I am a very lucky man! This year for Christmas, I received:
The Search for Planet X
My partner likes to take my kids to our local friendly store of games (LFSG?) and have them pick out a game from my wishlist to buy for me. This almost always leads to my partner getting frustrated trying to wrangle children while looking at her phone while saying “don’t touch that” and “put that back”. This time, she managed to get one from near the top of my wishlist! I adore deduction games; moreso than anyone else I know… so soloable deduction games are a great choice, even if ignoring the fact that most of my gaming is done solo these days.
Unicorn Glitterluck: Cloud Crystals
My 6 year old very pointedly made a choice at the game store to buy a game that she could play. She absolutely is poised to become my primary gaming opponent in these next few years. It makes me happy to see her engaging in the hobby… but… it does mean that I’m going to get bright pink Unicorns from time to time, apparently. This is a game I’ve played with her several times and with her and her sister once. Honestly, she’s likely to outgrow it soon, but her 2, soon-to-be 3, sisters will continue to get mileage (metric: kilometerage) out of it for years to come.
Cats in Boxes
Not a game. A cool, toy-factor-y areal puzzle (not spatial). Overly but charmingly produced. Very satisfyingly functional form-factor though; It’s a 5x5 grid with 5 cats that slot into the grid squares. There are also 5 boxes, one for each cat, fixed permanently to a polyomino piece so that the piece cannot be placed where a cat is, unless the cat fits into the box. It comes with a book of levels to solve with varying difficulties. Very satisfying and relaxing. My 6-year-old wanted to try it as well and it got her to sit in one spot working through different puzzles for over 20 minutes, so it’s worth at least $100 by that account (if we’re comparing apples-to-apples with anything else we’ve spent money on to entertain our children)
Beyond the Sun
This one gets the same story as above, except this was very low on my list. My partner, thinking that I don’t neurotically order my list with the things I want most at the top and marked as “most wanted” and things lower down being more of a way to track things over time that I’m sort of interested in, thought she was doing me a favor by scrolling down a ways to find something that had been on my list for a while. I’ve played BtS online and, though online gaming is definitely not my thing, I think I got the impression that I don’t really need this game. I smiled and said thank you to the almost-2-year-old that, assuredly, had spent hours agonizing over which of the complex strategy games to select for her father. Later, I researched briefly the expansion that includes a solo mode… but ultimately decided to exchange it for something I’d be more excited about. See below…
Astro Knights
Before I had made a decision one way or the other about Beyond the Sun, we got together with my family. My grandmother watched me open this and then said, “I have no idea what that is.” Every year, my dad asks what I’ve been doing with my free time and tries to get an idea of which of my wishlists he should be looking at (I keep different wishlists for my different hobbies), and then he helps my grandmother find something from the appropriate wishlist. Likely, it’s whatever is the first in the list that fits her budget (or, probably his budget).
But! I was thrilled to open it and gave a cheerful “thank you!” because I’ve owned a (figurative) literal ton of Aeon’s End content for a few years and I think the game is wonderful! But I don’t play it 
Because I played once and thought it would be a great game to explore with my partner! 
Who hasn’t really had the energy to play games these last few years But has recently said she wants to find a time to ship the kids off to her parents’ house for an evening so we can play a game some night
Regardless of how Aeon’s End with my partner goes, I’m glad to have this game that I can explore solo without feeling guilty! Hopefully the improvements on the system aren’t so great that it sours me on AE? I doubt it.
21st Century Pop Culture Trivia
My in-laws had randomly picked 3 trivia games off of some shelf, likely at Barnes & Noble, and wrapped them up to randomly distribute to me, my partner’s brother, and my partner’s sister’s husband. I randomly got 21st Century Pop Culture Trivia. Oddly enough, this is the most appropriate of the 3 for me to receive, as I, apparently (according to the math), was an adult and probably was supposed to be aware of pop culture in my 20s as recently as the timeline covered by the questions. I recognize some of the names of celebrities, TV shows and moves referenced on the cards, even! The others were… sports trivia, which went to my partner’s sister’s husband, who knows quite a bit about sports; such remarkable facts as: 1) sports exist 2) they are played by players (sometimes) 3) people are capable of watching these events. And the other was movie trivia which went to my partner’s brother… which is actually appropriate, because “watching movies” is a cornerstone of his personality… but… not as much as my other brother-in-law. So, really, these three gifts combined represent, likely, $30 thrown in the garbage and the carbon footprint of around 10lb of cards being produced in China and shipped to the US. Oh well; I’ll just regift it… to… … I dunno, I haven’t figured that part out yet.
Let us return to a place Beyond the Sun! Yesterday I needed to run some errands (I swear I had 10 days off work but was only able to accomplish a negative amount of tasks), so I finally made the decision to forgo trying to track down the soloable-expansion to BtS and just exchange it for something else. I dropped by my gaming store of local friendliness with the unopened product in question and perused their wares for quite some time. At the top of my wishlist was Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze and Heat: Every Game Needs a Short, Catchy Name Followed By A Subtitle; I didn’t expect their post-Christmas inventories to offer good odds on either of those being available, so I set about finding other things on my list. In addition to other things, I did actually manage to find BOTH UA:TtA and H:PthM. But neither of them were comparable to the cost of Beyond the Sun… really? Crap, well, I could exchange and get a gift card for the remainder. Or… and hear me out here… I could just buy the top two games on my list and pay the difference!
“Wait, pillbox, isn’t that just you buying yourself a Christmas present in January?” you ask? To which I will reply, “No, look, it makes sense. I still owe my partner her big Christmas present (a very expensive mop or something that has weird promotional sales?) and I got a gift card from my VP at work that can be used towards that, so really… I’m… spending… money… that… hang on, how did it work in my head… You know what, let’s just go with what you said.”
Yeah, I exchanged Beyond the Sun for
Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze
I have a lot of Unmatched boxes already (okay, well, less than other people, but still FOUR) and I’ve never played! I bought it mostly to play with my then-neighbor, but when I moved, he didn’t also move(!?) the jerk!. My partner would probably like it, and my kids will probably eventually like it, but I’ve paused buying anything else in the series before I can figure out how it ranks among my games. However, when looked at the price of this compared to BtS, I thought briefly about buying Tales to Amaze and the Houdini vs Genie box, but that would still not add up to BtS (admittedly, it was closer than what I ended up spending), but ultimately decided that I really shouldn’t buy anymore Unmatched content beyond Tales until I figure out whether Unmatched has a future in my collection.
Heat: Pedal to the Metal
This had actually slid down my wishlist quite a ways because it has been perpetually impossible to find. However, as of about a month ago, I started seeing some copies show up in online retailers (restocks for Christmas, but possibly just too late to hit Black Friday/Cyber Monday shoppers, so the inventory levels weren’t decimated? Who knows). Around the same time, I saw an influx of people talking about it as a solo game (likely due to them recently buying the newly available stock? These things are always connected but never transparently so!) and I bumped it back up on my list near the top.
Imagine my surprise when my game store of local repute had a copy just sat there on a shelf as though it wasn’t the hardest game of 2023 to track down all year. The manager there, whom I’m pretty sure does most of the ordering but not the stocking, was legitimately surprised to see me plop it down on the counter.
I do so love Flamme Rouge, but I’ve never been much into cycling (except as a kid, when my bicycle was an artifact that represented freedom, back in the 80s when that sort of thing was a thing). I have a lot of Flamme Rouge stuff and I’m not actually eager to ditch it, but maybe I will? The Heat expansion will allow you to play as the color orange, which is obviously superior and ranks the expansion right up there with “mortgage payment” and “electric bill” on my list of financial priorities (my partner may not agree with my assessment though, so it may get knocked down a few notches at the budget meeting).
Additionally, I had sent my partner information about All-Aboard Games’ preorders for Ur: 1830 BC (the Splotter 18xx game that doesn’t feature trains), and 18BE Railways in the Coal Dust (an 18xx game that features a solo mode… so… I’m obligated by law to investigate). Well, she preordered both of them for me, instead of forwarding those links on to, say, one or both of my parents in case they were asking for a bit more expensive items that I might be interested in.
So, yeah, I got the top 4 things on my boardgaming wishlist and even a couple of things from my future wishlist, what more could a man want?
Well, I also wanted an enormous paper cutter/guillotine and my partner bought me that as well! When I say “enormous”, I mean it’s large enough to cut down A2 into A3. She seems to have tried to spend around $600 total, which is oddly similar to the price of this space-age mop floor cleaner thing she wants. 
