Waning Staples

Warning: The following article is mostly composed of numbers and musings.

Last year I played a total of 788 games. Of those, 265 were of the Pathfinder ACG, 175 were the Lord of the Rings LCG, and 155 were of Dice Masters – in other words, those 3 games made up roughly ¾ of my total gaming for the year.

So far, 2016 is looking very different – 389 games played between January and June is not too far removed from last year (369), but the distribution is very different.

The most played games still feature some familiar faces. Although our most-played game of the year is a new entry – Zombicide: Black Plague with 60 sessions, Pathfinder is only just behind with 59 plays, then LotR LCG on 41 and Dice Masters with 34.

Even allowing for this new arrival, there’s a much broader spread of what’s being played: whereas the top 3 games last year accounted for 75% of what I played, the top 4 games this year make up fractionally under half (49.9%). Even these figures may be a bit generous – almost half of those games of LotR came on a single evening as I tried without success to beat a particularly irritating quest. Dice Masters is more-or-less in freefall, as our local community vanishes and I struggle to find opponents.

 

Rising Stars

Just behind the leading pack, you can find a growing number of games in the teens and twenties of play-throughs: the Game of Thrones ACG and Marvel Legendary have both passed 25, having been discovered (or released) part-way through last year, they have kept a steady turnover, without really threatening the top 4 (Legendary is probably held back by its labour-intensive set-up, and Game of Thrones play is always capped by the need to build a functional deck and arrive at the FLGS at the same time as other players). Zombie Dice is a new entrant in the mid-teens, where it’s comfortably holding its own.

There was previously a line here about another game which appeared to have broken into this group, but it was disqualified when it transpired that I had typed a number in the wrong row of my spreadsheet…

 

I can’t see this one staying at a single play-through, once it’s actually released…

The real change this year though, is in the single digits. Last year, I played a total of 58 games, but only 12 of them 5 times or more, and 30 of them (i.e. more than half) only once. This year, I’ve played 44 games so far, but already 17 of those have been played 5 times or more, and only 10 of them have been played just the once (for now). The selection of games being played is broadening.

 

Intent

Obviously, some of the changes in game-play have a fair amount of intentional behaviour behind them – regulars will know that I’m trying to play ten games ten times in 2016, which is something I didn’t do last year (I wasn’t trying, it just happened that 7 games got played ten times or more, and the others didn’t), so this definitely encourages me to look more often at games I like but haven’t played that much. There’s also the issue of trying to empty my “un-played” pile, which is causing the dust to be brushed off a fair number of old games – I’m trying to avoid this turning in to a token “play it once” activity, both in terms of playing games more than once (at least the shorter ones) and in terms of seriously considering whether I want to play that game again.

This guy again? he gets all the fun post

Reviews also deserve a mention at this point, as you can’t really review a game without playing it a fair few times, but only 1 of the 9 games I’ve reviewed so far has really taken the house by storm (Zombicide), so that’s another whole set of games that are getting played “a few” times, but not loads and loads.

 

Fallen Favourites

Despite all of that though, I still think that there are issues with what have historically (at least for 2015 and the second half of 2014) been our “main” games.

Lord of the Rings LCG  has been a family favourite for 5 years now, but as I’ve commented at length elsewhere, it feels like it’s reached a point where they have over-complicated the game, and increased the difficulty to the point where sitting down to play is just painful. Our local meet-up for the game has also missed a few sessions (I don’t quite know what happened for June, I think we all just forgot…) which doesn’t help, and the sense that you need to custom-build a deck for every quest you tackle makes a game at short-notice a real challenge. [Do I keep the 4-player decks built in the hope that friends will come over and want to play? Or build for 2 and push to do that mid-week instead of one of the newer games? Sadly the days are gone when you could have a set of decks ready that did both]. I had this come up on Saturday, when a friend suggested a game, and I had to indicate that I had nothing ready that would give us a viable game.

Pathfinder is still a solid game – As noted above, it’s still very near the top of the “most-played” list for the year, [there’s an ongoing tussle with Zombicide] and we’re still picking up the Class Deck expansions as they come out (looking forward to lots of Goblins in the near future).

If this guy doesn’t get Pathfinder back to the table, nothing will…

That said, there are still factors weighing against the game. First of all, it’s worth noting that Pathfinder is in something of a fallow period in terms of the material they’re releasing: after a hectic first 2 ½ years of the game, they have opted for a long hiatus between the 3^rd and 4^th Adventure Paths, to let people catch up with existing content – as a result, there’s definitely a lack of urgency as we re-play earlier paths, no pressure to be finished in time to play the next thing out.

That said, I think my enthusiasm for this game took more of a blow from the final stages of the 3^rd AP, Wrath of the Righteous: there was certainly intent on the part of the designers to make it “big” and “challenging” but it also felt badly scaled (the “Army” henchman are ridiculous against survivors groups of 6), and the excitement of having everything constantly turned all the way up to 11 quickly wore off – we still haven’t finished that path with our second character group, and I’m honestly not sure whether we’ll ever bother. Definitely a place where – for us – difficulty went a step too far.

Dice Masters I like. Given the chance, I’d still be playing this every week, but our local group has basically disappeared, with two people selling up, and others just not able to make it down very often. As a 2-player head-to-head, this one is never going to get much time at home, and working at UK Expo meant that playing in Nationals Wasn’t an option. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get some games of this in over the next month or two, but I largely let the Civil War set pass me by, and I’m not going to be spending money on the upcoming Green Arrow/Flash set unless something major changes.

The Future

Overall, I think the spread of this year’s gaming has been healthier than last: playing a broader range of games seems like a sensible way to go. As an added bonus, the fact that I’m doing review work means that I’m able to balance a lot of my costs in acquiring new stuff, either by getting the games I want as review copies, or at the very least selling or trading them to offset my costs. The only thing I’m really lacking is having as much time to play games as I do to write about them.

Modern Classics: Pandemic

Modern Classics is an intermittent series where I take a slightly more detailed look at some of the key cornerstones of modern gaming – the lines that gaming regulars will all be familiar with, but which might be a bit baffling for outsiders. I decided to kick off this new series with Pandemic.

 

Pandemic

Pandemic is a co-operative game for 2-4 players. The object of the game is to prevent the people of the world from being struck down by various diseases, whilst discovering a final cure for each of the conditions.

The game progresses over a series of rounds. Each turn a player will take 4 actions with the token representing their character: these can be moving round the map, removing disease cubes from the board, using their character’s special power, trading cards (if you and another character are both in the same city, you may trade the card representing the city you are in) or researching cures for the 4 diseases.

At the end of their turn, they draw 2 cards from the deck – mostly these will be cards representing the cities on the board, which can be discarded for faster travel, or collected as a set in order to develop a cure (you need 5 city-cards of a single colour to cure the corresponding disease). However, mixed in to this deck will be 1-off special actions, and epidemics: cards which punish the players by increasing the infection rate, returning the infection discard pile (see below) to the top of the deck, and generally increasing the pressure on players.

Lastly, players reveal cards from the infection pile equal to the current “infection rate” (starts at 2), and add disease cubes to the city indicated. If a city ever needs a 4^th cube of a disease, it instead triggers an “outbreak” – spreading disease to all the surrounding cities. If any of these cities were already at 3 cubes, this can lead to a hideous chain reaction, stacking outbreak upon outbreak (it won’t ever loop back to the original city, but if you have several interconnected cities, they can move from a low and safe-looking level to an outbreak very quickly).

The players lose if the player deck runs out, if there is an 8^th outbreak, or if they need to place a disease cube, and cannot (because they have run out). They win if they manage to cure all 4 diseases before any of these things can happen.

Pandemic is a fun game. There’s definitely theme to it – the game board is a world map, cubes are disease, and your character ability will be tied to their “job-title.” That said, it’s not the kind of fully-immersive narrative experience which requires a great deal of emotional investment by the players. The mechanics are simple enough to follow, and the game comes with an in-built way of adjusting the difficulty (you can have between 4 and 6 Epidemics in the deck) which allows you to vary the level of challenge depending on your group.

Like any co-op game, there is a slight danger of alpha-player syndrome, but there are generally enough possibilities that you can do a lot of discussion and planning as a group, whilst still having individual autonomy over what you ultimately do –in this respect, I’ve always found Pandemic more fun to play than something like Thunderbirds which feels a bit too much like a logic puzzle.

Expanding

Since Pandemic first came out in 2008, there have been a wealth of additional titles in the series:

Top – Epidemic Cards from the original game, Bottom – Virulent Strain epidemics with added effects

On the Brink was the first expansion for the game and it came with Petri-dishes for storing disease cubes when they aren’t out on the map (new editions have these in the core game). More practically, OtB also came with a selection of new events, a greatly expanded set of role-cards for players and some additional modes you could add:

The Virulent Strain version of the game replaces the Epidemic Cards with new ones that have additional nasty effects which trigger when the epidemic happens – as these interact with the disease that has the most cubes in play at the time of the first epidemic, it can make for some interesting early-game decisions, as well as adding another level of depth.

The Mutation is a 5^th disease, with purple cubes – it only spawns via event cards, but as it has far fewer cubes available, it’s much easier to run out of if you’re not paying attention, as well as adding a 5^th requirement for victory (i.e. all 5 diseases must be cured).

The Bio-Terrorist crosses Pandemic with Scotland Yard, as one player skulks around the map in secret (tracked via pencil and paper) trying to spread disease whilst the others seek to hunt him down. In the 4 or 5 years we’ve owned the expansion, this is the one module we’ve never tried.

Aside: Printing –

On the Brink was the only expansion made for the first printing of the game – it was then re-released with new graphic design, meaning that anyone wanting to mix in future expansions either needed to re-buy the game, or sleeve all their cards. There was definitely a good argument for a new printing: the player pawns for the original game were massive, and look slightly comical next to those from the expansions, but the card-backs change was a pain. We weren’t keen enough on the game to re-buy, or to sleeve, and this was what broke the chain of expansion-buying for us.

 

In The Lab was the second expansion, and it extended the existing modes – new events, virulent strain epidemics, player roles etc, – as well as adding a whole new board that added to the complexity of curing a disease. Rather than simply discarding 5 cards of the disease’s colour at a research station, you now have to sample and sequence the disease, then treat it later. The general consensus is that this is a thematic improvement (apart from those who object to the “gene-slicer” job title), without massively impacting the difficulty: ItL requires less card-trading, as you can spread the burden of having to amass a set of 5, but that’s balanced by the extra actions spent in the lab doing your research.

In the Lab also introduced an official Solo version of the game, although being a co-op, there was never anything stopping you from controlling two characters and playing by yourself anyway.

 

State of Emergency was the third, and (probably?) final expansion for the base game, before they went all in on expanding in new directions. Again there were new roles, new events, and some extra modules to add new ways to play the game: a superbug to make the Purple disease more terrifying, Quarantine zones, some additional (negative) event cards shuffled in to the deck and even “Hinterlands” to represent human-animal infection. This last can seem a bit tacked-on, until you read the designer’s rather detailed explanation

There’s certainly interesting content in this expansion, and a lot of people have plenty of good things to say about it. The modularity from earlier boxes is retained so you can mix-and-match elements which make things easier or harder

I think the release order is probably the buy order for Pandemic expansions. If you have a particular fondness for the theme, you might get SoE ahead of ItL. If you’re only getting one, I’d say go for On The Brink.

 

Same Brand, Different Game

Aside from the straight-forward expansions, the Pandemic concept has been taken in a few different directions:

Pandemic: The Cure is a 2014 dice-based version of Pandemic. It’s meant to be lighter and quicker than standard Pandemic. Being a dice game, there’s obviously a fairly high degree of luck involved, but that fact that you can re-roll your dice (right up until you roll a “Bio-Hazard”, which not only loses you the dice, but also causes other nasty effects) gives you decisions to make, even if they are of a risk/reward, push-your-luck type.

This is the one to get if you want a lighter, quicker, slightly more abstract Pandemic.

 

Pandemic: Contagion

As I mentioned above, the Bio-terrorist role is one we’ve never bothered with. Clearly though, somebody out there wanted to be bad-guys, and they got their chance with Pandemic Contagion, which allowed them to play as the diseases themselves! In Contagion, you can take actions to increase the nastiness of your disease, or you can unleash it upon the world. Various cities will be in play throughout the game, and when they reach a certain level of disease, they fall, giving points to the diseases who caused them the most damage.

Unlike the rest of the Pandemic series, Contagion isn’t co-operative. I’ve also heard some concerns raised about whether the theme is in bad taste, although to be honest, this is also the most abstract of the Pandemic games I’ve played, so you could glaze over a lot of that if it bothered you.

 

Legacy

As I’ve already mentioned, Pandemic has been around for a while, and was a fairly popular, fairly well-rated game, without really setting the world alight. Last year however, was when things really exploded.

2015 brought us Pandemic: Legacy, a massively popular and controversial product which ultimately climbed to #1 rank on Board Game Geek.

Where classic Pandemic started from scratch each time you played it, Pandemic: Legacy is a campaign game that takes you through a year: Each game represents a month (if you win, you advance to the next month, if you fail you can have a second try.)  The key thing though, is that over the course of the year, the world will change. Failure or success in one game will directly impact what happens in future games – cities may undergo permanent changes and even your character will change, gaining skills or becoming traumatised by the things they have seen.

For many this is the greatest thing to happen in modern board gaming (hence that #1 rank which needs not only a very high average rating, but also LOTS of ratings), for others it’s sacrilege as you write on the game components, open sealed packs, and generally mark the game in such a way that no future game would be the same.

I won’t go into too much detail, as I recently got in trouble for detailing too many spoilers. Let’s just say that everything I’ve heard on the gameplay for this has been really positive, the only question-mark is the price point

[I wasn’t going to get into this again, but I go back and forward on Legacy: It’s a £50 game (ish) With 2 players, completing the game in the minimum 12 sessions, that’s around £2.25 per person per session, which compares fairly favourably with most other non-free entertainment. If you get a 4-player group, and play 18 games (assuming you fail to win a month ½ the time), you’re at about 75p per player per game. Despite all that, I still don’t know that I can bring myself to deface my own game…]

Legacy Season 2

Given the success of Legacy Season 1, it was inevitable that Season 2 would eventually follow. This was a Post-Apocalyptic setting, where players are concerned with discovering corners of the world that have been lost, and keeping the surviving cities supplied with food, water etc.

Definitely the biggest departure from the basic Pandemic model, you can find a full review I wrote of this.

Reign of Cthulhu

Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu. raised a lot of eyebrows as Pandemics jump-the-shark moment when it was first announced.

Fortunately, it turned out to actually be a really good game. Rather than warding off illness around the world whilst you try to cure 4 diseases, this game sees players keeping cultists and Shoggoths at bay whilst trying to seal 4 gates in Arkham, Dunwich, Innsmouth and Kingsport. As you’d hope from any Cthulhu game, madness played a big role.

 

Iberia

Pandemic Iberia returns to the classic goal of disease prevention, but takes you to Spain in the 19^th Century, where you can trek through the hills as a rural doctor, or develop the infrastructure as a railway engineer. It presents its own unique challenge and, most importantly, you can build railways.

Rising Tide

Continuing the tradition that started with Iberia, we got another Pandemic game late in 2017, themed around that year’s World Championship location. Rising Tide challenges you to save the Netherlands from flooding. Lots of pieces, a tiny bit fiddly, but definitely offering a unique challenge.

 

Conclusion

So that’s the world of Pandemic. If you’ve never played any of them, I’d definitely recommend giving at least one of them a go, and as you can see, there are plenty of options if you like what you see.

UK Games Expo 2016: A few thoughts

3 -5 June saw the NEC in Birmingham play host to the UK Games Expo. For anyone unfamiliar with it, the Expo is the UK gaming event, playing host to national championships for many games, allowing emerging designers to show their creations to new audiences, giving us a sneak-peek at new creations from more established brands, offering a bring-and-buy for your mistaken purchases from last year, and generally being choc-full of all the things a gamer could want. The event was running for its tenth year, and for the first time, it had graduated from the hotels to one of the actual exhibition halls itself. Today I just wanted to offer a few thoughts on my experiences there.

 

My Way In

This was my 3^rd UKGE. I first went in 2009, when it was still a comparatively new event, to play in a couple of tournaments (Command and Colours Ancients, and Memoir ’44 – I finished second in one of them, although I can no longer recall which). There was then a long hiatus before last year, when I went back on the Friday and Sunday for the Dice Masters tournament, missing out on the top 8 in the Nationals thanks to my own inability to remember what energy-type one of my cards was (for anyone interested, my opponent had Venom fielded, who gave all my non-fist characters -2A -2D. Forgetting that Black Widow is fist energy, and thus unaffected, I thought that she had between 0 and 1 defence, which led to her getting repeatedly KO-ed before she could do anything)

Having previously always been a paying customer, this year was a bit different, as I was going to be working the weekend, doing game demonstration. This meant I had to be there for pretty-much the entirety of the 3 days, but also meant that I didn’t have to pay to park/get in, and got fed, which are all definite bonuses.

 

The Gateway

The banner somewhat undermines my ongoing attempt not to name the company I do the demoing for, so I should reiterate that they are probably not aware of, and certainly do not endorse this blog.

I started doing games demonstration last autumn, and notched up a handful of days’ experience, mostly in high-street shops, trying to attract the attention of focused passers-by with nothing more than a tin of Dobble. This time, at a convention, would be a little different: for one thing, you’d hope that people at Games Expo would be a bit more sold on the concept of games to begin with. There were also about 60 of us, rather than the typical 2 or 3, and we were demoing a wide range of games, mostly with much longer play-times.

I was on the “gateway” section – games which the powers-that-be felt every gamer should have tried at least once. It contained a fair mixture, from a very fiddly, heavy Euro game in Peurto Rico, down to the very quick and simple, like 6 Nimmt. I had played most before (Stone Age, Jamaica and Tsuro were the only ones which had never crossed my radar, and Tsuro was very quick to pick up), although I found myself stationed in the corner with St Petersburg and Puerto Rico for most of the weekend, as nobody else on the team knew St Petersburg, and our Peurto Rico ‘expert’ was nabbed by the FFG team, to demo a Star Wars game.

The Gateway games section is definitely an interesting place to work. For one thing, you get a lot of “Hmm, I think I’ve already played all of these before” to which the response is probably a polite version of “that’s the point!” – I considered telling people they weren’t allowed to try any other games until they’d completed the gateway section, but wasn’t sure whether they’d appreciate the humour or not. It’s also difficult to know how to respond to negative views on the game “Huh, Puerto Rico was kind of fiddly, shame they couldn’t have made it a bit more streamlined” (they have: it’s called San Juan!”) Overall, it was actually kind of fun.

The Dangers of Crowds

As anyone who read last week’s article will know, large gatherings of gamers (or, indeed, any other type of people) are necessarily my thing. At 25,000 visits from 12,500 unique attendees, UKGE was always going to be pushing the limits.

I signed up to do this weekend many months back (I think it was late 2015), and my feelings about it had fluctuated over time. Having had a very difficult week last week health-wise, I’d spent a lot of the time dreading the whole experience, feeling that I’d left it too late to pull out, and generally getting in a bit of a state over the whole thing.

Friday didn’t start much better in this respect. The first hour or so was very quiet, which typically leaves the demo-er with two options: either stand around doing nothing, or approach people and invite them to play the games – simple enough in theory, but an activity with a fairly low success rate – “Maybe later, I just want to have a wander round first” was the standard answer. Not ideal for someone already on the verge of a panic attack. I think I spent most of the first few hours trying to remember whether I had extra anxiety medication with me, or whether I’d left it in the car.

Thankfully, things picked up, and by lunch-time we were busy, meaning that I spent most of my time explaining games, rather than just hovering awkwardly. I checked some games into the Bring & Buy on my lunch break, had a first glance at some of the stands, and was generally feeling a lot better.

By the end of Friday, I was already fairly shattered, and sufficiently emotionally and physically exhausted to be completely flattened by the next unexpected twist.

The company paying us to do the demonstrations was feeding us for the weekend, and putting us up in hotel rooms on site. Shared rooms. If you think about it, this is blindingly obvious: most hotel rooms are not designed for single-occupancy, and the cost of putting everyone by themselves would be astronomical. However, it was an obvious event that I had completely failed to plan for: I’d established by process of elimination that I would not be sharing with either of the two guys I knew beforehand, and (mentally) collapsed: I told the line manager I’d drive home each night instead (it’s just under an hour door-to-door in good traffic), then spent an hour hanging around in a state of general despair, feeling angry at myself for my inability to cope with the situation and, waiting to get my parking validated.

Tsuro. Significantly more fun than a panic-attack

Come 6.30, parking got sorted, and I was also given the standard allowance of meal vouchers. Knowing that the rest of my family would already have eaten, I grabbed a bite to eat from the vans, chatted to people for a bit, and generally felt a whole lot better. One of the most annoying things about suffering chronic depression and anxiety, is failing to spot the difference between an attack of a diagnosed condition, and just really needing some food. I hung around for another couple of hours, played some games, then drove home, ready to collapse into bed.

By Saturday, the whole experience was a lot more familiar, and I had a decent rhythm going. Apart from a few minor issues (including one rule for Puerto Rico which we were teaching wrong all weekend), I felt comfortable with the games I was supposed to be explaining and it turned out that the other demo-ers were human after all, and easy to hang around with outside of working hours to chat and game.

Visions of Things Unseen

Aside from getting paid to go to Expo, there are other benefits to doing work for the UK’s main game distributor. After a stern series of warnings (may be paraphrasing, but in my head it was somewhere along-the-lines of “return this in perfect condition, or be shot at dawn”) a friend managed to borrow a preview copy of Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu for the Saturday evening. This won’t be released for another month or so and, aside from the dozen copies being raffled over the weekend, is basically the only one in the UK right now, so this was a big deal.

After much wandering round and round the hotel (about an hour all-told) trying to find a table not already filled by gamers, we finally tracked down a place to set up, and embarked on our mission to seal the Gates before all of the Old Ones could awake and Cthulhu could destroy the world. It’s not an exaggeration for this to be called a Pandemic Game, and there are lots of similarities to spot (“oh so cultists are disease cubes then…”), but based on our one play-through this does feel like they’ve done a really good job of producing a game that’s different enough to be worth bothering with.

The mechanic for trading cards is less irritating than original Pandemic, Awakening an Old One is more interesting and involved than simply suffering an outbreak, and the way that characters can go insane, with their abilities changed by the experience feels very thematic. Fittingly, I was the only one to actually go insane on the night (my character, not her controller), but we managed to eke out a last-gasp win. All-in-all, good fun, and I look forward to playing it (or reviewing it: hint, hint Dan or Nigel if you’re reading this…) when it’s released properly.

The Show Must Go On

When I wasn’t working, I did manage to spend a few hours looking round the show itself. I managed to meet up with some people I’d only ever communicated with online before (although between my phone being useless and me driving back to Nottingham each night, we didn’t get any gaming sessions in together) and it’s always nice to be able to put names to faces. I managed to sell some of the dead wood (well, card and plastic) from my games collection at the bring and buy, which cleared some shelf-space at home – more on that in June’s Gaming Challenges update. I also had a chance to briefly sample a few new games coming from independent designers. Dungeon Crawlers seem to be all the rage at the moment, and I took a punt on Side Quest, and made a mental note to keep an eye out for Legends Untold. Again, I think Dungeon Crawling needs an article of its own sometime soon.

 

Final Thoughts

In the end, for a weekend that looked like it was going to kick off with a complete breakdown, I actually had quite a good time. I’m definitely glad that I’d booked the Monday off work to recover, and for that reason alone, I couldn’t do this sort of thing every weekend. The rest of the team I worked with were definitely a major part of this, all friendly, open, helpful folk. Hopefully in future years, with a bit more advance-planning, and the fact that I’ve met a lot of people now, I’d manage to actually stay over and get the full 3-day Expo experience.

I wouldn’t say that it was a perfect con by any stretch of the imagination. The signposting at the NEC is terrible, there was a disappointing lack of bins, and at £12 per day just for parking, I’d have to seriously consider whether I could afford to go to something like this if I were paying my own costs. Probably the biggest pain was the difficulty of finding some free space in the evening for gaming. Overall though, I think UKGE is a great thing, with a good mix between familiar games and new, between just trying things out and playing at the highest level – it’s a slight shame that the tournaments take far too long for anyone to really do that AND get a deep experience of the show, but that’s just the reality of life. Expo does a great job with what it has to work with. Long may it continue, and I’ll probably see some of you there in 2017…

None of Some (Again)

So, May has been and gone, and with it, very little movement on the game challenges.

The 10-plays challenge is still sat at 8 different games, and whilst there are others heading in the right direction, there is nothing particularly near. As I’ve said before, this challenge isn’t one that worries me particularly. Playing 2 games 10 times in 7 months doesn’t feel like too big a challenge, and between upcoming things, and games that are already hovering around the 4 or 5 mark, I’m sure I’ll get there.

Perhaps more worryingly, the zero plays list also remained largely undisturbed this month – nothing made it to the table which hadn’t done so before, although it was somewhat refreshing to see games like Dixit which started the year on the endangered list getting a repeat run-out.

Overall it was a comparatively quiet month for gaming – I spent quite a bit of time painting Zombicide Minis, and my wife does a second job around May/June time, which can cut into the number of gaming sessions that take place.

 

Making Room

What I did decide it was time to do though, was to start moving on some of the un-played games, the ones which I knew were never really going to make it to the table. I listed a handful on a Facebook group, and managed to shift a grand total of 1.

Test subject #1

There are other components, but I didn’t want to risk damaging the game 5 minutes before sticking it in the post…

Monkey Dash is a game I picked up at UK Game Expo several years ago (the internet tells me it was 2009). It’s a really cute little game where you have to manoeuvre crates into a line so that your pet monkey can escape from the banana factory where you work before the supervisor arrives (and sees the monkey, resulting in you getting fired on the spot). The only problem is, the other player is also trying to extricate their own monkey, so as fast as you drag the crates into a line, they will be dragging them away again.

I played this quite a few times when I first got it. I loved the theme, thought the mechanics were clever, it was fairly quick, and above all – Monkeys!

Everyone else though, seemed to feel differently. It’s a two-player, head-to-head game with very little luck involved, and that generally isn’t something which goes down well in our house (something I was only starting to realise back then). After the first few weeks, I just couldn’t find anyone to play this with.

So it sat, on the shelves for 7 years (wow. It sounds like a really long time, when I put it that way…) I’ve moved house twice in that time period, and would have carted this with me each time.

Ironically, having listed games to free up space, and get some cash to use expanding games I do play (all the Zombicide add-ons are going to land soon), I didn’t even end up selling it! Instead, I’ve traded it for another game, which will no doubt be arriving soon. Swamped I understand, is a game about crocodiles, lamentably inferior to monkeys, but it is a cooperative game, so hopefully it will get some more play time.

Letting Go

Getting rid of Monkey Dash was clearly a sensible thing to do (see above for the not-played-in-nearly-seven-years), but it was harder than I expected. As I was talking to the guy who took it off me, I found myself wanting to hold on to it. Even after I’d agreed the deal, part of me wanted to change my mind (he’s posted his half now, so I can’t back out).

Perhaps it was due to my irrational attachment to all things monkey-related, perhaps it’s just that fear of seller’s remorse: after all, it rarely works out that you can re-buy the game without spending more than you made. Either way, I never expected there to be an emotional wrench to getting rid of games.

My games collection is fairly big as it stands, and in all likelihood I’ll be getting more games in the future, whether it be by old-fashioned purchasing, review copies, or even winning a game in a competition (that happened this week! – although it’s a Kickstarter copy, so I’m kind of hazy on the details of when/how I get it). Unless I start dispensing with furniture, I’m going to have to shift some more things in the coming weeks and months – we shall see whether it gets any easier, and I’ll keep you all posted of anything interesting that happens.