Finishing out 2023 was fun for me. My wife and kids, a friend of our son (who has nearly been like a second son to us at times), along with my youngest brother, all got together and played a few games at the end of the year. After we had played a long game of Paladins of the West Kingdom, we played Scattegories a couple times in the late hours of December 30th before calling it a night. The next day, the gaming continued.
I recently got a boardgame about classic movie monsters called Horrified. I hadn't played it before, but yesterday I got it out and played it with my son and my brother. It is a co-operative board game, with a deck of monster cards which determine when villagers will appear, when the monsters will move and attack appear and other events. The players will win or lose together as a team.
The first game of Horrified put us up against Dracula and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. We got hooked. We finished our first game late on December 31st and we decided right away that we wanted to play again. Due to the New Year celebration, we took some time to go outside and enjoy watching the fireworks that were launching in our neighborhood. We decided to watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation since my brother had never seen it before, then we decided to resume gaming the next day.
After having breakfast on the first day of the new year, we got back to Horrified again. We played against Dracula, Frankenstein and the Bride, along with the Creature from the Black Lagoon and we managed to beat them with the Terror Level of the town only getting to 4, which was 1 higher than our first game that had only 2 monsters. We played again right after that, against the Mummy and the Invisible Man, and although it seemed tough to beat those monsters, we still won with the Threat Level at only 1. Our confidence was pretty high at that point, so next we took on Dracula, Frankenstein and the Bride, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Wolf Man, but they destroyed us. As our final game to ring in the new year, we played once more against Dracula, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Wolf Man. This time the town reached Terror Level 5 and we were only 3 cards away from the game ending with the Out of Time condition, but we won and it was awesome!
By the way, in 2023 I played 60 different board game titles. I played the average game twice throughout the course of the year for a total of 120 game plays. 15 titles were played at least 3 times, while Dune: Imperium was the most played game of the year, with 10 plays!
