What on earth is an H-Index?

One of the more unusual gaming discoveries I made in the first part of July was of another games blogger out there who was even more number-obsessed than I was.

Via a post on Board Game Geek, I found my way to an article which went into great detail about something called an H-Index. Since then I’ve found various other links which suggest that this is actually quite a common thing for game-stat-geeks to look at.

Without even realising it, I’d been making reference to something resembling an H-Index for a while, when doing my monthly updates on the 10 of 10 challenge.

If you want to read the full explanation, you can do so over on the original blog, but broadly speaking, an H-index looks at N games played N times – so if you’ve played 3 games 3 times (or more), your H-Index is 3. It’s a measuring system that works in squares, so if you had 100 games played 3 times, or 3 games played 100 times, you’d still only have an H-Index of 3, until a 4^th game reached 4 plays.

As I said, I’d used what was essentially an H-Index in tracking the 10 of 10 challenge through its early stages, because there was generally more of interest to say about 6 of 6 (for example) than “still 3 games at 10, no others have got there yet” but I was a bit uncertain last year what to track after I reached 10 of 10 – did I go for 11 of 11? Or did I just keep track of 10s?

I like the H-Index model, and will use it going forward – I’m currently at 11 for 2017, as even though 13 games have been played 10 or more times, several are still sat on 10 or 11.

Looking back over the years I’ve kept records, I was able to put together lists for 2015, 2016, 2017 (so far) and “all time”(since Christmas 2014) – this was what I got.

The “Big 4” – all appearing on each individual year, and the all-time lists.

2015 –    H7

Pathfinder ACG, Lord of the Rings LCG, Dice Masters, Marvel Legendary, Game of Thrones LCG (2^nd Ed), Machi Koro, Mapominoes

 

2016 –    H13

Zombicide: Black Plague, Pathfinder, Lord of the Rings LCG, Dice Masters, Marvel Legendary, Game of Thrones LCG (2^nd Ed), Mansions of Madness, Arkham Horror LCG, Elder Sign, Zombie Dice, Legendary Encounters Firefly, Beyond Baker Street, Dominion

 

2017 –    H11

Lord of the Rings LCG, Arkham Horror LCG, Pathfinder ACG, Zombicide: Black Plague, Elder Sign, Dice Masters, Aeon’s End, Dominion, Marvel Legendary, Eldritch Horror, Dungeon Time

 

All-Time – H17

Pathfinder ACG, Lord of the Rings LCG, Dice Masters, Marvel Legendary, Zombicide: Black Plague, Game of Thrones LCG (2^nd Ed), Arkham Horror LCG, Elder Sign, Dominion, Mansions of Madness, Mapominoes, Machi Koro, Beyond Baker Street, Zombie Dice, Aeon’s End, Star Wars Destiny, Yggdrasil

 

All-time: How we got there

The guy who wrote the blog article has also tracked the intervals between moving up a level on the H-index – this was a bit more awkward to extract the numbers for, but eventually I got to something that looked a bit like this…

The first game played after I started keeping records…

1              Mapomines        25/12/14

2              Mapominoes, Yggdrasil                 27/12/14

3              Pathfinder, Yggdrasil, Mapominoes         28/12/14

4              Pathfinder, LotR, Dice Masters, Pit           8/3/15

5              Pathfinder, LotR, Dice Masters, Mapominoes, Coup        12/5/15

6              Pathfinder, LotR, Dice Masters, Mapominoes, Dominion, Machi Koro      26/6/15

7              Pathfinder, LotR, Dice Masters, Legendary, AGoT, Machi Koro, Mapominoes      18/10/15

8              Pathfinder, LotR, Dice Masters, Legendary, AGoT, Mapominoes, Machi Koro, Curse of the Black Dice                15/3/17

9              Pathfinder, LotR, Dice Masters, Legendary, AGoT, Zombicide, Mapominoes, Machi Koro, Curse of the Black Dice                       25/3/16

10           Pathfinder, LotR, Dice Masters, Legendary, AGoT, Zombicide, Mapominoes, Machi Koro, Dobble, Curse of the Black Dice                    28/5/16

11           Pathfinder, LotR, Dice Masters, Legendary, AGoT, Zombicide, Mapominoes, Machi Koro, Dobble, Bananagrams, Dominion               15/7/16

12           Pathfinder, LotR, Dice Masters, Legendary, Zombicide, AGoT, Machi Koro, Mapominoes, Dominion, Boggle, Bananagrams, Yggdrasil 21/9/16

13           Pathinfder, LotR, Dice Masters, Legendary, Zombicide, AGoT, Machi Koro, Mapominoes, Mansions of Madness, Dominion, Yggdrasil, Boggle, Bananagrams      8/10/16

14           Pathfinder, LotR, Dice Masters, Legendary, Zombicide, AGoT, Mapominoes, Machi Koro, Mansions, Arkham LCG, Dominion, Elder Sign, Yggdrasil, Zombie Dice             2/12/16

15           Pathfinder, LotR, Dice Masters, Legendary, Zombicide, AGoT, Mapominoes, Arkham LCG, Machi Koro, Elder Sign, Mansions, Dominion, Zombie Dice, Destiny, Bananagrans  29/1/17

16           Pathfinder, LotR, Dice Masters, Legendary, Zombicide, AGoT, Elder Sign, Mapominoes, Machi Koro, Arkham LCG, Mansions, Dominion, Zombie Dice, Yggdrasil, Dobble, Bananagrams              27/2/17

17           Pathfinder, LotR, Dice Masters, Legendary, Zombicide, AGoT, Arkham LCG, Elder Sign, Mansions, Mapominoes, Machi Koro, Zombie Dice, Dominion, Yggdrasil, Beyond Baker Street, Dobble, Bananagrams                19/3/17

18

After the first 3, this follows a fairly steady, mostly linear progression, albeit with a few bumps here and there – it seems fairly common for there to be a long period without an increase, then going up 2 levels in fairly short order.

21 games total have appeared on the all-time H-list, with some coming in at lower levels then ducking out again, whilst others have been firmly entrenched for the duration. This is the full list, with the games in Red being ones that have previously appeared but have dipped out.

Ready to make a comeback?

AGoT, Arkham LCG, Bananagrams, Beyond Baker Street, Boggle, Coup, Curse of the Black Dice, Dice Masters, Dobble, Dominion, Elder Sign, Legendary, LotR, Machi Koro, Mansions of Madness, Mapominoes, Pathfinder, Pit, Star Wars Destiny, Yggdrasil, Zombicide, Zombie Dice

Of these, Curse of the Black Dice and Destiny have both gone, whilst Pit and Coup are languishing on 6 and 7 plays respectively. Boggle is probably the only one that could realistically hope to re-enter the H-index in the future (although the shaking at the start is a bit noisy if the baby’s napping…)

The plays of these 17 games account for 74% of all sessions logged

Fortunately, there are plenty of other games either already just short of 18 plays, or due to land in the future that I hope will keep this ticking along – I’ll keep revisiting it as I go…

 

2017

The 2017 list is slightly harder to organise chronologically with only monthly data: reaching H-5 in January tends to lump everything together somewhat!

For a while in January, I was only playing games that began with “El” – only 1 apiece though…

The 11 games currently on the list account for 53% of the year’s gaming, so just over half,

2017

1              Elder Sign            1/1/17

2              Zombicide, Destiny         4/1/17

3              Legendary, Zombicide Elder Sign               13/1/17

4              Legendary, Destiny, Elder Sign, Zombicide            21/1/17

5              Zombicide, Eldritch Horror, Destiny, Arkham, Elder Sign 29/1/17

6              Elder Sign, Zombicide, LotR LCG, Destiny, Dice Masters, Eldritch 26/2/17

7              Elder Sign, LotR, Zombicide, Dice Masters, Destiny, Legendary, Arkham 7/3/17

8              Elder Sign, LotR, Zombicide, Arkham, Legendary, Aeon’s End, Pathfinder, Dice Masters  26/3/17

9              Elder Sign, LotR LCG, Zombicide, Arkham, Dice Masters, Aeon’s End, Pathfinder, Eldritch, Legendary,                4/4/17

10           LotR LCG, Arkham, Elder Sign, Aeon’s End, Pathfinder, Zombicide, Dice Masters, Eldritch, Legendary, Destiny                30/4/17

11           LotR LCG, Arkham, Zombicide, Elder Sign, Pathfinder, Dice Masters, Aeon’s End, Legendary, Dominion, Eldritch, Dungeon Time                 25/6/17

 

This follows a much more standard distribution curve, rising sharply at the start, where a game only needs playing once or twice, then levelling off over time. Interestingly, these games only account for 52% of all sessions logged so far this year, which suggest a fair few other games hovering just outside the top.

Aeon’s End, Arkham, Destiny, Dice Masters, Dominion, Dungeon Time, Elder Sign, Eldritch, Legendary, LotR LCG, Pathfinder, Zombicide,

Only 12 different games so far have counted towards this index of 11, with Destiny being the exception that dropped off the edge – I’ve given up on the rather punishing Destiny release schedule (coupled with a very high price-point), but I’m optimistic that Mansions of Madness and/or Runewars will make it up to 12 for the year sometime soon.

 

 

Timed

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about time: about hours of gaming rather than sessions, as a more useful measure of how much a game gets played. Using the approximate session-lengths I’ve estimated for most of my games, it seems that 10 games have clocked up 10 hours so far in 2017: Zombicide, Eldritch Horror, Arkham LCG, Aeon’s End, Elder Sign, Mansions of Madness, LotR LCG, Runewars Miniatures, Pathfinder, Legendary. – I don’t imagine it will take all that long to add another couple to this list, but much beyond 12 or 13 is likely to be difficult.

 

Going all the way back to Christmas 2014, I can get to 14 games played for 14+ hours – Pathfinder, Zombicide, LotR LCG, Dice Masters, Legendary, Mansions of Madness, Eldritch Horror, Arkham LCG, Game of Thrones LCG, Elder Sign, Machi Koro, Yggdrasil, Aeon’s End, Dominion – I can see myself getting up to 15 fairly shortly, but beyond that it’s likely to be a struggle (to pick one example sitting just outside the 14-hour mark, 2 hours of Mapominoes is quite a lot of games)

 

Hopefully some of you are still awake (you should have guessed this was coming when I published a mostly-pictures article earlier in the week), and will be back to join me next time. I’ll have the July re-cap at the beginning of August, but if you’re lucky I might manage another proper article before then too…

Monsters of the Mansions: Part II – The Investigators

I’m aware that this blog has a habit of getting a bit number-crunch heavy at times, lots of theory, and not a lot of board game.

As part of an ongoing attempt to stem this tide of text, I try periodically to introduce some more visual content, looking at my efforts with the Paintbrush.

Today I’m going to return to Mansions of Madness- I did a painted low-down of the base game back in the autumn, and today I want to look at some of the expansions.

Suppressed Memories and Recurring Nightmares were 2 boxes that provided the tiles and figures of Mansions of Madness 1^st edition for 2^nd edition players – they disappointed some 2^nd-edition fans with their lack of scenario/card content, but they way that they extend the range of Investigators and Monsters at your disposal made them a must-have for me.

Sadly, I can’t really get the pens in focus – that’s how detailed they are!

Between the 2 boxes, there were no fewer than 16 new Investigators made available. Some of them were really nice figures to paint, and I was really pleased with some of the details, like the creases on Kate Winthrop’s lab-coat, and the pens in her pocket.

The Guys

Generally speaking, the male investigators in Mansions of Madness tend to be less interesting to paint – Darrell the Photographer, and Bob the Salesman particularly fade into the background, although figures like Dexter the Magician and Monterey the Archaeologist have a bit more of the unusual going for them.

There are also a few rather more dynamic male investigators appearing in these boxes – Michael the Gangster and Joe the PI both come out all guns blazing – Joe feels a little bit over the top to me, but I like Michael’s scope, and he’s a fun investigator for scenarios that have a heavy focus on monster-bashing.

Relying more on mind than body, the next 2 male investigators are Vincent the Doctor, and Harvey the Professor – a lot more brown in the palette for these men (there’s no way I was going to paint Tweed pattern on something that size). I also liked Vincent’s Saw – definitely the approach to medicine you expect your Arkham Investigator to take.

Of course, no Arkham Investigators set would be complete without everyone’s favourite Arkham LCG Investigator, Duke, who comes to Mansions in the company of his faithful sidekick, Ashcan Pete.

Because Duke is so small, it’s quite difficult to get any meaningful detail onto his miniature (aside from the red scarf around his neck, but being the only dog in the set, he still stands out from the others quite well.

 

 

The Gals

Jenny Barnes is a character who takes quite a bit of flak from various members of our play-group, and you have to admit that her outfit looks better suited to society balls than creepy old houses. However, she’s a character with quite an interesting backstory, and very good utility in most of the different games, so I still wanted to do a good job on this one – the colour-scheme for her dress and hat vary across the different Arkham Files games, but on personal preference I went for the blue rather than the purple end of the spectrum.

Gloria, the author was another fun one to paint- the shades of green weren’t that remarkable, but anyone who carries a typewriter like a handbag has done more than enough to catch my attention.

Sadly, this miniature arrived slightly damaged (leaning forward at quite a funny angle) and, although I’ve been able to correct it a bit with a hair-dryer and pot of cold water, there’s still a noticeable lean.

Amanda and Carolyn, the student and the Psychiatrist respectively, both have fairly blank outfits, but with a lot of utility in Elder Sign and Eldritch Horror, I still wanted the figures to look good – they certainly aren’t the stand-outs of the bunch (Amanda’s glasses are way too dark/thick-framed), but I think they’re passable.

Sister Mary, like Father Matteo from the 2^nd Edition core box, appears in clerical robes, and I decided to follow FFG’s illustrations with a brown colour-scheme, rather than black and white, which leaves them looking a bit less similar to one another.

 

Last, but by no means least comes Mandy, the Researcher – this was a really difficult figure to paint, combining my two pet peeves from this range of figures – glasses and excessively detailed shoes. Overall though, I was quite pleased with the end result, particularly when viewed from a table-top gaming distance: the dark wash bringing out the detail lines in the jacket really well.

 

That’s about it for today – I want to aim more towards little and often with these pieces, but hopefully I’ll be back soon with some more Monsters

Pecunia populi vox dei

(based on very rusty GCSE Latin, “The Money of the People is the Voice of God”)

Monopoly is a rubbish game. It often makes me sad that a lot of people think that’s what Board Gaming is.

Lots of other games aren’t rubbish, but they’re not for me. Rising Sun, a recent CMON Kickstarter, is a Diplomacy-style game of shifting alliances and careful negotiation for 3-5. Not playable with 2 (or 1), not cooperative, it was never going to be something for us.

That’s a shame – the Samurai + fantastical elements theme really caught my attention, and I monitored this one for a while, in the hope that they would announce some kind of variant / option that would bring it into scope. But they didn’t and I moved on.

(I will rely instead on a brief obsession with Legend of the Five Rings this summer autumn, poring over gorgeous artwork and lamenting the fact that I will never be able to afford to visit rural Japan, before that too gets abandoned like every other competitive LCG because I can’t get to down to the FLGS reliably enough to play regularly…) [/tangent]

 

Increasingly though, it seems like my approach to the campaign – watching hopefully, then resigning and moving on – is an unusual thing to do. More-and-more, the approach is to request, demand, or simply berate until a designer changes their mind to suit your tastes – or until you run out of energy and give up.

That process – which at best could be considered constructive feedback and collaboration, and at worst descends into entitled sulking and name-calling, is what I want to look at today. How does the creative process for a game on Kickstarter differ from any other game?

 

Finished?

The thing about making a game through Kickstarter (or any other form of crowd-funding), is that you’re not just presenting people with a finished product, you’re asking them to invest in a concept.

Now for a good Kickstarter, that concept will be very well thought-out, extensively play-tested and soforth: having good gameplay videos, or a review copy in the hands of a well-known games-blogger are both major elements in ensuring the success of a Kickstarter. Still, the fact remains that you haven’t actually made it yet, and that gives people the impression that things are still up for grabs.

It’s also worth saying that (officially) people on Kickstarter aren’t just buying a game, they are investing in your idea – and that will give a lot of them the sense that they now have a right to tell you how to make your game.

Going back through the Rising Sun threads [On Board Game Geek – I lack the sanity to wade through 34k+ KS comments], I was actually surprised at how few there were clamouring for a co-op version, but there were still plenty of threads demanding 2-player options, less “racist” language and iconography (some in the game itself, but mostly in the marketing) more properly-dressed female figures, more mostly-undressed female figures and so on.

Obviously, looking at it from the outside, with a little bit of cold detachment, you can see how ridiculous it is for one person to cancel their $100 pledge as a protest at the way a $4.5 million project is being run – my personal favourite thread was this one.

I think there’s certainly a lot more chatter these days about any not-yet-released game, and how the fans think the designers should make it better, than there used to be. Still, it feels like Kickstarting a game gives people a sense that they have more of a right to tell you how to make your game to suit them.

Done right, the interaction between designer and backer can be a good channel for market research, and have some sensible benefits. For example the Aeon’s End: War Eternal campaign offered an add-on pack with dice to use as life-counters, and it seems to have largely been down to Kickstarter comments that these will now be spin-down dice (adjacent numbers next to each other). However, when you start to believe that $100 gives you the right to tell a company that their entire business model is wrong, it may be time to stop and think for a moment.

 

Investment or Pre-order?

Notionally, Kickstarter is still about investing in an idea – Creators pitch that idea to backers, and offer them bonuses for investing now and making that project happen, rather than waiting for retail.

In reality, the scope of what a project is, is a lot broader than that. At one end of the scale, Cool Mini Or Not are one of the biggest Kickstarter producers, and a lot of people have commented on the fact that a CMON Kickstarter can feel a lot more like a simple pre-order than like a proper project to back an otherwise infeasible project. You expect delays, but it would be a major shock if a CMON Kickstarter failed to deliver altogether.

If I pre-order a game from the FLGS, I don’t expect to be able to influence how that game comes packaged, or how it plays and, if that’s the case, I shouldn’t have any more expectation that I can do so when pre-ordering online.

But, however much it might look, or feel like that, a Kickstarter project is still (officially) not just a pre-order, even when it’s a $4 million project with a projected delivery time-frame of only 3 months (looking at you Gloomhaven). In that context, people are always going to ask for additional things they want.

Behind the Scenes?

Most big Kickstarter projects these days will have a fairly complex marketing strategy, designed to ensure a strong start, retain interest over the course of the campaign, and hopefully generate a last-minute surge. This will lead to a broad sprinkling of updates and stretch goals, with information being held back and released at strategic moments.

One issue with this limited flow of information, is that it makes it very difficult to say with certainty what was prepared before the campaign began, and what was only added late in the day, as a response to ongoing feedback – was stretch goal #10 really a response to what people were clamouring for? Or just a happy opportunity for the creator to add a bit of spin, when announcing something that they had had planned all along.

Zombicide: Green Horde had a mammoth campaign, which finished recently in dramatic fashion, breaking the $5 million barrier with 2 minutes left!! Unlike previous editions of Zombicide, Green Horde features hedges and barricades – some hedges printed on the terrain boards, and a handful more represented by cardboard tokens that can be added as a scenario requires. The offer of a hedge-and-barrier pack to make these 3D was clearly planned all along. When people then clamoured for the opportunity to buy more hedges (without extra barriers), so that they could replace all the hedges, (not just the token ones) with 3D models, I’m prepared to believe that CMON genuinely did re-think their plans, and offer more of the same components in a slightly different arrangement.

By contrast, from very early on, there were lots of people who wanted a crossover pack to use their Green Horde figures in Massive Darkness – sure enough it was unveiled in the final week of the campaign, prompting a little surge in pledges. That doesn’t mean for a moment that I think CMON didn’t have it planned all along, just a lot of experience in how to manage people’s interest in a KS campaign.

The point where I start to suspect that they may actually be making things up as they go along is when they announce new figures and don’t have sculpts ready for them – the 3D renders of the Ultimate Survivors in the Green Horde campaign hint at that for me, and ”Reptisaurians” (Lizard-men) from Massive Darkness came as concept art only – now they really look like something put together at the last moment. 

 

“Your chance to get involved!”

One area where it does seem easier to prove that the community are influencing the final product is when campaigns contain backer competitions: to take another recent example, the Aeon’s End: War Eternal campaign featured Board Game Geek competitions to name one card, and to write the flavour text for another. Now, obviously these are fairly minor (and crucially non-mechanical) tweaks to the game, but they do serve to foster a greater sense of involvement among backers.

Inviting comment is a double-edged sword though: for one thing, a lot of people were fairly disappointed with the outcome of some of these contests, especially as the creators seemed to simply pick their favourite from amongst the various suggestions, rather than allowing a public vote, or even basing their decision on the number of Likes and positive comments. At this point the cynic starts to wonder: was that a real member of the public who posted the winning suggestion? Or a fake account from the creators to ensure that they didn’t have to change anything as a result of their own competition (just to clarify, I don’t think that’s what happened here).

Backlash

Ultimately, the more Creators try to engage backers in the project, the more they open themselves up to criticism when they don’t change their game to suit the whims of the public. For every clever little fix the backers suggest, they can expect a whole handful of crackpot suggestions to re-design the game to do something completely different, to replace the components with Obsidian, or translate it into Klingon (not the same game – if they were replacing the components with Obsidian, then you would translate into Cardassian. Obviously.)

I think it’s also worth remembering that in all of these types of forums, it tends to be a vocal minority who do most of the commenting – this can lead to situations, where a dozen or so people clamour for something, and generate the impression of an irresistible tide of feeling, when 95% of people are happy with things as they are, and are just keeping quiet about it. Green Horde had over 100,000 comments by the time the campaign was over, but it wouldn’t surprise me for a moment to learn that at least half of those comments came from a dozen or so people. This is certainly my sense of what happened with Aeon’s End: the graphic design on the first edition was fine, but the people who liked it didn’t feel the need to post endless threads on BGG and the like demanding it be kept the same (why would you?) in this context, those who pressed for change would have sounded like an overwhelming majority.

Strangely, I couldn’t find the comment I was looking for amongst 105 thousand others!!

I think that listening to backers has the potential to be a great resource for Game Designers and Creators. However, mob rule is only going to get you an incoherent or perennially delayed game, and there must come a point where they know their own mind, and know when to stick with their decisions.

Like most backers, whilst I recognise that KS projects are not there to suit my every whim, I generally wish that communication was more frequent, and clearer. Even there though, Creators have better things to do than report on design and development events in minute detail, and sometimes a silence is just a silence.

 

That’s about all I wanted to touch on today, and it brings me to the end of this little mini-series on Kickstarter. I’m sure it’s an area I’ll touch on again, probably around the autumn, by which time (hopefully) I’ll actually have my hands on some of the various games I’ve backed.

Boards of June

If May was slow, then June was slower. Having to travel for various family birthdays, the continuing trials of a baby who hasn’t read the book on sleeping, re-organising my house to give said baby a room of his own and (ironically) a long weekend at the UK Games Expo all got in the way of some more regular gaming sessions.

 

UKGE

UK Games Expo is the biggest weekend in gaming in the UK, and one of the biggest in the world these days, and it’s always good to make it along to this.

Last year I was doing games demonstration, part of a big team that had grown even more this year, to the point where I believe they hit 100 demo-ers! This year I’d decided to head along with a slightly smaller party, joining the good folk from Games Quest.

It was certainly a gruelling time – long hours of fairly heavy physical work setting up on the Thursday, and an impromptu meeting in a hotel car-park on Friday night to unload a game that had accidentally made its way to Expo via Luxembourg. Saturday was the biggest day ever at UKGE in terms of attendees, and then the always long and wearying process of set-down / trying to figure out exactly what went where on Sunday before heading home.

Overall, it was a good weekend – aside from talking to a lot of people about a lot of board games, I also found myself on a stand that sold replica swords and magic wands. For anyone interested, Longclaw is quite nicely weighted (did I ever mention that I used to do sword-combat as a martial art?), but Needle feels better, if you know how to use a fencing blade properly. [disclaimer: all brandishing of swords was done when the hall was closed, and I wasn’t going to accidentally impale any passers-by].

I also got to have a bit of a look round, and a catch-up with the team behind one of the KS games I’m waiting on – unlike last year, I didn’t come away with any new games, but there were certainly a few things which caught my eye and I’ll be looking out for in the near future.

The only disappointment with the weekend was the amount of actual gaming that got done – I’d hoped to get in at least one session of Terraforming Mars (a game which sits firmly in the “looks interesting, but too expensive to try” bracket for me), but ultimately we only managed a single game of Skull and a few rounds of Codenames. That said, the final round of Codenames in particular was one of the funniest I’ve ever witnessed as the opposing spymaster gave a clue which everyone except his 2 teammates understood, then watched them blunder around for ten minutes before accidentally stumbling on the right answers via sheer dumb luck. [ok, you probably had to be there].

Expo was the first time I’d spent nights away from home since my son was born, and I ended up going back to join him (and my wife) at my in-laws house on Saturday night. I hope to make it back to Expo again next year, but am learning the folly of making long-term plans without getting the baby’s permission.

 

What got played?

My dad still doesn’t understand why everyone is laughing at his wall…

Bearing in mind the low overall level of gaming, June wasn’t too bad for crossing off games that had previously been unplayed – 3 days at my parents’ house ensured the inevitable dusting off of Mah Jong, and B-Sieged also made its first foray from shelf to table. I still have 15 unplayed games, some of which will be going up for sale soon, whilst others should get played reasonably soon.

There were a few fun new discoveries in June, perhaps the most surprising of which was Doom, a 1-vs-many board game from FFG, based on the computer game of the same name. I’d picked this up to review, and had expected to wheel it out to limited enthusiasm, possibly paint it, then sell it on, but found it went down surprisingly well. By contrast with The Others, a superficially similar game I reviewed last year, this game has a tight ruleset, streamlined gameplay and more customisation potential than you can shake a stick at. It’s not a short game by any means, but it still returned to the table, by request, on 2 out of the 3 nights following its initial introduction. The fact that it doesn’t lend itself well to 2-player means I’ll probably still end up moving it along, but an engaging diversion nonetheless.

 

Themes?

The rise of Doom also impacted the Theme and Mechanic break-downs for the month, with “Sci-Fi” and “Kill the Other side” being far more prominent than they have previously, (although “Kill the Other side” owes its prominence at least as much to Runewars). There was still a fair amount of the usual quest-completing-monster-beating-world-saving, but not in the overwhelming way it has been in the past. Lastly came the ever-helpful criteria that is “win,” which became a bigger element than normal.

Aside from that, Fantasy remains strong, with a sprinkling of Abstract, although it was a pretty lean month for all things Lovecraft – just a single session apiece for Mansions, Eldritch and Elder Sign, whilst Arkham LCG found itself caught in a lull as I tried to work out whether to re-build decks or wait for the next adventure (new deck arrived on the 29^th, but didn’t get a chance to play it before the month ended).

 

Overall thoughts

As we start to lurch towards something a bit like a routine, I get a distinct sense that the high levels of gaming we managed between January and April are phenomena of the past. Whilst I have hope that bed-times and regular naps might allow us to get a bit of structure back into life, a baby who is actually interested in the world around him takes more time and attention than one who basically lies around inert, and we’ve progressed much more rapidly to the grabbing stage of things.

The rather massive Kickstarter for Zombicide Green Horde (the successor to Black Plague) meant that June was the nearest I’ve come to admitting defeat in my attempts to have a negative overall spend on gaming for 2017: I’ve managed to claw things back towards zero by selling off a few unused odds and ends, but I’m still in the red right now.

Even if I don’t get back to negative spend, I don’t think that what I’ve spent looks at all shabby when compared to the hundreds of hours of gaming we’ve had (not to mention dozens of hours painting).

Right now my spending on gaming this year is up a fair bit on last year (69% of the spend after only 49% of the time), but with sales already at 131% of last year, I don’t think I’d be too worried, even if I didn’t know that most (hopefully all) of 2017’s bank-breaking Kickstarters were behind me.

I’ll continue to monitor my collection, and am already starting to consider moving along one or two favourites that others don’t share my enthusiasm for, and which I struggle to get to the table.

Whatever happens, I’ll keep gaming as much as I can, and when I have anything (hopefully) interesting to say, and the time to say it, I’ll keep posting on here.