2024 is another year in which we won’t complete our 10×10 challenge! We’ve got to 7*10 which is quite an average ending for us, although we did manage to set some records this year.

We played most different (new) games of any year, 177 (for now) different games of which 104 were new to us. If we manage to squeeze in three games before midnight tomorrow we’ll end up having logged 386 plays which would beat our record for the most logged plays in a year. That being said this is a byproduct of just hanging out with our lovely friends who just happen to love board games as well and we have so many plans with friends to try other games.

This year we did play some great games and I think we should bring back the Golden Standees, or at least do a social media post of games we enjoyed the most or surprised us in some way. Games like Dead Cells and War Story: Occupied France and City of Six Moons impressed us by putting a new spin on Campaign games, choose-your-own-adventure-games and “what a game can be” respectively and we suspect their influence will be seen in multiple games in the coming years. We’ve also played some upcoming games like Neon Hope and Katmai that we really want use our influence to make sure people know about it. We might not be able to fill a whole week full of blog posts about it like SpaceBiff but we should be able to put out something insightful. If you have anything you want us to talk about, let us know in the comments!

This week we played a lot of games in between all the festivities but, except for Ratjack, which is a very interesting mix between Love Letter and Black Jack that we should explore a bit more, it was all old favorites! We played a very tense and exciting four-player game of Joyride, which is the perfect player amount for this game. We also introduced Rachel’s nephews to the joys of Robot Quest Arena and The Wolves during which they both showed how quickly they could apply their video game knowledge into cool strategies for games they had never played before.

During our Christmas day off, we played two runs of Dead Cells and didn’t defeat the first boss again… although we are getting closer and closer every time, so hopefully next time we’ll get him and we can start exploring the other biome this game has to offer.

Finally, we played a very slow game of Northgard, which took quite a bit longer because everybody was tired after a week full of visits and grand feasts but it was loads of fun. The monster module in the game makes for a unique 4X experience in which you’re heavily being suppressed by wolves, bears, and undead interfering with your strategies. We’re very curious to see more of the big expansion they’ve planned for next year.

For our last day of the year, we’ll play our first-ever game of Roccoco and probably some games of Trio, which is a delightful game that I think might make it to the Can’t Stop/6 Nimmt echelons of the “best games” of all time on our list. After that, we’ll have a whole new year to play some more games!