Best Games I played in 2020

So much That's Pretty Clever. Girlfriend laminated the last 4 score sheets so we could keep playing. Got the sequel for Christmas and have been playing that now... it adds some interesting wrinkles. We struggle to break 200 in it though.

Played Catan and Kingdomino almost daily with my dad until he passed. Neither were new to me this year though.

I played all the Supergiant games this year in some capacity in anticipation of Hades, but I think Pyre might be my favorite. It definitely has my favorite soundtrack.

I hear everyone on the light and relaxing front. I just don't have the wherewithal to deal with brain-burning, betrayals, or any of that.

Most-played game has been RALLYMAN: GT, 99% of it on BGA. It's the perfect async game -- the game state is immediately apparent when you come back after a few hours (or days) to take your next turn. You don't have to remember what you were planning to do, or some complicated chain of resource exchanges. You look at the situation and go. According to my stats I've played 510 games of it. At first I only liked the GT5s but I am coming around quite a bit on the other two cars. They shift more of the game from puzzling out an optimal path, to risk management.

In-person with my family, it's been all about light fillers. They have to be easy enough that my non-gamer wife and pre-literate spawn can play. So: FOR SALE, SUSHI GO, AGE OF DIRT, IT'S A WONDERFUL WORLD, etc.

Roleplaying over Roll20 has been okay, but boy do I miss tabletop. My tastes in RPGs run pretty strongly towards games that have little physical doo-dads. Cards, special dice, tokens, etc. But those are hard to do virtually.

Here's hoping 2021 will see a change. I'm far down on the vax priority list though, and I'd feel pretty stupid to be the last person to die of a preventable disease.

2020 was the year that I was able to play some pretty heavy games that were previously shelf toads because of tabletop simulator, so I guess I'm in the opposite of light games due to covid camp. I feel like heavy games prevented me from drifting off into real life during the game, so served the diversionary purpose better. My love of heavy games was really reinforced this year.

Everybody is made very differently!

Rallyman and Leaving Earth are the walk-off home runs for me. The Crew has been a kick as well, but in tier 2.

I tried to make a bunch of story-driven solo games work for me this year. I had this dream that, during quarantine, I would leave something set up on my desk and just play a turn or two when I had some time. I tried Mage Knight and Fields of Fire, but neither of them really took. But then I started playing Deadball, a dice-based baseball game that aims at a less simulationist space than the usual titles (History Maker, Statis Pro, Strat-o-Matic). I really love it. It might take a while, but I'm planning to write up a blog entry for the site about it and what I've done with it. Suffice it to say, if you love baseball (like I do), this game is baseball. It's not a stats sheet. It's baseball.

The best board game I played this year, though, is easily Triumph and Tragedy. I played nine times with the same group by Zoom, usually half of a game on one Sunday and the second half the following Sunday. It has never failed that, when we are debriefing the end of the game just played, one of us says "So, should we set it up again?" This game is not a historical simulation so much as an engine-building sandbox that is loosely tied to the events of WWII. Even after all of these hours (a full play is easily 7 hours), I still feel like the ceiling for my improvement at the game is a long way off. It's thought provoking and stays with me. I talk to my wife about it when we go on walks. I write down ideas for my next production phase during the week. I kind of can't believe how much I like it, because I am emphatically not a world war 2 guy.

In video games, my best games of the year were definitely:

1.Littlewood, an obvious ripoff of Stardew Valley's aesthetic, but with a charming and low-stress game underneath it all. I don't know if I would start it all over again now that I am finished, but it was worth the 7 dollars or whatever I paid on Steam.
2. The Sudoku apps made by the guys who run the Cracking the Cryptic Youtube channel. Even if you don't think you would enjoy watching a guy solve a sudoku puzzle for 30+ minutes, I encourage you to search "the miracle sudoku" on Youtube and enjoy.

^given your comments about WWII themed sandbox, does that make you excited about the sci fi space version of Triumph and Tragedy on P500?

Yes, I am definitely interested in it, although I haven't backed it yet. The information they've made available so far makes it seem to me like it might play very differently to T&T. Not knowing the map ahead of time seems especially different. But I will probably put down a P500 when it gets a little closer and I can see a little more solid info.