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Monday, December 23, 2024
My games of the year 2024
2024 was a weird year for me in gaming, as it came with a fundamental change: I played a lot more board games than in previous years. Which led to me being more occupied with board games, and spending less time on PC or console games. Of course, that change is relative: I would estimate that I had a total of around 80 board game sessions in 2024, with an overall duration of around 250 hours. I played 600 hours of games on Steam alone in 2024 (Steam doesn't actually tell you, you need to do a calculation based on hours played of one game divided by the Steam Replay 2024 played time percentage). The impression that I played a lot of board games and fewer video games comes from the board games being played with real people around a real table, which is obviously a lot harder to organize than playing a computer game, either single-player or online multiplayer. By joining a weekly board game night at a local store, I managed to play one board game session per week there, plus 2 to 3 sessions per month organized by myself or friends elsewhere.
My boardgame of the year is Agemonia. We played roughly 20 sessions of that, and are now a few sessions away from finishing the campaign, which took much of this year. As a campaign game, Agemonia for me hit the sweet spot between gameplay and narrative, with the gameplay being interesting, without becoming too long or grindy. In contrast, I gave up on Tainted Grail for the gameplay being too grindy; and while I will finish our campaign of Familiar Tales next year, the gameplay of that one felt a bit too easy and trivial for me. Outside of campaign games, I discovered the joys of playing some of the crunchier single-session board games, with my favorite there in 2024 being Dune: Imperium. I also played an implementation of that as a computer game.
On the PC, my game of the year 2024 was Millennia, which I played for 138 hours. I wouldn't say it is as good a 4X game as Age of Wonders 4, but AOW4 came out in 2023, and I played it less in 2024 (although the Steam Replay still says it came second place). The main problem that Millennia has, is that it is ugly, but one gets used to that after some playing. Underneath the ugly hood, it is a very solid 4X game, with a good amount of replayability, improved further by the DLCs. An honorable mention goes to Drova: Forsaken Kin, an indie RPG which took me just under 30 hours to play through, but I enjoyed it.
I played very little on the console in 2024, but the about 100 hours of that this year were taken up by Unicorn Overlord, which thus by default becomes my console game of the year. For a tactical JRPG, it has a rather unique combat system, which turned out to be more fun than I would have thought. And like Drova, this was one of the games that didn't outstay its welcome, and I managed to actually finish it before running out of fun.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link
