Which TOADS are you SHELVING?

Which awesome game has sat unplayed the longest, how ashamed do you feel and who is to blame for this gaming injustice?

The sad thing is that I have so many candidates... I am guessing it is either Duel of Ages II or Stronghold.

I don't really feel ashamed about it... they are definitely not "in the rotation" style games. But surely one day they will come back down off the shelf. Right?

Right?

Who is to blame.... I'd say the blame is equally spread among myself and my friends, for deciding at some point to have children.

COVID turned most of my games into toads. I'm not ashamed so much as it's a big bummer; anything requiring more than two players has been collecting dust for over a year.

I have basically no excuse not to have played Ambush!, though, except that I always fall asleep reading the rules...

All of my block wargames. Lost my regular 2 player partner a while back.

Aside from the occasional solo Mage Knight and... Camp Grizzly which has become a new favorite among friends, I'll confess that my entire board game shelf space is occupied by Covid toads.

Toads, toads everywhere on our shelves. I've done more Vassal and TTS solo stuff than actual games in the last couple years.

I have over 100 games in my collection, so I don't call a game a toad just for getting a couple of years of dust on it. And this pandemic isn't going to last forever, so multi-player games that were getting played just before the pandemic are unlikely to become toads.

Here are some toads that I haven't played even once in the 21st century:

Arkham Horror (1st edition) - This was my absolute favorite board game when it was published in the late '80s, but it has been fired by 2nd edition. However, this is a game that can be set up in minutes and played in under 90 minutes, so there is still hope that it will get played again at some point. Also, my copy has sentimental value... I loaned it to Kevin Wilson while he was working on 2nd edition. Last played in 1999.

Creatures & Cultists - My copy was an insert to an issue of The Unspeakable Oath, a irregularly published magazine about the Call of Cthulhu rpg. Mechanically, the game is based on Naval War, but the cards are humorous. Each player is the leader of a cult that is trying to summon their Cthulhu Mythos deity first, while also trying to destroy all of the other cults. It's moderately fun, but can run a bit long for a game with player elimination. Last played in 1999.

Junta - There was a nice new edition published around 2008 that I picked up for a very reasonable price, but I have never gotten it on the table. The big problem was that the one who _always_ shows up to play boardgames at my house has played Junta once and didn't like it. So he vetoed it every time I brought it out, and eventually I gave up. The game apparently runs quite long, and the combat system is overly complex. Never played.

Warhammer Quest: Shadows Over Hammerhal - I have a small local group that played through Silver Tower and some of Blackstone Fortress before the pandemic, but we never got around to Hammerhal. No reason, except that the host for this group is a military reservist who sometimes gets called away from home for months at a time, so Silver Tower took more than a year to complete. Never played.

Nemesis.
Runebound 2e.
The Hunt.
Neuroshima Hex.
Titan.

All because of COVID.

There are a lot of contenders right now, naturally, but I think that the toadiest thing I have at the moment is Android, which I love, but requires such a Stars Are Right confluence of things that it's tough to get it played.

I picked up a copy of Android out of respect for the design knowing that I'll likely never play it again.

I remembered this thread from earlier in the year: therewillbe.games/forum/15-games-catchal...ads-are-you-shelving

I'd love to see how this trend evolves and who amongst us will manage to get their toads played as time goes on. At this point my collection is very much a collection and I know a game that doesn't get played solo or online is likely to remain a toad.

If we're thinking of titles that are toading which bother me - I picked up a job lot of Arkham Horror 2e, have sorted it out and organised everything to make it easy to get to the table and printed out some handy play aids before realising that I couldn't comfortably fit it and four investigators on my table. Now I'm stuck, unsure what to do until I upgrade some furniture. It's a new enough acquisition that it may not count as a toad yet but I know what it's destined to become.

sornars wrote: If we're thinking of titles that are toading which bother me - I picked up a job lot of Arkham Horror 2e, have sorted it out and organised everything to make it easy to get to the table and printed out some handy play aids before realising that I couldn't comfortably fit it and four investigators on my table. Now I'm stuck, unsure what to do until I upgrade some furniture. It's a new enough acquisition that it may not count as a toad yet but I know what it's destined to become.

When I finally bought a house, my first piece of new furniture was a table that was large enough to fit Arkham Horror 2nd with all the expansion boards plus eight players. Before that, I had to bring out a card table to fit a couple of the expansion boards.

AH2 definitely needs a side table for the 500 decks of cards etc once you start adding in expansions

More like a ping pong table.

I'm never going to play Robinson Crusoe.

Surprisingly, the only board game I have that is unplayed is Empire Engine. Came out in the micro-game fad post Love Letter. It is way too fiddly for a micro-game, but it's also too cheap to sell and still make money after shipping.

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If we are counting expansions, then things get worse:

Catan: Seafarers. Never played. Maybe someday. Catan is in a weird place for me right now -- not really short and light enough for my family and in-laws, but of course everyone in my main gaming group is over it.

Street Masters: Aftershock and every other Kickstarter add-on. I thought this would be great based on the theme, but it's fiddly, hard to teach, and basically needed a bunch more development by someone not connected to the design and playtest team. I'll eventually sell the whole thing.

Some of the expansion material for Western Legends, or at least the stuff they add that requires new rules. The stuff that can be easily slotted into the base game, I've added.

Tiny Epic Defenders: The Dark War. Like WL, I've integrated the stuff that doesn't require new rules; also like WL, I still have so much left to explore in the base game that I haven't felt like I need to add the other stuff.

Some of the expansions for Sub Terra, same scenario as WL and TED:TDW.

The England map for Railways of the World.

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If we are counting RPGs, then that list will take longer to type than I currently have time before I have to leave the house.

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If we are counting RPGs that I only have on PDF, then just shoot me now.