Ludography 2024
06 Jan 2025Tabletop gaming, mostly in the form of board and card games, is my biggest hobby. I’m also the kind of game nerd who keeps notes. This may sound unusual to outsiders, but it’s common enough within the community that several game logging tools have sprung up, including the one I use, Board Game Stats.
Armed with a year’s worth of data now that the last games of 2024 have been recorded—yes, I did get two plays in on New Year’s Eve—I’m looking back and reflecting on another year in the hobby.
Some Big Numbers
By my standards, I did a lot of gaming this year, logging 278 total plays. My busiest month for gaming was January, when I played 49 games, but I didn’t break 30 in any subsequent month. I was surprised to learn that I logged more games than a few of my convention-going friends just playing online, attending weekly game nights, and playing occasionally on the weekends.
I also played a wide variety of games: 129 different titles hit the table this year. I did most of my gaming in person, with the split around 60-40 between live and online. I did most of my online gaming on Board Game Arena (BGA) and Yucata, in roughly equal proportion.
Fives and Dimes
Gamers who log their plays often share lists of games they’ve played at least five times (nickels), ten times (dimes), or more. This year, I racked up one quarter, three dimes, and nine nickels. A few games stand out when I look at the list:
| Game | Play Count |
|---|---|
| Mottainai | 28 |
| Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West | 12 |
| Ark Nova | 10 |
| The Castles of Burgundy | 10 |
| Heat: Pedal to the Metal | 8 |
| Splendor | 8 |
| Las Vegas | 7 |
| Thurn and Taxis | 7 |
| Coloretto | 6 |
| Ra | 6 |
| Splito | 6 |
| Just One | 5 |
| Skip-Bo | 5 |
I’m unsurprised to see Mottainai atop this list for the second year in a row. I’ve been encouraging people to try it for years, but it can be a tough game to teach, and that limits its appeal. I’ll write about it more some other time, because I think it’s underappreciated and deserves the attention. For now, I’ll just say that I think it shines as a fast two-player duel, and I’ve found a wonderful community of players on Yucata who share my enthusiasm for it. I played it less often than I did in 2023, but I fully expect it to be my top game again in 2025.
Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West is a legacy game based on Ticket to Ride. It took my group about six months to play the full campaign. I’ve only played one other legacy game (Betrayal Legacy), so my basis for comparison is limited, but I enjoyed the campaign overall. The game introduces different mechanics from session to session, some persistent and others transient, so there’s quite a bit of variety in the gameplay. I also appreciated the balance between hidden scoring and public scoring in the campaign. My group had a good sense for who was in the lead, but we really did not know how close we were, and everyone felt “in it” throughout.
After playing it 10 times last year, I feel like I finally “get” Ark Nova. I still don’t love it, but I believe I better understand its appeal. All 10 of my plays were online, hosted on Board Game Arena, against friends from my IRL game group. We played all of them asynchronously, meaning we took our turns slowly over the course of several days, and that’s definitely how I prefer to play it. I feel much better connected to what my opponents are doing when I can click over to their tableaus and see what they have going on, something you seldom get to do when you’re at the table together.
Taken together, these 13 games account for 118 plays, or about 42% of my total for the year. My group tends to play a lot of new games, which is wonderful, so it doesn’t surprise me to see that I have a very long tail of 83 games I only played once.
New (To Me) Games
Several games I played for the first time in 2024 left strong impressions. Aside from the already-mentioned Ticket to Ride legacy game, three others stand out: Heat: Pedal to the Metal, Arcs, and HUANG.
Heat was unquestionably the biggest hit of the bunch. It took me a while to get my hands on it, since it seemed to become completely unobtainable after Shut Up & Sit Down’s glowing 2022 review. In my experience, racing games tend to fall to extremes, either very uninteresting or very interesting. It took a couple of years, but I’m delighted to report that Heat is, in fact, very interesting. The design captures the feeling of pushing your car to the limit—requiring you to build up the eponymous heat—but it really makes you pick your spots. Perfectly safe driving is just as unlikely to result in a win as driving like a maniac. And you experience that tension in a streamlined package that’s easy to learn and fast to play.
Arcs is a mid-weight, card-based space combat game that was one of the most talked-about 2024 releases in the hobby board game world. I only played it twice, and I have not been able to play a campaign yet, so I know I haven’t seen everything it has to offer. Sadly, it didn’t catch on with my regular game group. It seems to benefit from multiple plays, as both action selection and scoring can be a bit tricky (pun intended), depending on both cardplay and resource tokens. I want to give it more chances, but it may be hard to get back on the table.
HUANG, on the other hand, was very well received by my game group. Most of us are big fans of Tigris & Euphrates, which HUANG’s design is based on (by way of Yellow & Yangtze, which I’ve never played). It took us a couple of plays to adapt to the differences between the two games, but both are quite accessible to new players without sacrificing the depth that makes them so fun to play again and again. Both games are highly abstracted, somewhat unorthodox civilization builders where players control a set of leaders spread across different dynasties. As they rise, go to war, experience internal conflict, and fall, players try to position their leaders to benefit themselves, even if that means having different leaders on both sides of a conflict. I don’t think HUANG will ever displace T&E from my collection, but it’s different enough that I am happy to have both.
Predictions for 2025
Looking ahead to the new year, I’m optimistic that 2025 will be another good year for games. It’s my great fortune to have a wonderful game group, not to mention non-hobbyist family and friends who are more than obliging when it comes to trying weird games. My plan is to play more of the games in my collection and continue drawing down how many new titles I acquire, something I did pretty well last year.
As I already mentioned, I expect Mottainai to top my list of plays again this year. Just before the new year, I started a campaign of the new Clank! legacy game, so I expect that to make an appearance in this year’s dime list. I’d also be delighted to play the Arcs campaign at least once, and I have a few other games, old and new, that I’d like to get to table at some point. (I’m eager to try Votes for Women and to see if we can’t make Dune happen some weekend.) Beyond that, I’m always hoping to be pleasantly surprised by something unexpected, whether it’s a new release or an overlooked gem. In the end, I’ll be happy as long as I get to spend quality time having fun with good friends around the (real or virtual) table.