May 2026 Gaming

May was a busy month!

I mean, not March busy, but definitely better than April busy.

There was a 14-hour boardgame marathon where I ended up playing 8 games a total of 14 times.

Just in one day!

Then a couple of Sundays had multiple short games after playing the main event, which is always fun.

This month, I turned it around by doing the “new to me” post first, but here’s an overview of what actually got played in May.

Overall for May, I played 30 games a total of 44 times.

That’s outrageous!

Of course, Final Girl led the way again, but Sky Team was right behind it.

Here’s the list of games played.

And here it is in grid form.

Many thanks to the incredible Boardgame Stats app for this beautiful summary!

It was a fun month, including a few games that I haven’t played in quite a while.

Let’s get to those highlights.

Going back to the oldest, I had a really nice play of Sanssouci, a game that I haven’t played since 2018!

Wow, that’s a long time.

I remember mentioning it in one of the BGG Top Games posts, saying that I hadn’t played it in a while and I’d like to.

Now I have!

I remember liking it after the first play.

This play seemed a bit disjointed due to my lack of memory of how to play and also having to teach it!

I kept feeling like I was getting something wrong and it felt harder to do things.

It is an easy game to learn quickly, so that was probably just me.

This is a game where you are building gardens and having a bunch of nobles walk their way through the gardens to get as deep into them as possible.

Very simplistic explanation, but it is a fun game and I’d like to play it again before another 8 years is up.

Another game I haven’t played on the table for a while (over 2 years), though I have played it on Yucata some, is one of my favourites.

Underwater Cities is just such an amazing game of action selection and building onto your player board.

You’re collecting resources, building cities, farms, desalinization plants, or laboratories, and then the tunnels to connect them.

You have three actions per round, but hopefully nobody’s taken your action space (the green, yellow and red spaces).

I love the card play in this one too, as choosing an action also lets you play a card of the same colour.

It’s all just genius, and I’m happy to have played it again after two years.

Partially because I started a game on Yucata recently and felt incredibly rusty!

A game that I haven’t played on the table in 4 years (though I have many plays on Boardgame Arena, which is also where I played this, but live so it “counts”), is Lorenzo il Magnifico.

No picture from that game, but here’s a picture from a previous game!

This is another game on my Top 50 because I played it on BGA so much.

The action selection is awesome, you always feel short of money but yet you can get a lot done if you’re efficient.

And I love the dice mechanic where everybody benefits/is screwed equally, because you all use the same dice!

That one hasn’t been coming out at all so, when I had some time, I set up a live BGA game and got it done that way.

I missed it!

Alhambra is another game that I played on BGA this month because it’s been 2 years since playing it on the table.

I really enjoy this one, though I suck hard at it.

Here’s another old pic since I didn’t take a screenshot from BGA.

This is a tile-laying game where you are trying to form the most prestigious Alhambra complex by connecting tiles in an interesting way.

That’s because there has to be just one wall ringing the whole thing.

So tiles with walls can’t be inside other walls, and walls can’t be placed next to each other.

The really cool thing is that you have to use the same colour money as the location from where you’re purchsing the tile.

You will spend turns just collecting money (one money card or multiple cards that add up to 5) and then spend a turn (or multiple turns if you spend the exact amount of money required for a tile) placing them (or you can place it in reserve if you don’t have a space for it yet).

This doesn’t hit the table often (obviously!) but I always enjoy it when it does.

Finally, for games where it’s been ages (over 2 years), there’s Nucleum.

This is a pure economic game of building connections from city to city, constructing buildings in cities, and powering them up for points and other benefits.

The action selection system is really intriguing because you’re using a set of action tiles, where you can play them for the action on both sides of them, or you can actually use one of them to lay out a route on the board.

But that action tile will forever be gone, so make sure you have bought extra tiles where at least one of them will give you the same action!

That is ingenious, but it also led to my first play of it in 2024 going way off the rails.

I was not in a good mental space that day anyway and I had used my only tile with a certain action on it to lay track, and was having trouble replacing it.

I was just getting more and more frustrated.

I wanted to try it again to see if my opinion was coloured too much by that experience.

This game went much better, at least as far as how fun it was.

But not as far as how I did!

I actually did better last time, but I enjoyed my play more this time.

I’m not sure this game is for me, as brilliant as the design is.

But I’m trying a few games on BGA just to see whether things improve.

With all of that, there was also my monthly game of Combat Commander, where this month I got to tutor a newbie!

That’s always fun.

Much Final Girl was played, including enough to get one review done.

Also, Cascadia is becoming one of our lunchtime mainstays, with two plays of that this month.

All in all, May was a great month for gaming!

June has a 3-day convention in it, so next month’s post may be even longer.

That’s good!

What did you play in May?

Let me know in the comments.