January
The month where leisure-writing goes into the backlog
Life
I guess one of the advantages of having a blog is that — in data storage terms — it tends to be a little bit more reliable than the human brain. January has been busy. Super-busy. But perhaps I can take some small measure of comfort from the fact that while flipping through my Board Game Geek posts from around this time last year I came upon this extract: “work assessments, trips away, and various random projects/obligations that I somehow got drawn into at the very start of this year leaked very significantly into the first week of February too. So this is pretty much the first day of 2025 that I’ve been able to sit down, sip my early morning coffee, and NOT have something looming over me to rush off and prepare for. ‘Phew.”
Perhaps all of my Januaries are super-busy, but I somehow manage to blank the whole experience out by the time the next one comes around? Anyway, this year has — apparently — been more of the same. A significant project deadline at work … legal issues with Mrs Shep’s website (ugh!) … the garden pond springing an impossible-to-track-down leak… the central heating breaking down (while I was away on a 3-day work trip to Leicester and Mrs Shep was home alone)… basically, no end of problems keeping us awake at night. And not a tremendous amount of free time to write about board-game related things, sadly.
Not that we didn’t do some fun stuff, along the way…
Mrs S fancied a trip to London, to document this year’s No Trousers Tube Ride. (Which is pretty much exactly what you might expect from the title). A trip which presented a perfect opportunity to pop and see an exhibition by one of my favourite artists. Invader has teamed up with Shepard Fairey and Damien Hirst for a collaborative set of works currently on display at Hirst’s gallery, in Vauxhall. It was a good show — I enjoyed it a lot. And because Invader has been in the city for the exhibition, several new pieces have appeared on the streets of London over the last couple of months, so it was fun tracking some of those down too.
Board Games
But… what board-gamey things do I have to tell you about this month?
Well, a mere 15 years or so after its debut… I played Martin Wallace’s Last Train to Wensleydale. (Specifically: the remix version implemented on the B-Side of the First train to Nuremburg board). It’s an interesting network-builder train game, themed around the transport of passengers, stone and cheese through the Yorkshire Dales, with your available actions based on a bidding-on-multiple-things-at-once auction (representing gaining influence with the various companies and governing bodies involved with operating tiny Yorkshire railways) … and some interesting mechanisms which reward you for selling your routes off to bigger (non-player) railway companies as soon as they stop being profitable.
Which is all well and good … but, really, the true-to-life board geography is where things get particularly interesting; the valleys and hills of the real-world Yorkshire dales make for some very tricky route planning and value judgements … and definitely provide the kind of wrinkles to the game that a lot of present day, ultra-balanced and designed-to-be-instantly-accessible games lack.
All in all, I enjoyed Last Train to Wensleydale. It’s well worth a play, should you get the chance.
I’ve also managed a couple more games of Fives (pictured above) and Shinjuku since my last update, both of which seem to be standing up very well to repeat plays. Fives is very much set up to become a favourite trick-taker in these parts (dare I say… top five?) …and Shinjuku is proving to be a pleasantly-pacy pick-up-and deliver affair, now that we’ve got a bit more used to the rules and the board geography (and yes, I have switched to the Kaiju variant now!)
January acquisitions…
Not a huge amount to report this month. I grabbed a copy of Oink’s Tropichaos after hearing good things. I’ve only played it once so far; feels a bit like a small push-your-luck game embedded inside a slightly bigger push-your-luck game. Don’t get me wrong; the decisions were fun … but I’m not sure if it maybe amounts to just a tiny bit too much compounded luck-pushing for me. I’ll need some more plays to make my mind up.
After being surprised by how much I enjoyed the super-cheap copy of New Frontiers that I acquired in December, I thought I’d grab a copy of the Starry Rift expansion to go with it. Yes, it feels very odd to quickly follow up a £10 bargain buy with an expansion that cost me almost four times as much as the base game did 😆 … but a scan of boardgameprices.co.uk suggested that UK availability is already a bit limited, and I kind of had my eye on the solo variant that comes with Starry Rift (I’ve really enjoyed playing New Frontiers… but wow, do I suck at it! … some one-player practice might be exactly what I need)
And finally… my Barrage - The Far Companies kickstarter pledge delivered a couple of weeks ago (several months late, of course, due to tariff shenanigans). I didn’t back the fancy big box (which was the main focus of the campaign) but was mostly after the two new player factions. The plan here was to get the bits to drop a 5th player into the game (I simultaneously bought the 5th player expansion as a pledge add-on, but not The Leighwater Project … which seems to be the previously-only-available route to getting the wooden bits necessary to make the 5th player expansion actually playable!).
I haven’t played a lot of Barrage … but what I have played, I’ve enjoyed. It ranks in the BGG top 50 and has always struck me as being — mechanically — exactly the kind of thing that should down well with the Newcastle Gamers regulars. Being able to seat a 5th person might help get it to the table a bit more often.
At least… that was the logic when I backed the campaign, something like a year and a half ago.
(As with a lot of Kickstarter impulse buys, that plan now seems like something that happened a very, very long time ago… 🤷♂️)
Video Games
I’ve been doing a lot of digital retro-gaming this month. Santa brought me an Intellivison Sprint console, the latest emulator-built-into-reproduction-hardware creation from the Atari/PLAION stable.
Intellivision was a cartridge-based gaming console released in 1979, which featured an unusual disc-touchpad-and-12-button-keypad controller into which you would slot various plastic overlays into to provide game-specific button mappings. The new version of the console comes with 45 games built in, and a full set of matching plastic inserts to slot into its handsets for added 1970s authenticity (though at least the modern controllers are wireless!)
My family didn’t own an Intellivision … but my uncle did, and there are a few games that I fondly remember playing together, so it’s been fun to revisit some of those. It would be fair to say that the console’s library was a bit of a mixed bag… but there ARE a few significant/interesting titles in there. Including this curiosity…
Utopia — a game from 1981 in which two players plant crops and build cities on competing islands — is widely accepted as the very first example of a real-time strategy game. But some folks also argue that it set the template for many a city-builder and civ-style game to follow.
Which therefore, perhaps, makes this particular digital curio the common ancestor of many modern board games? …the mitrochondial eve of so many gaming mechanisms that we now know and love??
Utopia might not be particularly stunning by modern standards. But back in the day… it was absolutely ground-breaking stuff. And you can’t help but feel that you’re playing a genuine piece of gaming history when you attempt to plonk your little buildings down in valid locations and steer your fishing boat past the super-annoying storms and pirate ships in the quest for fish to feed your people… Good stuff!
I’ve also been playing a fair bit of the Atari 50 compilation on steamdeck this past month (a title which I bought about a year ago, played for a little bit, but then got distracted away from) …and have been particularly enjoying its implementation of Akka Arrh; a previously-unreleased 1982 arcade prototype:
Akka Arrh is a game which I found completely baffling on my first couple of plays (which, I guess, is why the original never progressed any further than field testing), …but has quickly turned into the most fun I’ve had with a retro-game for a very long time. Check out IndieGamerChick’s review for more pics and info.
Writing
You probably noticed that I didn’t write very much this month. I guess that — with everything else going on — something had to slip. But also …I dunno. Writing about board games just doesn’t seem as interesting as it used to be.
I kind of started writing a new-years-opinion piece a few weeks ago, about where I think the world of board gaming is right now. But then I watched the Board Game Bollocks New Years Rant, and kind of felt like he’d beaten me to the punch on most of my points… so that trailed off a bit and never got finished. (I know that the on-screen persona that Mr Bollocks adopts isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. And his gaming tastes often don’t align with mine. But he’s a smart guy. He knows his gaming history, and I find that his editorial-leaning stuff, in particular, is usually worth a watch).
But yeah… I’ve not been feeling that compulsion to rush to the keyboard every few days and tell you all about what’s been exciting me in the world of board games… because nothing much has been exciting me in the world of board games. Or, at least, nothing that I haven’t already told you about many times already. You really don’t need to hear about the umpteenth game of (the always-excellent) Keyflower that I played on Monday night… do you?
I sometimes wonder if this is a malaise that has fallen across much of the Board Game blogging community. Tony Boydell mostly just covers museum acquisitions and walks in the countryside these days. The gaps between Caroline Black’s posts seem to be getting longer and longer. Alex looked like he might be heading for some kind of huge reset at the start of this year (but then changed his mind?). Christian seems to write as much about TV, books, uber-niche-CD releases and marvel superheroes as much as he does about board games now. And while I still read meepleonboard’s daily substack posts (which is so much easier to do because it simply pops up in my email inbox), I increasingly find myself drawn to Nick’s real-life adventures below the fold, rather than the gaming stuff.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. Just reflecting, I guess? But yeah… I’m still here, and still writing. But for a long time now, ‘Tyranny has been a thing that I only write when the muse takes me, and when it’s something that I want to do (because this is a pure hobby for me. Not a side-gig). And the muse has definitely been a bit AWOL lately.
But thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking around…
See you in the next one, whenever it lands! 😉
I've never been one to keep a close eye on the latest developments in boardgame design, so that I'm very willing to be corrected by others who are much better placed to comment than me, but it does seem to me that these days most new releases retread old mechanics that have already been well explored, and that the heady days when innovative and influential ideas emerged regularly (worker placement! rondel!! deck-building!!!...) are long gone. Tony regularly refers to the 'Golden Age of Euros' when games were 'unflabby and entertaining' (to quote his blog entry yesterday).
Consequently nowadays it tends to be an original and intriguing theme that tempts me to buy a new game, as much as the gameplay itself which may resemble that of dozens of other games in my collection. And similarly, although I don't write about boardgames, if I did I can quite imagine that the thrill of doing so would be rather less now than it would have been 10-15 years ago.
But I always enjoy your writing, John, so I do hope the muse continues to take you from time to time, whatever subject catches your eye!
Good grief John, you don't owe us any writing that is specifically about board gaming. Write about what you want: I'll read it. Occasionally I might raise a single finger whilst nodding or give a thoughtful "hmmm, yhesss..."
I have my boardgame collection behind me on conference calls which leads to all the usual faux-interested office conversations (and the occasional genuine one) that you might expect. what genuinely stuns people is when I say that I spend more money each year on travel and accommodation to play boardgames than I do in buying them themselves. There just isn't much out there at the moment that makes you want to leap out of your chair.