Board Game Friday: October 2024 Games Played Recap!

October 2024 will go down as a great month in my board gaming history because October was the month that my six-year-old son was able to play Unmatched with me for the first time on his own.  He was able to read the cards and understand how to use them.  Even better, he loved the game as you can see from my full gaming breakdown for October 2024:

Yep, lots of Unmatched on there.  My personal way of keeping track is that if we play two characters from the same set and use the corresponding board from that set, then I count the play as a play of that specific game.  On the other hand, if we play a game of Unmatched where each of us uses a character from a different set (and/or a different board), then I count that as a play of "Unmatched Game System."  It's a little convoluted that way, but otherwise, I'd have to double-count each play (giving "play" credit to two different games).

Overall, the month of October saw me play a total of 57 games spread across 20 different titles.  Here are the top 9 most played for the month:

Obviously, Unmatched was the main game of the month but I also got to try a few other new-to-me games.  From that list, Ecosystem was a fun little card puzzle game where you try to build a varied ecosystem where each card feeds off of surrounding cards.  In the game, each card represents something from nature (stream, meadow, dragonfly, deer, bear, etc.) and each type of card has a specific scoring condition.  The game is super easy to learn and quite quick to play, I recommend it.

I also (finally) got to play Dinosaur World.  I'm a huge fan of dinosaur-themed games and Dinosaur World didn't disappoint.  In Dinosaur World, you draft dice, place workers, and build up your very own Jurassic Park dinosaur theme park.  The main gimmick of the game is that at the end of each round, you drive your little jeep meeple (i.e. jeeple) around your park visiting your attractions.  Of course, people are fickle, and the more you visit an attraction (even the T-Rex), the more bored people get of that particular attraction...and thus, the fewer points you get each time.  It's a light spatial puzzle tacked onto a decent worker placement/drafting game that I found worked quite smoothly after the initial rules were read.

Another new-to-me game was Lands of the Mesozoic.  This was a Kickstarter purchase and it ended up being a rather interesting card tableau builder where you constantly end up destroying your own tableau (in this game, that's not necessarily a bad thing).  

57 game plays including three new-to-me games plus I got to introduce Unmatched to my son.  I can't ask for a better month of board gaming!