This time last year we hit our record for number of plays in a month.
I thought it would be too much to reach that number again, but that hasn’t stopped me going for it one year later. The plan was to average 4 plays a day, thought we had two games days on the calendar, so I knew they’d get us more to the table than just the daily average target.
We started with some smaller games the first few days. This wasn’t to ‘cheat’ the system. We weren’t going to just play 100+ games of BANDIDO all through September. But it gave us a good start to get a little ahead of schedule.
While those first few days consisted of games like TAG TEAM and LEGENDARY FORESTS, games that take about 15-20 minutes to play, we soon moved onto bigger fare with things like ENDLESS WINTER and INVENTORS OF THE SOUTH TIGRIS.
The month has been a nice mix of light (RAILROAD INK), medium (TEA GARDEN), and heavy (GALACTIC CRUISE) and it’s been fun hurtling towards the end goal of 116 or more.
So how did we do?
At the end of the day, on Wednesday 30th, we’d had 125 plays under our belt.
On a visit to Winchester, we discovered a shop that was geek heaven. They had a small selection of comics, of Pop! Vinyls, of Action figures . . .
. . . and around a corner, they had one of the best selections of board games for sale outside of an online store. There were so many I have on my wishlist, or that I’ve not seen anywhere else in the wild. I was beyond overwhelmed.
Unfortuntely, the prices were a little high. I was about to walk away when I spotted WELCOME TO . . .
This is a Flip ‘n’ Write I’ve never played, depsite being a big fan of the mechanic. So I picked it up and ended up playing it that evening. And it’s good.
You have to pick two cards from three different pairs. Each pair is made up of a house number and a scoring ability. You have three streets on your sheet that you’re marking houses on, making sure that numbers are asending, while blocking of houses in sets of 1-5 for scoring goals.
A good purchase.
I picked up the first game in this series, IN THE HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING a while back, and despite a rocky start, it quickly became a firm favourite.
When Burnt Island Games crowdfunded a deluxe prequel, I was interested, and when they added deluxe components for the original, I dismissed any hesitation and backed for everything.
But, while we continued to play the original in all it’s deluxe glory, we never got round to FALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING. Part of this was because it’s primarily an area control game, which doesn’t normally work well at just 2.
So, from October 2022, it sat gathering dust until we had our recent epic gaming weekend. It seemed as good a time as any. And it turned out to be a pretty good game.
While it doesn’t beat the polyomino based original, the area control works okay in this one due to it being players versus another enemy.
Did I play well in our first game? Absolutely not. Focused too much on the rules, I wasn’t paying attention to certain aspects that led my trolls to be slaughtered at rather inconvenient times. But it was a learning game, and I’m keen to play it again soon.
For most of 2026 I’ve been playing games on BGA with @boardgamejimmy and the two hosts of the ‘I’m Having My One’ podcast.
We tend to play a game a handful of times, and then someone will step in and pick something else.
This month saw LABYRINTH selected. I have heard of this game. It’s been around for a while (1986!), but I’ve never been in a situation to try it.
It’s basically a family weight game where you’ll have a tile you need to slide into one of the rows or columns on the board. This will shuffle things along in one direction, pushing a tile off the board.
But the key is the treasure icons on the map, and the player tokens on the various paths. You need to pick up the treasures by joining paths up to make a route you can travel to reach them. It’s delightfully simple and fun, and while I spent the first game ‘learning by doing’ (I scored my one and only point in my last turn, lol), I soon got to grips with it and took a win on game number two.
And it plays well on BGA too.
Do I need more solo games in the collection? Probably not. But that doesn’t stop me from grabbing a new one when it catches my eye.
And that’s what happened with WARP’S EDGE. It was a game I was aware of, a game released back in 2020, but one I’d just glossed over.
Recently I was seeing it a little more in my social media, so I dove deeper, finding a bag builder that appeared intriging.
You draw tokens that offer up attack lasers, manouvering abilities, and energy (the currency of the far flung future). Every round, four enemy fighters sit in your way that must be avoided or taken out, and your mission is to destroy the mothership they protect.
It has that enjoyable escalation that all good Deck Builders and Bag Builders have where you improve with each addition you grab.
There is a nice level of replayability with the four fighters for you to pilot and the five motherships for you to battle against. Glad I finally grabbed it.
Our friends had gotten this small box card game at last years Dice Portsmouth birthday bash, but hadn’t played it since. I said I was happy to learn and teach and give it a go.
The game sees players start with four cards (the same for all players) of four different colours. On your turn you’ll play one face down to each oppenent sat either side of you.
When the cards are revealed, they will have certain abilities on them that will trigger based on the suit that your opponent played against them.
The aim of the game is to gain Turnips to purchase the three relics (in order). But you can also use your turnips to purchase more cards from a market, meaning that, over time, players hands grow a little asymetry.
At first glance it looks like nothing much at all. But I really enjoyed our 4-player game. There is the constant mindgames between you and your neighbours, playing a card that will benifit you the most, but will block them or give them less.
The red cards let you steal peoples Turnips if they are not secured in their Banks (you can hold 5 Turnips on a card, but it’s a specific action to move them there).
It was a lot of fun and I’m hoping that they bring it with them next time.
I’ve owned this one for about 5 years now. While it does play at 2, it’s best played with more, and I wanted the first play to be optimal.
Well, we finally played it last weekend and it was awesome.
Each player starts with 7 cards in their hand. Each turen you’ll draw a card, and then place one down to a face up market.
These face up cards are available to the next players, or they can draw blind from the face down deck. But taking from the deck speeds the game up, because once there are 10 face up cards, the game ends.
But what are you doing with the cards? Well, there are a whole bunch of unique cards across 10 (technically 11) suits. Each cards will normally have a base strength in the top left corner, and then a postive or negative effect that depends on what other cards or suits you also hold.
You are basically curating your 7 cards over an indeterminate number of rounds in order to score the most strength when the game ends.
It’s fast flowing, it’s clever, and it has an online app that makes what should be a fiddly end game scoring session into a sinch.
I need to play this a lot more.
I was lucky enought to be sent a prototype copy of CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT from Worgan Games before it went to Crowdfunding at the end of September. We had fun playing this with friends and family and I even put together a How To Play video for it.
We finished our 52×1 Challenge back in July, so I thought why not talk about it in September.
The Challenge is about averaging one new game per week, to make sure that games aren’t being left to rot on the Shelf of Shame. We’ve been doing it for a few years now and it just helps keep new purchases from fading into obscurity.
We also had a friend over for a games day. Here I talk about what we got to the table during the visit.
My favourite arrival of the month turned up and I immediatly got stuck in to playing the features, one a day, for a week. I had a lot to talk about at the end, so I figured a first inpressions video would help get it all out of my brain.
I also got around to another of mt ‘5 Great Games . . .’ videos. This time I discussed some of the awesome co-op games I’ve enjoyed over the years.
