Games Made
If you count posting rules for games in the Abstract Strategy Games forum on BGG, then I guess I released two games last year. Both are games meant to be played with Chess Cubes, and one of my current projects is working toward producing a physical set of the cubes. (Pictured is a 3D render of all the sides. Special thanks to Paul Carroll who worked with me on the glyphs and Blender file.) I won’t be mass-producing them, but rather, silk-screening wooden cubes “by hand”, which means they’ll be a fairly luxury item, (and priced accordingly).
Eventually you’ll be able to order Chess Cubes online at chesscubes.com, and I plan to also show them at conventions and that sort of thing. I’m partnering with Brad over at https://www.twincitysticker.com/ to produce these, and it’s actually been a really enjoyable part of the project to work with and get to know Brad. We’ve been playing continuous games of Glinski’s Hexagonal Chess (asynchronously on greenchess.net) for the last 6 months or so. (More on that in a bit.)
I continued to focus primarily on board games and board game design in my “free” time, so unfortunately, I don’t think I released any new digital games at all in 2025. I’m still in the middle of a fair number of games projects, both physical and digital, and I’ll just list the ones here that I’m still occasionally making progress on here:
- Producing the aforementioned physical set of Chess Cubes.
- Making slow but steady progress on a re-write of ActionChess in Swift. (I’ll release this first for iOS – as an update for anyone who owned it previously, but eventually, it could be released to all of Apple’s platforms.)
- Iterating and playtesting some board games that use the shapes from the Math Happens Foundation’s Bubble Tiles set. This project actually got me to fix my 3D printer over the holiday break this year, and has seen some significant forward momentum in the last couple of weeks.
- I haven’t worked on this in a few months now, but I did produce 20 copies of my board game mashup ChessXGo. I need to figure out where I’m going to list them for sale. (Or I might just sell them at conventions, assuming that I’m eventually at conventions selling Chess Cubes.)
- I did just the tiniest bit of work to wrap-up some changes to the Blither app and release them as an update on the App Store over the holiday break. (This doesn’t count as a release, since it wasn’t a new game.)
- Similar to the above, I wrote some new features for the Hexagon Grid Generator. (I’m contemplating a similar project for the square grids, but it wouldn’t be until after I finish a big refactor to HGG that separates the grid definition from anything shown on top of it, like game pieces or whatever.)
- It’s been more months than I care to admit since I’ve worked on it, but I’m also still planning on re-releasing ActionGo at some point. I would love for that to be on Steam. We’ll see.
All of the above probably deserve their own blog post (or posts!), but this list will have to do for now.
Games Played
I decided somewhere around March 01, 2025 to change the format of my games-played log. This led to some weird numbers until I realized I needed to convert the January and February entries to the new format. The program that parses the log now spits out the following for 2025:
393 unique games logged.
365 days logged.
...
267 games first played this year.
169 days with new games played.
296 games played on only one day.
...
38 prototype games played on 23 days.
...
355 days played on BGA.
10 days played Picross.
...
19 game reviews written.
I’ll write about board games and video games separately.
Board games
Physical (in-person) board games
According to my log, I played 144 different in-person tabletop games, on at least 65 days last year. 23 days I played at least one game tagged with prototype. I’m willing to bet there is near 100% overlap on those days. (Although I didn’t do the work to verify that.) My point is that I went to at least 2 Protospiel conferences last year, and lots of design days, and a handful of Break My Game nights.
In addition to Protospiel MN and Protospiel Twin Cities, I also went to GenCon and Essen Spielle conferences with Adams Apple Games. I definitely played a lot of board games at both events.
Highlight acquisition from GenCon was probably Zensu, which is at least a couple of years old at this point. My log says I only played it on 2 days, but I think I played it three times the first day I played it.
Highlight acquisition from Essen was probably Kopis, which is sadly only listed 1 day at the con, but similar to Zensu, I played it several times in a row. (I’d like to get it to the table again soon!) Also shout-out to Waddle, which is a super-accessible abstract strategy game in a tiny box that plays up to 5 players. The log says I’ve played only 3 days.
On BGA
563 tables (games played) 85 different games Victories: 342
Top 10 BGA games (in terms of play count) from 2025 Azul: 43 games finished Can’t Stop: 41 games finished Oxono: 39 games finished Ink: 36 games finished Innovation: 33 games finished Hokito: 25 games finished Yoxii: 23 games finished Ark Nova: 23 games finished Splendor: 20 games finished Gizmos: 20 games finished
Shout out to Galactic Cruise and It’s a Wonderful World, both of which are fairly new to me, but are the games I’ve probably been most excitedly playing on BGA these days.
Other online board game sites
Abstract Play 14 games played on 58 days 5 different games: Amazons, Cubeo, Trax, Terrace, Four
I basically only played regularly on Abstract Play for the first month or so of 2025. There are plenty of games I’d like to play more of over there, (and more get added all the time!), but there are only so many hours in the day.
Glory-to-rome.com My friends and I have continued to play continuous games of Glory to Rome on this site. It looks like we finished about 18 games over there. I’m currently ranked number-two on the site, but I’ll bet that has less to do with my skill, and more to do with the site’s relative popularity.
Chess Variants 12 games of Glinski’s Hexagonal Chess completed on Greenchess.net 2 other chess variants played there
It’s clear that I’ve been obsessed with Chess Variants for the last year or so. (Actually much longer, but it’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve felt like any of my own ideas were worthy of sharing and/or promoting.) When I first started talking with Brad about producing Chess Cubes, he made it clear he is especially interested in hexagonal Chess variants, and I suggested we play some of them online and asynchronously. All the games I played on Green Chess were with Brad.
I also played a handful of other Chess variants on other sites, including Sovereign Chess, which I got pretty excited about. I subsequently ordered a physical copy, but I haven’t managed to play it physically yet.
Puzzles (not really games)
After Board Game Arena, the thing to get logged on the “most days” was a book of pen-and-paper Fillomino puzzles that I ordered from Nikoli. I am almost done with all the puzzles in the book, and I’m not sure what I’ll do when I run out. (Probably order more Nikoli books, I suspect.)
I did not track doing jigsaw puzzles, but maybe this year I will. My wife and I usually either have a jigsaw puzzle on the table, or a Lego build in-progress. I couldn’t even guess how many puzzles we finished last year.
Two other entries in the top 5 for me were “daily puzzles” that I did regularly for a while. Embarrassingly, they were Queens and Tango (55 and 53 days, respectively), both puzzles I played on LinkedIn. (In part because I was visiting the site daily to play these puzzles, I had a bit of a LinkedIn problem for a while last year, and consider myself to have spent far more time on the site than is healthy. It’s now on a list of sites with Reddit and Instagram that I’ll only allow myself to visit when I truly just want to waste some time.)
Video games
There are two lists here, the games I played “for the most days” in 2025, and the games I think were the most interesting or memorable. For the latter list, I’ll probably prefer games released last year. I just hope I don’t miss any.
Games I played the most times in 2025
- Diablo 4 (Xbox): 39 days
- Hades (Switch): 39 days
- Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor (Steamdeck): 32 days
- Donkey Kong: Bananza (Switch 2): 28 days
- No Man’s Sky (PS5 & Xbox): 26 days
- I Am Future (Steamdeck): 16 days
- Ball X Pit (Steamdeck): 16 days
- Blue Prince (PS5): 16 days
- Megabonk (Steamdeck): 14 days
- Strange Antiquities & Strange Horticulture (Steamdeck): 10 days
Kinda feels like cheating to lump Strange Antiquities and Strange Horticulture together, but I actually think there may have been days I played them that I didn’t log. Notably, if I combined all the Picross from this year together, it would also be tied at the end at 10 days. 3 of those days were playing Picross 3D on my 3DS, which I have owned for years, but never played until last year. I honestly can’t remember if this is why, but it’s a foreign cartridge, and when I first dusted off my 3DS, I realized it wouldn’t play. A few minutes of research later I decided to jailbreak my 3DS, and probably less than an hour after that I was playing it.
Hades kinda replaced Picross last year for much of my time spent working out in front of the television. I also played Hades II that way, but it was before the game was actually released, and after only a couple of days I decided to go back and play more of the original first. When the sequel was officially released, I had a lot less enthusiasm for it, and haven’t gone back to play more of it yet.
It’s also worth noting that I filled my workout circles more often this year with walks than with time on the trampoline. I didn’t track it specifically, but I’d be willing to bet I used the trampoline to work out only 50 to 100 days last year. And I’d be willing to bet I went on more walks than that.
My top 10 games I played in 2025
- Blue Prince – This game was in the back of my brain for the better part of a month after it came out. My wife and kid both tolerated my talking incessantly about it, and I even managed to rope them into watching me play and helping brainstorm puzzles on occasion. There was also a lively (and very long) thread in the local tech slack about it, with folks trying to give gentle hints without spoiling anything.
- Donkey Kong: Bananza – Absolutely loved this game when I first started playing it. Apparently it was the same team that made Mario: Odyssey, and it shows. (I also think that game was brilliant.) This is basically just Odyssey with fewer hats, but the added element of destructible terrain, which is used in all kinds of really fun ways. It feels gimmicky for all of about the first 10 minutes, and then (at least for me) it will slowly blow your mind.
- Öoo – This little puzzle game only took me 4 days to complete, but I loved every minute of it. It’s a side-scrolling platformer, kinda, but it plays more like a sokobahn-like block-pusher. The mechanics unfold in a very satisfying way, and at a progression that was never frustrating for very long. (At least for me.) Incidentally, it’s worth noting I only heard of this game because of the Thinky Games email list, which I highly recommend, as there are always great new puzzle games to try in there (often free!). Block-pushing puzzle games are a genre that kinda feels saturated to me at this point, but playing Öoo felt impressively fresh. And I’ll also squeeze in a shout-out to NuWorm, which is one of those free games from the list. It’s super hard, but I’m enjoying coming back to it to bang my head at the next level every once in a while.
- Hotel Infinity – I dusted off my Quest to play this game because a) I absolutely loved Manifold Garden, and will probably make an effort to play any game in that vein, and b) my friend August worked on it. It’s a shorter game, only took me an hour or two to play through, but I massively enjoyed it. Highly recommended if you’ve got access to the VR hardware to play it.
- Megabonk & Ball X Pit – I’m lumping these games together because they scratch a very similar itch for me. I did play Deep Rock Galactic: Survivors more than either of them, but it feels less creative, and genre-bending than these do. Both are really just well-made survivor-likes, with lots of meta-upgrades to keep things fresh. For Megabonk, the innovation is really the 3D. For Ball X Pit, it’s the mashup of a breakout-like game with the survivor-like roguelike meta-upgrade loop. They’re really nothing like one another, but they (along with DRG:S) are my current go-to games for mindless video games.
- Lumines: Arise – This came out toward the end of last year, so it didn’t make my top-played list, but I’ve really enjoyed the time I’ve spent with it so far. I also enjoyed watching a stream with the producer and a couple of the developers where they reminisce about the series and talk about making various versions of the game over the years.
- Pico-8 action puzzle games & CorgiSpace – I got really into digging through Pico-8 games for the best action puzzle games at some point last year. Plumbsum and Plumbsum 2 were some of my favorites, but I also discovered Hot Wax (which is much older, I believe) which I spent an afternoon or three playing as well. Finally, at some point in the last couple of weeks, I discovered Adam Saltsman’s CorgiSpace on Steam. This is a bundle of some 13+ games he made in Pico-8 over the course of a year. There is at least one really great action puzzle game in there, and there are a bunch of really good puzzle games in the collection more generally. I highly recommend it.
By my reconning, I’ve listed more than 10 at this point.
I hope you had a great holiday season, and here’s hoping 2026 doesn’t feel like quite the dumpster fire that 2025 felt like. At least we have games as an escape!
Interested, as I am, in the family tree of puzzle games, when I wrote up my 
The gameplay is at your own pace, and you do see a queue of the next few pieces, so you can plan ahead to maximize your strategic brain burning. When picking up the game again after all this time, I found it didn’t quite hold my attention the same way 1010! and Hex FRVR have for so many hours. I’m not honestly sure why that is the case. The complexity is about the same, maybe a tiny bit higher, due to the color matching rather than line-making, but I found myself playing the game a lot slower than I do those others.
