New To Me Books and Games
books
Twenty five years ago I was a member of an online book club. We had a couple of discussions of mystery novels each month, on a Yahoo! Groups mailing list and this was something I loved being part of. (I just looked the list up and I’m really pleased to see it is still going, though obviously long migrated from Yahoo! Groups, and there are still names I recognise posting on it.) One of the things a lot of the members did at the end of each month was give a quick round up of all the books they’d read that month and I joined in doing this.
I quickly found the value in this was in having the record to look back on myself. I often remember enjoying an author’s work but when I look at what I actually said I’m more ambivalent about the book than I expected. It works the other way as well, I find books that I’ve enthusiastically endorsed saying that I can’t wait to read their next book, and then I’ve forgotten about them entirely for a long time.
These quick summaries ended up getting migrated on to my website as that seemed to be the best place for them. I’m happy to share my insights with anyone else but my primary audience is my own future self. I try to be fair to authors - if I’ve finished the book then it obviously wasn’t that bad - but I don’t think of myself as a book reviewer and am happily subjective. For a while I posted them on Goodreads, before I fell out with Amazon entirely, and they got read by other people, I still post them on Storygraph, but here is my journal of record. Though sometimes it feels like a bit of a bind to finish reading a book and write down what I think of it and I often get behind, the exercise has proved its value to me and I’m going to carry on doing it for as long as I’m able to.
but also games!
A couple of years ago I started posting about the board games I’d played each month on social media, aided by the excellent graphic summaries provided by the BGStats app. That quickly became a thing where I’d write a quick one liner about each of the new-to-me games that I’d played. Just as with books I started to find my own thoughts useful after I’d forgotten them, plus there was the added factor of being hampered by the space constraints of social media, and last year decided to make a post on here each month about the new games I’d played that month.
The problem was sometimes I can play a lot of new games in a month and by the end I’ve often started to forget what some of the games were. This year I resolved to change things up to make the posts less of a slog to write, they’re enjoyable to write but also get long and complicated which puts me off writing them.
At the end of January I’d only played two new games, hardly worth writing a post about those by themselves. Then February brought a stack of new game plays and I didn’t get round to the post and now it’s the beginning of April and I’ve played 31 new games this year and not written anything down about them. But I definitely want to.
I contemplated making a post for every game, I do that with books after all, but games vary a lot. Some only take minutes to play. Others have a problem that I don’t have with books, I’m playing them because someone else chose them; I don’t stop playing a game when I decide I don’t like it much, I carry on because it’s a group activity and sometimes I find I actually like it by the end!
The long and the short of it is that I think I’m going to do a round up every nine new games or so. That might sound like a weird number, why not ten?! It’s a square number and makes for nicer images that way! And four seems too low, and sixteen is definitely too high. And I thought future me might appreciate why I decided to do this so I wrote this post for her as well. If you’re not future-me, thank you for reading!
