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The Board Game Challenge Continues

The Board Game Challenge Continues

It’s already half way through the year (how??) so you may be wondering how Board Games Challenge 2026 is going. As I posted back in March, this is our project to play as many unplayed games from our large collection as we can this year, with the goal of maybe winnowing it down a little if we can identify games we don’t care for or aren’t even interested in playing at all.

First, here’s a couple of games we’ve played recently.

Cascadia is an elegantly designed tile layout game with a Pacific Northwest wildlife theme. It has a drafting mechanic where you take a tile that represents the environment at the same time that you take a wooden token that represents the wildlife, but the placement rules and scoring differ between the tiles and the wildlife. Without getting into too much detail, the challenge is finding the right pair of tile and token for your strategy, given that you only have four options. It’s a great game that gets a lot of strategic depth out of fairly simple rules – game design gold, IMO. Definitely a keeper.

Blokus Duo is also a tile layout game, but more about area control than forming patterns. This version is 2-player only, and basically whoever gets the most tiles out wins. You might be familiar with the multiplayer version, as it is more of a family game. In the 2-player version, it is much harder to get all of your pieces out. The game is also small and portable and doesn’t take up much table space, so it’s great for taking places. Here we are actually playing in a bar as you might be able to tell from the shot. Also a keeper.

the spreadsheet filtered by only games played

The basic problem that we’re having is that it’s hard to find a game we would want to get rid of! How far have we even made it in our challenge? Let’s consult the spreadsheet (remember, there was a spreadsheet?).

It’s got all the games in our collection, downloaded from BoardGameGeek. Whenver we play a game in 2026 I put in the date, and I count expansions if they were included. I even front loaded the spreadsheet by including a bunch of games we played over the holidays as played in January.

We’ve played a lot, yes? It’s just a little over 7% of our total collection, so I guess it’s not looking too good for getting through them all this year. We did identify one game that we decided to sell after playing it, and I also put up on ebay the extra copies of a few games where we owned two copies. So far three games have sold!

We might have bought a few more games, too, so not sure if this project is going to actually reduce our inventory by any appreciable amount. But it was worth a try, right? And it sure is fun to play board games!

Board Games Challenge 2026

Board Games Challenge 2026

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.