The Games of 2022

EDIT (Jan 13, 2023): It turns out that a subtle bug in the BGG for Android app prevented most of my plays from being properly logged after December 23. I have worked around the issue, and it has required me to update parts of this blog post.

It's time for my annual tradition of reflecting on the year's board games. I logged 462 plays in 2022, which is on par with 2021. Those numbers are still smaller than 2020, which of course was an unusual year. Also, all the family now enjoys playing larger and longer games. My youngest son is seven, and he's never asking to play Reiner Knizia's Flea Circus any more: he wants to play Clank or his recent favorites, Castles of Mad King Ludwig and even Rising Sun. I was not very good about hosting Guys' Games Nights this year, despite having told multiple people that I really wanted to do this. There are some guys in town whose company I truly enjoy, whom I haven't seen in a long time, and for whom board games are what brings us together. I need to do better with this in 2023.

In my annual blog posts, I usually report on the games that I played at least ten times during the previous year. This year, there are some interesting ones just under that threshold, so I will go down a little further into the rabbit hole.

• Race for the Galaxy (44)
• Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition (31)
• Downforce (27)
• My City (25)
• Etherfields (22)
• Thunderstone Quest (21)
• Clank! (19)
• So Clover! (19)
• Castles of Mad King Ludwig (14)
• Arcadia Quest (13)
• The Quacks of Quedlinburg (12)
• Crokinole (11)
• Dune: Imperium (11)
• Stuffed Fables (10)
• Wingspan (10)
• Massive Darkness 2 (9)
• Oceans (9)
• Exit: The Game - Advent Calendar: The Mystery of the Ice Cave (9)
• Mechanica (7)
• Xia: Legends of a Drift System (7)

This was the year that two of my games broke 100 logged plays, and those games are Race for the Galaxy and Clank!. The latter counts just "regular" Clank! and not the legacy version, although I have combined those two in some past analyses. These are, of course, two of my favorite games, and I picked up two new games by the same designers for Christmas: Res Arcana and Clank! Catacombs. These have already received a lot of play considering Christmas was just a week ago, and I expect to see them both moving up the charts.

Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition is a game recommended by my brother, and I bought it for my eldest son without knowing much else about it. I love it as something like a crunchier version of Race for the Galaxy. It certainly shares a lot of the same DNA. We get it out regularly, and I expect it will see a spike in plays when the expansion comes out.

I first played Downforce with my brother two or three years ago, and I had kind of vague memories about it: it was fun, the cards looked cheap, and it played six players. I saw a copy at Origins and picked it up, and it has been a huge hit with the family. It supports six players but is even more fun at fewer, and it's a challenge without being too stressful. This makes it a go-to game when everyone wants to play something together, but I suspect that title may soon go to Railroad Ink, which is another new Christmas acquisition. Railroad Ink takes almost no time to set up and tear down, and everyone takes their turns at once; these are highly desirable for a family of six.

My City is the only game I have bought twice. I got a second copy for Christmas 2021 and played through the campaign again with a different subset of four. It was still great, and now we have two sets, which means up to eight people can play the non-legacy version of the game.

Etherfields proved to be a lot of fun. I have painted all the miniatures except for one, which is why you haven't seen them on the blog yet. I'll say more about it when that last figure gets painted, but for now, suffice to say that my two older sons and I have really enjoyed it.

2022 was the year that my third son learned to play Arcadia Quest, and we played a few campaigns together. We're excited to try a campaign with Pets and Riders together, and that will likely come this summer. What will happen when my youngest son wants to play, though? Either my boys will play without me or my oldest will be away at college, and both of those are kind of scary thoughts.

Some of the boys and I started up another run through the Stuffed Fables campaign, but it fizzled out. It's hard to put my finger on why. I was less excited the second time through since there was less discovery in the story, but even the younger boys seemed less interested in getting the game to the table. I think it ends up in the awkward pile of games that I have spent hours painting the miniatures but no longer have desire to play.

I picked up the Exit Advent Calendar on a friend's recommendation, and my family definitely enjoyed it. One puzzle was a stinker, but the others were a lot of fun. Different members of the family were able to solve different puzzles, which was both good and unpredictable. One reason I wanted to write about it here is that games like are a bit unclear on how they should be logged. At first, I logged every room as being a play, but that seemed inflated. I ended up logging just each session, of which we had seven distributed through the 24 days before Christmas (which is not the same as Advent, but I bought the game anyway, so pedantic liturgical season marketing is probably not a good business move for them). 

I was a little surprised to see that Xia was only at seven plays since we played it so much last year. It's always fun, but it is a big commitment of time and table space.

To wrap up, I will take my customary look at the top-played games in my collection since I started logging plays in 2016. Let's somewhat arbitrarily take the games with 40 or more plays.

• Race for the Galaxy (108)
• Clank! (102)
• Thunderstone Quest (92)
• Crokinole (86)
• Kingdomino (80)
• Gloomhaven (66)
• My City (63)
• Arcadia Quest (61)
• The Quacks of Quedlinburg (59)
• Carcassonne (58)
• Animal Upon Animal (56)
• Camel Up (51)
• Quiddler (50)
• Rhino Hero: Super Battle (43)
• The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine (40)
• Runebound (Third Edition) (40)

That's all for this year's review. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming!