Year In Review:
2019 Review
This Year Was… … :
Fresh! Trying to impart knowledge to a group of 10 year olds, doing citations for assignments late into the night, bringing up the Padawans in the right way, having kids' parties in the house for the first time… These were some of the many fresh experiences I had in 2019. Not all of them were pleasant and not all of them were entirely new to me, but there was a sense of achievement and contentment after each experience, something that I don't usually attribute to the trying times of my life, a fresh perspective of experiences as it were, hence the aptness of the adjective to describe my 2019.
Fresh
However, planet Earth did not have a great 2019 at all. Tensions amongst powers great and small materialized in the form of trade wars between nations and withdrawals from alliances and pacts to voice their dissent. Many seats of power changed hands or were held by the barest of margins (except the cricket mad nation, which in itself was not a great result for minorities either). Prolonged, persistent protests in previously peaceful, attractive locales continue unabated. Typhoons and hurricanes landed, ice caps melted and forest fires are out of control. All this has caused a nagging sense of instability in the world this year, that can't seem to be shaken off.
Are we putting our future stability in the hands of the right people?
I tried oh so hard to find the global silver lining, one positive common event that speaks past race, religion, creed and nationality… and I found this.
sniff
People held their bladders, twitterverse exploded with "I love you 3000"s, a lady had to be taken to hospital for uncontrollable crying. The end of the Avengers arc brought the world together, when for a change, art chose to imitate life. The best of us, are so often taken too soon and those of us that remain can only take solace in what remains… the legacy of their love. I love you 3000.
So let's move on to the land I call home… Malaysia.
Google "Malaysia 2019" and a lot of the image results look like this. Malaysians sure love our holidays
2019 was also supposed to be a "fresh" year for Malaysia. We got ourselves a new government, but judging by the results of the subsequent by-elections, the sheen on our shiny new government is starting to wear off. Nevertheless, many new policies have been rolled out, among those that affected our everyday life was the smoking ban within 3 metres of an eatery as well as the ban on plastic straws.
A new era also came when our national hero tugged at our heartstrings when he announced his retirement from badminton following a nose cancer diagnosis. What made Malaysians go "We love you 3000 LCW" was the fact that everyone who watched him emotionally announce his retirement, knew that if he had his way, he would die on the court, his racquet in his hand, his soul continuing on upwards as his body comes down after making a smash.
And lastly, we had the bubble tea craze occur in my town, where an entire street has been taken over by these sugar infused drinks dispensaries. Hordes of patrons were descending on this street night after night causing all sorts of congestion: traffic, plumbing and rubbish disposal in particular.
I think this is partly FOMO, partly love for the drink?
So here's the update on the little Padawans in training. Padawan Minigeek took to formal schooling like a duck to water. Our fears that she would be behind in her studies went unfounded as her teachers assured us that she has done very well in class as well as at her exams. However, we are still Asian parents, so we made sure that the singular mistake in her Maths paper haunted Padawan Minigeek for a couple of days at least. She has made some close friends and they have already had their first play date at our house and vice versa. It didn't feel as weird as I thought, probably because growing up, friends of family members were always welcome in our home. As a person, I probably identify the most with Padawan Minigeek, both of us being the eldest child in our families, there is an 'unfair' expectation of responsibility and model behaviour which we feel we are not appreciated for. She cycles back and forth between being a stubborn, independent, responsible person and a needy, moody, uncommunicative kid which drives her mother up the wall, but I get Padawan Minigeek, we all need to just be a kid sometimes.
In terms of activities, Padawan Minigeek is definitely my go to person in the family
What can I say about Padawan Babygeek? This year was really his year. He's developed his own opinion and can tell you all about it, he can remember lengthy songs and sing them out of nowhere, he has his own brand of humour and is choosy about what he wears. So now that he has a mind of his own, sibling fights tends to occur on a regular basis these days. I see that as a good thing, constantly teaching conflict resolution ("if you won't share then I'm taking it away"), giving in ("RPS for it") and resolving differences in a harmonious way ("both of you stand in the corner") will hopefully make a lasting impression that fighting is a big no-no. He's got his own catchphrases like "Why nobody said Amen" and "Hug & squeeze but not so hard" which makes him so (I don't care if I'm biased, I'm going to say it) adorbs. And as much as Padawan Babygeek has changed, so much remains the same, he wears his heart on his sleeve, eats like it's always the last meal of his life, plays all the time and dances like no one is watching, all whilst having the idiosyncrasies of an old man – burping, farting and loving old people types of foods.
Still one of my favourite shots of Padawan Babygeek, first of his name, eater of chicken, watcher of television and king of the laundry throne
This additional paragraph is one I am not just happy, but privileged to finally write. This was the year that Padawan Minigeek and Padawan Babygeek started playing boardgames with me without using house rules. A lot of credit goes to Everdell which seemed to spark the 14 plays in 4 months that I've had with the Padawans. Padawan Babygeek loves Everdell & Wingspan where he gets to collect lots and lots of food, whereas Padawan Minigeek is currently loving Castles of Mad King Ludwig because hey, who doesn't love to build castles. Playing with the Padawans these days has been a revelation, I get to play a full boardgame with unpredictable moves from Padawan Minigeek and Babygeek and have the opportunity to test out all my weird strategies and tactics that I don't usually get to do. When we've finished a game, Padawan Babygeek likes to ask, "Who won?" and my answer always is "Everyone won!" with high fives and cheers all around, and that's a special feeling because I can actually mean it when I say, that everyone won today.
About me. Well, I no longer need to be in two places at the same time so that's a minor improvement at the workplace. However, I have taken on the additional role of assistant teacher and am also pursuing a Masters in Teaching & Learning part time as well. It seems that the more I abhor going back to school, the more destined I am to keep attending. So I technically now have two places of work, which I commute back and forth to throughout the day. It can be tiring but I do enjoy seeing the students each day and helping them to learn something in the classroom. Being part of the school, I get to keep an eye on Padawan Minigeek so that's an unexpected side benefit I guess. Apart from that, I am tubby and healthy, doing well in school and work and ultimately blessed and grateful to God for my life and His daily enabling. Man, I absolutely have no idea how I could have pulled off 2019 on my own strength, so it must be God.
I'm known as the man with many hats, like this guy, but unlike me, he's pulling it off, with a sick handlebar moustache to boot
With all that out of the way let's talk about some boardgame statistics for 2019 using the very handy Board Game Stats app, with a side by side comparison to 2018:
2019 v 2018
So because of the post-graduate thingamabob that I'm doing, something had to give and the biggest casualty was sadly, Gloomhaven. Our thrice monthly sessions were sadly reduced to a handful of sessions (2019: 6, 2018: 24) that were held in my non-assignment breaks. Our interest in Gloomhaven is still high, but I guess until I get over this hill, Gloomhaven will have to sit on the back burner for a while. The SWAGamers monthly meetups also had to miss the October & November slots, which was kind of the reason why I decided to do a full day event in December, it had a good turn out and went quite well.
As such I am quite surprised that I actually managed to play more distinct games this year (2019: 31, 2018: 27) and also had more plays at 104 vs 2018's 74. Doppelt So Clever was my most played boardgame in 2019 which I played solo on my phone (still can't get more than a 300 score), followed by Padawan Minigeek's favourite tile laying boardgame – Castles of Mad King Ludwig. Easily a third of my plays came in the last quarter of 2019 when I started actively playing with the Padawans.
So, let's move on to the COLLECTION OF JOY and rate my performance as a curator. I made 4 new acquisitions this year, maintaining pace with 2018's 4 purchases as well, but only transferred 1 boardgame as opposed to last year's 5 boardgames. I don't think there will ever be a year where I don't buy a single new boardgame, so a nett +3 was not a bad year of maintaining the COLLECTION OF JOY. Let's run through the wishlist and go into the details of what has been added and moved to a new home:
Goodbye, my friend
Games from last year's Wishlist:
As of 2018, my wishlist contained: Clank! In Space!, Orleans: Trade & Intrigue, Aeon's End & A Feast For Odin. So after two years of being on the wishlist, Clank! In Space! has finally joined the COLLECTION OF JOY and this only just happened last month. Someone put up a second hand copy on Facebook for a good deal and I leapt at it. I think Aeon's End and A Feast For Odin will probably be acquired in similar fashion as a second hand purchase or not at all, but both do remain on the wishlist for another year.
Wishlists – keeping your FOMO at bay
So what's new to the Wishlist? Only two games actually.
Cartographers - The boardgame that brought colour markers back to the boardgame table
Cartographers - I don't own a roll & write boardgame in the COLLECTION OF JOY and whilst there is technically no rolling in Cartographers, the writing mechanic combined with the fantasy theme have ticked all the boxes for me. Flipping over terrain cards, Players will then choose to add one of the terrains to their map. I love maps and getting to draw one in a fantasy setting is a dream come true. And it also plays as many people as you can give out player sheets to! (I'm already thinking of this as a class activity). This would have been an instant purchase for me. It is just a shame that I can't find a retailer in Malaysia that carries games published by Thunderworks Games (please do something about this guys), so I will probably settle in to wait for someone coming over from UK to carry this back for me.
Barenpark - BEARS! Someone needs to do SHARKS!
Barenpark - I think this boardgame sits on that fine line where it is something Padawan Minigeek would be interested in and that I think I would enjoy. I've enjoyed Phil-Walker Harding's Sushi Go Party! and Padawan Minigeek seems to enjoy tile laying, building games. Plus it's about building a zoo filled with BEARS! The expansion Barenpark: Bad News Bears also looks interesting with the addition of monorails and two other modules. If I can't pick this up second hand I think I will end up buying it BNIS next year.
Games Added To THE SHELF:
So apart from Clank! In Space!, what else did I acquire in 2019?
Everdell - The half an acquisition that I made in 2018's was finally delivered in September of 2019. Everdell was all it promised and more. The card combinations are so clever yet simplistic enough for Padawan Minigeek to understand. And even Padawan Babygeek who doesn't do much reading yet, can get a decent score because he's hogging all the good worker locations. It's a beautifully designed boardgame and a delight to play. I wish the Pearlbrook expansion added stuff rather than replace some stuff that I actually like from the base boardgame but it changes the gameplay enough that it feels like I have two versions of the game. I'm not going in on the remaining expansions as I have no interest in owning even more versions of an already great boardgame. No regrets whatsoever.
Wingspan - I never thought I would be an owner of a boardgame about birds
Wingspan - After selling Coal Baron I wanted to pick up something for the Padawans, particularly after being excited about their newfound interest in boardgames. I was torn between Tiny Towns & Wingspan and ultimately the 2019 KdJ winner won out and is now known as the "Birdhouse Game" by the Padawans. I do enjoy the simplicity of the gameplay where there are only 4 actions which become increasingly more powerful depending on the types of birds you decide to put into play. The birds themselves have abilities and score points, usually one offsetting the other, and when played properly, can create a powerful engine that scores lots of points. To be honest, Wingspan triggers a lot of memories of Race For The Galaxy for me personally. There is some element of luck in finding the right pieces for your engine but at the same time, you can still win the boardgame without focusing on building an engine though that seems less likely against more experience Players. Wingspan is far more streamlined, much easier to teach and explain and way easier to build a basic engine by powering up your actions. I don't love the boardgame yet, but Wingspan definitely has a place in the COLLECTION OF JOY for its design.
Paladins of the West Kingdom - I have a great big weakness for crunchy euro games set in a medieval / fantasy setting
Paladins of the West Kingdom - I have heard a lot of great things about its predecessor, Architects of the West Kingdom and if there was any knock on the game, it was that some reviewers felt that the gameplay was a bit light. So when the heavier Paladins of the West Kingdom was announced on Kickstarter, I was all in from day 1. And then tracking the shipping container, waiting for deliver to my FLGS and then pulling my hair out as my parcel was being delivered to my doorstep, kickstarters aren't very good for the heart.
Games NEW to me in 2019:
This is a new section I'm adding to just quickly comment on the boardgames that were new to me in 2019.
Some are really old and some are really new, but they're all new to me this year
Doppelt So Clever - I picked this up on my phone when there was a discount. IG was blowing up with people trying to break 300 and I wasn't getting much boardgaming in my life at the time so a couple of dollars for a game I played 39 times seems quite worth it. Doppelt So Clever is basically a luck puzzle, a very bad comparison would be evil level Sudokus. Sometimes you luck into a key Sudoku square and the puzzle unfolds itself but the logic and the process to solve the puzzle remains the same. Doppelt So Clever feels that way, each colour segment responds differently to high and low dice rolls and provides you different bonuses and scoring. I'm still terrible at the game but I think that the key to doing well at Doppelt So Clever is to learn the optimal time to score in each colour segment in order to gain the most bonuses and hence a higher score.
Pandemic - I'm surprised that it's taken me this long to sit down and play Pandemic. I actually know how to play it but have never sat down to play myself. When I was younger, we would sit down around a jigsaw puzzle and work at it based on our assigned tasks, the older ones got the difficult mono-coloured sections, whilst the younger ones got the edges and every now and then we would convene together to figure out what to do with a problematic piece. Pandemic feels exactly like that.
Flash Point: Fire Rescue - Another co-op boardgame that has been around for a while that is new to me (shows how many co-op boardgames I get around to playing). Flash Point: Fire Rescue really made me feel like a fireman, hacking through walls, picking up the dumb pet who got stuck in the corner and hightailing it out of the building then rinsing and repeating before the whole building collapses. The difficulty can increase very quickly if a fire continuously breaks out in the same area of the building, but hey, fires never occur when it's convenient for everyone do they?
Champions of Midgard: Jarl Edition - Okay, so all five of us have never played the boardgame before. I was the only one who roughly knew how it is played through cursory reading of the four different rulebooks and watching some "Let's Play" videos. So I think with trying to figure out all of that whilst watching out for the other Players, some of the fun got lost in translation for me. My play of Champions of Midgard: Jarl Edition felt a bit like a generic worker placement boardgame with some excitement coming from the dice rolling from combating monsters, however unless you have angered the dice gods recently (like poor Edward), the results are not too unpredictable. However, I must say that the Valhalla expansion was the most interesting because you can get more warriors from the ones that have fallen in battle. It adds this extra dimension of tactics where I'm actually cherry picking some of my warriors to send them to certain death, in the hopes that I can get something better later.
Everdell - Not too sure what more there is to say about Everdell that I have not said already. If you're on the fence, I'd say just pick the game up already (you'd have no trouble trading or selling it anyway). Oh just one thing, if you're teaching the game, be sure to doubly remind your Players up front that they are only allowed 15 spaces in their town. My Players keep insisting that I never mention this rule in my briefing.
Wingspan - I've also covered this earlier so I won't say much more. Just that there is not much Player interaction in Wingspan, something that I haven't noticed other mentioning in their reviews. Some bird abilities have global effects but otherwise Players are only interacting with one another by competing for food dice and bird cards, and even then I rarely hear anyone say "Hey! I wanted that!" during the gameplay.
Paladins of the West Kingdom - So I've played once with Padawan Minigeek so far and all she did was basically hoard Provisions and Coins without using them, so take my comments with a large sack of salt. Paladins of the West Kingdom has drawn some comparisons with Orleans and that's fair, you are using particular coloured workers to take actions, making your engine stronger so you can take more actions or more powerful actions to gain more points. Except that in Paladins of the West Kingdom, sometimes you don't get the coloured workers you want (I know Orleans Players complain that their Fisherman is stuck in their bag somewhere and refuses to come out, but at least you know he's in there!) because you don't have control over the types of workers you are going to receive from round to round. And so planning becomes much more tactical and on a round-to-round basis, because the gameplay compensates for this by giving you a gazillion options to get around this lack of control. For example, one Player might take one single action to destroy a Debt, whereas another Player will need to take 5 actions to the same thing. This is not meant to make Paladins of the West Kingdom sound like a luck filled outing, but to demonstrate that it is a different sort of brain crunching monster from Orleans, but a brain crunching one none the same, because when I managed to figure out how to destroy that Debt card in 5 moves, I felt like a million bucks.
Closing Thoughts On 2019:
As the Padawans grow older, they naturally become more independent and less reliant on their Teacher. The benefits of this are obvious when you no longer have to wipe the poop off their bums after they've done a Number 2. What is less obvious is that the Teacher now has more time for himself, being able to read a rulebook in the time it usually takes to clean up the Padawan, ask them if they are really done with Number 2, sometimes having to wait again if they reconsider, cleaning up again if needed, dressing them then cleaning up yourself thereafter. There is also less supervised time, trusting that the Padawans have sufficiently learned how to use the force to play safely in the playground or sit on a swing without falling off, and the Teacher gets to have another go at Doppelt So Clever to try and break the 300 score whilst listening out for the anguished cry of a Padawan who may have tripped and fallen or kicked the durned ball out of the play area again.
Whilst all this free time is great for reengaging in boardgaming (or in my case – pursuing the knowledge of imparting knowledge), there is a hint of joyful sadness as I realize that this is the start of a process where the Padawans gradually become less and less reliant on me until the day they leave the Jedi Home and become Jedi Knights of their own making. I'm just glad that even as the Padawans begin to spend more time pursuing their own world of activities that they still choose to come and ask if they can play a boardgame with me every now and then.
So what's next in 2020? As I mentioned way back in 2018, I was planning an Essen Spiel pilgrimage in the coming year with Gideon. Things have somewhat derailed and has gone from "this is happening" to "not in the cards" to "maybe, we'll see". At this time of the year, I'm more of a "if it happens it will" mood, and things will probably be more decided before the end of the first quarter. My melancholic mood about Essen Spiel also stems a little from trying to complete my Masters degree in 2020, it is a natural instinct for me to be apprehensive about studies, particularly after being away from books for so many years.
On the boardgaming end, I suspect the SWAGamers format may change quite drastically, turning more toward a "by invitiation only" event to have more control on the number and level of Players in order to get heavier games to the table. With our current format, we tend to cycle through new Players and we end up playing a lot of the same light weight games like Majesty or Sushi Go Party! month in and month out. The group format will still occur, but maybe only once a quarter if I feel up to it. I do enjoy organizing these big group sessions like the boardgaming day we did at the end of the year but man is it a pain to set up and take down, so we'll see how it goes in 2020.
And as is customary for me to end each year with an annual geek contribution, here's something geeky for your viewing pleasure:
The Star Wars universe had a great year this year, on screen with The Mandalorian and off screen with Star Wars: Outer Rim
If you enjoy such things, try and guess the games I played in 2019 in the first 2019 picture at the top of the post as well as all the characters and the movies they're from in the geek contribution.
Wishing a blessed 2020 to all my readers. "May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks." – Gandalf
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