The Boardgames Chronicle 2024 most often played games

Welcome to the first post in the series, which will look retrospectively at 2024 from my board-gaming experiences, as well as what I am expecting – and anticipating – in 2024. First of all, big thanks to my fellow bloggers for inspiration and motivation to do this series of posts (yes, I am talking to you guys 🙂 CliosBoardgames, ThePlayersAid and Dude! Take Your Turn!)

As always, I am starting with something I am very much interested in – a look back at the 2024 and what my most played titles were (plus some other, useful stats). Again, I am equipped with great app, Board Games Stats, which I am using for sixth consecutive year – it provides so much insightful data about my hobby, is handy and has sync with BoardGameGeek. If you have not tried it yet, make sure you do!

Let us have a look into details below!

General insights

Definitely, 2024 was a very good year for my boardgame group – 103 different titles (slightly smaller number than in 2023) played 356 times – a stable trend from 2023. Some of the games were longer, some of them much shorter, some played solo, some multiplayer, but still, having all things concerned, it was good to see that on average we had a session every day of the year!

True, this is of course trick of the statistics – there were days with many games (especially during conventions), there were with one larger title or with none at all. But well, this is still something to rejoice!

Opponents & players count

Analyzing that statistic will be very interesting. During the pandemic years, my main opponents were Vassal folks (play online). Is started to slowly change in 2022 and drastically in 2023. Now, in 2024, it is back to normal. My regular, weekly or bi-weekly group (Kuba G, Kuba J and Adam) contribute to huge proportion of all games. Similarly my family (Magda, Natan, Kuba K). I am very glad that some of the prominent content creators (Clio, Dave, Alex, Grant) are also among people I played a lot last year.

Of course, being mainly a wargamer, you notice 2-player games with record – 34% percentage. Second place – not surprisingly is taken by 4-players sessions – another 33%. Interestingly, I played a lot of good 3-player wargames last year, which accounts for 15% of all plays. Nice!

Most played titles

And now to the most important and interesting statistic! The BGStats divides all your played games into couple of categories:

• centuries – played 100 times or more – well, not in 2024 nor in 2023 was I so biased to one of my favorite games so much as to have over 100 sessions logged; but there were times – like in 2016 – when I played Commands Colors Ancient 165 times…
• quarters – played 25 times or more; this time there was only one game here – and this time not a Commands & Colors nor Frosthaven! It was Time of Crisis which I played both live and via Rally the Troops.
• dimes – played 10 times or more – here we have pretty strong, versatile representation of seven titles – mainly wargames like C&C Ancients, Table Battles, Burning Banners or Plantagenet as well as Euros – in this case Harmonies or Doomlings.

• fives – played 5 times or more – in that section I have like 12 games, among them: new Rebel Fury from Mark Herman, new game by Fred Serval – A Gest of Robin Hood, brutal Arcs by Cole Wherle or great family games – The Adventures of Robin Hood.

It really gives me a lot of joy to see that I am still keeping-up with my hobby, playing such a versatile array of games. Writing a blog and running a YouTube channel takes a lot of time – some of which could possibly be devoted to playing the games! I can only hope – and wish to myself and all of you – that 2025 will be again great as far as our hobby is concerned.

PS. Next week I will present how The Boardgames Chronicle blog & YouTube channel fared in 2024 and will suggest Dear Readers a look back at some of the best content created.