Games Played: Q4 2020
I’m hip-deep in my master’s thesis at the moment, but I still want to take a few minutes to write up last quarter’s games played while it’s still “last quarter”. Who says procrastination can’t also be productive?
More Games Played, More or Less
During the previous two quarters, the count of games played crashed. In the second quarter, I played less then ten games per month. This improved in the third quarter, but the average for that six months was only about 11 games per month. Compared to this, Q4 was downright busy, with the October to December game count being 29, 41, and 46 games.
Some of these games were even with other humans in the same room! The pub quiz team that I’m on won a copy of Queendomino on a lucky Monday night, and that went over well with the group when we met up a few weeks later at the local game cafe. My family also discovered and enjoyed several of the Unlock! escape room puzzle games. The Heroic collection with Alice in Wonderland, a Sherlock Holmes mystery, and an 80’s arcade experience was especially well-tuned to our skills and interests.
But the reality is that most of my gaming was solo or online. The Wingspan Steam app leads the way here. It runs smoothly, it’s soothing to play, and the pace of multiplayer games is just right for watching a video or catching up on a podcast as I play. There are some excellent affordances here, and I’ll try to do a write-up of the app and my quest to actually improve my skills playing the game soon.
Stats Time
The rest of the Top 10 Played for the quarter ran as follows:
| Game | Times Played |
| Wingspan | 36 |
| Spirit Island | 6 |
| Food Chain Island | 5 |
| Unlock! Series | 5 |
| Ascension: Deck Building Game | 3 |
| Splendor | 3 |
| Tapestry | 3 |
| Cosmic Encounter | 2 |
| Nemo’s War | 2 |
| PARKS | 2 |
On the ritual statistics front:
Games played: 100 (85 in same period of 2019)
Different games played: 39 (33 in same period etc. )
Played more than once: 14 (14 same period…)
Not played in 2019: 14 (not sure about the 2019-2018 comparison)
Not played earlier in 2020: 16 (ditto)
Newest game played: Food Chain Island (2020)
Oldest game played: Mastermind (1971)
Longest time since last played game: Cosmic Encounter (April 9, 2015)
Status of Cape Horn: a little more dust on the shrink wrap
I have plenty more thesis chapters to procrastinate on, so with any luck I’ll be picking up on 2020 games as a whole and maybe a new top 100 games soon.