It’s that time again to catch up on what’s been going on, the plans for next year, and my top 100 tabletop games (no longer restricted to board games).
End of Year
I experimented with sales for my game, The Unseen World. I especially pushed the no-budget marketing during Halloween when the game was 50% off. And it worked! This past Halloween was the best-selling month for the game. Still haven’t gotten any noticeable reviews for it, but that’s okay.
Unfortunately, the newsletter slowly became less and less useful for getting playtester feedback until I just wasn’t getting any feedback at all. Two games in playtesting sat for months with no work getting done. On the upside, after putting Umbra into open playtesting (anyone can play, no signups), I got some really good feedback. Depending on some things not in my control, I’ll possibly be working on an update for Umbra and starting another round of playtesting (or working on something else; we’ll see how things go).
One surprise this year was the announcement of a new adaptation of James Clavill’s Shogun. As a result, my review for the novel has gotten a ton of extra traffic! I don’t think it’s translated into additional views other than maybe a couple of other book reviews, but that’s okay. Overall, my existing reviews and articles have been doing pretty well this year.
Coming Up
Where’s Winds of the North? Well, it unfortunately takes months to hear back from publishers, so every time I submit it somewhere, it goes on hiatus while I wait (I was also waiting on feedback earlier this year). We’ll see how things go, but WotN may also go into open playtesting next year for more feedback.
Top 100 Tabletop Games
Last year’s list did incredibly well, and it was a lot of fun to make. This year, I’m opening it up to non-board games like RPGs and gamebooks (and more I’ve only played online). My gaming group and I also approached our gaming a bit differently this year. We weren’t as focused on playing new games as much, but were also much more strict about what new games get played. Lots of games have been culled (and some getting culled soon) because we simply decided we weren’t interested enough to play them over loads of other games.
As the year was coming to an end, I started shifting to focus more on replaying games (especially ones we hadn’t played in a while), and my group did the same. We still played a few new games toward the end of the year, but the focus has definitely been on replays. Still, there were some surprising shakeups and some unfortunate drops. At least a few games still suffered from not getting replayed, but there’s only so much time. Well. Time to see how things turned out!
Thomas P. King, author and game designer 
One thought on “End of Year & Top 100 (2023)”