LogFAQs > #961302354

Before COVID shut the world down, I played a ton of tabletop games every year - between meetups in my city and game nights with various different friend groups. Since the pandemic hit, meetups have become a lot rarer, friends have moved out of town, and group get-togethers have also become more infrequent. As a result, my plays of everything have gone down - both new games, of which I used to try about 60 per year, and of the games I generally consider to be my favorite. One area where gaming has exploded for me is online; I now play pretty much constantly on boardgamearena.com, mostly with randoms but occasionally with friends.

I've done a board games ranking three times on B8. The first time, I hopped to write up the first 100 games I'd played the moment I'd crossed that marker, regardless of how many times I'd played them. The next two times I performed this exercise, I was more discerning, choosing only games I'd played on at least two separate occasions - those resulted in lists of 80 and 134 games, respectively.

This time, I'm going back to the "if I'd played it once, it's on" method - but I'm only including games that I've actually played in the calendar year of 2021. For the most part, these rankings reflect games I have played in person this year, with one notable exception. This will actually exclude many of my sentimental favorite games, but it's made actually ranking the list easier, since I need to worry less about how my taste might have changed over time and weighting the ranking categories.

Rankings as always will be based on an inconsistent combination of the following, roughly in descending order of importance:
- how much fun I've had specifically in the past year with them
- how much fun I've had in the past with them, i.e. their sentimental value
- how much I enjoy/admire/respect their game design
- how much I anticipate/dread getting it to the table again

Game #69 (nice) will be up shortly.