Seven plays of Final Girl is hardly a surprise. It allowed me to get a review done and enough plays of the latest feature film to do a new one, which will probably be coming out either this week or next week.

There was of course my monthly Combat Commander ladder game, where I committed the cardinal sin of forgetting a rule and then having it come back to bite me by costing me the game.

But it was still fun!

All in all, it was a great month of game, and as I said, one I didn’t really expect to be that great.

February has a convention for the final two days, so it should have a great amount of games played too!

What did you play in January?

Let me know in the comments.