End of Year & Top 100 (2024)

End of Year

It’s been a good year; well, for me, anyway. Thanks to The Dungeon Dive’s review of The Unseen World, sales skyrocketed. The Unseen World is now a Gold Best Seller on DriveThruRPG and has sold over 500 copies, and more than half of those sales were thanks to the review. The money helped with some expenses, but it also meant a bit more spending money than I normally have. New games this year! I also dove into one of my grail games thanks to the extra cash.

Early this year, I had also joined a writing group. We only meet once a month (and a couple months got canceled), but this led to a second writing group (four of us from the monthly meetup) that meets weekly. I feel like the continued pressure to keep writing has helped get me through some rough periods and given me at least a little confidence. On top of it all, I’ve made some awesome friends. I found more people willing to tolerate my presence!

Coming Up

As expected, Winds of the North playtesting has come to a crawl with my playtests alone finishing up the development. But it’s in pretty good shape, so with any luck, it’ll be released next year. Maybe. I’ll have to see if the publisher I had spoken to is still interested (and ask myself if I’m still interested); otherwise, it’ll be a self-published release like The Unseen World.

And maybe I’ll have it in me to try and get some short fiction published. We’ll see.

Top 100 Tabletop Games

Top 100 2022
Top 100 2023

This was a good year for games, too, specifically new-to-me games. I played some games from last year and some much older games for the first time. One of them was a grail game!

We continued our approach of getting a lot of replays this year and being very selective with our new games. We had far fewer duds than before (and I include “an all-right 6/10” as a dud). And some new favorites are popping in. A few of them I knew very well after the first play that it was going to be a new favorite, but there were a few other surprises.

I’ve seen some people mention that they struggle to do top 100s because they don’t know how to compare games that are too different from one another. Here’s my approach:

• First, I assume that the two games being compared are being played under ideal conditions, whatever those conditions are (and regardless of how infrequently those conditions might be available): which one gives me more enjoyment?
• Second, which is the one I remember more or have the stronger desire to play again?
• Third, if I still can’t decide between those things, I then lean towards the theme that connects with me more.

If all of that still feels equal, then the one that is easier to get to the table; it’s an unfortunate but pragmatic quality of a game. Time is limited, after all. Not to say that my approach makes it easy; it can still be pretty difficult at times.

This year, for various reasons (including weird groupings on Pub Meeple where it seemed to skip some comparisons and just auto-group them?), I had to redo the list because it just felt like a mess. There were too many games that felt high up just from old, fading memories of playing while more recent games had gotten held back. I’m much happier with this list, though it was agonizing to place some games.

Here we go!