Monday, September 28, 2015

30 Games in 30 Days (Into the Home Stretch!)

For the month of September I have decided to play a different game with the family (or at least the kids) every day of the month. You can read about the previous weeks here:

Week One
Week Two
Week Three



Saturday, 19 September 2015 - We played Frostgrave on Saturday (there's a more extended write up about this game here: Frostgrave: The Cemetery) This is where our challenge started to fail in the playing a different game each day department... this would have been way easier to do last month when I wasn't doing a regular game night - but I suppose it wouldn't be a CHALLENGE if it was easy. So while we didn't play a different game every day of the month I'm still saying it's been a success in the spirit of the challenge - which was to play more games more regularly and play some different games... 



Sunday, 20 September 2015 - We got together with our friends the Genets, that we ususally play games with on Sunday afternoons, and I ran them through the Song of Blades and Heroes scenario I was planning to run for ToonCon. I took a bunch more pictures and meant to do an blog post about the game... but I just haven't gotten to it. I think it was the funnest of the playtests I did, so I'll hopefully get to it this week. 



In an effort to try and keep with the play a DIFFERENT game each day (even though we'd already failed in that regard) we tried out Quiddler. I think a friend had gotten this for The Boy for his birthday a year or two back and we STILL hadn't gotten around to trying it out. I read through the rules and thought is seemed easy enough and a game that everyone would like and might become a regular "hey, we got 20 minutes to kill why don't we play Quiddler?" type game... But instead the kids were thoroughly frustrated by it and rounds ended in tears...!? I have no idea why... they're quite articulate kids with huge vocabularies.... perhaps it was because it was at the end of a very long tiring day and they just couldn't see the patterns in the letters...? Ah well... I had hands like this one above and then before it got back to me, Amanda would win the round! So I don't know what the kids were complaining about!?



Monday, 21 September 2015 - On Monday we played Dominion. WE played a LOT of it over teh summer so I was a little surprised when I looked back at the games we'd played over the month and realized we hadn't yet played it! Does anyone else get hands like this!? Ugh... 



Tuesday, 22 September 2015 - Amanda, The Girl and I were just able to squeeze in a quick game of Hearts between eating supper and running out to their Karate class and me having to run out and fetch The Boy from his Drama Class... 



Wednesday, 23 September 2015 - On Tuesday we'd read about The Warlords of Japan in our study of World History - Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, the end of the Warring States Period, the Japanese invasion of Korea, the battle of Sekigahara, the siege of Osaka,  and the rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate... so on Wednesday afternoon we sat down and played Ikusa (formerly known as Shogun and Samurai Swords). We'd actually done extra chapters of reading on Tuesday so we'd have all day to play Ikusa  - as I expected it would take a lot longer to play... we finished it up in a couple hours. I totally crushed them both... I've actually played it before and knew not to waste money on ninjas and turn order and castles in the first few turns and to concentrate on consolidating an area of control... and I tried to articulate that to the kids and tried to point out they might want to gang up on me... but sometimes they have to do their own thing and find stuff out for themselves the hard way.



Thursday, 24 September 2015 - Thursday we played a quick game of Ticket to Ride between The Girl's bedtime 



Friday, 25 September 2015 - Sunday, 27 September 2015 - Friday was spent pretty much getting ready for the weekend - The Boy and I were at ToonCon 2015 all weekend - there wasn't much to prepare for the convention itself, but there are a lot of errands I usually do on the weekend that I had to try and cram into Friday afternoon... 

A complete report of the weekends activities at ToonCon can be found on a separate blog post:

ToonCon 2015

Amanda and the girl didn't totally miss out on gaming over the weekend - Friday evening was the regular Savage Worlds Realms of Cthulhu that Amanda and I play in. Because The Girl wasn't going for a sleep over at my folks (as the kids usually do on Cthulhu night) The Girl actually got to PLAY in the game - she actually just played one of the Characters who weren't able to make it (not mine, MY character DIED in our last game!). They were still playing when The Boy and I got back from our evening of gaming...

Three days left in our challenge... Whatever shall we play...?



8 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Thanks Ray! I don't know about that so much though... I think it's more that we just don't watch much TV or play video games or whatever else it is that other people do (not trying to suggest that what we do is better - it's just a different usage of time). I've also been getting a lot less painting done this year...

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  2. I'm very impressed with your project.
    We're trying to play through all (or at least most) of the games in the collection this year, and has so far managed around one new per week. Now most of the fast ones are gone and mostly meaty left but we have found a couple that were really fun. The upside of a project like this.

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    1. Thanks Joakim!

      I did a similar thing last September - but didn't have the stipulation that it had to be different games, so we ended up playing a lot of the same quick game - just to get our game for the day it (mostly For Sale!). the different game each day, while making it more challenging, has also forced us to dig out and play different games that we may not have for a while.

      In addition to this monthly challenge, as part of my Game Plan for the year I was hoping to add plays to half my collection of games on BoardGameGeek. It meant, at the time, playing over 100 new games this year... I'm not sure where we're at... (I think last I checked we were close to 80).

      I couldn't play EVERY game in my collection in a year because that's over 500 games now - and a lot of those games I have catalogued on BGG are old miniature games and supplements that I will never play again or that I simply picked up as references with no intention to ever play...

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    2. I don't count supplements as games, really. Then it would be a daunting task indeed. Also, some of the really old are still in the collection mostly on sentimental reasons. I don't expect to play them ever again, but they are nice to look at now and then :-)

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    3. I do actually try to keep track of expansion/supplement plays on BGG - the whole reason I keep track of plays it to prove to myself (or perhaps Amanda) that they worthwhile spending the money on.

      As you said, some I keep around for sentimental reasons - and in a couple of cases I keep them around because if I get rid of them, I'll just buy it again a couple years from now when I forget why I got rid of it?! (I've actually done this - I'm that big of an idiot!)

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