A Game a Day... (January 2022)
Well, to tell you the truth you don't have to do anything at all to keep the doctor away. They're always awfully busy and it's been decades since they did house visits anyway. But, I'm playing games daily regardless. It beats eating an apple.
Anyhoo. 2022! This year's theme is: "Play More Of My Owned Games and Play My Owned Games More". Which means I'm back doing crazy challenges and working towards reducing the magical mountain. I might as well spit out a monthly report for you while I'm at it.
Game of the Month
Jumping on the hype train when it has finally slowed down enough for me to keep up with it with my old legs, I finally played Imperium: Classics this month. What can I say. Eight civilizations that play differently, fifteen tables for solo opponents, a lot of icons that mean different things for different bots, two rulebooks that you both need to study and consult for solo play. You can only love a game like this - or all energy it took to play would be wasted and that realization would make you very, very depressed. So yeah, Game of the Month. 🏆 🥳
The stupid thing is, it isn't even that hard to play - there aren't many actions, the deckbuilding choices are pretty straightforward. You could play this quite fast and have your solo civ fix if they hadn't used every trick in the book and some new ones from up their sleeves to make it work against you.
I still played it 14 times. I've also got Imperium: Legends waiting, so I should easily get to 60 plays this year. Which made me wonder if I shouldn't up my pledge for Voidfall after all (I only deposited €1 during the Kickstarter campaign). 🤔
New to me
The other two solitaire games new to me in January were Crazy Taco and Maracaibo.
The taco serving game is a simple dice allocation game. I think I found it a bit too luck dependent, but it didn't leave much of an impression. While I played it 11 times. Oops. 😬 I just saw the picture I uploaded for this post and it looks like something that would cheer me up. I should get it to the table again.
I like a lot about Maracaibo, but it took me a while to realize this. Set up is a hassle, combat resolution (for the bot) and the money and VP tracks are very confusing. I bought the app and like it much better digitally where all the stupid work is being done for me. I hope playing it as a board game will be a bit easier soon as well.
I also played part of the campaign and wasn't interested in that. 🤷♂️ Which means it may not have too much replayability for me in the end. We'll see.
20x22
Two friends from the Belgium/Dutch solo board gamers Facebook community asked me to join in their 20x22 challenge. Because I misunderstood*, I immediately said yes. 😄 All three of us will work through the same selection of games.
Some will be very hard to play 22 times, I think. Because they take me long (Gloomhaven JotL, Nemesis), or because I'm not really interested in playing them anymore (Maquis). Some I don't even own yet (Ark Nova, Praga Caput Regni).
But other games will balance this out, because they're among my favourites (Marvel Champions, Nusfjord) or because they take little time to play (A Gentle Rain, Sprawlopolis). And the list helps on days when I don't know what to play.
*) I thought we were going to play 22 games 10 times each. I honestly don't know why.