2019 — 2026
A Gaming Life in Numbers
Nearly seven years of recorded plays. 559 games, 6,974 hours, changing tables, changing people, and a hobby that became something rather larger than expected.
Before the count
Long before I started recording every play, there were already games attached to places, people and older versions of me. I couldn't tell you how often I played them, or exactly when. I just remember that they mattered.
This is probably one of my earliest board game memories, somewhere around primary school age. I remember very little about the game itself. What I remember is moving the little car around the board, finding a job, getting married, and putting another tiny peg beside me.
At that age, that was enough. It was a miniature version of being an adult, played out in plastic.
These were my first real encounters with fantasy board gaming. I played them during summer holidays, but also through the rest of the year with a friend who did something that felt completely new to me: he made his own adventures.
He would take the system, invent a mission, create his own boss at the end and turn the game into something beyond what had come in the box. That eventually made Dungeons & Dragons feel like familiar territory rather than an entirely alien hobby.
Trivial Pursuit lives in a different part of my memory. I don't really remember thinking of it as a game in the same way I do now. It was just something the family did together.
There was the pleasure of knowing an answer nobody else knew, but also the opposite: reading some absurdly obscure question and watching an entire table stare back in complete silence.
Scotland Yard was my favourite in my early teenage years. We played it on summer holidays with friends I would only see because our families returned to the same place every year. They were the special kind of childhood friendships that disappear for most of the year and simply resume the following summer.
I loved being Mr. X. Choosing the bus or the metro, bluffing about where I might be going, trying to make everyone believe I was somewhere I wasn't. Of all these early games, this is the one I remember most clearly as a game I genuinely loved.
None of these plays appear in the numbers that follow. There are no dates, no scores and no totals. From 2019 onward, there are.
The overview
How the hobby grew, how the way I played changed, and what 5,000 recorded plays actually look like.
How much did I play?
The bars show how many plays I recorded each year. The line shows the hours spent playing those games; two ways of seeing how the scale of the hobby changed.
2026 is year-to-date. 2019 is excluded because tracking began in December.
How long was a play?
This is the average recorded active play time across all modes, including physical, live online and async play.
Async durations are estimated active-play time rather than contiguous session length.
What did a physical play look like?
Some years leaned toward long, heavy sessions. Others were dominated by shorter plays. This is the full mix of recorded physical session lengths, rather than a single average.
Physical plays only. 2026 is year-to-date.
The outliers
Hundreds of games lived in roughly the same statistical universe. A few did not.
First, everyone else.
Hundreds of games occupy a much more recognisable landscape: short experiments, recurring favourites, and a smaller group that accumulated serious time at the table.
Then put them back.
Gaia Project ran away in hours. Innovation ran away in plays. Two very different ways to dominate the same hobby.
The games that swallowed the graph
At 318 hours played, Gaia Project stopped behaving like a normal game and became its own gravitational object. Around it orbit the other forty-nine games I spent the most time with.
Body area represents total play time. Distance from Gaia represents the year of each game's first play: older games occupy the inner system and newer arrivals sit farther out.
The eleven largest worlds after Gaia are shown as major planets. The angular positions of both the major planets and the minor worlds carry no data. They were determined by the prestigious scientific discipline ofwhatever stopped everything crashing into each other.
Hover over any body for the game, hours played and play count.
The timeline
Dynasties, obsessions, slow burns, disappearing acts and games that somehow kept coming back.
The games that defined each year
These are the three games I spent the most time playing each year.
The dynasties
I consider a dynasty to be a game that combined longevity with repeated dominance: at least 20 plays across four or more tracking years, a top-three finish in one year, and multiple appearances in the annual top ten. Only two qualified.
Among my 10 most-played games in 6 different years.
Among my 10 most-played games in 2 different years.
The seven-year club
From 2020 through 2026 YTD, only 12 games were played in every single year. Not necessarily the most-played games, just the ones that kept finding their way back to the table.
Each square represents one year. Darker squares mean more plays. 2026 is year-to-date.
The comebacks
These games went unplayed for at least two full years, then returned for at least five more plays. Not a nostalgic one-off. An actual comeback.
The late bloomers
These games started quietly, with no more than eight plays in their first 365 days, but later grew into something much bigger.
The table
The numbers remember who was there too: recurring opponents, gaming groups, friendships and different eras of the physical table.
The signature games
These are the eight people I spent the most physical gaming time with, and the three games that absorbed the most hours when we played together.
Beyond the numbers
Five thousand plays did more than fill a database. They changed what I was willing to try and what I wanted from a game.
If I had shown my current favourite games to 2019 Def, he would have rejected about half of them on sight.
Somewhere inside these 5,000 plays, my definition of a good board game changed.
Board games were clever systems.
They could also create stories I would remember.
Nemesis was one of the earlier games I bought, and it produced a genuine holy-shit moment. The machinery of the game could create cinematic scenes, panic, betrayal and that old-school science-fiction dread without needing a script. It showed me that modern board games could reach much further than I had realised.
There was probably a point where a game became too complex for us.
If the design justified the effort, complexity could be part of the reward.
When I first looked at On Mars, its reputation alone made me wonder whether it was simply beyond what we wanted from a game. Then we bought Vinhos almost by accident and thought it was incredible. That gave us enough trust to try On Mars. It was more complex than anything we had played at the time, and completely worth it.
You learned a game by reading its rulebook.
There were whole traditions of game design I barely knew existed.
My first encounter with COIN also meant my first proper encounter with GMT. I opened the rulebook and tried to learn it like a Euro, only to discover that the rulebook was closer to a reference manual. The playbook and scripted opening were the real way in. That one game opened the door to COIN, historical games, radical asymmetry and an entirely different way of thinking about what games could model.
Good games should probably stop one mistake from ruining your evening.
Sometimes the consequences are the game.
My first 18xx was 18 Chesapeake, but the lesson came from the system rather than that particular game. There was no reassuring catch-up mechanism waiting to repair a bad decision. Stock manipulation, railway competition and the decisions of the other players could leave you in a hole you had dug yourself. The genre was deterministic, brutal and strangely liberating. If you screwed up, you screwed up.
Area control, negotiation and high conflict were probably not for me.
Those words now make me want to know more.
Dominant Species changed area control from something I thought was not for me into something I could love. John Company did the same for negotiation, turning the people around the table into part of the machinery of the game. Arcs pushed the journey even further: an aggressively confrontational game became one of my favourites. Somewhere along the way, conflict stopped being something a design had to apologise for.
Replayability mostly meant that a game stayed fresh.
Playing again could be satisfying because I was getting better.
Pipeline made improvement unusually visible. Its economy is brutally tight, so understanding the system a little better actually matters. Better networks, better timing, better decisions, better scores. Replaying it was not just seeing the same game again. The pleasure came from learning how to play it well.
At some point, replayability stopped meaning“can I get five or ten plays out of this?” and became“will I still want to play this years from now?”
Gaia Project, Innovation, Voidfall, Mage Knight, Pipeline... I already know there are games I can keep coming back to for years. But Age of Steam is probably the best example. The different maps obviously help, but mostly it’s a system with endless depth and clever player interaction.
There are games on these shelves I could play hundreds of times and still not feel done with them. And that does make me wonder: if I only owned twenty really great games, how much would I actually be missing?
I'm not sure I like the answer.
The milestone
Innovation.
Which, after all of this, feels suspiciously appropriate.
Epilogue
Five thousand plays made the hobby feel smaller, right? Nope. It made it feel larger.
This isn't a shopping list. Some of these games are already on my shelves. Some I've played before. Some are entire corners of the hobby I still feel I've barely explored.
I want to play every Age of Steam map before I die, and Dan is under legal obligation to help me. With Twilight Struggle, what I really want is a permanent opponent and a rivalry that builds over time, more like chess than an occasional game.
1817 and 18USA sound like an accountant's fever dream: mergers, takeovers, changing share structures, short selling, market-driven interest rates, hostile takeovers and corporate liquidations. Naturally, I want in.
For someone who adores Gaia Project, it is becoming increasingly ridiculous that I still haven't properly explored Terra Mystica.
War of the Ring is another obvious gap: one of the most acclaimed two-player games ever made, still sitting somewhere on the horizon.
And Stationfall continues to have perhaps the most efficient sales pitch imaginable: John Company in space.
There are older designs I still want to spend time with too. Not because they are new, but because they have survived long enough to remain interesting while thousands of newer games came and went.
I would love to have card games become a more regular part of my gaming life: Netrunner, Star Wars Unlimited, Riftbound, Lorcana. These feel like games I’d enjoy most if I had someone to keep playing against, rather than just dipping into them every now and then.
War Chest, Hive, Tak, Santorini, Homeworlds, Shobu, and probably several others I am forgetting. There is something deeply appealing about games where almost nothing gets between the players and the system.
Aeon Trespass: Odyssey
I own it. I've played it. And one day I want to do the ridiculous thing properly: start a full campaign and actually see it through.
Not sample it. Not play enough to understand the system. Finish the thing.
Maybe that is what the next stage of the hobby looks like: not finding more games, but finding out how deep the ones already here can go.
The strange thing is that none of this contradicts No More Games Needed.
I probably don't need more games. I need more time with the ones I already love, and more people to share them with.
There’s still room at the table.