Gaming Goals for 2021

I, too, intend to purchase less in 2021 than I did in 2020. To be fair, there was a lot of retail therapy involved this year, and I know I should go through my games and try to whittle down some that rarely, if ever, get played. Boxes are starting to get stacked up wherever because the shelves I have are full.

At the moment, I know I want to pick up the reissued Hansa Teutonica, and then the Unmatched sets that are due out later this year, but that’s it so far that I feel like I must have, whereas other things like The Search for Planet X I can probably live without. Also trying to pick up anything for Imperial Assault I do not own, as it’s getting harder and harder to find. Luckily only need the Bespin Gambit for boxed expansions.

Otherwise, similar goals to last year: get more of my 0-1 times played games to the table, try to get TI4 to the table again, finish up our Pandemic Legacy S1 and Betrayal Legacy campaigns.

6 Likes

I feel like I did okay this year. I didn’t have to/get to stay home, so that helped. My goals are mostly just hopes; I hope that I

  • Will be able to go to a convention in 2021

  • Will be in at least one math trade

  • Will play my games more

  • Will sell the games I actually don’t want

  • Will run a D&D campaign

  • Will run a pbf game

  • Will buy less expensive games. Nothing over $100, especially on Kickstarter. This one is more of an actual commitment, since I actually regret most of those that I did get. Flick Fleet was great, but not $300 great :flushed:

3 Likes

You can also get beds with shelves underneath…

you could argue that if you have any games you wouldn’t WANT to play 10 times (leaving aside the actual possibility of doing so) then they might not be that great a game?

I don’t really have any gaming goals other than playing more in person! I only really currently have my father in law that i can play with semi-regularly so hoping that restrictions lift enough to be able to see other people more.

That said, my wife has said she is interested in trying a few more games, just not strategy/heavy ones so will be trying her with a few roll and writes (she likes Welcome to… Which we’ve played a lot over zoom this past year!) and some two player games such as Jaipur etc.

Im pretty sure I’ll continue to buy all the new WFRP stuff and probably new DnD books as well, and maybe look at expanding into other games I’d like to play/GM.

I probably will buy more games (I don’t have that many) but am also restricted by space - i have a tiny office that has a 3x2 kallax-equivalent in it and thats pretty much it at the moment! The only thing im collecting is Memoir 44 stuff but a lot of it is so expensive for relatively little addition, I don’t know how much I’ll actually buy

3 Likes

Just put three “good, but not great to me” games up for sale.

Effectively reducing the big box count by five… Not a bad prestart to the year.

3 Likes

Yes

and yes.
I wasn’t spending money on much else, so I’m comfortable with how many games I bought this year but my collection would look very different sans-pandemic.
I too plan on buying less, but won’t beat myself up for slipping up. It’s a hard enough time as it is, so finding some comfort in cardboard isn’t the worst sin.

7 Likes

I practically stopped buying a ton of games 3 years ago 2017 after I bought some too many games from German board games stores during the Christmas sales and my last visit to Spiel in Essen. I noticed that my collection was huge (still under 100) and that we can’t play everything as it deserves to be played.

So I stopped watching SUSD and other board game youtubers, so I don’t hear much about new games which is great :slight_smile:

I still bought some games or got some as presents in the last three years. All in all under 10 games though. This year I bought my wife 2 christmas presents (Cottage Garden, Dragon Castle) and got 2 from her (5 Minute Dungeon + 1 expansion). The Kitchen Rush expansion because my loves the game, then Decrypto because we played a beta version at Spiel 2017 and we liked it a lot, so that was a 2018 purchase. The Gloomhaven expansion as one of the most played games in our collection. Fog of Love and the new beautiful Parade version (with the Alice theme) as presents from my in-laws. That’s roughly it (could be I forgot something).

I notice a theme there… I try to adapt my collection more to my wife’s tastes which is very smart because I almost never play games without her :wink:

But yeah it was VERY liberating just to ignore a big aspect of one of my core hobbies and to focus on the games I had. We have so many excellent games and Gloomhaven took so much space and time up anyways :smiley:

It was time to say “Stop, I own enough.” and it was great. Don’t regret it at all :slight_smile:

I avoided Kickstarters in general because I learned from PC games kickstarters that my excitement or interest often wanes a lot till the game is ready to play (even if it is a good game, don’t want to talk about bad games). This seems to me to be true for board game kickstarters too.

That’s the reason I didn’t back Frosthaven last year. I told my group, you know if we want to play it after it is available then I am willing to pay some extra money to avoid the risk of having a huge and expensive game lying around.

So maybe this is helpful to some others how I started to view my collection and how I reduced my spending by a lot while still enjoying the hobby.


But now to my new year’s resolution:

-I still have too many unplayed games, it is time to get them more on the table :smiley:

7 Likes

My gaming goals for 2021 are quite simple, although not necessarily a certainty to resolve: play a non-party game in person with others who actually enjoy games. A few friends I know like and will play some silly or party games - but playing a longer strategical boardgame or roleplaying game with one or more other people again in the same room would be wonderful.

6 Likes

It feels as if I’ve bought very few games this year.

Then I look through my BGG collection and see all the Baseball Highlights expansions I wanted, Volt, Air Land & Sea, Ghost Stories… and the Kickstarters I’ve backed this year (11 pending)… and think “OK, maybe I just didn’t notice”.

5 Likes

This is a tough one for me… I love doing 10x10s, although obviously 2020’s was a complete write-off (I played… maybe 5 or 6 of the 100 games I wanted to?). Not because I need to accomplish an arbitrary number of things to feel accomplished, but because it gave me guidance on figuring out which games I really want to play, and why.

That stated, if nobody else is interested in doing one for 2021 (and I would totally understand why!), I won’t make one this year.

Ever since I completed the installation of my “BoxThrone” ™, I’ve reduced the number of games I’ve purchased sharply because they just won’t fit. I refuse to buy more gaming shelves (either for minis, where I have 5 shelves, or for games, where I have a 7-unit BoxThrone), which means that for everything in, something else has to go out (sometimes multiples, due to space constraints). 2020 saw me pick up a lot of expansions and about 15 new games, but the shelves are now absolutely packed. There just isn’t any more room.

That stated, I have about… oh… let me actually count. 13 games I own but haven’t played (Android, 51st State, New Salem, Shadespire, Vindication, Lisboa, The Undercity, Crusaders Thy Will Be Done, Andrenaline, Anomaly, Defiance, Wildlands, and Stuffed Fables). I’m going to try to play each of those at least once over 2021.

I’m going to try and trade/sell/give away the games in my collection that I just don’t care for that much (Renegade, Euphoria, Bargain Quest, Dragon Castle, Santorini, Nemo’s War, War of the Indines, a few others).

I’m going to make one more push to get a group of RPG players started. My partner expressed an interest in the Star Trek Adventures system (Modiphius 2d20 system), so that may be the winner, but we’ll see.

Other than that, the same kind of goals as usual: a bunch of big, heavy space operas (Eclipse 2nd, TI4, Outer Rim, Space Empires, Star Trek Ascendancy, Dune) and lots of RPG-lites (Blackstone Fortress, Defiance, Journeys in Middle-Earth, Stuffed Fables, Undercity).

But all of that will hinge very heavily on school (I really struggle with online learning, and everything takes me 4-5 times longer as a result), writing (4 novels to complete and publish in 2021, and I’m going to resume looking for representation/publishers, which means torrents of rejections and trying to differentiate myself from the hordes of other authors), and government restrictions (I am extremely paranoid about making others sick, far beyond a rational level, but I haven’t visited anyone since March 2020, full stop).

Oh, and lots of painting. I want my Infinity to be completely painted (poorly, but that’s the level I paint at) as well as all of my RPG-lite games (I think I just need to finish Journeys, Stuffed Fables, and 2 expansions for Blackstone fortress).

6 Likes

Well thats a lie…

5 Likes

If you paint poorly, I cannot begin to imagine what level of rubbish mine will be…

3 Likes

You gentlefolk are far, far too kind, but it’s appreciated. I don’t consider myself a very good painter, but that’s mostly because I kinda know what a good painter does and am capable of it myself when I have time… which is never.

I forget the specific term for it, but there’s something like “competency vs knowledge” as a line where you get better at a thing at more-or-less a constant rate, but your knowledge of how good you are at a thing is non-linear. This is why it sometimes feels like you’re doing a thing forever and never getting better, because you can see how you should be doing a thing and right now you’re not doing that.

I paint my models following a 3-step process:

  1. Prime (white)
  2. Paint (contrast paints)
  3. Fix Major Mistakes (usually with brushing on primer and then applying contrast over the mistake)

I know I should be following a 7-step process:

  1. Prime (black)
  2. Zenithal highlights (gray, then white)
  3. Base colours
  4. Shades and washes
  5. Highlight colours
  6. Metalics
  7. Final touches

But I don’t do that, because my current 3-step process takes about 1 hour per model, and the 7-step process takes 4 hours per model and looks… more-or-less the same. Frustratingly similar.

And the reason I can paint so much so quickly is because I accept the end result will look kinda-okay-sorta-fine-unless-you-look-too-closely, and I’m okay with that. Because otherwise I would spend all my time painting, and everything else would suffer as a result.

Anyway.
/Diverging Topic

3 Likes

I have a few lighter games that hit the table often, hence I don’t feel like a need to include them on a 10x10. I think these lists have their purpose once you are a bit more settled in the hobby, and I think it is still early days for me.

There are games that I own that I would love to play 10 or more times, but it is unlikely with my family or closest friends, so that is why I will not include them in a list and save myself the frustration feeling when I don’t accomplish them. And considering how the vibe in my club is, I seriously doubt I could log 10 plays of 10 games there. Hence my statement.

I think different challenges where a variety of different games can be used to achieve them that will help expand my experience and learn new games suit me better.

3 Likes

I’m aiming to not worry too much about the size of my collection and have fun buying, selling and giving away.

And playing.

And exploring.

Maybe by not setting stressful goals I might actually make it manageable again.

Although having said that I might consider a 7x7 (i.e. a half 10x10).

10 Likes

Since I’ll be logging my plays I get 10×10-tracking “free” (at least once I write the code to do it automatically), and if in December next year I notice that I only need a couple more games of something to make 10×10, it’ll probably happen. (And some will be pretty much automatic because I’m playing them a lot now, like Rallyman GT and Letter Tycoon and classic Rallyman.) But I’m not going to push for it.

3 Likes

I should hopefully move house in the new year, so storing the collection won’t be a problem. I’m relatively new to collecting any way, so my buying addiction isn’t on the same level as others… Naming no names!

My main goal is to play some heavier games this year. I’m a big fan of games with simple design, but lots of tricky decisions so the games I play tend to not break 3/5 for weight. Any suggestion on what to go for are welcome - a friend just got the Grand Austria Hotel which looks good.

The other goal would be to play more of the games I’ve barely touched - duelosaur island, trambahn, chronicles of crime, quadropolis and last bastion.

3 Likes

I’ve been enjoying Letter Tycoon on BGA

2 Likes

I’ll always recommend Brass or Food Chain Magnate

3 Likes

The easiest thing to do will be browse the BGG Top 100. Almost all of those are in the 4 to 5 out of 5 for weight, and most of them are somewhere between good-to-spectacular if you can handle the complexity.

The big jump from mid-weight to heavy-weight, in my opinion, isn’t on you: it’s getting everyone else around the table to read and learn the rules themselves, because everyone has to be on the same footing in order to have a chance. You can’t really “teach” a 4/5, because you will forget something critical and everyone will think you were cheating or doing it intentionally. And, of course, most of the rule sets take a bit of practice and a few hours of pondering to really get, so assume your first game (even if everyone learns on their own) is going to be a bit of a mess.

That stated, “Mage Knight” is fantastic, “Gloomhaven” is of course solid as a co-op, and “Twilight Imperium 4th Edition” is the greatest game ever crafted by human hands.

If you’re looking for something more Euro: Brass Birmingham, Food Chain Magnate (I didn’t care for it, but I totally understand why others do), or Lisboa might be worth a look.

6 Likes

Thank you for putting words to the phenomenon :slight_smile:
I hadn’t quite realized that.

In any case. I have made an additional resolution. I want to present my collection in a way that I can show it to my friends to convince them to play those heavier games with me. To that purpose I plan on documenting the games I own with photos and a few comments on my personal website. I already started by grouping my ~100 favorites into my own personal categories and taking pictures of the covers and I actually copied over some comments on new games I made in the Recent Games thread. I don’t plan writing full reviews. Just a better overview that may also help me weed out the collection and prevent me from buying more dudes on a map games.

8 Likes