Who even am I anymore?

Up until last weekend, I hadn’t played a single board game since March.

This is unusual for me.

There was a time a few years ago where I struggled to get up to 100 plays, and I had a friend come over in the last week of the year and she helped me get up to 100 plays and everything was cool.

Lets have a look at some stats and see when that was……

Okay so, 2025 isn’t as bad as I thought with 78 plays.

2024 had 170 plays.

2023 had 368 plays.

2022 had 103 plays (which is when Leanne came over and helped me get over 100 that last week)

2021 had 109 plays.

2020 had 200 plays. Which considering the pandemic you can look at in one of two ways.

2019 only had 51 plays.

2018 had 256 plays (ooh we like a good power of two).

Okay. So maybe this isn’t as bad as originally thought.

It’s tracking to be a mid-level year in terms of games played. Not up at the highest of pre-pandemic levels when I was doing games night twice a week, but also not as low as it has been.

It doesn’t help that the majority of the people I like to play board games with live far away, have extremely busy lives and we don’t get a chance to play all that much.

It also doesn’t help that the conventions I like to go to have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger (and noisier, and crowdier).

When I do go to conventions, I end up playing with the same handful of people anyways. So I just have people I like to play games with but in a very noisy and busy environment.

I’ve got more games than I can realistically ever play. I need to trim that collection down to maybe a kallax worth. Maybe two kallax worth.

There’s definitely some I won’t ever play again. And some that I have that I would love to play but don’t get much of a chance to.

It’s also possible that as the boys get older, they will want to play the more advanced games with me too. So there’s that little niggling voice saying don’t get rid of all of them - just trim the collection.

Star Wars Rebellion for example. Never played my copy. Have 3D printed an awesome insert for it. Absolutely love it, but it takes 4 hours+ and is two player only.

Thematically, there’s no other Star Wars game like it - captures the whole Rebellion vs the Empire extremely well. So I won’t get rid of it. There’s a chance that both Luke and Harry will love to play it with me at some point.

I’ve also spent quite a lot of the last year playing the Last War mobile game. I quit a few weeks ago and whilst I really enjoyed the game and the people I met, it was such a time sink and with the scheduled events, it was hard not to be around in an evening and things.

So I feel a bit ‘free-er’ after that.

We’ve moved things around this weekend which will see me feeling more comfortable gaming on my PC on an evening (and still being close to my wife), so there’s a chance that will pick up.

It might even see me doing more computer based stuff.

That’d be nice.

I could do with getting something sorted with friends coming to game. The kids are definitely a lot more pre-occupied and self entertaining than they used to be.

I can’t believe they’re back to school in just over a week. That’s insane.

Where has August gone?

Anyway, I’m just talking rubbish now.

Wasn’t even going to write a blog post, was just going to update Hugo.

Let’s see if this uploads and updates first time…..