In board games, I have been playing some lighter board games like Railroad Tiles and Welcome to Everdell with family over the holidays. I have started to play The Dark Quarter with my wife. We aren't sure yet how much we like it, but gameplay is rather similar to the Destinies games we played, just cooperative instead of competitive. Weirdly, while in The Dark Quarter we are playing detectives, I have the impression that we are doing less deduction than in Destinies. Instead we are often just visiting everything in a more or less random order, which doesn't feel very challenging.

The best board game, if you can call it that, that I played in the last weeks is Tend. Uncharacteristically I have been playing this several time as a solo game. Next week I want to bring it to my board game nights, and see how it holds up if played with several players. It has to be said that there isn't a huge amount of player interaction, just the neighbor cards. I think I'll try to play it with 2 other players, which is the lowest player count in which everybody has two different neighbors. I tried out different strategies now, and they all seem to be viable. So looking at the random objective and task cards and choosing a strategy that fits with them is key to a high score. My best score up to now is 190.

End of 2025 I discovered an app called Board Game Stats. So I installed it, and started using it since January 1st. The idea is to have a bunch of statistical data about what games I played at the end of this year. It has some nifty features, like importing my game collection from BGG, a stopwatch to time how long a game took, and digital score sheets specific to each game. I'll try to use it for all of my board game sessions over the year and see whether the statistics are interesting.