Collection: Acquisitions and Cullings (Jan, 2017)

I made a promise to myself at the end of last year, not really a resolution, but I went into the new year with the intent to slow down my purchase rate. 2016 was the year I truly went crazy with my games purchases. Actually listing and talking about all those games would be too big an endeavour, but not counting promos or Kickstarter campaigns I backed, I bought 56 new games and 25 expansions the past year. That is on average a new game every week, plus a new expansion every other week. I have been gifted a couple of games, and traded a game for another game one time as well, but those have not been included in those numbers. 

That is a lot of money spent; a lot of new games to get to the table. No wonder there were some loved titles in my collection that didn’t hit the table, I simply didn’t have time to play both the games I had and all these new games I had purchased, as well as any games introduced to me by other gamers.

Knowing myself I knew there wasn’t a chance I was going to stop completely, despite the fact that I do intend on getting to Essen Spiel this year, and really should put away money for that upcoming gaming binge. I can’t simply make myself ignore the fact that there are still many games out there that I want to try out. And as you’ve probably guessed it, I’ve gone beyond breaking that initial promise to myself.

So to mitigate and maybe distract myself from making quite as much damage to my wallet these coming months as I did this past month, I want to highlight what games I’ve bought this month, as well as shedding light on what games also exited my collection in the same time period.

New on the Shelf

Key to the City: London

This is a game I’ve been kind of drooling over since finding out about it. I even tried finding it when I went to London at the end of last year (how meta), but it and the other game I was looking for was sadly out of stock. Finally I bit the bullet even though it was still pretty pricey at all my sources (ironically one of them dropped the price not once, but twice within a week of me ordering it). This game builds upon the mechanisms in Keyflower, but is more streamlined and adds in both standee structures as well as a networking element of supplying locations with water, underground service, sewage, energy, etc. And it was the new addition of those as well as the London theming that really drew me to it. I got it to the table really quickly after getting it, and I’m really pleased with the game overall.

Sheriff of Nottingham

I was introduced to this game last year and intended to get it at some point because it’s a bluffing style of game I actually enjoy and I didn’t already have anything like it in my collection. I can envision introducing family members to this one, as it’s simple and engaging, and you aren’t forced to bluff, you can simply play the game honest and still have a solid chance to win.

Dream Home

I must admit that this wasn’t a long planned purchase; I more stumbled upon the title and checked out the mechanisms because I enjoyed the ‘look’ of it. This is a game I purchased mainly with the intent of playing it with family, but I have already played it multiple times with gamers as well. It’s a light drafting game where you build up the rooms in your house and score according to how well you built it.

Ulm
This particular game purchase I attribute to Rahdo’s runthrough and praise of it. It’s a game of building up influence in the city of Ulm, Germany, and it has this unique mechanism of drawing an action tile and sliding it into a grid, which determines which three actions (the tile you drew and the other two tiles remaining on that row/column you slid it into) you get to take that turn. I got it to the table quickly (probably because of my own eagerness) and I’m very pleased with it.

Istanbul & Istanbul: Mokka und Backschisch
This is a game I tried a good while ago, and I enjoyed it. I considered getting it earlier, but I concluded that another person in my group had it and I could play his copy, however I haven’t seen the game being brought to the group in forever, so I finally decided to simply get my own copy. Another reason I wanted to get it is because I’m curious about playing the expansions, so since I was buying the base game, I got the first expansion as well.

Fresco: Big Box
I will admit that I haven’t played neither regular Fresco nor this version yet, but upon researching it I’ve been very intrigued with it, and since price differences were so low, I decided I might as well buy the full package right away. It’s all about collecting and mixing paints in order to contribute to the big fresco and score points, however the many modules that come with the big box give the game a lot of variation opportunities without necessarily adding so many rules that learning them becomes a chore. I hope to get it played soon.

Biergarten

This is a Kickstarter game that I backed last year that finally arrived this past month. It’s a quick card game that effectively is like a tile laying game, but you can switch positions of the tiles as part of your turn. I got it to the table at the last game night, and I’m happy with the purchase, but think I should probably play it with fewer players than the max player count next time.

Kingdomino
A tile laying game with an interesting system on how you choose your tiles. All tiles are numbered according to the likeliness they will have crowns on them, which is what you need to score areas. And the player who chose the lowest numbered tile the last turn gets to choose first, so you not only choose tile, you also choose player order for the next turn. This just arrived in the mail today, so I'm really excited to get it to the table as soon as possible,

Small World: Royal Bonus
Added it on to justify shipping costs on my order with Kingdomino. I own and enjoy Small World a lot and I intend to collect all the different races and abilities added in these mini-expansions.

Ice Cool
One of few dexterity games that have intrigued me, you are flicking penguins around a school built up by the game boxes, and what really intrigued me was how you could make the pieces turn or even jump depending on how you flick. This just arrived today, and I just had to open the box and just make a few flicking attempts.

Waiting for the arrival of

Elysium

My choice to order this one is a combination of finding an insanely great deal for it and being intrigued with the mechanisms once I started researching it. It’s a card drafting game where you take cards for abilities, and then later transfer them in order to score (losing you the abilities they gave you). Never played it, but I just know I’ll love it.

Games culled from my collection

These are merely the games I have either sold or given away this past month. I have a few others currently listed in board game trading/selling groups, so more might still leave my collection.

Aquasphere
I’m a Feld fan, but I just couldn’t get into this particular game. I couldn’t get past the rules and actually play it, through no real fault of the game. I just think there was a disconnect between it and me. A friend was eager to take it, so hopefully he’ll enjoy it.

Bandu
The first few times I played this, I really enjoyed it. However with time I just tired of it. The moment that did it was when I was part of organizing a game event where we taught and played games with people new to board games, and one particular group I taught it to simply wanted to play this one over and over, and over again.

Dragonriders
This game looks gorgeous, and I was really excited to learn how to play it, but as I started reading through the rules I just couldn’t see how it could work in practice with how you used distance markers to move the dragons, however the markers couldn’t touch other dragons or the edge of the track (which narrowed in multiple places). It seemed like there was no way you could play the game where the dragon taking the first turn wouldn’t win. No one was interested in buying it from me for next to nothing (I though maybe someone would like to repurpose the gorgeous components into a new design), so ultimately I dropped it off at the local second hand store.

A Game of Thrones: The Second Edition
This game is a good example on how theme just won’t make a difference. I love the theme, I love the show, and the theme fits the game mechanisms perfectly. But the game is simply so mean, and so long that I find myself not wanting to play it again. I prefer my battle-oriented games to be of the lighter variety.

Guildhall
This game sat on my shelf for years and I just never got it to the table. There was simply no justifying keeping it.

The L Word Card Game
I generally don’t like trivia-focused games unless it’s focused on something I’m especially interested in, and I never was a big enough fan of this show that I would find a trivia game of it that interesting. The only reason I owned it was that I got it as a prize in a raffle.

Star Fluxx
I bought this simply because of the Table Top episode. It looked like it was so much fun there, and though I really enjoy the references within it to all the fandoms, Fluxx simply wasn’t my kind of game.

Witch of Salem
This one was a tough one to decide to cull. I already mentioned this in a previous entry. I’m generally not big on Cthulhu horror themed games, but this game was a bit of an exception. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. The reason I ultimately decided to let it go was that it had not hit my table in the past year, in fact it seems that pretty much no co-ops have hit my table the past year. I don’t seem to prioritize them, and I had to acknowledge to myself that if I was to actually get a co-op game to the table, it was more likely to be Pandemic (which I’m actually not sure if I will keep, either).