Challenges, do you do them?
Why?
Why don’t you?
Do you do boardgame related challenges like ABC Challenges or 10x10 or … anything else?
Do you do other challenges not boardgame related?
Have challenges or attempts at such had positive or negative impact on you (and the challenge related hobby/aspect in question) or no impact at all?
Somehow they always feel like homework.
The only year I’ve completed a planned 10×10 (i.e. I nominated the games in advance) that was exactly the way it felt towards the end - I ended up selling Sagrada because I’d burned out on it getting those last few plays in.
The challenges I do now are “soft” 10×10 (just counting my plays), which may encourage me to bring a particular game to a meeting where I hope it can get played, and the BGG 52 Game Challenge, where you score for games with particular characteristics (e.g. this year “Play a game someone else didn’t like.” or “Play a game whose cover is totally different in another language”). In that case, I enjoy the intellectual stretching of trying to match a game I’ve played to one of the categories.
I have only done such challenges since I started logging my plays.
I have tried planned challenges and mostly failed those and like @RogerBW burned out on games that I could not get played 10 times in a year. So for the most part I have done soft challenges. But I have barely ever completed one.
Especially frustrating are the multiplayer challenges. They just show me how little I play with others. The solo challenges are easier.
I use those challenges to find a bit of direction / focus in my largish collection (400+ games now as of last week, counting everything except expansions). And so I keep doing them and tracking my games.
I have tried some of the ABC or 52 categories challenges, luckily I always encounter them late in any given year. But matching them later seems more fun than forcing myself to play certain games.
I have found 1 particular challenge to have had a really positive impact and that was inspired by someone here years ago posting about doing a “12 Games of Christmas” Mini Challenge over the holidays. This year by accident rather than by design, I played games with the family / kids over the holidays and decided after a really really “dry” 2025, to at least get some games in at the end of the year. I challenged myself to play 1 game a day for 12 days. I am now on day 61 or so. And it brought actually playing games back into focus during a super-stressful time at work and as stated elsewhere it has been one helpful aspect for me in dealing with the stress.
The challenge itself was very small and appeared very doable and led to me continuing on and on step by step.
I am also telling myself it’s fine to miss a day eventually. I am also allowing app plays to count and often just resort to A Gentle Rain or similar super-quick/light fare.
Incidentally my tracking app for games BGStats offers a tab called “Insights” and it tells me that I have played 10% of my owned games this year so far. This statistic has prompted me to play a more varied number of games from my collection. I am up to 50 different games played this year (a couple not from my collection though).
In Germany at least it is common to have New Year’s resolutions. I barely do those. Because they tend to fall flat within the first month or even week.
But I have attempted to change some of my habits by challenging myself:
Most years it took me well into February. Even taking longer though those challenges had a positive impact on my physical well-being. And I am struggling to get back to that because backpain is … meh. Right now, even going for a walk counts as a success.
This often came in the form of challenges (those are often called diets). Nothing has stuck until last year when (at the suggestion of my migraine doc) I set myself a challenge to use an app to track my food for 3 months (the thing came with a three month subscription). The app was less helpful than I thought because food tracking sucks. But as a consequence I made some changes to my meals and those stuck and I am now with a few sustainable food habits that are better than they have been for the past 20 years if not more. They are sustainable because despite the high amount of stress I am experiencing lately I am sticking with them and it is not causing additional stress. It just works that way now. I am very grateful to have got here. I am not describing what I did unless someone asks because I think food is such a personal thing and what works for me is unlikely to work for anyone else. Also: It barely changed anything for the migraines but that’s a different discussion.
In recent years I was working through my Twelve Gamedays of Christmas challenge, trying to play a different boardgame everyday from December 25th through to January 5th. As my workload got busier at that time of year it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with, so this new year I started a simpler challenge, simply to play one different boardgame each weekend throughout the year. So far so good, with lots of titles left for the rest of the year and I’ve given myself some leeway for shorter simpler games during the busy summer weekends that I know will come.
Away from boardgames, I was giving myself three challenges for each darts season, until dropping one from the list a couple of years ago. I aim to hit a 180 at least once per year in a competitive match, which I finally achieved for the previous two years, but games are running out for the rest of this spring sadly. I also aimed to get a checkout of 100 or more, and after several near misses I finally got a checkout of exactly 100 a few weeks back. For a few years I was keeping my scores and working towards beating a certain average over the course of each season, but this was becoming too distracting and affecting my play, so I dropped that two years back.
I’m logging my plays locally now rather than on BGA/BGStats/whatever, which gives me many more easy visualisation options. (For a data set this size, I’m using boring old CSV files; Perl gives me an SQL interface onto them with DBD::CSV, but I can edit by hand when I can’t be bothered to write the relevant took.)
I think my challenge plays tend to fall into one of:
and I try to make sure category 2 heavily outweighs category 3.
so that was you who inspired my challenge. I wasn’t sure and too lazy to search.
Mostly 10x10 or whatever variation. Mostly to get my games played repeatedly. I used to not do them as they feel like work but the desire to get games played finally made me do it. The challenges are a means to an end
I think if I wanted to I could but I don’t think there’s a game I really want to play ten times (especially one I’m not already going to play ten times).
Also you get this kind of weirdness where small games hit targets but don’t really feel as if they count the same as one play of a meat game. (Eg 10x tag team is really the same as 2x Orleans)
I used to try a pre-selected 10x10 challenges, but never did much better than 50% completion. I would also try to use it to get unplayed or rarely played games to the table, but this rarely worked out well, some games ending up taking too long to play regularly, or just never getting chosen for play when friends were over. I agree with those who say it became a chore, as trying to play the same games over and over meant pushing for those and leaving plenty of other games by the wayside.
So now I just challenge myself to get unplayed games to the table. And I do mean “to the table”. I am only counting physical plays of my copy of the games. No BGA. No apps. My current challenge is to get one per month. I figure it can help cull the collection if I play something and don’t enjoy it. Though admittedly that hasn’t happened yet. Currently I am ahead, having played three new games this year so far.
As a bonus challenge, I am trying to replay all the games I played for last year’s challenge, of which there were 12. Trying to play them at least twice this year. Already done with 1.5 of them, though I am rather certain that two plays of Fortune and Glory will not happen.