Yes, it’s that time of year again when I (Mark Jackson) ask you to submit your Five & Dime lists to me in order that I can continue to compile my completely unscientific lists & compare them to each other.

For those of you who haven’t heard the story, here’s how this all came to be…

The year was 1999… Prince (or, at that point, the Artist Formerly Known As Prince) was still telling to party like it was that chronological year. Y2K was the all the rage – many people were stockpiling water, food & medical supplies in preparation for The End of the World As We Know It (glancing R.E.M. reference). I, on the other hand, was stockpiling games.

And game statistics. You see, my practice of collecting “five & dime” gameplay lists began early that spring, as a post from Steve Zanini on the rec.games.board newsgroup set me off:

Steve wrote: Anyone familiar with SUMO magazine, would also be familiar with the 5 & 10 list. This is a listing of the games you have played either 5 or more times or 10 or more times. Think this would be a good way to re-cap what you played frequently in 1998.

I found the posts that followed to be intriguing and compiled them to produce a “Most Played” list of 1998. Then I did it again the next year… and the next… and it slowly but surely took on a life of it’s own.

This is Year #16… and now the Five & Dime lists have snowballed into a very interesting way to track gaming trends, albeit only in the online community of “designer” game players & collectors.

If you’d like to submit a list,  please post it to the following thread on Boardgamegeek:

http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1096677/the-five-dime-report-2013-bring-out-yer-stats

And, if you would be so kind, strip expansions out of your list. Don’t lump a family of games together (I consider TtR: Marklin to be a stand-alone game, while TtR: Switzerland is an expansion)… and please ONLY give me your five & dime, not your whole list.

A couple of other simple rulings:

• all of the Settlers games which require the base game (Seafarers, Cities & Knights, etc.) are considered Settlers of Catan, vs. something like Settlers of America, which can be played w/out the original game.
• I lump all of the Dominion stuff together… and any other expandable card game system (Race for the Galaxy, Summoner Wars, etc.) works the same.

If you would be so kind as to NOT do any kind of nifty HTML/web address formatting in your posts – I just have to get rid of it so I can compile.

Finally, I love reading your comments on the various games, but they make it very hard to compile. If you want to do that, please post those comments elsewhere. Thanks!

I’ll close submissions in early February & the results will be posted later this spring in three places:

• here on the Opinionated Gamers website
• in teaser form on Boardgamegeek
• on my personal blog, aka pastor guy

If you’re interested in not-so-ancient history, here’s a set of links for you to follow:

• all of the Five & Dime posts here on the Opinionated Gamers website