Once upon a time, I played strategy board games, but then I got bitten by the design bug and I fell into a designer playtesting group.  My logged plays from 2024 reflect a dramatic and unexpected change in how I’m spending my precious board game time.  I’ve been logging plays since 2005, and my most played games in various past years have included board games like Lost Ruins of Arnak, Santorini, Ark Nova, Oath, Root, Living Forest, Terraforming Mars, Roll for the Galaxy, and Spirit Island.  I’ve always logged all unpublished prototypes collectively under BoardGameGeek’s Unpublished Prototype entry, but only in 2024 did that emerge as my most played “game” with 70 plays, including many plays of my two forthcoming designs.

First things first, it turns out that I played 235 different games a total of 735 times over the past 12 months.  My first game played of 2024 was Dice Miner on New Year’s Day, the very underrated and overlooked 2021 game by Joshua DeBonis and Nikola Risteski.  And my last game played was simultaneous YINSH and DVONN by Kris Burm on New Year’s Eve with my nine-year-old, who couldn’t decide which to play, so we played them both… at the same time!

My top ten most played games of the year included another prominent trend though…

1. Unpublished Prototype (70 plays) 
2. Magic: The Gathering (34 plays) 
3. My City (24 plays) 
4. Arcs (17 plays) 
5. Android: Netrunner (15 plays) 
6. Pandemic Legacy: Season 0 (13 plays) 
7. Nekojima (12 plays) 
8. Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West (12 plays) 
9. Triqueta (12 plays) 
10. Werewords (11 plays)

The “Unpublished Prototype” entry is mostly final playtests on Kangaroo Island coming from Rio Grande in a few months and usability playtests on the pre-production version of First Monday in October coming from Fort Circle later this year, plus a new design that I’m currently pitching… fingers crossed!

Magic: The Gathering benefited greatly from the phenomenal new Clue version and the fun new Lord of the Rings set, plus a day-long cube draft.  I’m such a fan of the Ravnica: Clue Edition of Magic because of how the relatively minor new rules create fascinating incentives and decisions during combat.  And as a long-time fan of the Lord of the Rings books, it has been such a joy to experience the four Commander decks featuring iconic characters from the books!

Perhaps the biggest headline from 2024 are the three legacy-style games that cracked the Top 10 with 49 combined plays (or 54 aggregate plays if you count my initial plays of My Island), and I really enjoyed all of them!  My favorite of the three was certainly Pandemic Legacy: Season 0, which innovated on the Pandemic formula in fun and clever ways with an amusing story as well.  I also loved playing through My City two-player and seeing how the game evolved, so much so that I’m now working my way through My Island, although it’s slower going as a four-player experience.  Ticket to Ride Legacy was an unexpected hit as well with fun twists and turns throughout the campaign, although it’s hard to separate the game from the good company.  I’ve been a fan of legacy-style games since I first played (and adored) Risk Legacy in 2012, so I’m predisposed to like the format, but these three games and the evenings playing them were certainly a real joy for me over the past year!

Rounding out the Top 10 are: Arcs (which was not nearly as much my cup of tea as Root, Oath, or Pax Pamir); Nekojima (which I’ve had to customize to make more interesting for my family with various adaptations to the rules for a fuller game and experience); and Triqueta (which was my breakout surprise hit of the year)!  While Zooloretto may have all the awards, I’ll gladly take Triqueta any day instead.

The Honorable Mentions that just missed the Top 10 were:

• Daybreak (10)
• Men at Work (9)
• Rebirth (9)
• Wordle: The Party Game (9)
• Noobs in Space (8)
• YINSH (8)
• Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth (7)
• Seaside (7)

I’ve really enjoyed all of these games (except the questionable physical implementation of Wordle), so it’s no surprise that they’ve hit the table repeatedly over the past year in a crowded field.  Daybreak was a surprising and pleasant change of pace from Leacock’s past work, while Men at Work is a 2018 design that still holds my title as favorite dexterity game (aside from Crokinole of course) due in large part to those wonderfully chunky and well-designed pieces.  Rebirth saw tons of play as soon as the copy recently arrived, and the same goes for Lord of the Rings: Duel, which is a surprisingly clever twist on 7 Wonders: Duel.  I highly recommend watching this fascinating interview with Antoine Bauza and Bruno Cathala about their design process!  Seaside has been the game to bring to the park or a picnic, and I definitely expect it to see many more plays in the years to come!

Rounding out the games with 5 or more plays were: Anomia, Bling Bling Gemstone, DVONN, Keepsakes, Magic Maze, My Island, Pictomania, Root, Undergrove, Unmatched: Brains and Brawn, and Wyrmspan.  I like to play games of all sorts to see what’s going on across the hobby, and I think this eclectic list speaks to that.  Anomia, Keepsakes, and Magic Maze have all been wonderful family games over the past year, while Root, Undergrove, and Wyrmspan have been such enjoyable strategy games to explore.  I first learned Root in 2018, and with 6 plays this past year, I reached 59 total in-person plays of this gem (not counting the mobile app).  Although I’m not sure anything can top the day in early March 2020 when I played Root six times in a single day with some friends over the course of a very long and enjoyable day together.  Finally having a chance to see the Marauder Expansion in action though was a fun way to experience Root in 2024.

All of that only accounts for 29 of the 235 different games that I played last year, with the other 206 games unfortunately only being played 1-4 times each, including some truly fantastic games!

I loved having the chance to play Huang, Radlands, Apiary, Tatsu, Santorini, Sky Team, La Boca, and various other games 4 times.  While I was wary of Huang, as a long-time fan of Tigris & Euphrates, I’ve been enjoying exploring it and its wide range of differences from Knizia’s 1997 classic.  Apiary was easily my favorite game of 2023, and Matagot’s Tatsu is now vying (with Was Sticht and Njet) to become my favorite trick-taking game ever.

While I played 28 different games 3 times, my favorites were definitely Oath and Fishing!  After 32 plays of Oath since 2021, I can easily see enjoying another 32 plays if time allows.  The arc of each game and across games is fascinating to watch, much like the ebb and flow of a Tigris & Euphrates board.  And Friedemann Friese has really shown his brilliance with the design of Fishing, which coincidentally also features an ebb and flow of winning tricks to score points and dodging tricks to level up your deck.  I very much hope to see Oath and Fishing both hit the table more in 2025.

With 55 games getting 2 plays last year, it’s hard to summarize or pick a favorite.  I’ll say that my two plays of Captain Sonar were definitely the most raucous and amusing games of the year.  I was thrilled to get Antics back to the table twice, along with long-time favorites Imperial, Galaxy Trucker, Stephenson’s Rocket, and Watergate.  Those are all such tense and replayable games that get better and better with more experience.  Lastly, I squeezed in a couple of great expansions near the end of the year – Living Forest: Kodama and Radlands: Cult of Chrome.  I think that expansions can definitely be hit or miss, but I thought that both of those expansions really knocked it out of the park.  Kodama seems to significantly improve an already fascinating game by re-balancing the three paths to victory, and Cult of Chrome seems to add many more particularly intriguing camps with some funky abilities to explore.

Last, and definitionally least, are the 106 different games that only saw 1 play last year.  My least favorite games from among those were easily A Feast for Odin, Forest Shuffle, Pick a Pen: Gardens, and Dorfromantik: The Duel.  A Feast for Odin is a poster child for the tyranny of the kitchen sink, which I’ve decried extensively before.  And I wrote my warning about the misery of Dorfromantik: The Duel back in June here.  My write-up on the icon overload of Forest Shuffle and the blandness of Pick a Pen: Gardens, which also were decidedly “not for me,” is here.

My favorite games that unfortunately only saw a single play were: Dominant Species, Decrypto, God’s Playground, Mysterium, Notre Dame, Pax Pamir, QE, and Roll for the Galaxy.  I’m such a big fan of those 8 games, so I’ll have to try to get them to the table more in 2025.  For three players looking for an in-depth interactive competitive strategy game, it’s hard to beat Dominant Species, God’s Playground, or Pax Pamir.  For lighter fare, Decrypto and Mysterium are two absolute gems of teamwork, clue giving, and memorable head-scratching moments.

Ultimately, 2024 was a year in which prototypes prevailed and legacy games loomed large, but it was also a year of enjoying 235 different games and putting the finishing touches on my first two designs that will hopefully someday appear on someone else’s most played games list.