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 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!