2023 Recap

Introduction

This is the fifth year I’ve done one of these recaps. This is the longest and by far the most self-indulgent version of it. You can view all the previous posts in their specific category, but here are direct links to the entries for: 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Here’s a table of contents for this post:

By The Numbers

Game Design and Development

  • 2 iOS apps released (1 board game, 1 open source game-related utility)
  • 82 game design journal entries written (59 tagged tabletop, 15 digital)
  • 28 journal entries were “a continuation” of previous ideas
  • 2 journal entries were ideas from dreams (neither had any merit tho)
  • 9 board game ideas prototyped
  • 1 board game prototype ordered from The Game Crafter
  • 1 presentation given at CrafterCon on digital board game development

Games Played Log

  • 274 unique game entries
  • 195 games played for only one day
  • 240 days I played played some Picross
  • 20 game reviews in my game log

Board Game Arena

  • 457 plays completed there
  • 262 plays where I won (57.3%)
  • 78 different (unique) games
  • 56 plays of Gizmos (the most)
  • 24 different games only played once

Other Activity

  • 52 books read in 2023
  • 15 of those books I rated 5-stars
  • 52 movies watched in 2023
  • 4 of those movies I rated 5-stars
  • 8371 songs scrobbled
  • ~3104 photos taken (all from my phone)

Game Design and Development

Sometime last year I moved all my journals into Obsidian. Obsidian is great, but more importantly, they are all now markdown files, and much more organized than they were before.

A separate, but related project is to move all of my game design related documents and files into a .git repository specific to that purpose. It’s one of those projects that may be perpetually in-progress (although it is finite!), because there are so many files still in Google Drive. Some of those will remain, because they are publicly shared, or collaborations, but in all cases, I’d also like a copy to live in the repository.

The peace-of-mind I’m getting from this cannot be overstated, but additionally I’m finding it much easier to find where I’ve put things, and make progress on projects that have been shelved for ages. This process also surfaced some projects I’d completely forgotten about, and my list of prototypes (by what stage of development they’re in) has grown as a result. (Specifically, before the markdown version, I only had 28 “playable” board game prototypes listed, and I now have 31.)

My Game Design Journal

I wrote 82 game design journal entries in 2023. That’s twice as many as 2022!

After trying to “eyeball” some statistics, I decided to go through and tag all my journal entries, which made compiling the statistics reported above a simple matter of counting the instances of that tag in the file for 2023. (The tag count by file is built into Obsidian, and this was the main reason I decided to split the file up by year.)

My re-reading and parsing of the journal entries revealed a few other observations:

  • First, I think I tend to have a lot of game ideas where I have some game components, and I want to make a game using those components. For example, one of my holiday gifts this year was a set of 4-colors of wooden checkers pieces, and since receiving them, I have thought of no less than 4 new games playable with those pieces.
  • Initially, I wanted to tag new game ideas with whether or not they’re variants of other ideas. But I realized that it’s very hard for my brain to sort this out at a glance. This is actually a really hard question, and I now recall that there was a long thread in BGG about it sometime in the last year as well. I didn’t really resolve this, and decided not to report this statistic.
  • Related to the above, I was very liberal in my use of the #continuation tag. In the past, I always tried to list the date of the previous design journal entry that the idea continued, but this time around, I just went with whether the idea was building on any previous ideas I’ve had. A great many journal entries are about games I’m actively working on, and I certainly don’t list all the previous entries in those cases.
  • 7 journal entries were about variants for existing games not designed by me. Some of these were about new Go variants. I spent a lot of time last year thinking about Go variants, and am still considering publishing a set of them in some form or another.
  • 6 of the journal entries were game ideas that are playable with common components. I generally don’t include those kinds of games in my prototypes list. (Unless I really think they have merit, and then I’ll spend some additional time thinking about how or whether they could become commercial games. Maybe through some component trickery. Or, as was the case this year, perhaps by bundling them with other Go variants.)

Video Game Development

I was fairly focused on non-game contract work this year, but still managed to find time enough to work on (and release) the app version of my game Blither. I still have a lot of tasks on my TODO list for that game, but my enthusiasm for working on it has almost dried up at this point.

The only other video game development of note that I tackled in 2023 was to spend a few weekends porting Go Tetris to Swift. That project is maybe 50% complete at this point. I’m using an open source cross-platform game engine, called GateEngine, and I documented some of the exploration and learnings around using the engine (and my port more generally) in a series of posts on the Swift.org forums.

Games Played Log / Journal

Not including BGA turns, other turn-based board games, or Picross, here are my most-played games of 2023:

  1. Diablo 4 (Xbox): 117 days
  2. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch): 80 days
  3. Army of Ruin (Steam): 30 days
  4. Coral Island (Steam): 25 days
  5. Stitch (iOS): 21 days
  6. Hogwarts Legacy (Steam): 21 days
  7. Grimoire (iOS): 19 days
  8. Garden Tails (ios): 13 days
  9. Rogue Genesia (steam): 13 days
  10. Sumaddle (iOS): 12 days

Note that there are no tabletop games in my top 10, but I did play tabletop games (in person) on 49 days in 2023, which is a heck of a lot more than the 31 days from 2022. My most played “in person” tabletop games, by number of days played were:

  1. Passo: 5 days – I played this a lot with my kid, and because the game is relatively short, most of the time we played at least 2 out of 3 games, so this number may be way low compared to number of completed games.
  2. Cascadia: 5 days – My guess is I “just” played this 5 times.
  3. Go: 4 days
  4. Gizmos: 3 days
  5. Say?: 3 days – This game’s designer, Khanat Sadomwattana is really on a roll. I just received Yuma from the kickstarter, and am eager to play it.
  6. Aegean Sea: 2 days
  7. Meadow: 2 days – Shout out to Nate and Ellie, who own this game.
  8. Euker: 2 days – This is a thanksgiving tradition among my dad’s side of the family.
  9. Splendor: 2 days
  10. Splendor Duel: 2 days – I mostly got this to see what makes it tick. It’s a fine 2-player Splendor variant.

It’s obviously an idiosyncrasy of my “played log” journaling that I don’t currently log when I played a game more than one time in a day. I’m going to try and think of a way to fix that for 2024.

Board Game Arena

My top 10 games played on BGA this year were:

  • Gizmos: 56 plays
  • Innovation: 43 plays
  • Splendor: 26 plays
  • Race for the Galaxy: 23 plays
  • Azul: 22 plays
  • Jump Drive: 20 plays
  • 6 nimmt!: 20 plays
  • Stone Age: 17 plays
  • Ticket to Ride: 15 plays
  • 7 Wonders Architects: 14 plays

It’s no secret that I love the game Gizmos. I was happy to see it at the top of my most played on BGA list. All the games in that list are ones I play with folks on my Tuesday night online game night. We play asynchronously all week, of course, but an hour or two on Zoom definitely helps keep things moving along. Notably, the group has shrunk a bit in the last year. I stopped inviting other folks, even when it looks like it’s not going to be many people on the call, because a) I’m lazy, but b) it’s easy to end up with too many. (We usually try and play only one game concurrently.) c) I also think it can be sometimes awkward when folks on the call don’t know each other. It’s always hard to align everyone on which games to play and when, maybe even more than with an in-person game night. Even when everyone has known each other for years (as with our core group), it can sometimes be hard to pick a game, which is why we end up falling-back on these staples we know everyone already knows and loves.

If you’re reading this, and are one of the people I’ve stopped pestering to come play with us, please know that I still want to play with you!

I also wanted to remark on some of the games I personally really enjoyed learning this year on BGA:

  • Ark Nova: 11 plays – Just barely missed the top-10 cut off. I’ve never played this in person, but I’ve enjoyed getting to play it on BGA.
  • boop!: 9 plays – I saw this in person and dismissed it as yet another commercial game that’s too simple, and probably broken. But it was something much more rare: a commercial release of an abstract strategy game with some actual depth and clout! I have yet to pick this up (at least in part because I can play it any time on BGA), but I probably will do so eventually.
  • Let’s Catch The Lion! – 7 plays – more about this one below.
  • That Time You Killed Me – 3 plays – I’ve owned the physical version of this since it came out, but have yet to play with my copy. The digital implementation was the push I needed to finally learn to play, and explore this game a bit.
  • Earth, and Forest Shuffle – 2 plays each – I think it’s interesting that I only played both of these tableau builders twice. They were both new to me, and I thought I’d played both of them more than I had. I really enjoyed both games, and have considered picking up physical copies. (More so Forest Shuffle than Earth, but only because I think it would go over better with my wife & kid.)

Abstract Strategy Games

Toward the end of December, I started playing games on AbstractPlay.com. I only finished 2 games there by the end of the year (one game of Tintas, and one of Adere, both new-to-me and excellent games!), and I’m eager to continue to play there daily. I’ll include stats for those games next year in a similar way to BGA. I’m always saying abstract strategy games are my favorite, and I do like to try out new ones whenever I get a chance, but in general, they seldom make my “most played games” lists. So I decided to take a closer look at my plays of Abstract Strategy games in 2023. (And additionally, maybe I’ll try and change this somewhat in 2024.)

One of the standouts for me this last year was a game I didn’t acquire until mid-November, called Passo. Shortly after that, I convinced my 13-year-old to play it with me, and my game log says we played it 5 days. I don’t remember a day that we played it where we didn’t play best out of 3 times. And there may have even been a day or two where we did that twice. On the other hand, one of the 5 days was introducing the game to Nick Bentley, and I believe we only played it once.

Passo is one of those short games with simple components that I really wish I’d designed. I’ve even spent some time in past years working on designs played on modular boards! Before taking our first plane trip in 3 years, one of the things I did to prepare was to write up a list of about 10 modifiers to try out while playing Passo. Then on the plane, I presented these to my kid as a “challenge” for us to figure out which ones are fun. (The grid of 5×5 board spaces fits perfectly on one of those back-of-the-seat tables, by the way.) Interestingly, we tried a bunch of combinations of all my ideas, and none of them felt as good as Passo. I don’t know whether we gave them a fair chance, but the impression I came away with is that Passo is incredibly “honed” in its simplicity. It’s hard to make a better game out of its components!

Looking at my log again, the abstract strategy game I played on the most days was Blither, (the game I released as an iOS app) played on 10 days. I’m certain I actually played it more days than I logged it, since I’m also sure I worked on it more days than that, and I doubt there was a day I worked on it that I didn’t finish at least a game or two.

Other notable abstract strategy games:

  • My friend Mike and I played boop! on BGA 9 times in the course of about 3 months between March and June. At first, I thought it was broken. (Mostly because you can get into cycles, or at least very long sequences, but it’s also possible to get out of them.) But the more I played, the less I cared. I enjoy it well enough, and really loved reading the boop! designer diary on BGG.
  • In contrast, Mike and I only finished 7 games of Go in 2023, though we always had a game going throughout the year. I played at least 3 games of Go on my phone this year (in the Smart Go app). And notably, I played at least 3 physical games of Go, although all three were against either my 13 year old or other teenage friends they had over.
  • It’s hard to say how many, but I also played quite a few Go variants this year. Mostly on Ludii, and AiAi, but as I mentioned I spent a lot of time thinking about them, and part of that time was just spent googling around for what’s out there.
  • Notably, I found that Stephen Lavelle has two excellent digital Go variants: Pachingo, and Go48 He is one of my game-design idols. Arguably a genius.
  • I played 7 games of Let’s Catch the Lion! on BGA – I think of this little Shogi variant to Shogi as Tic-Tac-Chec is to Chess. I love both of those small games. My impression is that they give just the tiniest taste of the tactics you can find in the larger game, while still being their own totally satisfying self-contained experiences. Although I’ve wanted to for many years, I never spent the time to learn how to play Shogi. I think I’ve been intimidated by the usual look of the pieces, which are indecipherable to my western-biased eyes. I enjoyed Let’s Catch the Lion! so much that I ordered the full version (also known as “Dobutsu shogi in the Greenwood”) from a little shop in Japan. It’s my understanding that version is essentially Shogi, with kid’s pieces. I haven’t received it yet, but when it arrives I’m eager to explore some of the other variants described in this Shogi geeklist.

Video Games

I mostly played Diablo 4 with friends, and I had sort of grown tired of it at one point not too long after it came out, but then the second season content sucked me (us?) back in again. Plus, at some point my brother got an Xbox, so I was also playing with him too for a while.

Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is easily my game of the year. It’s just a really solid sequel, with tons of little improvements over the first one, giving me plenty of reasons to keep playing. Just thinking about it makes me kind of itch to play it again, though it looks like the last time I played was back in September.

I was surprised to see iOS appear so many times in the top 10. Although it’s kind of disappointing which games are on there. Stitch is a nice “easy” puzzle game. I think it’s puzzles aren’t all that great, but it’s art is very nice and the experience is meditative. I think it has a similar feeling to putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Both my wife and kid are also playing it. (And have probably played a lot more than I have.) I was actually going to drop Apple Arcade with the recent price increase, mostly because I haven’t played many of the games lately and have been disappointed with the recent releases, but I mentioned it at the dinner table and was told that would be unacceptable.

I had to open Grimoire to remind myself what it is, and it’s definitely a stupid idle clicker game. Garden Tails isn’t much better, though at least it’s got some match-3 in there, and it’s pretty. I should play more Sumaddle though. That’s a good puzzle.

I didn’t start playing Coral Island until November 18th, so it’s impressive that one got to 25 days. I’m kind of done with it, but there are a few other objectives that I could imagine playing just to get to. It’s definitely got content to play a lot more than I have already, but I only started playing because my kid wanted to play it. I definitely got sucked in. Notably, our friend Angela got it for Xbox, and ran into a ton of bugs that don’t exist (as near as I can tell) in the Steam version.

I play Picross fairly frequently as part of my daily workout, so it doesn’t seem fair to include it in the list above. Yes, it was (again) my most-played game of the year, at some 240 days. But this is fewer than last year’s 297 days, and at least part of the reason for that is that I figured out how to use a “spare” pair of Joycons with my Steamdeck. So I bought a dock and hooked it up to my TV, so it’s pretty functionally equivalent to playing a game on the Switch. It’s a little more effort to get it set up, so I still play Picross for my workouts 75% of the time though.

Video Game “Platforms”

Here are the results of tracking “where” I played games last year:

  • bga – 71 games on 355 days
  • tabletop – 51 games on 49 days
  • ios – 46 games on 131 days
  • steam – 36 games on 130 days
  • web – 33 games on 32 days
  • xbox – 14 games on 136 days
  • switch – 9 games on 279 days
  • oculus – 8 games on 9 days
  • aiai – 8 games on 5 days
  • ludii – 5 games on 2 days
  • playdate – 1 games on 1 days
  • ps5 – 1 games on 1 days

Poor Playdate. I played so much of it last year, but the last time I fired it up was to update it and check out the new catalog (store) built into the OS. But apparently I didn’t actually play any games that day, or I forgot to log them. (I honestly can’t remember.) There are at least a couple that I really want to try out now, so hopefully it will get more entries in 2024.

PS5 is a weird one. I’m sure I turned my PS5 on more than 1 day last year… but it’s true that there weren’t any games on it that I got into the way there were in 2022. I still have a small stack of games for it that I haven’t even opened yet, but that’s true for every platform.

A few words about “web” – It’s worth noting that, when entering a web-based game into my log, I often have the dilemma where I wonder if “web” is the correct platform. For instance, BGA is a website! Obviously I treat BGA as its own platform, and it’s tracked separately anyway, so that’s a bad example, and I’m planning to treat AbstractPlay.com the same way, but what about Yucata? (I actually didn’t log any games on Yucata in 2023, but I did in 2022.) Ludii is also a website, but I log plays as Ludii, because it’s also a stand-alone app. I think this year I’m going to try and avoid using “web” as a platform, and use the domain instead. So if I’m playing a game on itch.io, I’ll put that as the platform instead. This decision is at least in part because I realized I didn’t log all the times I was playing Glory to Rome on the website that exists for it, or solving puzzles on Puzzmo, which I can’t imagine I did more than a small handful of days. Even so, I should be tracking those, and will endeavor to get better at remembering this.

Favorite Video Games of 2023

I already spoiled this section by saying that Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is my game of the year. And obviously I liked Diablo 4 just fine as well, or I wouldn’t have played so much of it. I kind of hate how loot-box-y it is, but there’s always plenty to do without paying.

Other notable games I loved this year included:

  • Cocoon (Xbox) – I finished this over 5 days. I’m pretty sure it would have been 3 days, but I got stuck on the very last puzzle of the game.
  • Walkabout Minigolf (Oculus Quest) – This is a surprisingly fun VR game, especially when you play with other folks. It feels basically exactly like playing regular minigolf, except you’re in a virtual world, where strange and interesting things can happen. (Also where you can fly around.)
  • Six Match (iOS) – I’ve had this game on my phone for a while, and have played it previously, but I played a bunch of it again this year. It’s a very interesting take on match-3, I think. They added puzzles at some point, and I enjoyed those quite a bit. (Probably haven’t even beat them all yet.)

Shout out to the weird (new-ish?) subgenre of “avoid-em-up” games, also known as “survivor-likes”, since Vampire Survivors was the one to bring a lot of attention to games like it. Army of Ruin made my top 10 most played, but there are a kind of ridiculous number of them in the middle of my games played log this year. A lot of them sitting at 5-10 days played, including Brotato, Boneraiser Minions, Pathfinder Survivors, and 20 Minutes Until Dawn. They all have upgrades that scratch a particular itch, and feel sort of like eating popcorn to me. Not filling, and certainly not nutritious, but satisfying none the less. My favorite of the bunch is probably Boneraiser Minions.

Other Tracked Activities

Books

I marked 15 of the 52 books I read last year 5-stars. My favorites were probably these:

  • Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult, by Maria Bamford – I am an unabashed fan. This was a hilarious memoir.
  • Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, by Ada Calahan – Two memoirs in one year? I loved this book almost as much as I love Frank O’Hara. His best poems are on another level, but this included some very choice lines, and got me thinking about O’Hara and his work again, and was also lovely in its own right.
  • Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree – This was an excellent cozy book about an orc warrior whose life is changed by trying coffee for the first time, and decides to open a coffee shop. Delightful.
  • A Heart that Works, by Rob Delaney – Okay, seriously, I NEVER read memoirs. Comedian, actor, and writer Rob Delaney writes here about how he got his first book deal by being funny on Twitter. It’s probably worth noting that I listened to both this one and Maria Bamford’s book read by their respective (celebrity) authors.
  • Witch King, by Martha Wells – This was the first in a new series by one of my favorite authors. If you haven’t read Martha Wells, start with either Murderbot or the Raksura books (sci-fi robot or fantasy dragon/changlings – to taste).
  • Defekt, by Nino Cipri – This short sequel to an equally short first novel about the multiverse connected to the backs of big box furniture stores is compelling and lovely.

If you read this, and follow me on Goodreads, know that I’ve stopped updating there, and may even delete my account eventually. I’m now posting my mini-reviews, as well as rating and logging the books I read, on The Story Graph.

Movies

The number of movies I watched each month of this year was quite variable. I only watched one movie in August (a really weird french Power-Rangers-inspired movie called Smoking Causes Coughing, 4-stars), which was the least, while in December I somehow watched 11 movies.

I marked the following four movies 5-stars in 2023:

  • Nimona (2023)
  • Barbie (2023)
  • Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)
  • Twelve Monkeys (1995) – This was a re-watch, and remains one of my favorites.

Music

I scrobble all my music, and last year sometime I imported everything from Last.fm into ListenBrainz.

I still send my scrobbles to both places, however, and interestingly enough, they have conflicting numbers for how many tracks I listened to. Last.fm says I scrobbled 8,578 tracks, while ListenBrainz says it was only 8,371. Last.fm’s report includes a bunch more information, so I’m not ditching it any time soon, but its totals for “most listened” both albums and artists are lower! I think there must just be some difference in how both services compute albums as “listened”.

Both sites do agree on a lot of numbers, so I think this is accurately my most listened to albums and tracks:

My Top 5 albums listened to in 2023:

  1. No Rules Sandy, by Sylvan Esso
  2. The Lion King: The Gift, by Beyoncé (and other artists)
  3. History, by The Knocks
  4. Touche, by O’o
  5. Sylvan Esso, by Sylvan Esso

My Top 5 tracks listened to in 2023:

  1. Apricots, by Bicep
  2. Heaven Takes You Home, by Swedish House Mafia
  3. Coffee, by Sylvan Esso
  4. Claws, by Charli XCX
  5. Echo Party, by Sylvan Esso

Shout out to Le Youth, which both sites agree was in my top 5 listened artists, but somehow doesn’t appear in either of the above lists. Bonobo and Ben Böhmer also appear in my top 10 artists.

Notes on Process

A bit about my tracking of this stuff: I’ve spent a fair amount of time for this post pulling together all my data. Here’s a list of my sources:

  • the daily log (text file) self-reporting all the games that I play
  • Board Game Arena
  • my game design journal entries
  • The Story Graph (I also track books I read and my reviews in a text file)
  • Letterboxd (I also track movies/dates/reviews in a text file)
  • Last.fm and ListenBrainz for music

Around the time I started the original game log, I was trying to log all my games to Board Game Geek (BGG). BGG is great for board game plays, but doesn’t do all the other games that I play, so I mostly stopped using it (or BG Stats, which syncs with BGG) in favor of my own custom text file that just lists the date, and any games that I played that day, as well as the platform each game was played on. Every year since 2019, I’ve enhanced how I parse this log, so I can milk it for more statistics. The latest version is, of course, written in Swift.

I spent at least a couple of hours on the Swift project this year, and mostly it does exactly the same stuff it did last year, but now it does it better. It’s got better error reporting (important for the inevitable data-scrub that has to happen before the file parses correctly), but also the report it spits out is clearer, and ordered with the totals that I really care about at the bottom (while still printing all the gritty details above, so I can fact check and get into the weeds if I want to). Finally, I did also do a refactor of the project itself, moving it from a command-line macOS application to a Swift Package executable. This allowed me to write some tests. So now I’ll know if any future changes I make break parsing of the older log files.

And I have already identified two things I want to be able to parse for next year:

  1. I’m going to start marking games that are new-to-me games in my “played log”, so I’ll have better stats on how many games I played that I hadn’t before. I’ll do this by prefixing them with a +.
  2. I’m also going to mark games that I played more than once in a day by adding something like x2 or x10 in the parenthetical section after the game name. Most of the time this won’t apply to video games, so it’s fine if it’s missing, but for board games or any other game where you can “finish it” one in a sitting, I’ll add this when necessary.

I’m 6-days into 2024, and I’ve already used both features a bunch.

I will of course continue to pull in my digital board game plays from Board Game Arena (BGA) next year, but I’ll be adding games from AbstractPlay.com to that as well, which means I’m pretty sure I’d like to somehow incorporate parsing both of those and then integrating them into the Swift project as well. Both so I can get consistent gameplay counts, but also just so I don’t have to do as much manual counting.

I’ve written quite a bit about my game design journal, and in some posts I did analysis around what kinds of ideas I had. This year, because I’d already added the entries from 2023 to .git, I decided it was fine to add to that file as long as I didn’t change its contents. So I went through all my ideas from 2023, marking each entry with 2-5 hashtags. Obsidian has several features around hashtags that let me easily pull together the raw numbers that I reported above.

Of course just the process of reading through all the entries from last year was interesting, and I even found an idea I thought might be of interest to the creator of a game I like, so I sent it to him. Hopefully he’ll find that unsolicited idea welcome, but I’m not holding my breath for a reply.

I mentioned moving to The Story Graph for book tracking. It’s what both my wife and I have decided to use instead of Goodreads. We both have Goodreads accounts that go back over a decade, but are unhappy with Amazon (who owns Goodreads), so we’ve decided to stop using the Goodreads entirely. I also have a text file for books I’ve read, and that file is actually far older than any of my other logs. (I neglected it for many years in the middle, but started keeping a list of books I read in 1995, while I was still in High School.) I love some aspects of The Story Graph, but I recently wanted to see a list of my wife’s books read in 2023, and that seems to be impossible currently, though the site has all this information and will show it to me in different ways, as well as show it to her. it just doesn’t make that list available to other users. (The stats are, in general, far better on Story Graph than on GoodReads though.)

As usual, pulling this post together took way longer than I’d expected. This year I even set aside a whole day for it (January 2nd), and even though I actually got a decent start on it the day before, I still wasn’t ready to post it at the end of the day on the 2nd. I then proceeded to spend at least half of the rest of the week on this endeavor, and still hadn’t finished it by Friday. I’m guessing I spent ~20 hours putting this post together.

Looking Forward

I enjoy this kind of introspection for its own sake, but I sometimes struggle to come to any conclusions after. And since I dislike putting pressure on myself, I usually avoid new-year’s resolutions and that sort of thing.

But in spite of that, I’ve decided I’m going to make a concerted effort to try and play more abstract strategy games this year. I’ve already made a deal with my kid to play a game of Go at least once a week, but I’m not holding my breath for whether that happens.

I will also be attending GAMA this year for the first time. I’ve heard it’s the industry conference to attend for Board Games, and I’d like to check it out for myself.

Here’s hoping that you and I both have a productive and happy 2024!