Normally I’m not someone who makes big board gaming plans for the year. But last year, not too surprisingly, my gaming was down a fair amount. I had really been pushing to get in more gaming than the pandemic happened and just a lot of things happened making it tough to really want to game all that much or to be able to game all that much. This year, I want to make it more of a focus for myself to game, I decided.

Gaming Resolutions

A lot of people do board gaming goals for a year, I think the most common that I see is the 10 by 10 goal. This one is straight forward, you pick ten games from your collection that you want to play at least ten times during the year. Or there will be other derivations of that, some people have done 100 by 1, so play 100 different games in a year, or 20 by 5, or some other thing like that.

I’ve also heard of resolutions such as playing all the unplayed games in ones collection in the year, so that they’ve played all of their games. Or play through their full collection. The Brothers Murph actually played through the whole collection in a week, which was insane because that was 200 or so games that they made it through. Granted, some of the smaller games they probably know so well that they played in five minutes, but still, that’s a lot of games with set-up and tear down.

My Resolution

For myself, I want to play games equal to the number of days. Now, I don’t plan on playing on game per day, that seems like a lot and there are just going to be some days where I might not get in any games. Instead, I want to play games 365 times this year, and I’m off to a good start with it.

To help myself keep track I picked up the BG Stats app which I’m going to be using, and have been using this year. It’s a nice app that I’ll talk about more in the future as I use it more and mess around with the features more. In fact, it actually gives you a lot of the challenges ($0.99 add-on purchase) to keep track of things like that and as a challenge itself. Right now I’m sitting at 26 plays in 27 days, but more on those soon. Another nice thing is that it connects up with Board Game Geek, so I didn’t have to enter in my collection again.

The Plays

So, why am I talking about this, because I want to talk about what I’ve played in each month. Generally one of the first days of each month I will go back and look at what I played the previous month and see how well I am doing on the goal as a whole. I think it’ll help me keep track of what I’m doing and what I’ve played, and it might also be interesting for you to see what games have gotten to the table. So next Monday, expect to see a post on that.

It also does a few other fun things that I’ll be talking about beyond the games themselves. I’m going to look at stats surrounding the types of games I’ve played, so how many solo or how many in groups, the group size, etc. I am still getting used to all the stats that I want to keep track of in it, but I think that it’s going to be fun.

So Why The Goal?

Last year, as I said, my gaming was down. Obviously with a pandemic and not being able to get together in larger groups, like for a board game night, that made it way more difficult to play games. Also, the motivation to play games solo just wasn’t there as well. Thankfully throughout the year I did get back into gaming some more. I know that the start of this year especially when we can’t be outside in Minnesota, there is going to be not that much chance to play games. Once it gets nice sure, we can play outside and hopefully we’ll be getting vaccinated by then as well, one of the gaming group already has had their first round of the vaccine. So this is for me to not fall back into not playing games. I have a big game collection, 232 base games, and over 300 with expansions added in. Now, a lot of those have been played and have been played prior to me keeping stats, the app says I haven’t played 180 or so of them, but it’s less than that since I don’t have played of Clue, Scrabble, Ticket to Ride, and more even though I have played them, just not since I started keeping track of gaming on BGG and now BG Stats. But still, I want to get through more of them and this will help me do that. And even if I just played a handful of games solo this year and eventually can play in groups, I’m just excited to play more games and a little challenge motivation never hurts.

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