If you hadn’t heard, we own way too many board games over here at Morgantown Manor. If that were even a thing, I mean. You can peruse our collection on BoardGameGeek:
https://boardgamegeek.com/collection/user/sbarrera

If you see the same game appear more than once in the gallery, that is not a mistake. That means we own an extra copy (or two) of that game.

It’s kind of out of control.

In the interest of reclaiming some of our house space, I have been trying to sell some of the games on BGG and on ebay, with a slight amount of luck. It’s hard for me, though, to give up any of these lovely games. A little thing called loss aversion.

Aileen presented me with a challenge: let’s play all the games we never play, and anything we don’t like or don’t even want to play is a game we can get rid of.

We started the challenge yesterday, with three games in the “abstract” category – meaning they are just about logic with no theme like building a civilization or crafting things or something like that.

First we played the delightful Ingenious by the legendary Reiner Knizia. It’s all about placing your dominoes-like tiles next to similar colors to score the most possible points – but the trick is your final score is the lowest you have among all colors, so you can’t ignore any color.

Next we tried this game we have never played before called Da Vinci’s Challenge, a two-player game where you make a variety of patterns using just two types of pieces. The real challenge is noticing the patterns when they happen, because if you miss them there’s no takesies-backsies to score them on a later turn.

This game was a thrift store find. We get a lot of our games that way, which is kind of how we got into this mess in the first place.

Our copy of Da Vinci’s Challange had one already filled in score sheet –>

Looks like the kids crushed Dad pretty good, though we had to wonder if Dad was playing nice.

We finished the day’s gaming with a classic abstract called Qwirkle, where you play rows of tiles that either match in color or in shape.

Aileen says we get to count the games we already played this year, and I started a spreadsheet to keep track of them.

Yeah, it’s like that.

Looking forward to playing more games in this challenge mode, since there will be lots of games we don’t usually play, and many that we have never played (never played games are called the “shelf of shame” in our community).

Stay tuned for more board gaming posts this year, though I promise there won’t be one for every single game we play.

That would just be crazy.