Five & Dime for 1st Quarter 2010

You can tell I've been serious about the board game hobby this year because for the first time I've been tracking my plays on Board Game Geek. The website has my entire collection listed, and each time I play a game I record the play and note anything interesting about the session and the winner and any scores.

One of the best aspects of this record is that I can tell which games I've been playing the most. One common way of tracking games played over the course of time (especially on an annual basis) is a 'five and dime' list that tracks the games one has played at least 10 and at least 5 times. Including face to face game nights, plays online, and head to head games with my daughter, here's my first three months (more or less) this year:

Carcassonne (12 plays)
Dominion (8 plays)
Ghost Stories (8 plays)
Pandemic (8 plays)
Ca$h'n Gun$ (6 plays)
Race for the Galaxy (6 plays)
Agricola (5 plays)
Dixit (5 plays)

That's a pretty good list that encompasses most of my favorite games. Time's Up: Title Recall would be the most glaring omission and that is sitting at 4 plays currently for the year. I do, however, think that something can be said for just those plays I've had during face to face sessions this year. So, stripping away games with the kiddos and those played online we get to this core list:

Ghost Stories (6 plays)
Dominion (6 plays)
Race for the Galaxy (6 plays)
Ca$h'n Gun$ (6 plays)
Agricola (5 plays)

The primary differences here are Carcassonne which I've played exclusively this year with Abby or online, and Pandemic which I almost only play online. This list is in some ways a companion piece to "The List" of unplayed games I wrote about several posts ago. Many of those games are fringe titles that need a specific group or a particular situation to find play time, whereas these on the five & dime list are the core of my collection that see play after play. We shall see how the two lists develop over the course of the next few months...