The Gaming Archivist: Review

1st January 2017 (Sunday)

Year In Review:
2016 Review

Review – 2016
This Year Was… …:

To be honest, 2016 was sort of a "honeymoon" year for me. It was the kind of year where I got to take a breath of personal time and savour it after a big change like having a second kid in the family. Where not everything is a DEFCON 1 situation and we could take time to do normal family things again, like go to the playground, watch movies, go on family holidays and dine out at a nice restaurant without leaving our table looking like a tornado, typhoon and tsunami happened to it.

We also don't have to tip the waiters so heavily anymore, YAY!

As is customary in my annual review, I will do a flashback on the year that was 2016, but with more emphasis on happier events... This is not to diminish the loss & suffering of those impacted by the many terror attacks, wars, bombings and unfortunate accidents, but a writer's prerogative to focus on hope in the new year:

In distant space, approximately 40 light minutes away, NASA's space probe Juno has arrived at Jupiter (two planets over from us) after a nearly 5 year journey. Just as astronomically incredible, Leicester City win the English Premier League of 2015/16, a simple statement about an incredible achievement that would probably be made into a movie. Also another potential movie, Donald trumps Hilary to be the next POTUS in what were seemingly unbelievable odds. And speaking about movies, 2016 was the year of animated and geek movies with the top 10 highest grossing films all firmly within these categories (I deem Jungle Book an animated movie due to its origins) with Walt Disney Pictures having produced 5 of the top 10. It would appear that the era of the Geek is nigh.

Redemption for all the comic book loving, Trekkies, force lovers and gamers out there

In the land of my people, the political landscape seems to be descending into a playground fight between children. At least the long anticipated LRT extension project has been completed, although initial hiccups prompted a slew of "Train to Busan" parody memes. The short-lived Pokemon Go craze saw Malaysians of all shapes and sizes braving the perils of stepping outside their home on to public roads and parks, which I understand was a global phenomenon. Malaysians were then given an introduction to Business Finance and Corruption 101 through the many, many videos on 1MDB after the WSJ and DOJ reports. Then Mohd Faiz Subri, whose goal stunned many online viewers, was shortlisted as among the top three nominees for the FIFA Puskas Award for the best goal of the year, what an honour!

This man is a wizard

On the home front, we've had to go through many lessons in parenting, especially with Padawan Minigeek and Babygeek being so different from each other. It's tough being a mom & dad, trying to educate your child that they need to be fair in a world that is far from it. And there's the multiple personas you need to don, when to be the playful dad that gives horse rides, when to put on the angry face when someone crosses a line, when to put on the "no means no" face when they make googly eyes at you and when to be like Bruno Mars in his song "Grenade" when they get into trouble.

Parenting is rough

So, apart from my full time job of parenting, I have more or less eased into my new work place. The learning curve can be steep at times, more because we seem to be breaking new ground every quarter for some reason. Apart from that my work life simply comes down to getting priorities straight and setting the right expectations. When that fails, then like all snobbish government offices, I resort to a queue system. It's just what you have to do when you're the only water boy on a team of thirsty players. Otherwise I'm learning loads from the different things I have to do, sort of like a RPG character with a main mastery rounding out his sub classes.

Except I have 6 subclasses

In terms of boardgaming, SWAGamers (previously known as KFCgamers, the name of our little group that meets up for boardgames once a month) has seen an uptick in sessions this year, managing to have 8 mornings of boardgaming (not including the Cube Championships) as compared to only 5 sessions in 2015. This year saw me play 14 boardgames as per the spreadsheet below, to get my thoughts on those games you can refer to the last paragraphs of my session reports on those games where I usually share my concluding or new thoughts on the game. SWAGamers was essentially all of the boardgaming that I did in 2016 making it more important for me to schedule time out for it in the coming year.

Slowly but surely the statistics are experiencing incremental growth

Whilst my number of plays is slowly increasing, my number of acquisitions are actually in sharp decline (2014: 8, 2015: 5, 2016: 3) of nearly 50% year on year. This is not surprising given that my gaming cupboard is nearly full to the rafters and that 2016 was a very soft year in the industry to me. The newly released games that I found interesting were (a) not really interesting upon further research (b) not a reasonable player count or requires too much learning commitment and (c) were being picked up by others in SWAGamers. As such, this was the first year that I got absolutely nothing from Essen SPIEL. Below is a list of the games I was initially interested in, followed by the ones I did eventually end up buying:

Games of Diminishing Interest:

Colony by Ted Alspach, Toryo Hojo & Yoshisa Nakatsu
Courtesy of W Eric Martin

Colony - After Suburbia & Castles of Mad King Ludwig, I was more or less a Ted Alspach fanboy and Colony, with its sci-fi theme, was like a shoe-in for space on my shelf. But the dice mechanic and the seemingly lack of control over your own fate due to turn to turn changes of your resources waned my interest in the game.

Vast: The Crystal Caverns by Patrick Leder & David Somerville
Courtesy of Annowme

Vast: The Crystal Caverns - The uniqueness of having completely asymmetric roles in a game where you can play the good guy, the bad guy, the bad guy's minions and the environment itself stoked the fires of interest in my boardgaming blood. However this also means you need to teach each Player how to play as their character individually each time which is somewhat of a pain unless you have dedicated Players. Plus, the game is being kickstarted again to include miniatures which put me off to just wait for the miniatures version to hit retail.

Dream Home by Klemens Kalicki
Courtesy of balint77

Dream Home - I think fatherhood has started making me a sucker for cutesy things. I will admit that my interest in Dream Home is probably more due to Bartłomiej Kordowski's work as the artist for the game. Thankfully Gideon is picking this up and I'm really looking forward to giving this a try.

The Colonists by Tim Puls
Courtesy of nunovix

The Colonists - City building games automatically grab me by the throat and demand me to pay attention. I read the rules (boy there are a lot of rules), tried to find video coverage that wasn't in German and the game play actually sounds really good. The only problem is the game length, when the rulebook "suggests" that you "save" your progress in between eras (of which there are four of them), it gets kind of scary. Also, the game play seems strikingly similar to one of the games I'm actually getting (please see Yokohama below).

The Pursuit of Happiness by Adrian Abela & David Chircop
Courtesy of 3pod

Roll for the Galaxy & The Pursuit of Happiness still remain on my "on the fence" list. I have a feeling that I am more likely to pick up The Pursuit of Happiness over Roll for the Galaxy once it does become available.

Games Added to THE SHELF:

Yokohama Deluxe designed by Hisashi Hayashi & kickstarted by TMG
Courtesy of punkin312

Yokohama Deluxe - Ever since a deluxe edition of Orléans was kickstarted by TMG, I always sit up and pay attention when TMG decides to pimp a game to the "deluxe" level. That plus the kickstarter was funded in 2 hours and went on to meet all its stretch goals meant that although I had sworn off kickstarters, I swallowed my pride and after doing my research which made me realize that this was a mini version of The Colonists but set in Japan in the Meiji era, immediately turned in a group pledge with Boarders Tabletop Cafe. Expect to see this sometime in March 2017.

Orléans designed by Reiner Stockhausen
Courtesy of henk.rolleman

Orléans - This game has been on a roll since its release in 2014 and is now in to its second expansion with the first receiving even more praise from reviewers. This game was on the fence for me back in 2014 and when an opportunity to pick it up at a discount came along, I didn't hesitate to pull the trigger. Absolutely no regrets in picking up this one, you can read about the game in this session post here.

Smash Up: Science Fiction Double Feature designed by Paul Peterson
Courtesy of W Eric Martin

Smash Up: Science Fiction Double Feature - If you follow this blog in its early days in 2010/11, you will know that "Operation Gamerwife" could not be considered successful in any way. It came as a wonderfully incredible surprise when I received this from my wife for Christmas. It is somewhat of a double surprise seeing as my original base game of Smash Up was gifted to me by family as well. I rarely receive boardgames as gifts so this was extra special.

Closing Thoughts On 2016:

In terms of boardgaming, 2016 was somewhat of a comeback year for me. Whilst I'm still a far cry from 40+ games a year like way back in 2011, I'm now back in the double digits scene and with a little bit of hope, think that hitting a decent 20+ games in 2017 is plausible with 12 scheduled sessions of SWAGamers for the coming year. For the blog, the focus will likely be on releasing more "Play Better" reports and refining the skill in taking timelapse videos of our sessions, hopefully differentiating this blog from other regular boardgame sessions reports.

On the home front, the children are all growing up and as such, their training in boardgaming has slowly begun. It still remains to be seen if they show any aptitude to reach Jedi Knight but it won't be from lack of trying. Mummy however, insists that the Padawans' education needs to be rounded out with other things like reading, writing, math, music, sport and communication. So she takes care of those arrangements whilst I, the Jedi Master, teach survival skills for Jedi Knights, like cooking, hunting, gaming, counting change, proper foot attire, hand-to-hand combat and crossing the road.