It’s embarrassing to admit, but up until last November, I hadn’t sat down to play a board game since…
… yikes, was it really back in 2021 when I played Gloomhaven? Oof.
Anyhow, despite everything else going on in the world lately, and everything I’ve been dealing with personally over the past year, I finally got to a space where I can play board games again.
And, crazily enough, just in time to celebrate the blog’s 13th year! (A little belatedly, anyway. Friday was the blog’s birthday, and I just remembered it now, haha.)
Anyhow, it all started on Thanksgiving day last year. I spent the day with my closest friends and some of their family members, and after we all ate dinner we were looking for a simple game to play. I’d backed Stack O’ Cats on Kickstarter, as did my friends J and Kasi (though they got all the different cat variant expansions, while I just got the tuxedo cat expansion), so I figured “hey, why not stack some cats?” It was silly, low-stakes fun, and we played collaboratively in two groups trying to make the biggest stack of cats. I really enjoyed finding silly ways to test the laws of gravity with the little wooden cats.
Then Christmas rolled around, and J bought me a copy of the My Little Pony deck-building game, along with a couple of the expansion packs. It’s surprisingly fun! Even my friend Rachel, who doesn’t really know much about My Little Pony, had fun playing the game. (And I remembered how much I love deck-builder games, thanks to this.)
And then last weekend I broke out A Place For All My Books, another game I backed on Kickstarter. It was so much fun! It’s such a cozy and chill game, and I’m looking forward to playing it again.
And then today: I finally broke out Cyber Pet Quest, another Kickstarter game. This one I got to pick up at Gen Con 2024, which was awesome – and I’d really been looking forward to playing it, but never had the time or the energy. Until today, that is. J and Rachel and I played it all afternoon and got through the first three chapters of the game.
I’m not sure exactly what shifted in me that made it so I can actually focus enough to play board games again instead of just zoning out while friends play games next to me. All I know is that something has shifted, and I’m back to enjoying playing games again.
And thanks to all this, I might actually start reviewing games again here on The Crafty Nerd. In addition to the games I posted about here, I have a couple more brand new games I want to play and share my thoughts about. And where better to do that than on my sadly neglected blog?
… granted, now that I might start posting regularly here again, I’m going to have to figure out how I want to spread the word about new posts. I don’t use Facebook or Twitter anymore, though I am on Bluesky, and could possibly be convinced to post on Instagram again…
Eh, that’s a problem for future me to deal with. Tonight, I’m just going to sit here and enjoy the warm fuzzy glow that comes with finally being able to play board games again.