Happy New Year, everybody! The OG staff wishes you all a very happy, healthy, and prosperous 2025, with more of the things you love about life and less of the things you hate. The former will hopefully include lots of great gaming, of course!
The new year is a time when many people put together lists of resolutions. And while that kind of introspection may not be your thing, the concept shouldn’t be a foreign one, because many gamers love making lists of games. Top 10 lists, Desert Island lists, lists of our favorite games by timeframe, designer, and genre—all sorts of things. Coming up with lists of games seems to be a big part of most gamers’ DNA.
One popular choice for this is an Alphabet list. What’s your favorite game whose title begins with the letter “A”? What about “B”? And so on, for each letter of the alphabet. It can be an enjoyable exercise.
Just before Thanksgiving this year, I saw a post from Caroline Black on the Geek. Caroline regularly posts a blog on BGG called The Dyslexic Gamer that I like to check out from time to time. Her article that day was about a couple of games in her own alphabet list. After reading that, I realized that the OG group had never put together an alphabet list and I thought it might be a fun thing to do. I put my own list together, posted it to a shared spreadsheet, and asked the group if anyone else would like to come up with their own list. The results were pretty impressive: we wound up with contributions from 30 people! With that much data to work from, it was obvious that an article needed to be written to summarize it all. Dale asked me if I wanted to ring in the New Year with a 3 part piece, and I agreed. So thank you, Caroline, for the inspiration!
Alison Brennan: Game Snapshots – 2024 (Part 9)
I think the implication of a 7 rating changes the longer you’re in the hobby. When I started back in ‘99, I needed to own all the 7’s and I wanted to explore all of them. Now that there are so many 8-10’s in our world with the explosion of the hobby, these 7’s are still perfectly fine but the bar for what I prefer to play is now set higher. I’m happy to play a 7 and I’ll enjoy it (especially because I like variety and exploring new things) but it’s not something I need to own or explore further because, hey, it’s time to play this 8-10 we haven’t played in ages and then let’s explore this other new 8-10 again!
Speaking of 8-10’s, one of my favourite light card games, Texas Showdown, was finally re-released this year as Seas Of Strife. We’ve been playing it a lot this year so I thought I’d give it another mention. The new theme is ridiculous but at least now I’ve been able to roll it out to all my gaming groups and, yep, everyone loves it and they’ve bought more copies in turn to play with their families. It’s got just the right amount of card counting to reward you, without being onerous, and then sometimes it just doesn’t matter anyway, you get what’s coming. But always fun. The author’s variant is surprisingly enjoyable as well – it changes the feel because no non-top card is safe anymore, generating more ‘what the, wow, really’ laughs when a trick is won by a stupidly low card. Anyway, recommended if you like light trick-takers.
Here’s the latest batch of new-to-me games over the last little while.
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