Most play-time Twitter poll

Yesterday I started a small Twitter snowball asking people for their top five games or game series by play-time. Thought it might be more interesting than most plays or favourites.

Hardly a scientific sample and people are still sending the replies. but here's the top picks:

#1 Netrunner (15)
#2 Gloomhaven (12)
#2 Pandemic (12)
#2 Magic: the Gathering (12)
#5 Carcassonne (9)
#5 Twilight Struggle (9)
#7 Playing cards (8)
#8 Dominion (6)
#8 X-Wing (6)
#8 Race for the Galaxy (6)
#8 Ticket to Ride (6)

And then a whole bunch on five picks each:

- Imperial Assault/Descent
- Memoir '44
- Acquire
- Chess
- Scythe
- Settlers of Catan

Going to be biased by games that were popular during teen years, easy games to get to the table and those with a good app version, but still interesting. A few particular surprise picks:

- I did not expect Netrunner to top this list. Better get my copy out again.
- Scythe is no passing flash in the pan, although its appeal eludes me.
- Descent/IA does much better than expected, presumably due to campaign play
- Acquire is a stone classic a lot of folks seem to forget when discussing stone classics

I totally expected Netrunner to do well. It has long term appeal, hugely popular, and the key component is that it's a lifestyle game that is very rewarding with repeated play.

The list seems to be comprised of two components - evergreens and lifestyle/campaign games (X-Wing/Netrunner/Gloomhaven particularly). That's not terribly surprising to me.

Netrunner is so bittersweet for me. I loved it. Don't think I'd ever gotten that deep into a card game before. Amazing community, tournaments, online chatter, everything. Then the cards just kept getting worse (as most long term FFG games tend to), team leads kept changing, and the game just kind of fell apart. I miss what it was, but even if I hadn't sold my stuff I wouldn't be playing it now.

RIP Netrunner. You were too good for this world.

I have a top five, but nothing even comes close to being number six. After a certain point, there have been too many games competing for table time and none have risen above the masses.

1. Jyhad/Vampire: the Eternal Struggle. I started playing 25 years ago, and had a regular weekly play group for at least half that time span. I could have played a couple of games last night if I wasn't so busy with some home improvement projects. For several years, the only products published for the original World of Darkness were expansion sets for this game.

2. Acquire. My dad randomly bought this game back in 1970 and got addicted. He soon taught me how to play, even though I was in first grade at the time, because the game needs at least three players. For most of my childhood, we played Acquire at least once a month, and sometimes more often. If my dad had been a Simpsons character, one of his catchphrases would have been "How about a game of Acquire?"

3. Arkham Horror (1st/2nd). The late '80s was a bit of a dry spell for boardgames. The family classics were still dominant, and there were a few great newer games like Dune and Cosmic Encounter. Arkham Horror 1st stood out at the time with unusually high production values and a distinctive setting, so we played the hell out of it. Easily at least 100 games in the space of a few years. Then Arkham Horror 2nd came along in the early 2000s, and that was an exponentially more entertaining game that saw even more play.

4. Car Wars. From 1981 to 1990, my gaming group played a lot of Car Wars. Steve Jackson kept cranking out map sets and expansions, and we played them all. About half of our group was already obsessed with both Star Fleet Battles and Champions, and Car Wars seemed to combine the better elements of both of those games.

5. Shadowfist. This CCG altered the course of my life for a couple of years. It's a cross between Magic and Cosmic Encounter with a Hong Kong action movie theme, so I suddenly became a big fan of HK movies and only dated asian women for a couple of years. Shadowfist eventually faded from the local scene because most of the Shadowfist players were also Jyhad players, and Jyhad was the better game. But Jyhad isn't great with less than four players, so we sometimes still play some 3-player Shadowfist while waiting for Jyhad players to show up.